Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class. A production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio, Hey and Happy Friday. Casual Friday
Speaker 1: is here, and I'm Holly Fry, I'm Tracy Vie Wilson.
Speaker 1: I feel like every day is Casual Friday in a
Speaker 1: pandemic CADA kind of. UM. One of the things we
Speaker 1: talked about this week was James Forton Ye, who we
Speaker 1: talked about pretty openly in the episode, having been both
Speaker 1: fairly convinced we must have talked about it before. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I could find no evidence to support that. Nope, me neither,
Speaker 1: which brings up an interesting thing, right, there is no
Speaker 1: evidence for a lot of the aspects of his life
Speaker 1: that people often talk about. UM. Kind of the biography
Speaker 1: of him that that everybody really turns to is um
Speaker 1: written by a woman named Julie Wynne. That biography is
Speaker 1: titled A Gentleman of Color, and it's kind of like
Speaker 1: the one that a lot of people reference, and her
Speaker 1: research is really really amazing. UM. But she points out,
Speaker 1: like what we know is kind of not ever through
Speaker 1: primary source documents with him, because it appears most of
Speaker 1: his papers were at some point destroyed, probably in a
Speaker 1: property transfer or something. UM. But they're like kind of
Speaker 1: put together from the writings of people that knew him
Speaker 1: who say, oh, he told me this once, etcetera. And
Speaker 1: one of the things that comes up all the time
Speaker 1: when you're reading about him is he purchased the freedom
Speaker 1: of enslaved people. But I it's a little tricky to
Speaker 1: know if if that was really the case. Um. So,
Speaker 1: if anybody was looking for that in the episode and
Speaker 1: didn't get it or felt like kind of bummed that
Speaker 1: they didn't hear about it, it's because if he did,
Speaker 1: it was probably a little more indirect than we might think. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was so much a man about the letter of
Speaker 1: the law. And really there are some things about his
Speaker 1: writing even that troubles me because there is a certain
Speaker 1: tone of uh, like a purity standard for black people
Speaker 1: to be perfect, um and you know his thing is like, no,
Speaker 1: you have to be this much better. So I don't
Speaker 1: know if he would have actively participated in something like
Speaker 1: that while he was also trying to lobby Congress to
Speaker 1: do things. Um that is, it gets to be a
Speaker 1: little bit tricky. And again we talked about it in
Speaker 1: the episode. Right, this is contextualized at a time and
Speaker 1: place when like those kinds of thoughts would not be
Speaker 1: perceived quite the same way they are today. Obviously, there
Speaker 1: is a problem to it. We don't know what he
Speaker 1: was thinking, specifically, aside from his abolitionist writings that we have,
Speaker 1: we don't have diaries, we don't have like personal notes
Speaker 1: to really know what his logic flow was for the
Speaker 1: way he presented certain ideas and thoughts. Even in his
Speaker 1: thirteen pamphlet, the end of it is very almost apologetic
Speaker 1: in tone, where he's like, I don't want to offend anybody.
Speaker 1: I don't want to make anybody feel like I'm pointing
Speaker 1: a finger, I'm blaming, Like we just we need to
Speaker 1: fix all of this. But even though he has very
Speaker 1: clearly outlined, well documented instances of complete disparity in how
Speaker 1: people are treated and respected, so there is a weird
Speaker 1: back and forth there with him. It's hard to parse
Speaker 1: because again we're going off of very little actual source
Speaker 1: material from him. So I just wanted to mention that
Speaker 1: as people are reading things about him or studying him,
Speaker 1: if they if they are inspired to do so, that
Speaker 1: you keep that in mind. It's there can be some
Speaker 1: tricky parts of his story that are are a little
Speaker 1: bit um like I said, you know, it troubles me
Speaker 1: a little bit because you hate to see it. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this idea of like you have to act right so
Speaker 1: white people will treat you right, and it's like, wait, no,
Speaker 1: they should have rights the end. That's that's always a problem. Again,
Speaker 1: that's me working it out well, and so we've that's
Speaker 1: something that has come up on the show relatively often
Speaker 1: when we've been talking about social movements advocating for people's
Speaker 1: rights and the idea of respectability and how uh, in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways, respectability could be a really important tool,
Speaker 1: but it was also a double edged sword because it's
Speaker 1: just like creating a standard that is like continues to
Speaker 1: be applied. Like if you look at uh, if you
Speaker 1: look at headlines about Black Lives Matter today, you will
Speaker 1: still see things that are about the idea of respectability
Speaker 1: rather than the idea that like everybody should have rights. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's also some other interesting stuff and it comes up
Speaker 1: a lot in that biography. She's pretty unflinching in her
Speaker 1: examination of his life about how he could as part
Speaker 1: of that kind of obsession with achieving respectability. Uh, he
Speaker 1: was a bit controlling of his employees at times, would
Speaker 1: really kind of put his teetotal or stamp on any
Speaker 1: discussions about that they would have about like, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm the person that pays your wages, and I think
Speaker 1: you should not drink um. Allegedly, he would even tell
Speaker 1: his white employees how to vote, which is an interesting thing.
Speaker 1: You know, a company that did that today would not
Speaker 1: would not fly. Uh. So it is There's a lot
Speaker 1: of really interesting stuff to unpack there, and I think
Speaker 1: if you go into it kind of appreciating the conflict
Speaker 1: of of so much of anyone's story from that period
Speaker 1: of time right as viewed through our modern lens. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a really interesting puzzle to put together. I'm thinking
Speaker 1: about all the times that I've gotten newsletters that places
Speaker 1: that I've worked that are like, here are the candidates
Speaker 1: that are supporting our business, uh, which is uh, not
Speaker 1: quite the same as vote for this person, but it's
Speaker 1: the same intent. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things we
Speaker 1: talked about this week was six Topics, Uh that when
Speaker 1: folks asked us to cover it on the show, I'm like,
Speaker 1: but there's this one book about it, one book. Um.
Speaker 1: I I often will have these these conversations with my
Speaker 1: spouse where He's like, what are you working on? And
Speaker 1: I explained what I'm working on, and this time, um,
Speaker 1: he said what you're working I was like, well, I'm
Speaker 1: working on a six impossible episodes and I'm I'm calling it.
Speaker 1: There's a book about it. And he had a totally
Speaker 1: different read on what that would mean. In his imagination,
Speaker 1: it was something that is so big that it is
Speaker 1: only possible to cover it in a book and podcast.
Speaker 1: And I was like, Oh, that's very interesting, but that's
Speaker 1: that's not that's not what it is. Uh. One. The
Speaker 1: last thing that we talked about was the loss and
Speaker 1: family murders, which actually happened not that far from where
Speaker 1: I grew up. Um, I'm not close enough that, uh
Speaker 1: that it was like a source of sort of macab
Speaker 1: fascination for everyone. Um. And that episode of the podcast
Speaker 1: Criminal that we talked about. In the episode, um Phoebe
Speaker 1: Judge talked to all of these people from Stokes County
Speaker 1: and they talked about it just sort of being uh
Speaker 1: like local almost local urban legend at this point, like
Speaker 1: a thing that everybody living there knows about and talks about. Um.
Speaker 1: But it was a thing that I don't think I
Speaker 1: learned about until high school when the book White Christmas,
Speaker 1: Bloody Christmas came out and I got a copy of
Speaker 1: that book, and I don't know if it's still in
Speaker 1: my parents house somewhere. Um. If so, it's super hard
Speaker 1: to find. Now if you want to get the like
Speaker 1: that edition of that book, you can find people trying
Speaker 1: to sell it for like nine dollars. So I have questions.
Speaker 1: So you learned about it in high school when that
Speaker 1: book came out, did it then become a source of
Speaker 1: fascination for people in your peer group? I know it
Speaker 1: became a source of fascination for me, um, because I,
Speaker 1: like a lot of folks, I had that the the
Speaker 1: sort of um fascination with crimes and like really grewesome
Speaker 1: historical stories. Um. I. The person that I I'm pretty
Speaker 1: sure I learned about it from was actually my drama teacher,
Speaker 1: and she had known about it for a really long
Speaker 1: time and it was really fascinated with it and was
Speaker 1: so excited about that book coming out. Um. She she
Speaker 1: had this story that she told us in drama class
Speaker 1: about like her son. I don't I'm not sure if
Speaker 1: they had known that the book was coming out, um,
Speaker 1: but her son had found a copy of it in
Speaker 1: the bookstore and was trying to keep her from seeing
Speaker 1: that it was there so that he could get it
Speaker 1: for her for Christmas. So yeah, there were there were
Speaker 1: other weird stories, some of them true and some of
Speaker 1: them faults. That were more things that we discussed in
Speaker 1: our in our peer group. Um, like, there was this
Speaker 1: supposedly haunted road in a place called Rural Hall in
Speaker 1: North Carolina called Payne Road, and we talked about pain
Speaker 1: Road a lot. Um. I don't think that we really
Speaker 1: had Charlie Loss in conversations until possibly after the book
Speaker 1: came out. Fascinating. Definitely read that book more than once.
Speaker 1: It may or may not be in my parents basement.
Speaker 1: I feel like I didn't grow up with any good,
Speaker 1: local horrible stories. We had alien sightings. That was our thing.
Speaker 1: Slightly different, not as not as I don't know I
Speaker 1: was gonna say, not as cool, but some people I
Speaker 1: think it's probably more cool. I don't know. I like
Speaker 1: the I like crimes and scary things. So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's almost October as of when we're recording this. Oh
Speaker 1: it's been October in my heart since July. So yeah,
Speaker 1: good Ready, If you would like to write to as
Speaker 1: you can do so at a history podcast at i
Speaker 1: heart radio dot com, and you can subscribe on the
Speaker 1: i heart radio app, at Apple podcast anywhere you listen.
Speaker 1: We hope you have a wonderful weekend however that plays
Speaker 1: out for you, and we'll see you next week. Stuff
Speaker 1: you Missed in History Class is a production of I
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