LDG Development, University of Louisville, and the James Graham Brown Foundation.

Today on Great Conversations, joining us as host is John Yarmuth.

He served eight terms in the U.S.

House of Representatives.

He's also a writer and journalist.

He's speaking with our guest, Congressman Jim Clyburn, author of The First Eight, a Personal History of the Pioneering Black Congressmen who Shaped a Nation.

[APPLAUSE] It's a thrill to be here tonight And I get the honor of introducing Jim Clyburn, who is not only an icon, but he's also a dear friend.

JOHN YARMUTH: Jim Clyburn is in his 17th term in the House of Representatives, representing South Carolina's sixth congressional district, which is Columbia, Charleston and areas all around that.

And he has been part of leadership for the last 20 years.

First and foremost, he is a master at making life better, making congressional life better for everyone he serves with.

Not only has he been a congressman for 17 years, 17 terms, 34 years, but he is number nine.

title of the book, The First Eight, he is number nine, number nine, the ninth Black congressman from South Carolina.

And as we will discuss, there were 95 years intervening between the eighth and Jim's coming to Congress, in, in 1992.

And one other thing that's important in terms of today's discussion is that Jim Clyburn started off his career as a history teacher.

[Applause] Thank you.

Thank you.

So we are thrilled.

This is not Jim's first trip to Louisville, but, and I hope it won't be his last.

But we are thrilled to have Jim Clyburn tonight with us, the author of, The First Eight, A Personal History of the Pioneering Black Congressmen Who Shaped a Nation.

Welcome, Jim Clyburn.

JIM CLYBURN: Thank you.

[APPLAUSE] Thank you very much.

Thank you, All right, Jim, now, everywhere I go these days, people ask me the same thing without fail.

They say, "are you happy not to be there?"

[LAUGHS] So I'm going to ask you a different question.

Are you happy to be there?

Well, I am happy to be there, in large measure, because I think that people who have a good understanding of the foundations upon which, our great country was built, should, have a role and should accept the role of trying to help this country continue its trek toward a more perfect union.

We're not - [APPLAUSE] We're not a perfect nation; we will never be perfect, but we should always be in pursuit of perfection.

And our country today is at a crossroads.

And those people who believe in that pursuit, I think, should not hesitate to make whatever contributions they can to that pursuit.

and to be in the position I'm in today, I'm happy to be there.

I'm not too sure another person occupying the seat would, would do as well.

[LAUGHTER] I don't think there's any question about that.

You know, I have, let's get right to the book, and we're going to talk later on in the discussion about some of the current issues we're facing.

but I'm going to.

Because when you started this project, you had one notion of how it was going to go, and then you changed course.

Yes.

Explain how that happened.

Well, a lot of people, under the mistaken notion that, that, I'm the first African American from South Carolina, to serve in Congress.

And you can understand why that is.

And because my dad made me do current events.

Every night before going to bed after we did homework, we had to share with him current event.

So I grew up reading newspapers.

We also had to do a Bible verse every morning before breakfast.

So reading the Bible and reading the newspapers was a part of the ritual that I had.

So, I do from, that and my dad making me learn everything in the world about Robert Smalls who he thought was the greatest man to ever live.

I, I just knew so much about them.

And I also knew that people would often, come into my office and ask me about these eight pictures up on my wall, the pictures of these eight people.

And one day, I'm explaining who they were, and a person in the group says, I thought you were the first.

I said no, before I was first, there were eight.

And so I told my staff later that day that my next book is going to be about these eight people.

And my idea was just introduce these people to readers, and get them to know that they did exist, and they met in the significant challenges that they overcame.

But then, in the middle of this project, the aftermath of the 2020 election started to unfold, and I saw those people up in Michigan banging on the door trying to set up alternate set of electors.

Same thing in Pennsylvania.

That famous phone call.

or infamous phone call.

Down to Georgia.

"Find me 11,500 votes."

I said to myself, this book has got to take a different turn.

So I call my editor and I call the publisher.

Said, "Look, we got to do this book differently."

And so I started over, because I wanted the book to not just inform, but to be instructive.

And so, I decided that this book would take the lives of these eight people, take the challenges and then address the 95-year gap between number eight and number nine.

What led to that gap is what seemed to be under way in many quarters today.

I'm convinced that Project 2025 has its grounding in something called the Edgefield Plan that was written around 1875, in preparation for the 1876 elections.

And the 1876 elections led to the end of reconstruction and the beginning of Jim Crow.

And that, to me, is why I thought the book should be written the way it is.

Since it is about eight men, we have to talk about a few of them anyway.

And I don't think you can start any discussion without talking about Robert Smalls.

Absolutely not.

Of these eight people, they were different people.

Really different people.

Only three of the eight were born enslaved, Robert Smalls being one of those, and all three of them got their freedom differently.

Joseph Rainey, who was the very first one, was a barber who learned the barbaring trade from his father who used his income from barbering to purchase his family's freedom.

So that's how he got to be free.

George Washington Murray, number eight, was the only one who was emancipated, on 1863 January 1.

Robert Smalls was my hero, like he was my dad's hero, born enslaved, at 12 years old, he was sent to Charleston to work in Charleston to send income back to the slave master, who was John McKee.

While in Charleston, Smalls, had various jobs, one being a lamp lighter, but he wanted to work on the waterfront.

That's where the money was.

And he finally got a job on the waterfront.

And while on that ship, The Planter, he exhibited some real leadership skills.

And so the captain of the ship made him sort of the foreman.

And the captain and his two brothers, there were three of them on the ship, every Friday, and they would leave the ship, go into Charleston.

Would not come back until Saturday.

Well, on this particular Friday, Smalls started playing around on the ship, mocking the captain.

I have no idea, what language might have been used, but he grabbed the captain's hat and flopped it on his head, and started prancing around the ship, And one of his buddies said to him, "See, you know, Smalls, you put that cap on.

you look exactly like the captain."

That put an idea in Smalls' head.

And Smalls started studying the currents of the Charleston harbor.

He started studying the whistles on the ship in order to give signals for safe passage, And he hatched a plan to gain his freedom.

He brought his wife into the plan, and, um, on the day or the evening that they decided it was time to make the move.

he smuggled his wife onto the ship, and child.

She brought with her a bedsheet.

He got his buddies to fire up the engines, and they started their trek, out of the Charleston Harbor.

This was the Confederate's prize ship, The Planter.

When he got, he passed five sent with the right whistles, got to the last one, Fort Sumter guarded the entire harbor.

He did it correctly.

And the sentry yelled out to him, "Go blow those damn Yankees to hell!"

[LAUGHTER] The sentry had no idea who he was talking to.

[LAUGHTER] When he got beyond, in the distance, of a firing, of a cannon His wife raised that bedsheet, turned it into a flag of surrender, and they delivered, The Planter to the Union forces.

And, [APPLAUSE] he... These Union generals didn't know what to think, and Smalls... This took place in March of 1862.

The most remarkable thing about is he was rewarded with cash and his freedom.

He... in March got his freedom In August, he was sitting down in Washington, D.C.

with President Abraham Lincoln.

No formal education.

He went to Washington because General Saxton saw them losing the war, and Saxton wanted to bring freed Blacks into the war, and Lincoln was not allowing it.

And those of you who have studied this should know that, one of Lincoln's closest friends, was, advising him, to to bring Blacks in, but he wouldn't do it.

Well, Saxton felt that Smalls, because of celebrity status, everybody knew who he was.

People up in New York tried to get him to come and live in New York.

Pennsylvania.

But he wouldn't go.

Smalls was sent to Washington to talk Lincoln into allowing them to bring freedmen into the war.

He thought if anybody could do it, Frederick Douglass couldn't get it done.

Smalls got it done, and Lincoln authorized Smalls to go back to South Carolina with a letter to enlist 5000 Blacks into the war.

And that led to others.

And 40,000 Blacks died in that war.

But the interesting thing is Lincoln wrote that, but for the freedmen, the war would have been lost.

So Smalls goes back to Beaufort.

He made a triumphant run, which is what I think one of the funniest things about Smalls.

I think about the one of the reasons that he really became so famous is because a bounty was on his head.

They were offering 6000 dollars anybody who could bring Smalls i And they want that ship back.

One day, the ship was involved in Smalls was involved in about 17 skirmishes with the ship.

One skirmish took place near Mars Island, those of you that have been down to Hilton Head, South Carolina.

They were taking supplies, and somebody spotted the ship.

And they decided they were going to take the ship.

So they had this fierce battle.

The captain of the ship got scared, ordered Smalls to beach the ship.

Smalls knew that this bounty was on his head and he was not about to give up.

So, he told the captain, that he was not going to do that.

The captain got scared and ran into the coal room.

Smalls locked him in the room.

And took over the ship, engaged and won the battle.

Took the ship back.

And when they got back and the authorities found out what happened, they fired the captain.

Made Robert Smalls captain of the ship.

He then became the first African-American naval captain.

in our history.

[APPLAUSE] And to round out who this guy was, Smalls went back home to Beaufort with his wealth.

When he got back, his former master had lost his wealth.

And, lost his house.

Smalls bought the house and the house next door.

And with his buddy in the house next door, J.I.

Washington, he kept this house.

Now, John McKee died.

I think 1875.

Smalls took his widow, who had fallen on hard times.

He died pennniless.

He brought her back into that house and kept her until she died in 1904.

So for 29 years, Smalls took care of her.

In the meantime, he ran for Congress.

[LAUGHTER] Smalls ran for the house of legislature first.

Got elected to the state house, served for ten years.

Got elected to Congress, and served for ten years.

And he left, he was defeated by George Washington Murray.

I think one of the things that is impressive about Smalls, I mean, there are many things.

And if if there's not a movie made about Robert Smalls, I don't know.

I mean, they won about Spartacus and Gladiator and Django and I mean, you know, it's, it's a good topic to have formally enslaved people who become heroes.

But even after he was where he lost his office, he was he never stopped fighting for the rights of Blacks.

And, the vote, and all those things.

Another interesting thing about Smalls is that as you imagine, after the Civil War, all of the formerly slave states had to develop new constitutions.

And so there was a constitution written in 1868.

At that Constitutional Convention, Smalls was present.

And this was when, the formerly enslaved got all the rights and privileges as United State citizens.

Smalls also attended the 1895 Constitutional Convention, which is the constitutional convention that took all those rights from them.

Smalls was one of two people, to be at both those conventions.

So just imagine, you get all your rights, and then some, 20 years later, they were all taken away.

But Smalls did not stop.

YARMUTH: Right, and we'll get in briefly on a few of the other men you write about.

But let's talk about that, because one of the most important narratives of the book in my opinion, is that people would be surprised to realize how much power Black citizens in South Carolina had for a period of time.

And that over a period of time, how they lost lost it.

But Blacks were 60-something percent of the population of South Carolina.

CLYBURN: Right.

They had, at one time, four out of five members of the congressional delegation in South Carolina Four out of five.

And they were able to draft a constitution giving them rights, advancement, education, and so forth.

CLYBURN: Right.

giving them rights, advancement, education, and so forth.

of South Carolina, was an integrated was an integrated university.

CLYBURN: Integrated and majority black.

There were more Black people at University of South Carolina prior to of the so-called, in the reconstruction than the whites.

In fact, they closed the whole university down for three years, to allow the transition to all white.

And so, and what people tend to forget, as I said, only three were slaves, Richard Cain, who, one of the people I'm sure you want to get to Richard Cain, had never been enslaved.

He was born up in West Virginia in what is now West Virginia.

His family moved to Ohio.

He felt a call to the ministry and, he became disenchanted with the United Methodist Church.

And he joined the A.M.E.

Church and went to Wilberforce University, the first private HBCU in the country.

And from there he pastored first at Bridge Street A.M.E.

Church But he was sent to Charleston by the A.M.E.

Church after the war to rebuild Emanuel A.M.E.

Church.

that a lot of people have gotten to know, since that fateful day back in 2015.

And there's another, Robert Brow Robert Brown Elliott was educated in Liverpool.

And, I have no idea how he got to Massachusetts.

But, he came to South Carolina from Massachusetts, was a lawyer and a prolific orator.

So when you talk about the writings of these, the Constitution and all this other stuff, these were not people who were without great intelligence and intellectual ability.

They were good writers.

And this is what people miss about so much of this.

Thomas Miller, who was number seven.

Thomas Miller was educated at Lincoln University, the same school that educated Thurgood Marshall.

Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.

He went back to South Carolina.

George Washington Murray went to South Carolina College, which is what the University of South Carolina became for Blacks when they made the university all-white.

So these people, had all kinds of backgrounds, all kinds of experiences, and they put together some great documents.

The 1866 Civil Rights Act that was passed by these eight people with help from Henry Cabot Lodge.

These people were incredible people.

That law 1866 Civil Rights Act still stands today.

And most lawyers will tell you that that is the best civil rights act to bring in it civil rights lawsuit under.

better than the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

You mention Thomas Miller.

To me, one of the fascinating aspects here, he was born to two white parents Yeah.

You know, we say, how did these people come to be?

Well, seven of them were born African-American.

One of them was not, he made the choice.

He, by his own admission.

and everybody if you research the history.

He was born to the daughter of Thomas Heyward, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and he was born out of wedlock.

So they put him up for adoption, and an African-American family adopted him.

And they moved from the little town of what is now Ridgeland.

For Reeveville at the time.

They moved to Charleston, and there in Charleston is where he, lived out, most of his life.

But he was conscripted just like others into the Confederate Army.

And he didn't.

And they got captured, and the Union, they spent time in the prison down in Savannah.

So when the war came to a close, those Union soldiers took him with them back up to New York.

And from New York is where he went over to Lincoln University, and got educated and here he was Would he go back to New York?

And live his life out as a white guy?

Or was he going back to South Carolina.

He elected to go back to South Carolina.

He went to the University of Sou Carolina law school, and became, as he said, in the book on page 229, [LAUGHTER] You find a tombstone, it's a tombstone that I went, I found his grave, and went and took a picture of his tombstone.

Because there on that tombstone, he tells exactly what drove him and there were words there to the effect, I served God and the people, loving and not loving the white man less, but the Negro needed me most.

And so he made the choice.

And when I say he made the choice, aside from being captured, this guy who also got convicted.

But, never really spent... All of these people were - they used the judicial system to get them out of office.

And so he was one of them.

But he got saved because of his paternity.

When he was about to be murdered one day.

So there's some interesting stuff.

It's fascinating.

Absolutely.

So we've talked about what a very uplifting stories so far.

But let's talk about the dark side of, what happened.

Again, going from this position where they had four out of five members of Congress, 96 members of the state legislature in South Carolina, they were 60-something percent of the population.

They never elected a governor.

They elected a lieutenant govern Two lieutenant governors.

But never a governor.

but then things started to change.

And the story is it needs us to set the parameters.

This is one of those jaw-dropping things that you, when I read that, I said, "Oh, my God."

To go from 96 members of the state legislature, Black members of the state legislature to seven in just a few decades, in, at one point, and there were 720 something thousand Blacks in South Carolina, and only 5500 are registered to vote.

Right.

Think about this.

All the way from a majority, almost 60% of the vote was African-American, and it went all the way down - only around 5500 out of 700,000.

How did that happen?

It is when you see, the Supreme Court reinterpreting what the 15th, the 14th and the 13th Amendments meant.

Remember, it's the 14th Amendment that has those clauses on equal protection in the law.

And due process of law.

And so when the Supreme Court started, reinterpreting what due process meant, it is what led to a reduction in that.

So when you go to register to vote and you're asked to, now this, I've never seen this apply to South Carolina, but to Mississippi, Alabama, "How many jellybeans are in the jar?"

This is the kind of insulting things that were done to deny voter registration.

In fact, to fast forward a little bit, if I may, when John Lewis and others, Hosea Williams, hundreds of others walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7th, 1965, only 3% of African-Americans in the entire state of Alabama were registered to vote, because of these laws.

The same thing happened in South Carolina.

So when some of these men were in the House of Representatives, back in the around 1870, they were, they were seeing these problems.

They were seeing voter intimidation.

The Ku Klux Klan had been organized.

there were hundreds of Blacks killed, in elections.

They would, in some cases take over the polling places and only left whites.

I mean, some of the - forget the jelly beans.

I mean, there were violent - CLYBURN: Oh violence.

- violent means of voter suppression.

And the the members from South Carolina were helpful and, from South Carolina were helpful and, I mean, took a leadership role in passing three different laws in the Congress Enforcement Act of 1870, 1871, and then the Ku Klux Klan, and also which created the Department of CLYBURN: Absolutely.

And that was apparently one of the factors that led to this decline in power that they passed a law, but they couldn't get the federal government - To enforce it.

CLYBURN: Absolutely You know, there are three things And this may be a good point that happened during this period of time.

Each one of them came into being by one vote.

The first one was the vice president to Abraham Lincoln was Andrew Johnson from Tennessee, who was a white supremacist.

He had been taken onto the ticket for Lincoln to nullify some of the opposition he was getting in the South.

And he feared he was not going to get re-elected.

He was not planning to get murdered either.

But when he got killed, Andrew Johnson became president.

And Andrew Johnson set out to undo everything Lincoln had done and started ignoring what Congress was telling him to do.

And Congress then impeached him.

Sound familiar?

[LAUGHTER] And when the impeachment was sent over to the Senate, it failed by one vote, by one vote.

They did not convict him.

That led to the 1876 induction.

In that election, at the time of that election you needed 185 electoral votes in order to be president.

The contest between Hayes and Tilden from New York.

When the election was over, Tilden from New York had 184.

But he needed 185.

Hayes from Ohio had 165.

And in the end there were 20 electoral votes in dispute.

These 20 votes were sitting in three states: Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, Three pro-slave states.

These three states had sent up to Washington "Alternative Electors."

Sound familiar?

[LAUGHTER] So the house was in a quandary not knowing what to do.

How to settle this question.

They had to make a decision.

That's what the Constitution says.

The election goes into the House of Representatives.

So they appointed a 15 member commission to meet with the candidates, study the issue and report back to them as to what they should do.

This 15 member-committee met with the two candidates, I was not in the meetings.

I don't know what they said, but I know what happened.

They voted eight to seven to give those 20 votes to Hayes.

So Hayes then went from 165 to 185, which meant he became president by one vote.

185 to 184.

This was in March.

One month later, he brought an end to reconstruction.

So everybody believes that they made a deal in this meeting.

A lot of people call this.

the Tilden-Hayes Compromise.

I don't like to call it that because there was no compromise between Tilden and Hayes.

What this was - a deal struck and eight of these 15 people at the end of reconstruction.

So reconstruction came to an end by a vote of eight to seven.

Jim Crow became the law of the land.

By a vote of 185 to 184.

Three one-vote issues.

It's so strange reading through the book because the all the men you talk about were Republicans.

All Republicans.

And Hayes was a Republican.

And Hayes was a Republican.

CLYBURN: He double-crossed them.

And the bad guys were the Democrats.

Absolutely.

And of course, anybody who's followed history knows that, the Southern Democrats became today's Republican Party and, publicans became today's Democratic Party in the South.

And so somebody like Strom Thurmond, who was originally a Democrat, became a Republican.

Talk about the transition there because the Republicans were, were somewhat affected.

They were somewhat penalized by dissension that they had, and different approaches and so forth.

And they were not unified always.

Absolutely.

And that's why, I wrote the book the way I wrote it, because I wanted people to understand that you do not have to be unanimous to be unified.

For some strange reason, we feel everybody got to agree.

You can get beyond, and you should get beyond these individual differences.

You know, I stayed married to the same woman for 58 years.

Our backgrounds are so different I learned early that something had to give.

And I gave.

[LAUGHTER] And so that's how we made it.

Well, you know, these guys, they had different backgrounds, Different levels of education, different interests.

And in all too many instances, they let that define what they were doing.

And as a result, they lost their way.

And so I try to say, as I said to young folks over at the University of Louisville we cannot allow, our individual differences to define how we deal with the big question.

The question is bigger than any one or two people.

[APPLAUSE] And that's what happened here.

And there was another big problem I see.

I don't know if he avoided it on purpose.

But I did a whole chapter in this book on colorism.

No, that was the next point I was going to raise.

Go right ahead.

Because I think, a lot of that defined - I mean, that's what defeated Robert Smalls.

I mean with all the stuff we said about Robert Smalls.

And there's much more to the man than that.

Yet, the campaign - though George Washington Murray it was one of the people that I, I admire.

I did not admire the kind of campaign that he ran against Smalls.

Because Smalls was of mixed race Though his mother never told who the father was.

George Washington Murray was not.

And if you look at this period of time, you will see the newspapers did a job on these guys.

They kept splitting them up.

Now, Just told you that Miller was really not Afri can-American at all.

The newspapers started calling him the Canary.

Murray.

Real, really black.

They started calling him the Crow.

And I mean the newspapers and the headlines.

They they wrote stuff to denigrate these people and to turn them against each other.

And that is what led to all of t And so my whole thing is that we have to hear.

You used to be the newspaper business, if you still are.

I used to be.

And so we know this, how this works, but we cannot let headlines drive our relationships, because that's what happened to them.

These headlines helped to destroy - Now I'm not saying they would have overcome but for the headlines, I don't know.

But I do know, that's what took its toll.

Some of the things that are in this book, some of the language that you report on, is pretty outlandish.

This was an editorial from the Edgefield Advertiser.

'South Carolina is Africanized.'

Fairfield Herald wrote that 'the assembly of the new legislature was proof South Carolina had been trampled beneath the unholy hooves of African savages, and was now governed by gibbering louse-eaten, devil-worshiping barbarians.'

That's not atypical.

That's not atypical.

Not at all.

You mentioned Edgefield and Fairfield.

You also see some stuff there from the Charleston Mercury.

It's not the Charleston Post and Courier, but the Charleston Mercury.

There were some tough headlines there.

And that's one of the things that, you know, thinking about today for a long period, at least in my life.

People who may have felt that way never said it publicly.

They wouldn't have done it.

Clearly, at some point, I mean, the one of the most amazing things was when, Tillman was elected governor.

Your "buddy."

When they called him "Pitchfork Tillman."

And this is his inaugural address.

He said he declared his win "a triumph of democracy and white supremacy over mongrelism and anarchy of civilization over barbarism."

That was an inaugural speech.

Yes.

We're returning to a time or we've returned to a time when that is not all that different.

Absolutely.

And that's why I mentione the nicknames that these people put on these members.

So when you see nicknames being ascribed to people, that's why I'm saying so much of what's going on right now, I think is grounded in these.

I call it about 15 years of developing, a process, a system that worked, to do what they set out to do, which was to restore - In fact, one governor of South Carolina, Lawrence, I believe his name was, he wrote, I mean, he said in a speech his aim was to return the formerly enslaved to a period as close to slavery as they could get violating the 13th Amendment of the United State's Constitutition.

So their whole aim was to disenfranchise not to allow education.

So, so many of the battles they had was over schools.

Smalls in the 1868 Constitutional Convention.

Smalls, who himself, did not have a formal education.

He offered the resolution that passed at that convention for free public schools for all.

First time in the country that free public education was afforded to people, to all people, irrespective of whether or not you're a part of the elite.

Smalls authored that.

And died without ever having a formal education.

And yet, not yet, We had the situation which you report on here that even like in 1911, I think it was, South Carolina was spending $17 on every white student and $1.90 on every Black student.

Absolutely.

And when I was teaching the difference in the school districts, there were nine school districts in Charleston when I was teaching, and St.

James School District was up near McClellanville.

I remember when they were spending I think, like $90 or it might have been $190.

To over $700 to St.

Andrews which is a whiter school district.

So when we talk about the debate over critical race theory.

That debate is kind of, disappeared for a while.

But the whole notion of critical race theory was the study of institutionalized, impediments to Black Americans.

And how that is, has, perpetuated, the disparity and wealth and so forth over the years.

And, and we're where we are now.

And that when people need to understand, what has happened to generations of Black Americans, through institutionalized discrimination.

And this is a perfect example of And one of the reasons why this ought to be in every critical race theory course if they were actually taught.

But they're not being taught.

Let's turn for a minute.

You know, going back to your to your epilogue and you talk about you wrote this partially as a cautionary tale, and I think everybody who's paying attention right now would say so many of the, the attitudes, so many of the strategies, for oppressing people have returned.

And we have and, ok, we'll get a little bit political here.

We have an administration including the Justice Department maybe even the Supreme Court.

that seems unwilling, even if, well, many of them agree with that strategy.

But, they seem unwilling to do anything about it.

And is that the type of thing you're talking about with the cautionary tale?

That's exactly what I'm talking about.

You know, these things evolve.

You know, make a decision here.

You see something.

"Oh, that's just Black being Black."

No.

These things, these things evolve, and they keep growing.

And if you do not arrest the cancer, you gotta catch it early or it spreads, and if it's not arrested, it's gonna consume the entire body politic.

And so all these things are seeping in today.

I try in this epilogue to say we've got to be careful.

These things are not happening just so.

Let me give a couple examples here.

When the Edgefield Plan was writ all the people were told exactly how to carry out the violence, what they should when they go into these meetings.

They should demand to speak, just talk over people.

And don't ever threaten anybody.

It must be a promise if you threaten.

It has to be a promise that you must carry out.

And then they told them, And when you go, wear red shirts.

Red caps, red shirts.

And the biggest massacre throughout this that took place in South Carolina was the Hamburg Massacre.

down near Aiken, South Carolina.

That massacre came about because of the confrontation between the people and the National Guard.

Need I say more.

One of the things that was, part of the reason for the decline of power of Blacks in South Carolina was that there were there was a pretty significant debate over the issue of sending federal troops into a state without their permission.

Yeah, absolutely.

And ultimately, the, leaders at the federal level succumbed to that argument.

No, we shouldn't send troops out CLYBURN: Yeah.

That's what you know, we talked about these people being Republicans.

What was the especially egregious in all of this is that Rutherford Hayes, they all voted for Hayes.

They supported Hayes.

My parents were Republicans.

They remained the party of Lincoln all the way down to my childhood.

I don't think my parents really made the shift until 1964.

I think it started in Roosevelt and continued with Truman.

But the big thing came when Strom Thurmond But the big thing came when When you saw this big, massive, shift.

Even though, Kennedy got significant in fact, he got the majority of the African-American vote.

But even then, Nixon still got 29, 28% of it.

So this shift did not culminate until then.

So when you see, what those presidents do, Grant refused to send the troops to protect them.

This...all these were Republican So they were double-crossed early by the party.

And, knowing this history, I have fought with some of my frie who, of the other persuasion, this is, you've been double-crossed befor You just don't know it.

So we're in a fascinating time in America's history, and while I think everybody has gotten enough of the taste of the book that they're all going to.

Everyone's going to read it, and, be impressed by it.

But let's talk about today's environment.

Okay.

I think they probably want to hear you talk about that as well We had a conversation yesterday, and the issue was "is there reason to hope?"

"Is our democracy gone?"

All the questions that we hear in everyday conversation.

What can we do?

Is there a way out of this malaise that we seem to be in, where there is so much polarization.

There is so much division.

Among the American people.

Oh, yes, I do think so.

You know, South Carolinians, by and large, live by our state's motto.

"While I breathe, I hope."

But I also grew up in a parsonage.

And my father, as I told you, I don't know if I mentioned, the Bible verses we had to do, these current events every day.

We also have to do a Bible verse every morning before breakfast.

And the Bible verses I learned very early that I keep in mind is Hebrews 11:1, and that verse is that "faith is the substance of things hoped for.

And the evidence of things unseen."

And I do know how dark and dreary a lot of what we see going on today is seen to people, but, I maintain, that, we must not lose faith in those principles that have gotten us this far, we must not allow ourselves to, lose hope.

Jesse Jackson used to always say "keep hope alive."

"Keep hope alive."

And I think we have to do that now.

I doubt that there's anybody here who really saw what was going to happen two Tuesdays ago, thought that what happened was going to happen.

In New York, in Virginia, in New Jersey, and few people looked at - [APPLAUSE] Georgia, you may not be familiar with what happened in Georgia.

But Georgia elect publicly their Public Service Commisioners, and two incumbents were running for reelection, from the Republican Party, and they were defeated 60-40 by two on the Democratic side.

Mississippi broke the strangleho of the supermajority.

all taking place in that one day.

So, we stay focused.

Don't lose hope.

And, I think it we'll see.

a turn in this stuff, so I don't I'm still hopeful.

My Dad used to always say, "Son, the darkest point of the night is that moment just before dawn."

And so, you know, I hope I'm right I hope you are, too.

[APPLAUSE] Jim, you write in here about Charles Sumner, from Massachusetts who was, a constant champion of Black rights and, in, the U.S.

Congress and, you mentioned when he died, Robert Elliott, we haven't talked about him much but he's obviously he's a very prominent figure in this book and in American history.

But he eulogized Charles Sumner.

And he said in that eulogy, "Here was the perfection of moral constancy and daring.

Here was sleepless vigilance, unwearingly labor, hopefulness born only of deepest deepest faith, buoyant resolution, caring nothing for human odds, but serenely abiding in the perfect peace which the unselfish service of truth alone can bring."

He could have been talking about you.

[APPLAUSE] John, you're so kind.

[APPLAUSE] Thank you for being with us tonight.

This has been a great conversation.

Thank you.

Thank you.

[APPLAUSE] This program was made possible by the Owsley Brown II Family Foundation, LDG Development, University of Louisville, and the James Graham Brown Foundation.