Fmr. Pres. of the NAACP Ben Jealous on Reconciling America

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: So, our next guest is one of America’s most prominent civil rights leaders. Ben Jealous has worn many hats. He’s a scholar, a former president of the NAACP, and even a former Democratic nominee for governor of Maryland. Now, “The New York Times” best-selling author has a memoir which will be released in the U.S. tomorrow. Here’s — here he is with Walter Isaacson.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Christiane. And Ben Jealous, welcome to the show.

BEN JEALOUS, AUTHOR, “NEVER FORGET OUR PEOPLE WERE ALWAYS FREE”: Thank you, Walter. It’s good to be here with you.

ISAACSON: You’ve had a very interesting career. Starting with the NAACP, moving on to head people for the American way. Now, you’re moving on to the Sierra Club. And in some ways, it reflects an amazing background. Your family history descended from both confederate soldiers and enslaved people. Let’s start with your great, great grandfather, Edward David Bland. Tell me about him.

JEALOUS: Yes, my grandmother’s grandfather, Mr. Bland, walked out of slavery on the very last day. He was a teenager then in a family where they all knew they were cousins to General Lee. And he would go on about 15 years after the civil war, in the early 1880s to lead the Republican Party in Virginia and to choose, as his partner in building a massive multiracial populist movement, a former confederate general named William B. Mahone. The two of them were alarmed because the state was trying to crush the free public education system that had been created during reconstruction. And here with reconstruction having ended and Jim Crow not yet, having begun, in that gap. The old plantation owner class had declared that they could not afford the future of free public education and the civil war debt. So, the two of them built a party called the Readjusters. Simple demand, readjust the terms of a civil war debt so we can maintain our free public schools. They would go on to take over the state government entirely, abolish the poll tax, create the first public HBCU south of the Mason- Dixon, and make Virginia Tech by radically expanding it the working-class rival to UVA. What pained me, Walter, while I was researching the book was I had never been taught this history. I don’t think any of us have been taught that former confederate soldiers and formerly enslaved men ever got together and did anything, let alone take over a state government.

ISAACSON: That was very prevalent for a short while in our country, which is having a populist movement of blacks and whites together. It’s almost a vision of what we could have become. What happened to that?

JEALOUS: That movement was violently put down during my great, great grandfather’s bid for re-election. Six people were killed. There was vile disinformation that inspired a lot of that violence. But ultimately, it was resurgent. I mean, what you’re looking at there, the end of the 19th century is actually the planting of the seeds for what would be the greatest movement of the 20th century, which of course was FDR’s new deal coalition, and the way that that really led into Dr. King’s. And together defined, you know, what the 20th century was all about. And it’s what gives me great hope that, in this century, we might just pull it back together too.

ISAACSON: You talk in your book about the great antidote for insanity would be understanding our roots better. Explain how that has helped you.

JEALOUS: You know, it’s — race is a burden. My dad is white, my mom is black, and I grew up on a bridge between black and white, north and south, and even the old-world of the east coast in the cutting edge California, the place might parents move to try to find, you know, a great haven in our country that really doesn’t exist anymore. And digging into my family’s past, making peace with the fact that we’re related to Robert E. Lee, we descend from Thomas Jefferson’s grandma, but also understanding the tribes that we come from both in West Africa and in East Africa, really allowed me to see the diversity of humanity in much greater relief. And a better understanding that race is something that was imposed on all of us. But what all of us have is heritage. What all of us have is history. And the further you dig into it, the quicker you find that we are all connected. That we are all cousins. I even figured out that I was Dick Cheney’s cousin writing this book and, you know, for a guy who once ran for governor in Maryland as a Democrat that was a hard pill to swallow.

ISAACSON: You talk about racism, and not — it’s not a permanent thing, you say it can be ended. How does your background help you push back against people who say, no, this is so deeply ingrained, it’s going to be impossible to end racism?

JEALOUS: If you look at the state of Virginia where in 1619, really the — our country, as we know it began, it existed for 100. The American experiment of Virginia existed for 100 years before the modern ocean of race was created. Race, as we understand it is a caste system that is based on color. Race as it existed prior to the early 1700s was simply a — taken from an old Italian word for tribe, for a group of people defined by geography. And so, they tried to convince us that race is permanent because they say it’s always been this way. It hasn’t. It hasn’t even always been this way in our country, on this soil. You know, this was something that was created by colonial enterprise that was dealing with European indentured servants and African slaves coming together and rebelling. And they kept trying to split them. They used the military to split them. That didn’t quite work. They used new laws to split them, that didn’t quite work. So, then they reached for culture. And racism is an attempt to use culture to divide people. But what our own history shows, that people ultimately want to come together. Because their children are facing the same problems, and I believe that that gravitational pull between the working people of this country will ultimately lead us to overcome racism and finally make our nation what Frederick Douglass said, it was destined to be the most perfect example of the unity and dignity of the human family that the world has ever seen.

ISAACSON: Slavery is not much to the constitution, and yet it is woven into the constitution of the United States. So, how can you say that racism is not in some ways embedded in the DNA of this country?

JEALOUS: Because the country really starts in 1619. Not in 1776 or the 1780s when the constitution was being drafted. And we forget — my grandmother, one thing she would say — and that it was funny, my first professor in college of politics would say the same thing. He never forgets that before there were slave rebellions, there were colonial rebellions. And what they were talking about was there was a moment when European indentured servants and African slaves saw themselves just as that. You know, people who shared a common predicament of being exploited while coming from different places and being in a slightly different position in the early colonial experience. But they didn’t see themselves as, you know, the N-word, or the C-word, or the way that we’ve all been dehumanized since. And then all of a sudden, you are pouring over the history, because we, with our roots in the south always go back to the history. You keep digging through the history and you’re like, wait a second. This American experiment started around 1620, and the modern notion of race, this barbaric idea of a caste system based on color started a century later. Well, that actually means a lot. Because it means that people were coming together for a full century before we had racism tearing us apart.

ISAACSON: You call out some lies in your book. And one of them, you say, is that racism only hurts black people. And in some ways, you explained that yes, it makes white people invisible too. Go through that for me, will you?

JEALOUS: Sure. Look at the way poverty is shown in our society. And then look at what happened when we made the face of addiction inclusive in our country. Back during the great depression, the face of poverty in the United States where poor white people and public support for everything public was sky-high. After the civil rights movement, it shifted. And the media initial — when they want to depict a poor person, almost always shows a black or brown person even though there are 16 million whites in poverty, and about eight million blacks. By making most, the biggest group of poor people invisible, it has definitely hurt public support for addressing poverty. Similarly, we pretended for a long-time opioid addiction was just a problem facing black people. Certainly, up here in Baltimore that was the narrative. But when sheriffs across the country became impatient with the lack of action and dealing with opioid addiction as a health crisis that it is, they literally started publishing, Walter, the faces of people dying from ODs. And a lot of those folks were white too. And suddenly, the public debate shifted from, oh, this is a great criminal problem, we need to lock all these addicts up, to, oh, this is a health crisis and we need to deal with their addiction, and make sure that they get rehabbed, not prison. But what happened? The image of who was addicted and who was dying from it, and the media shifted from black to white.

ISAACSON: You talk about building big coalitions. You talk about bringing people together. As we have done, you know, sometimes in the 400 years of our history as this country. How did that inform what you did at the NAACP as its leader? And what do you think can be done now?

JEALOUS: You know, when I took over the NAACP, mass incarceration was still on the rise in this country. In a way that was very visibly destroying black communities. And if you walked into a prison, it was apparent, it was destroying poor white communities too. And, yet the Democratic Party’s principal leaders, state after state, were afraid to deal with the issue. They saw what happened to Michael Dukakis and the old Willie Horton ads. And they’re unwilling to share — to show courage. And so, I sat down with General Colin Powell and I asked him for advice. And he said, oh, Ben. He said, in this country it’s easy to figure out when you disagree with people. Take time to figure out the one thing you can agree on. And what I found, at the time, was that there is one thing that Grover Norquist, you know, great republican anti-tax crusaders, and I agreed on, was shrinking our prison system. And that Newt Gingrich, at the time, had the same conviction. We ultimately — when I was President of the NAACP, partnered literally with Republican governors across the country to shrink prison systems, from California to Texas to Georgia. Down in Virginia, we had a special problem. That was a lifetime ban and formally incarcerated people voting. Walter, one of the most shocking moments of my tenure as President of the NAACP was that Tim Kaine wouldn’t help me do it when he was governor of Virginia. But that Bob McDonald, the Republican conservative who succeeded him was all for it. It wasn’t in the best interest of his party, many would argue, but it was the right thing to do. And he understood, as somebody who grew up working class that there were a lot of men who made bad decisions. Women made bad decisions. They ended up in prison, who redeemed themselves after prison and deserve to be part of our society. And he was the first governor in the history of Virginia to literally make it his business to re-enfranchise formerly incarcerated people. So, that’s really the base of my politics. We don’t need to agree on everything. We just got to find the one big thing we can agree on and go get that done together.

ISAACSON: You talk about your experience leading prison reform, and how that brought together a coalition of left and right, and Democrats and Republicans. What other issues are there that this country could do that on?

JEALOUS: You and I, Walter, could, you know, walk over to, you know, any polling company and find issue after issue that 60, 70 percent of the American people agree on, including large numbers in both major political parties. It’s the politicians who lacked courage. And so, you know, fundamentally, my book, “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free” is a call to the people of this country. To look at each other no matter what the politicians are doing. And recognize that in the heart of each other, there is more in common than there is not. And there is a need for us to really control the future of our country and not leave to politicians who profit by dividing us again and again and again.

ISAACSON: What is causing this divide?

JEALOUS: We have wounds layered on top of wounds in this country. Ultimately, when I did the research for my book, I kept digging back into that. When you get down to is greed. Why would it be so important to keep trying to divide working people at the base of our economy? And who would have the resources to do that? Well, a small number of people who profit by paying people too little and disempowering them. And fundamentally, our country is on a great quest from the beginning was a quest against kings and those who would be kings. It was this great dream of creating a democracy in which we were all equal under the laws, we are all equal in the sight of God. And fundamentally, that’s the unfinished business of this country, is to really create that democracy that empowers all of us to build a better life for our families. By the end of the day, I would say, even upstream from racism itself is greed.

ISAACSON: You say that both blacks and whites paid a price for desegregation. Explain what you think it did, in some ways, that might have harmed the black community?

JEALOUS: You know, it’s funny. I don’t know if you rolled back in your head to, like, Archie Bunker in “All in the Family”, and Mr. Jefferson on “The Jefferson’s”. In the few episodes that they would both be on the same show together at the same time. It was pretty clear the price that men like Archie Bunker paid for desegregation. They believe that by opening up economic opportunity to women and to blacks, that somehow their opportunity shrank. It’s actually, in some ways, even more clear that men like Mr. Jefferson paid a price. Segregation was an — ultimately a formula for an economy. An economy in which white people did business with white people. And black people did business with black people. And when we ended segregation, millions of Mr. Jefferson’s lost their businesses. I had two in my family. Two brothers who owned dry cleaning shops in the inner city. And their businesses disappeared because they were now suddenly competing against better capitalized white owned businesses that had unfettered access to the banks. And while there was no more division of the marketplace, there was still discrimination at the banks that held back, you know, my uncles from seizing their opportunity when the walls of segregation fell.

ISAACSON: So, what should we be doing about that?

JEALOUS: You know, fundamentally, we shouldn’t fear change. We should understand that, you know, when economies transition, there are a lot of winners and there are a lot of people who lose as well. But we’ve got to be urgent about really delivering our country to that place that Frederick Douglass, also a civil rights leader who had a white father, a very different one than mine, and a black mother, was so eager to see us get to. You know, we can be the most perfect example of the unity and dignity of the human family that the world has ever seen. That’s within our grasps. But it requires each of us to just step back for a moment. Be a little bit more curious about what is happening on the other side of the street or the other side of the political aisle. Look into each other’s hearts. We got to turn down the 24-hour news that is yelling at us all the time, encouraging us to remain divided. You and I both know that we have, you know, beautiful southern states that are ultimately more impoverished than they should be. And frankly, discrimination and division and pitting people against each other is a big part of the formula that keeps beautiful states like Virginia and Louisiana poorer than they should be.

ISAACSON: Ben Jealous, thank you so much for joining us.

JEALOUS: Thank you, Walter.