>> Neda Ulaby: Morning. I'm Neda Ulaby, I'm a reporter with National Public Radio. It is such an honor to be here at the National Book Festival, to be here with you and with these two distinguished authors. We're going to spend the next hour almost, which is just not enough time learning about two of the most unsung female heroines of the civil rights movement, two women who in many, many ways could not have been more different. One was establishment, one was grassroots, one was upwardly mobile, incredibly well-educated, and the other one came from a background filled with such depravation that to describe it as dirt poor seems almost too grand. One was an obvious leader since her teens, the other one was an unlikely and late in life luminary. Both of them changed the course of history, and neither one of them has been given their due. Hopefully these two biographies that we are going to be discussing will help change that. Tomiko Brown-Nagin is a dean at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She's a law professor and a history professor at Harvard University. Her earlier book is Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement. The book we're going to be talking about today is Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality. Kate. Kate. Clifford Larson is a distinguished scholar whose earlier books include a biography of Harriet Tubman, Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter and The Assassin's Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln. Today, we'll be talking about Walk With Me, A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer. So I'm--am going to assume that many of you are like me. Maybe you've heard a little bit about Fannie Lou Hamer. Maybe you haven't heard anything about Constance Motley. I am hoping that you will introduce us to the subjects of these books. Tomiko, yours is, I think, unjustly, perhaps less known. Will you please tell us a little bit about Constance Motley, who she was and why--why you chose her? >> Tomiko Brown-Nagin: Sure. Happy to. Thank you, Neda. And thanks to all of you for being here this morning. I'm delighted to share about Constance Baker Motley, who is a legendary civil rights lawyer who in her time was very well known. I set out to write ou--to write about her because it's--it is the case that people today don't know her to the extent that they should. Legendary civil rights lawyer who litigated the cases that made it possible for all of us to be together today, regardless of race, made it possible for me to--to be a law professor and Kate to be a scholar. And symbolically, she was very important to professional women. To give you three points about her achievements, in addition to litigating cases like Brown versus Board of Education, the James Meredith case, the case that desegregated the University of Georgia and the University of Alabama, Motley was a path breaker in politics. She was the first female Manhattan borough president, as well as the first black female state senator in New York. And then she capstoned her career by becoming the first black female federal judge appointed by Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1966. And as you can imagine, she has inspired a generation of lawyers, including women of color, lawyers like my late colleague Lani Guinier, the first black woman appointed to the faculty of the Harvard Law School, Kamala Harris and Justice Ketanji Brown. Jackson, who, when she was introduced to the nation, cited Constance Baker Motley, this pathbreaking lawyer, as a role model. And so Motley really is a person who should be well known by-- by all of us, because, as I said, she really did lay the groundwork for modern American society changing the legal and the social landscape. >> Neda Ulaby: And Fannie Lou Hamer. >> Kate Clifford Larson: So Fannie Lou Hamer rose up to be an incredible leader during the civil rights movement in the 1960s. But as was brought up before, she had an entirely different life trajectory than--than Constance. I--it cannot be underestimated the deprivation and the poverty that she was born into in 1917, the 20th child of Mississippi sharecroppers. And her life was defined by hunger, lack of access to health care, education-- she reached-- attained a sixth grade education--and also the incredible violence that permeated life in Mississippi. And she rose out of that-- those circumstances as an adult to become a path breaker and to really change the landscape. She came out of the earth of Mississippi and she was very different than the elite civil rights organizers and figures that we know today so well, the Martin Luther Kings of the world and Rosa Parks, of course, and others that were sort of managing and--and--and pushing the movement forward on the national level. And she had this passion that she had to make a change because her life was so profoundly difficult and she was so oppressed and so many things had been taken from her that at a very late age, she was about 40 years old, 44 years old. She decided that it was time that she would make a difference. And she was a deeply spiritual woman. Her faith was everything to her. Her family meant everything to her, and so did her community. And that's where her activism started. And her faith fortified her to move forward when violence was perpetrated against her, her body, her soul. And she went on to lead people around the country and inspire them. And she became famous--for those of you who may know and for those of you who don't-- in 1964 at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, she was given a platform to talk about what was happening in Mississippi and how African Americans were not represented there. And they were denied the vote in Mississippi and her heartfelt speech that was so powerful, it shook the people in the room that heard it. Men and women were crying and people around the nation who saw the video of it later that evening in August of 18, 1964, deeply moved all of them and changed people so that it altered really the course, I believe, of the civil rights movement. President Johnson was affected by what she said as well, and he went on to sign some very important legislation, including the 1965 voting rights legislation, which has been powerful over the past few decades and is under threat today. So her legacy lives on in the voting rights campaigns around the country. And I think that there are people just like Fannie Lou Hamer in our communities today. And they need to be recognized and supported just like she was, because they can make a world of difference for all of us. >> Neda Ulaby: One of the things that I didn't know about Fannie Lou Hamer that it's just been sitting with me is the words that are on her tombstone are are a term that she kind of introduced into, into the cultural conversation, which is, I'm sick of tired, sick and tired of being sick and tired. Right. With Constance Motley, she came, she came from a West Indian immigrant family. She grew up in, in, in New Haven. Her father actually worked for Skull and Bones. >> Tomiko Brown-Nagin: He did. >> Neda Ulaby: And then she was plucked. A wealthy white man learned. I think she went how--how--how what set her on the trajectory to Columbia Law School. >> Tomiko Brown-Nagin: Right. Let me tell you about it and a bit about her background. She was not a person of privilege. In fact, her family, it was a working class family. Her parents emigrated to this country from the West Indies in the early 20th century from Nevis. They virtually every male relative in her family worked for Yale University, and she grew up in the shadow of Yale in New Haven. That's something I note in my work, is that for some could imagine, that one is a working class black person growing up in in New Haven in the shadow of Yale, there might be some resentment, but for her family, their position was inspiring. In fact, her father really read the privilege of the young men that he served at Yale, as a chef, into himself. And the parents thought of themselves as--as the father in particular-- as superior. They--they were part of the British Empire and proud of that. They were ambitious in their own way. And yet Constance Baker was a young girl and she was not expected to go very far. However, she was incredibly intelligent, ambitious, had teachers who introduced her to the work of W.E.B. Dubois and James Weldon Johnson. She decided pretty early on that she wanted to be a lawyer. And when she told her family and friends about this, they said, You must be crazy. Women don't get anywhere in the law. And yet she was able to attend college and then law school because she gave a talk at a social club, a civic club in New Haven, which happened to be attended by Clarence Blakeslee, who was a graduate of Yale and a wealthy man, philanthropist, who heard her speak and said to her afterwards, Why aren't you in college? Because you clearly-- clearly should be. And he offered to pay for her college and her law school tuition. And she said that it was like a fairy tale, that-- that she could be plucked in that way. And it set her on this course where she was able to attend law school and got her first job out of law school with Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and stayed there for-- for 20 years, during which time she-- she mostly --most of that time, she was the only woman. And just to say a little bit about who she was as a person, she was reserved. She was graceful, elegant in her bearing. And a part of this came from the sense of being connected to the British Empire. She grew up in a home where her mother would play God Save the Queen. And--and one could-- to, to see her was to understand that she did feel herself to be different. And it was really important that she felt this way, because, of course, when she went down to the Deep South to litigate these cases on behalf of people like Fannie Lou Hamer and others in the community, she was subjected to the same kind of indignities as were her clients. So she wasn't called Mrs. by opposing counsel. There were judges who wouldn't even look at her. And then on the other end of the spectrum, of course, there were members of the black community who just loved her, called her a queen, the civil rights queen, because she was doing this work in the courthouse, translating the deprivation of these communities into the language of the law. And I thought it was important to write her back into history. You know, she represented Thurgood Marshall, the Birmingham children's marchers. She was a colleague of Thurgood Marshall, of course, who thought very highly of her. And I believe it was a sort of historical malpractice to not have her considered one of the greats in the same way that these men are. >> Neda Ulaby: Who was--who was Fannie Lou Hamer in that same way as a person? Who was she? >> Kate Clifford Larson: Well, I love what you said about how Motley translated the deprivation that a Fannie Lou Hamer was experiencing, the discrimination, the violence into the courtroom and--and back to the community. Because Fannie Lou Hamer, as I said, was the 20th child of Jim and Ella Townsend. And what I discovered in my research is that seven of those children had died before Fannie Lou was born, and four of them were babies in the four years before she was born. And Fannie Lou and her siblings all talked about how it seemed that Fannie Lou was the mother's favorite. Well, now I know why she had lost four babies before that. And so Hamer was she was raised and loved and cherished and protected in this really horrific environment as sha-- cotton sharecroppers in the Delta in Mississippi. So she survives childhood and has a spotty education and she grows up to be a very strong child and taking care of her elderly parents. Once her older siblings had moved on and during the Great Depression, she struggled with them to feed themselves and work and earn money. And that informed her-- her being that struggle just gave her, in an odd way, this sense of strength and a nobility, even though that she had very little education and had no resources whatsoever and was the poorest of the poor. So when she became an adult, she looked around at those indignities and she-- they frustrated her. So while she could not speak out because speaking out meant she would be killed or hurt in some way or fired from her job as a sharecropper, she found other ways to fight back. And that meant, you know, the picking the cotton and the boss would cheat the cotton pickers and weigh their cotton and underestimate how much the cotton weighed. And she would jiggle with the weights and change the weights so that the sharecroppers were paid fairly. And the fellow sharecroppers thought she was crazy to do that, because they knew that if she got caught, she would be in so much trouble. But she just knew what was right. And as I said, she was profoundly faithful. She married another sharecropper in 1944, Perry or Pap Hamer, and they lived on this plantation outside of Ruleville, Mississippi, making a way out of really nothing. They adopted two little girls and they tried to have children of their own. But Fannie Lou had difficulty conceiving or carrying a pregnancy to term. She had several stillbirths and miscarriages. And so they raised these children and-- and had deep love and passion for family. But it was a struggle every single day. And one day she was talking with the-- Mrs. Marlow, who was the wife of the plantation owner, and Mrs. Marlow told her that she should go to the local doctor, Charles Dorrow, and he could take care of the fibroid tumors that Fannie Lou Hamer was suffering from and assured her this would help her get pregnant and carry a baby to term. So Hamer went ahead and did this, but Dorrow sterilized her instead and Hamer would talk about this in speeches all the time. They called it a Mississippi appendectomy because they did this to a lot of black women in the community. And when that happened in 1961, it changed her dramatically. She went through a crisis that tested her faith, and some women would have just receded into their home and done nothing after that. But it angered her so much and she knew that she had to fight back. That doctor took something from her that he had no right to take and there was no recourse because she was a black woman in Mississippi and she could not sue a white doctor. She became involved in the civil rights movement when the student [coughing] excuse me, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee arrived in Ruleville, Mississippi. Bob Moses, many of you probably know who he was. He was a young activist dedicated to the SNiCC, is what they called it. And a group of other young students and young people came to Ruleville and asked the people there, what did they want the civil rights movement to do for them and to help them with? And they wanted to vote. And this became the cause in Ruleville. And Fannie Lou Hamer eventually was able to register to vote and pass the onerous voting rights test. And she went on to keep fighting for the rights for everyone to be able to vote, because once she went and registered to vote her, the plantation owner evicted her from the plantation that very night. And so she was determined to not let that bring her down. She just had this fierceness about her. And some of her neighbors were very frightened for her and frightened for themselves that she would bring a reign of terror down on them, that white supremacists would just become brutal and try to kill them, which they did do. People fired shotgun blasts at their house and in their neighborhood all the time, but she had had enough. And after she was arrested for her role in the movement and brutally beaten and raped in the Winona County jail in the--in the June of 1963, she faced another crossroads. And she later said, have been trying to kill me my whole life. Well, they might as well do it, but I'm not going to stop fighting for equal rights. And as I said earlier in my comments, she went on to fight and fight and fight from the grassroots level. And those young people from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee were so wowed by her, she was 20 years older than them, but they looked up to her as such an inspiring leader and she was inspired by them. She once said that those students she felt was the new kingdom that had come to Mississippi, that there was more Christianity in those young people than she had seen in any church that she had attended. So they inspired her to risk her life and she inspired them to risk their lives to. And she went on to really mobilize change from the ground up, grassroots and challenge civil rights elites, as well as the white supremacists that would circle her house every single day showing their shotguns, threatening her. So her legacy is is so powerful today for the people that knew her. And I think a new generation needs to get to know her and know that you can come from the most obscure circumstances and the most difficult places and still rise up and be a leader and-- and create change. [applause] >> Neda Ulaby: Fannie Lou Hamer was born and raised in her activism was in Mississippi. In Mississippi is where Constance Motley had one of her most extraordinary legal battles. Can you describe her role in desegregating Ole Miss? >> Tomiko Brown-Nagin: Yes. And I just want to pick up on something you said, Neda, and something that Kate said. It is true that in many ways these women are differently positioned and they're a study in contrasts. But it's also the case that both of them--and something I deeply admire about Motley and about Hamer--they both had such tremendous courage. It's moral courage, but it's also the case that Motley, when she litigated in Alabama and Mississippi in particular, she did so under threat of her life. And this was the case when she traveled from her New York City apartment down to Mississippi 22 times in the span of 18 months. >> Neda Ulaby: With a small child at home. >> Tomiko Brown-Nagin: Yes. With Joel, her-- her son at home, her husband back in their apartment. And just-- just imagine doing that. You would only do something like that if you felt yourself on a mission. And she did it because, first of all, Thurgood Marshall assigned the case to her. They were in the office at LDF and received this letter from James Meredith, who said that he wanted to challenge segregation at Ole Miss in his home state. And Thurgood Marshall said, "This man has got to be crazy. That's your case." Because it was because of the violence in Mississippi. The threat just the-- the absolute stranglehold of white supremacy on people of the state. And nevertheless, Motley went down to Mississippi. She represented James Meredith. It was a terribly difficult case for all sorts of reasons. First of all, the fear and the anxiety that was provoked by being a black person coming down from New York, you know, the antithesis of many ways of of Mississippi, it was considered. And--and daring to come into a courtroom, a federal courtroom and stand up-- And Motley stood nearly six feet tall--and claime that a black man should be allowed to enter Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi. And she did that. And she did it despite hostility from her co-counsel who refused to recognize her. He would call her that woman. And Motley challenged it. And she said to the judge, who himself was a segregationist. But on the spectrum of segregationist, even he knew that-- that was-- that was wrong. And so he admonished the opposing counsel when Motley said, you know, he should call me by my name, Mrs. Motley, to-- to at least call her the woman from New York is what he ended up calling her. And another point I want to make about the ways in which this was a difficult case. So Medgar Evers, who was the main NAACP operative in Mississippi, would pick Motley up from the airport and he would travel with her, take her to the courthouse. And she stayed with Medgar Evers and his wife and children. She when-- she was in Mississippi, they were really her community--feeding her. And they experienced the terror of Mississippi together. So when they were traveling to the courthouse, more than one time, Medgar said to her, "Look. Don't look back. We're being followed." And the state police is trailing them as they're driving down the highway in-- in Mississippi. And he says to her, "Put that legal pad inside your New York Times because you don't want to be stopped and--and have evidence that you're you're doing this this civil rights work." And that happened time and time again. She said to Medgar Evers once when she was staying in their house, that there were some bushes that were close to hedges, close to the house. And she said, "You know, Medgar, you need to cut those down because someone could harm you. Just come behind those behind those hedges and--and harm you." And of course, that's exactly what happened. He was assassinated just a few months after she left Mississippi for the last time after just battling in court. You know, she would win positions in court. And the court of appeals just would not-- would not countenance what was inevitable. And ultimately, after being in court time and time again, Meredith was able to enter Ole Miss. But that was hardly the end of the story because he met a riot when he entered and two people were killed, all with Medgar Evers (sic) trying to enter Ole Miss. So it was quite a trial. She had to buck him up several times. You know, there were times when he thought that he-- he just had enough. He'd had enough. And she brought him out of the state into her New York City apartment where he could essentially taste freedom. And she got him through that, which illustrates how she not only was working in the courtroom, but outside of the courtroom, helping her clients to continue in this really perilous fight. >> Neda Ulaby: There's a great moment in the story. This the book is so incredibly richly researched. I would like these little details like James Meredith had once he was admitted into into University of Mississippi, he had to be in a two bedroom room because his bodyguards needed their own room. And then you also tell this incredible story about how there was such fear. It's incredible that not only did they all survive physically, but survived mentally. He needed-- he needed to take a break. And it was there was some fear that he might even flunk out. And Constance Motley said, you know, you need to study. And he said, I need to go dancing. [laughter] >> Tomiko Brown-Nagin: That's right-- That's right. So she brought him up to the apartment. He stayed with her. And ultimately he said he just needed to be with his friends and to dance. He needed not to feel like a soldier every day, which was what was required to be a part of these landmark cases. >> Neda Ulaby: Can you tell us a little bit, Kate, about how Fannie Lou Hamer challenged, as you say, the civil rights elites and whether or not these two titans of the civil rights movement actually ever crossed paths? >> Kate Clifford Larson: So I don't think they did. I don't think they met. Certainly Hamer would have been aware of Motley, there's no doubt about that, especially with her work in Mississippi. And Hamer knew Medgar Evers, so she was aware of things that were going on in the movement, and I think that she probably paid a special attention, I'm imagining, because another woman was in the trenches fighting like she was. >> Tomiko Brown-Nagin: That's right. I don't think that they knew each other, but certainly they knew of each other. And I'm so interested to hear about the challenge to the civil rights elite. And I know the Hamer story, including one line I had in my earlier book where Hamer says, you know, there's nothing that she respects less than the NAACP. Right, because and--and you tell you tell the story. >> Kate Clifford Larson: So she did say that, which is interesting because during the 1950s, she did try to get memberships, people to sign up to be members of the NAACP. But it was elite middle class men that ran-- ran most of the chapters, specifically in Mississippi but other places. And she tangled with some of the elites in the movement once she became nationally known. And she was in Atlantic City, Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy and all that, the group around King. They disrespected her because she was not well educated. She had a fairly strong Mississippi Delta accent. She was very poor, so her clothing didn't meet their standards. They even said that directly to her, that she was an embarrassment to them. And they'd say, Look what you're wearing, you know, you should go home. And-- and, you know, you weren't going to say that to Fannie Lou Hamer, that's for sure. She was not going to take any of that. She was so grassroots she could not relate to the elites in the movement and a Martin Luther King could not relate to her, despite how we all think of him as this-- this grassroots organizer. He was not. It was all the people below and under him and in communities across the country that were the organizers. And he was the figurehead and an inspiring leader. But Hamer, he and Hamer just talked past each other. And in fact, in Atlantic City, Hamer was there with a group of people from Mississippi challenging the right of the Mississippi, all-white Democratic Party, to be seated on the convention floor and to vote for President Johnson as the nominee of the Democratic Party that year. And she belonged to a more diverse group of people that wanted to represent Mississippi. And so they had this challenge. So Martin Luther King was there to support them, but he --he didn't have a feel for the people there. He-- he was he inspired people. And he spoke eloquently. But he read his speech before Hamer got up on stage, and she was the one that wowed everybody personally. And the press followed King around until they heard Hamer speak. And then, they could not get enough of Fannie Lou Hamer, because she spoke to people across the country that were living in circumstances like her. And so and some of those mostly men around King felt a little threatened by her rising power. They didn't want her to have the strong voice that she had. But there was no denying Fannie Lou Hamer and the nation really responded to her. She also had this amazing singing voice, so she used that so effectively as part of her rhetoric, as part of her speeches, her presence, and people felt connected to her once she would start to sing. So she had these qualities that many of those men did not have. And so there was a big divide between those elite leaders who are absolutely necessary. And she was just another part of the movement that we often forget about. >> Tomiko Brown-Nagin: So if I can piggyback on that comment and talk a bit about Motley's relationship to those same elites, she was--she was one of them. And some of the things that she did were consistent with the attitude, the sorts of attitudes that-- that Kate is-- is discussing. For instance, in the University of Alabama case, there were two plaintiffs originally. One was Authorine Lucy, whom everybody knows, and the other was Polly Ann Meyer, who actually had instigated the case and was a good friend of Authorine Lucy. However, Polly Ann Meyer ran into trouble when the university found out that she had become pregnant before she was married, and her husband evidently had some had some run ins with-- with the law and on the basis of morals, they said that she was not qualified to-- to apply, much less attend the University of Alabama. And the--the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, including Motley. And the local lawyer just dropped her. There was no effort made to-- to stand up for Polly Ann Meyer. And the reason was that in these legal cases, in particular, the-- the plaintiffs needed to be the best in the community as-- as was understood the politics of respectability, which Mottley certainly believed in, were-- were very relevant to the types of plaintiffs who were chosen and who could be successful. So, for instance, in the University of Georgia case, one of the plaintiffs was Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who had done really well in school and who had you know, she was-- she was very beautiful. And she was easier, I guess you would say, for-- for some to accept. But the thing about Motley, she also had trouble with some of the men in the NAACP establishment. In fact, after she had litigated her first case in Mississippi, which was on behalf of black teachers, a salary equalization case. She marched into Thurgood Marshall's office and said she didn't she wasn't being paid what she thought she should be paid, [laughter] and she didn't have the title that she deserved. And he eventually did give her a raise. And he was working with the NAACP National in-- and making those decisions. But it was not an easy way for her at all. One of the deepest valleys in her life occurred in 1961, when she was passed over for Thurgood Marshall's job once he was appointed to the federal court. She wanted to be director counsel. She thought that she deserved it, but she didn't get it. It went to Jack Greenberg, who was a terrific lawyer, supporter of the civil rights movement. He also was a white man, and Motley thought both race and gender had to do with why she was passed over. And so there are two sides of the coin there and all kinds of gradations. And I love juxtaposing these stories because it shows the texture of the movement. >> Neda Ulaby: Right. >> Tomiko Brown-Nagin: And the different experiences and certainly how gender is very relevant to historical memory of the movement. And also whom we should understand as leaders of the movement. It wasn't just the men who were giving the speeches and rallying the crowds as as important as that was. And it wasn't just Thurgood Marshall who was famously extroverted and charming and sort of the alpha male. It was also these women. You know, Motley was, as I said, reserved. She was not--she was not a trying to put herself out in front. She was just doing the work. And it's important to appreciate all parts of the spectrum of leadership. >> Neda Ulaby: We have a few minutes for four questions, if anybody has any. >> : I'm intrigued by the relationship between Ms. Motley and Ms. Pauli Murray. Were they contemporaries during their time at LDF and especially considering the issue you brought about leadership at the time they were both practicing. >> Tomiko Brown-Nagin: They--they did know each other. They were friends. They supported one another at the same time. Motley was able to go further within the context of the NAACP establishment and the legal establishment and be received better than Pauli Murray was. As-- as you know, I'm sure Pauli Murray had a hard time getting her legal theories accepted by the, the, the men of the NAACP, although as they thought about it, they decided they would use it because it was so great. They did know each other. They loved each other. When Motley was appointed to the court, Pauli Murray sent her a note saying, "Hooray for our side. We finally done it!" Because they thought that it would be so great for her to have one of their own on the court. Thanks for that question. >> : Quick footnote to history. When Fannie Lou Hamer was so badly beaten in prison, a young Yale law student named Eleanor Holmes came and. Helped her get out of prison. And she was in there with Lawrence Guyot, who was a very well known community organizer in D.C. as well. And those injuries she had were really life-- were with her throughout her life. >> Neda Ulaby: Right. >> Kate Clifford Larson: Right. They contributed to her early death. She died of breast cancer in 1977, but she'd been suffering with kidney disease or not disease, but a damaged kidney from the beatings she took in the jail. And but the people around her were quite amazing. And Eleanor Holmes Norton actually was very close to Hamer. And later when Hamer had a mastectomy, Norton helped her get prosthesis because Hamer couldn't afford to do that. And she did that for-- for Hamer. So, yes, she was that young lawyer that helped bail her out of jail in June of 1963. >> Tomiko Brown-Nagin: How old was Hamer when she died? >> Kate Clifford Larson: She was 59 years old. Tomiko Brown-Nagin: Tamiko Brown-Nagin: Hmm. >> Neda Ulaby: Next question. Oh, sorry. >> : Hello? I have a question. Well, first of all, I'm --I'm happy that you mentioned gender and the civil rights movement when you are discussing these two wonderful women. In my research, more with the anti-slavery movement, we talk about how even if you're fighting for the same thing, you may not agree how to fight for it. So I was happy to hear you talk about that. But also, sometimes women in particular feel a special burden to bring women's issues to the forefront. They represent one that represent two constituencies in a fight for anyone's rights at all times. Could you talk a little bit about whether or not either of these women felt a special burden because of their gender? >> Neda Ulaby: Mm hmm. >> Tomiko Brown-Nagin: Well, I can tell you that Mottley, when she became a New York City politician, said when people called her a feminist that she was not. And so she made a choice publicly to put some distance between herself and the women's movement, both because she didn't think that it was necessarily representative of her and the experiences of other black women, but also because in the context of politics in particular, when she already had so much against her, frankly, she wasn't going to take on feminism, too. And yet, as I said before, in reference to myself and Kate and many other women, she was she was important symbol of change. And when she joined, the court decided quite a few cases that open the doors of law firms to women, to journalists, opened opportunity there. And so she was a very strategic person and had to be supportive of women's issues, but in a way that enabled her to move in these circles that she needed to move in. >> Kate Clifford Larson: I have to say the same thing about Fannie Lou Hamer. She would not have described herself as a feminist, and actually she belonged to the National Organization of Women and she helped organize the Black Women's Caucus. And-- and she was colleagues with Shirley Chisholm and Betty Friedan and, and Myrlie Evers. And but they-- she was a very conservative woman. And they would have called her a conservative feminist because she was anti-abortion. And which is interesting, because before she was sterilized, she had helped other women access abortion services in Mississippi. And she was anti- birth control, too, which just kind of really blew the minds of all those feminist women in the late sixties and early seventies. Like, what do you mean? And she was very, very conservative. So I don't think she looked at gender as a burden. It was who she was, and she was fighting as a woman for rights for herself and for everybody. And she was particularly protective of black men because she watched the violence that was disproportionately-- visited upon black men in Mississippi. And so she was very protective of her husband and other men in the community. >> Neda Ulaby: I am so sorry that any other questions are going to have to be addressed to the authors as they sign books after --after the session. I just wanted to say at a moment when these forces of misogyny and white supremacy feels so much on the rise, when the political climate feels so daunting in many ways, I wanted to thank you for bringing the message of both of these heroines into 2022. >> Tomiko Brown-Nagin: Thank you. >> Kate Clifford Larson: Thank you. [applause] [instrumental music]