'Fugitive Archives' with Asale Angel-Ajani

And now I would like to welcome to the show Sally Angela Johnny. Welcome to What Happens with Sid. Thank you so much for having me. It's so good to be here. So you have a new book that came out in October, which was surprisingly just last month, and it's called Fugitive Archives, and it kind of goes back a little bit into your family history, but before we kind of dive deep into that, tell viewers a little bit about who you are, where you're from, and what kind of made you take this journey of telling your family story. Sure. So I'm from California. I'll start there, which might say a lot. But I'm from California. I, um... I'm currently living in New York. Actually, right now I'm in Georgia. But I am a professor and a writer. I've written a novel and other nonfiction. I'm a trained anthropologist. But the reason why I decided to write Fugitive Archives was because right after... George Floyd's murder in 2020. We had that very brief period where everyone was talking about, which seems kind of absurd now, how can we address issues around race and racism? And one of the ways that was proposed was that we just needed to have conversations, get to know each other, become friends, because we, in fact, didn't know each other as As a collective body, as divided communities. And one of the things that I knew from my family was that intimacy didn't necessarily mean. Uh closeness or the inability to be racist or racist betrayal, like I like to call it, or racial even enacting racial violence or terror against one another. Because my family is a very good example of American history writ large. or And so it just happened that as I started writing the book, I realized that we were coming upon the 250th anniversary. of the founding of America, as it were, and as I was going through my family's history, I could sort of map moments to broader history, broader historical issues that showed where this, from the earliest days of contact, where we were intimately, across color lines, intimately connected, and yet people still made Those who were in power, those who had the money, still made decisions and laws and policies. and Household decisions to, in fact, constantly degrade, violate, and abuse people, specifically Black people, but also Native people, and also my family. you. We have Japanese people. We have Latinos. We have the whole array of... Of folks in my family, so I wanted to show that through my family, my my family's bloodline, but then also extend it out to a greater American history. Yeah. And I know you also shine the light, you know, on your grandfather, Mickey. And there was a part in there where I guess when he was four and like he could. Tell his family members, you know, that were a part of the Ku Klux Klan based on, you know, the shoes that they were wearing or things like that. So what was kind of the feeling, you know, of hearing his experience and hearing his stories, you know, and how that kind of trickled down generation to generation? So that was actually my grandmother, my grandmother, Mickey, who one of the ways that I talk about this is that my so my grandmother, who was married 12 times, she was married three for her among her. Her first husband was Native American and her mother, who was part of the Klan, she grew up in a in a her mother was a devoted Klan. came from a devoted Klan family from even before the 1920s. So they were always on the wrong side of history. And I wanted to tell that story of my great-grandmother Maude and Mickey, my grandmother, because it's a clear example of how closeness and proximity doesn't filter down. So my great-grandmother Maude was... was a female who was dedicated, devoted, and one of the earliest women to belong to and create the WKKK. So we often think of the Klan as being mostly a male, masculine organization. But in the 20s, white women who wanted political power, this was a vehicle for them to do that. And so my grandmother. And she tells a story. She used to tell me the story of when she was about three or four, she could identify the feet of her family members in going through these Klan rallies. And she had a tremendous terror, a tremendous fear of the Klan. She knew what they could do. She knew what they were capable of. Now, my grandmother was married to my grandfather, who was black, and his earliest memory. was also of white terror and white racists who would who basically chased him out of his hometown in in Georgia and um so I grew up with probably their earliest memories became my earliest memories as as our as we get transmitted stories from our people from our families that's really how that shaped my earliest sort of sense of of what race and what racism looks like in the U.S., right? And so I started there because I wanted to think through how my great-grandmother Maude would, at one point, with one of my grandmother's other husbands who she had been married to for a brief period, my great-grandmother Maude burned a cross on her own daughter's lawn to protest the fact that my grandmother had married And this was in California, so this wasn't in Georgia, it wasn't in Mississippi, it wasn't in Alabama, it was in California. So that's part of that story. Now, because I just learned something with I knew some women were involved a little bit, but you would think of it from a perspective of like maybe they were the wives of the Klansmen or something like that. Not that they created like they had their own organization, you know, kind of involved with that. Now, how did women, you know, kind of play the role in, you know, social networking, recruiting and that kind of ordeal when it came to the Klan? So I should say that one of the best books about this is by Kathleen Blee, and it's been a book that's been around for a long time, and it's called Women of the Klan, I believe. Um, but. What, what, what's unique about my family members was that my grandmother, great-grandmother Maude, she was married to my great-grandfather, Oscar, who was not in the Klan, and though There's some question about where he is on the color line, because when I went through the archives and went through the documents, I found him 10 years before he had married Maude. He was living in a very black part of town in Cincinnati, Ohio, with two black women. Now, I don't know if he just happened to be. A white man who, who lived in this part of town with two black women. But my, the family lore and the family story is that he was, he worked on the railroads. He was always much more happy. And he was a foreman of an all black crew. And he slept, ate and lived with his black crew. Unlike other white foremen who would go live with the, with, you know, Who, in fact, didn't want to be in, didn't they, the crews of the railroads were all very segregated. But my grandfather, my great grandfather was said to have been much more comfortable around black people than he was with white people. So I didn't understand how he ended up marrying Maude. But the point is, is that Her family, you can trace their connection to the Klan the whole way through. Now, how the women were involved was that they organized events. The event that I talk about, my grandmother's earliest memory, was 60,000 WKKK women. So these were women, 60,000 of them. It was one of the largest marches they've ever had in the U.S. They went through her hometown, this tiny town in Indiana, and they had tremendous political power. They did all the things that we think of today, book banning, writing letters to their senators, going out there and marching to get their senators to pass policies. They would boycott. They would have these poison pen campaigns where if they thought that their neighbor was a Catholic. They would go after them or the school principal was Jewish. They would go after that. It was it was really when I went through all the records and the documents to me, it was it was such a fascinating and highly disturbing and very, very much echoing kind of what we see in politics today in terms of how on how they operate, how they operated. Now, with all the extensive research and, you know, digging that you did with this story, how long did it take you to do the research and then finally put everything into the book and get it published? So the book came out in October. So it took about I mean, it took a little bit longer than it should have, because speaking truthfully, there were other. There were pieces of the book, especially dealing with my family, that were tremendously difficult. And even in the course of doing the research, I found a brother that I didn't know had existed. You know, um, I connected a cousin to his father. I mean, it's, you know, so there was a lot of, I think when people are prepared to do this kind of work in your family tree, Because part of what part of what I want people to do with this, if if if you. read the book, get the book. Part of what I would love people to do is to think through a similar mapping, like how is our family, especially those of us whose families are told that they don't either, they don't belong, or they're somehow outside of the standard American story. There are ways that we plug ourselves in. And I think that part of what we can do is is really take our family stories and work with them. And sometimes when we do that, we find things that are very uncomfortable, things that we don't want to look at. And in fact, that was the case with my family. So it took longer from an emotional standpoint, but I think all in, I would say it took probably four years to do the research and then about two years to do the... Two years to a year to write and then a year to get it published. Publishing takes a long time. So now what would you say is the biggest lesson after all of this that you've taken away from it? And what's something that you hope readers take away from it? So I think for so personally, I think that what I took away from this was that. Good. On the one hand, I'm like, I don't know if I ever want to write nonfiction again. No, I'm, I took away from this a sort of a general. appreciation for the struggles of both my benevolent and not so benevolent ancestors. I understood truly, especially when I linked it up to what was going on in the wider American context, the political pressures that the elite class, the wealthy elite class, They've always been in the minority and my people either come from It's an enslaved or or genocided as a native and indentured servant background. We've always been, to put it very roughly, we've always been like poor people. We've not been. And that was something for me that was surprised to find that my my people have not been able to sort of. I think I'm the representative of somebody who has kind of elevated her position in life, but it's taken this many generations, right? I went to college, have degrees, and I'm the first of my family. And so for me, what I took away from doing this research was an appreciation for the political pressures, the economic pressures, but also So, um... I also took away some, a little bit of disappointment because there were moments in history and moments in our family history where people could have behaved and done better and they just chose not to. So for the reader, what I hope that they would take from this is a sense of how we can see ourselves collectively, how we all are part of this broader tapestry and how we can, in fact, how we've always been, in fact, in dialogue, in communication, how we've loved. Um, maybe even illegally, how we've, um, hated, how we've, how we've sort of gotten by. Um, but I think that what I hope that the reader will do is sort of take up the, the opportunity to think through their own family lineage and this broader American, uh, history. Well, Celie, thank you for being so informative, because I'm sitting here like I'm in history class. I'm just like, this stuff is interesting. You know, I learned something new, and I know viewers and readers are learning something. And thank you for, you know, doing the work, telling the story, and, you know, taking the time to come on and share that and talk with me and fellow book lovers out there. We greatly appreciate it. I can't wait to see, you know, what else you come out with in the next couple years, because I know you might need a little break after this. So I greatly appreciate it. Well, thank you so much for having me. I really, I, and listen, I am, I'm grateful for anybody who reads or listens to books. And so, um, so I'm a fan too, because I get information from, from your show, which I stream. And so I'm, I'm so thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.