Spirit in Action

Curing Down-home Racism on Tomlinson Hill

In writing this book, Chris Tomlinson asks himself the question, "What crimes had my ancestors committed to maintain their power and privilege? Did they know what they did was wrong? As an American and Texan, I wanted to understand the sins of our fathers."

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 06 Dec 2015
Audio Format:: other

[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ Today for Spirit in Action, we have the privilege of speaking with Chris Tomlinson. Chris was bureau chief of the Associated Press Office in Nairobi, Kenya for 11 years, and this span included time covering the end of apartheid in South Africa, time in Rwanda and Burundi around the time of the genocide there, and many other turbulent events on the African continent. A fifth generation Texan, Chris found a need to uncover the threads of his forebears, slave owners, and those who were owned by Chris's great-great-grandfather, most notably, Ladanian Tomlinson, the incredible NFL running back. Through meticulous research and transparent honesty, Chris Tomlinson uncovers the truth about his family and slavery in Texas in his book, Tomlinson Hill, the remarkable story of two families who shared the Tomlinson name, One White, One Black. I learned a lot about the aftermath of civil war in Texas and in our nation, and I think you'll find eyes opened by Chris's writing. Chris Tomlinson joins us by phone from Houston, Texas. Chris, thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. It's great meeting you, Mark. Thanks for having me on. We've got some threads of our history that go together. I'm taking off very shortly to head over to the Congo. Is there any advice you can give me about traveling in the Congo? I haven't been there before, even though I've been to Rwanda, Kenya and other places. You know, I mean this in the best possible way, prepare for chaos. It is one of the most chaotic places on the planet, and I say that with the deepest affection. But nothing works the way it's supposed to, and yet everything will work out in the end. So I would just advise, keep telling yourself that as you enjoy your time there. Actually, I'll have it a little bit easier than perhaps most people. Our host for this, I'm doing this as part of a group called the Friendly Folk Dancers, a Quaker International Folk Dance Witness. And so we're going to be doing folk dance with people in the Congo, the Quakers there, who are, of course, a peace witness. Did you run into Quakers, I think, in Rwanda? I would have thought that that was likely because they've been so influential in part of the healing process there. Well, actually, my housekeeper in Kenya was a Quaker. And he's someone I knew for, and still know, and still consider family for the last 15 years. And I did run into Quakers in Rwanda who were working to promote peace and reconciliation. It's a very difficult work that they do. You've lived so much of your life in Africa and other places around the globe. Maybe we should first demonstrate your bona fides as a Texan, since you are airing Texas as laundry or around slavery and racism. Perhaps you can prove your credentials as a Texan. How do we know that you're really a proud son of the state? Well, I'm a fifth generation Texan. After doing a couple of interviews, people seem to like the way I say "cotton." And I always say "seamant." So if my accent doesn't make it clear, then certainly my pronunciation and speaking style hopefully will. So okay, you're a Texan, I'm a Wisconsinite. I also did happen to live for five months. I turned eight years old when I was in Victoria, Texas. And I have some questions about that because that was when I was a little child. There's so much I didn't know, but I had the sense that integration had already happened in my school in Victoria, Texas. And I think you're going to disabuse me some of the knowledge. Let's first delve into your personal history that led you to Wright-Thompson Hill. After all, this is a bit of an expose of a lot of very personal family history as well as stuff about the state of Texas. What motivated you to take this risk, and was it uncomfortable? Well, it was a mixture of my childhood and my professional life. When I was seven or eight, maybe nine years old, my grandfather used to brag that our family owned slaves, and that they loved it so much that they took Tomlinson as their last name. And this was at a time that Dallas was struggling with desegregation. They'd been under various court orders for 15 years and still hadn't managed to do very much, and there was a new court order to have a busing plan. And I was going to be among the first kids to be bust. So race was a part of my childhood and a dramatic one. I was also raised to be proud of being a fifth generation Texan, to be proud that my family had this aristocratic slave holding past in Texas. It wasn't until I was an adult and became a journalist, and Franklin became educated, that I came to realize that this slaves probably didn't choose to take my last name, and that being a slaveholder was not aristocratic. I then combined that with my experience covering the end of apartheid in South Africa and post genocide in Rwanda. And the one thing that I discovered that every justice system requires is an accounting of the truth, a public truth telling, where everyone has a chance to testify and everyone's story is shared. And then only after those facts are established can we move on to some form of justice, whether it's contrition or punishment. And just looking at my own life and my own childhood, I realized that there has never been this honest accounting for what happened in Falls County, Texas, or what my family did, that we were telling lies about it. And so I set out to kind of have my own personal truth and reconciliation commission. And so I ask you again, was this uncomfortable for you? I mean, because you're talking about, I think, racism in your family, the way that your forebears were complicit in this. I benefit from my father's teaching. He was defiantly anti-racist. He was involved in the civil rights movement. He would stow at my grandfather when he spread this myth. But then, you know, he wouldn't tell me the true story, or he preferred to focus on his mother's side of the family, which didn't have this dark history. So I wasn't afraid of what I might find. I knew enough to realize that there are no good slaveholders and that more than likely my family had done bad things. And there was the investigative journalist part of me who was on the scent of a good story. And with every little detail and every revelation, I became more excited about the story. I almost detached from it. It wasn't until I sat down to write that I realized that, you know, I needed to do some self-searching to understand ultimately what my feelings were going to be at the end. Let's go back to some of the history, particularly. I was amazed at some of the things that I saw in the book, which should have been common knowledge, but that I didn't learn in 10th grade in U.S. history. Please outline some of that history, including the time when I took it and hit U.S. history. It was called Reconstruction. When and where did you learn this? Was any part of that taught in the school system in Texas? Well, Texas is a state with so much pride that we require students to take twice as much Texas history as they do American history in public schools. So despite all that time spent studying Texas history, what happened during Reconstruction, what happened during Jim Crow was never discussed in detail. And it was the convenient use of passive voice that kept the schools from frankly angry protesters. It's the classic mistakes were made. Slavery was a fact of life, but let's not go into who exactly did what, because that's just a little too messy. It was only after I started doing my own work, started going through primary sources and contemporaneous newspaper accounts and oral histories that I began to piece together the truth. One of the things that hadn't realized was following the Civil War that the Confederate states were not automatically joined back into the Union. They had to jump through some hoops to get there. Could you talk about what those hoops were and how successful, particularly I guess Texas, was in jumping through those hoops? Well, the Northern Republicans who had executed the Civil War were not in a big hurry to allow all of the death and the destruction to have taken place in vain. They wanted to see real change in the South. This was what the 13th and the 14th Amendments were about. It was to clarify that if you were born in this country, you were a citizen of this country, no matter the color of your skin. That's the part of the 13th Amendment that we like to celebrate today. But back then, there was another part that was controversial, and that was that if you were an American citizen who denounced your citizenship and you joined the Confederacy and you were a leader in the Confederacy, you were going to be banned from taking part in American politics. So you proved that you were worthy of being allowed to vote and rent for office again. These two things, birthright citizenship and a requirement that those active in the Confederacy had to go through a contrition process, were highly controversial, and in Texas, the politicians rejected it twice, leading the U.S. Congress to reject Texas's attempt to rejoin the Union. It was only after the Declaration of Military Law, the banning of almost all Confederacy supporters from voting that a progressive, predominantly Republican and largely black legislature came into power and approved the 13th and the 14th Amendments and did all of the things that Congress wanted them to do in order to come back into the Union. I had not really realized how important Lincoln's assassination was, the role that it played in what I think of as the failure of Reconstruction because the Vice President, Andrew Johnson, ascended to the Presidency with Lincoln's death and was not as sold, shall we say, on racial equality as was Lincoln. Is that your sense that we might have had a much different history and future following the Civil War and a much quicker resolving of the racist attitudes and practices? Has Lincoln continued as President and had, perhaps, Reconstruction continued for maybe another 10 years until the real transformation of racial attitudes had a chance to take hold? Lincoln's assassination certainly set this country back probably, you know, 75 years in terms of its progress towards racial equality. Andrew Jackson, his Vice President, was a devoted white supremacist. He did not believe that blacks should have equal rights, have equal representation in the courts, that they should have equal opportunities for school or employment. He also knew that the only way he could be elected on his own was by getting as many Southern states back into the Union and get as many Southerners voting again as possible. And so he's the one that kept telling the states, "Oh, you know, you've done enough, you've done enough, I approve, come back in before the next presidential election." And then it was the Northern Congress that said, "No, that's not enough," and kept rejecting it. Had Lincoln survived, I think we would have seen a longer period of Reconstruction. I think we were seeing greater resources devoted to Reconstruction and less, frankly, compromise with the Confederates. Another amazing tidbit was about the old and the new Ku Klux Klan's two very different critters. Explain the two origins, if you would, including the precipitous decline of the KKK in the mid-20s. I thought that the KKK, the second KKK, was thriving through much later than that. Well, the first Ku Klux Klan of the Reconstruction era was a gang, basically, a terrorist group that formed to maintain white supremacy and to discourage black political participation and to discourage black people from trying to exercise their newly received civil rights. There were no white robes, there were no burning crosses, there were no fancy names like Cyclops and Grand Dragon and that sort of thing. The Union troops fought the Ku Klux Klan and largely defeated it by 1880. Local gangs continued to exist and terrorized black people, but that was much more on an ad hoc basis. It wasn't until the film Birth of the Nation that a really poorly written novel by Southerner, creating a myth around the Klan as this group of knights in shining armor who protected all things good in American. A guy in Stone Mouse in Georgia, a man named Simmons, decided that he was going to restart the Klan, only he was going to model it after all of the fraternal organizations that he was a member of, like the Masons, the Odd Fellows, the Pythians. At the turn of the century, there were 100 of these groups and so he carefully created a structure and costumes and a code and it was all out of his imagination and out of this D.W. Griffith film. And it became an extremely popular political movement. It was a conservative Christian movement that claimed its authority in the Bible and history. And they really worked in the South to take over the Democratic Party. My great grandfather was a part of that. He was pretty clearly a Klansman. He participated in politics. He helped get Klansman elected to high public office in Texas. But at one point, a man from Dallas, Texas, named Cleveland Evans staged a coup within the Klan nationwide, moved the headquarters to Dallas, Texas, and it became a truly corrupt organization, almost a pyramid scheme. Also, the terror that they perpetrated, the lynchings, the beatings, which we call white cappings down here, really turned the general public against them. And so between the criminal prosecutions and the public embarrassments, by 1930 -- well, let's just say by 1924, we had over 150,000 Klansman in Texas. And by 1932, that was down to maybe five or six thousand. And that's kind of been the number ever since. The leadership has changed. The corporation, if you will, has passed through many hands. And there are still Klansman out there today, but it's never been as popular as it was back then. You already referred to the fact that your ancestors, your -- is that you say your grandfather, great grandfather, who was involved in KKK? Well, my great grandfather most definitely was. And I've been able to glean that from newspaper reports about a county and state political activity in the '20s. Also, his cousins were also leaders, public leaders of the Klan. My grandfather's -- it's not quite as clear. He graduated from college in 1923, moved to Dallas, and immediately moved in the circles of society who were Klan members, the police commissioner, the sheriff, the district judge, Texas senator, were all Klansman and very public about it. And these were my grandfather's mentors as he worked his way up as a young engineer building some of the nicest neighborhoods in Dallas. He was also a deeply racist individual. He used racial slurs all the time, and he believed in the Klan's view of white supremacy that you had to be a Northern European protestant to be part of the race that should rule the world. And that Catholics and Jews and Eastern Europeans and Southern Europeans were just as suspect as someone who was black or from Latin America. As you've already said, this is just not impersonal history, this is your family tree. And it's not only you, it's your acquaintance with Ladamean Tomlinson, the running back, and you're tracing both your family trees. Could you outline a little bit about those family trees, you know, go back to the beginning with Susan Churchill and James K. Up to you, those four generations, five generations? Sure, the origin of my Texanness is 1849 when a serial plantation owner and entrepreneur of his era named Churchill Jones bought 120,000 acres along the Brazos River about 20 miles southeast of Waco. This was far more land than he could ever grow, but this is what he did, he was a speculator. He bought unimproved land, brought in slave labor, turned it into a profitable plantation and either sold it on or took the profits and bought more land. He was married to Susan Tomlinson Jones, one of my great, great, great ants. And when she arrived in Texas, she picked out a hill for her brother and wrote home to Alabama and said I've got the perfect place for you, bringing your 48 slaves, develop this land, Churchill will sell it to you at a discount, and we'll be able to live together and build on the frontier. And he did, he purchased land in 1856, began developing it, he moved his family in 1859, and some of the slaves he brought with him were George, who was, by that time, was in his 50s, and Phyllis and Milo, Milo was George's son. George had been born in Africa in 1820, and by that point, Phyllis and Milo already had three kids, and in emancipation, they took Tomlinson as their last name. Now, I don't know why in particular they chose to do that, but I do know that white families often coerce slave families to take their name as a way of social control, a way of asserting some form of authority or ownership. Even though these people were now free. The black Tomlinson's continued to work for the white Tomlinson's for the next 110 years, largely as sharecroppers. My grandfather left the hill when he went to college in 1918, and never looked back, but our cousins lived on the hill right up until 1983. Ludanian's grandfather worked for the last white Tomlinson on the hill, a man named Uncle John, and from the oral histories, I know that Vincent's grand father walked over to Uncle John's house every morning, they shared breakfast, and then they set out in the pickup truck to figure out what needed to be done that day. Vincent was left behind to do the work, and Uncle John drove to his office at a bank in a nearby town called Marlin. So, our families have been intertwined for all this time, and Ludanian's father had been a sharecropper as a child picking cotton on Tomlinson Hill. If you just tuned in, you're listening to Spirit and Action, which is a Northern Spirit radio production. We're on the web at northernspiritradio.org, and on that site, you'll find nine years of our programs for free listening and download. You'll find links to our guests, like to Chris Tomlinson and his book, TomlinsonHill.com. We do have Chris Tomlinson here with us. The book, Tomlinson Hill, the remarkable story of two families who share the Tomlinson name, One White, One Black, and Chris joins us from Houston, Texas. I'm kind of amazed when you say, I read it in the book, when you said that they had breakfast together every day. I thought that that would be Verbotan because he's black and it's white, and that's in times of segregation. Did that not violate the rules of segregation for your grandfather and Ludanian's grandfather to share a meal? No, because as long as Vincent used the back door and not the front door, as long as he ate in the kitchen and not in the dining room, proper southern etiquette was maintained. Vincent was the farm manager. This was a time in which John is the landowner could lay out the tasks that needed to be done. He could answer any concerns that Vincent might have. But you're right in that there is no way that Vincent could have come in through the front door or have taken a seat in the parlor or the dining room because that would have broken the code. I had an amusement event when I was in college, '75 or '76. It was Black History Month, and they were showing something at the black students in the college. I went to the black woman who was my host friend of mine from one of my classes. She said, "You want to look at the upstairs? We have to have the white people use the back staircase to go upstairs. We don't allow whites to go up the front staircase." And it was very helpful to hear that in action. It's like, "Oh, I can't do that. That's what your ancestors were doing all of that time." As you were doing this research, did you have a sense of the pain? I don't think it fully comes through in the book. The pain, I guess I sense mainly acceptance, resignation on the part of the African Americans who were mentioned in the book. I don't have the sense that they were going, "Oh, our life is horrible." But did that come out in any of the research you did? No. And it's an excellent observation. One of the things that I noticed in all of my interviews was a desire to maintain a sense of dignity, even when talking about true crimes, some would say atrocities. Really heartbreaking acts of discrimination and prejudice. Despite all of those things, there was a desire to maintain a sense of dignity. I know that Lydanian and his brother, Levar, were two of the last people I spoke with, and that was because they also wanted to maintain this sense of dignity. They didn't want to talk about being victims. They didn't want to talk about the past in a way that would somehow diminish them. It was only after I was able to show them how their great-great-grandfather was one of the first black men to own lands in Falls County, and that he bought it from a white man, and then he sold it on to a white man and made a profit. His ancestors built the church. They built the school. They built the community of black families that continues today, and for those black families, for many of them, the hill is not named after the white slaveholder, but after Lydanian and Levar's grandfather, who was such an important leader. No one I spoke to really expressed any pain to me, and that may be because I am a white man, and I was my ancestors who perpetrated the violence and the injustice. But I think, more importantly, it was just maintaining a sense of dignity and pride in how far they've come. My friend Myron made the comment that if we had done things right during Reconstruction, that we would have actually implemented 40 acres in a mule kind of policy, that all of these people who had been enslaved would have gotten there 40 acres. I mean, after all, they're the ones who made the plantations work with their blood and sweat and toil. Well, and you know what? The Confederate veterans got the equivalent of 40 acres in a mule. There was this huge movement in the 1880s for the federal government to provide a pension to Confederate troops, not only the Union troops, but also to the Confederate troops. Where I lived in Austin, there was a Confederate veteran's widow's home on my streets. They had been government financed to make sure that the widows of Confederate veterans even were given this pension benefit. When the former slaves stepped up and said, "Well, we would like a pension for all the years that we spent in slavery, or just give us 40 acres in a mule, what are the other?" Congress didn't act. The white southerners scoffed at them and made sure they received nothing, while my ancestors who fought the Union, who committed treason, in the end, they got a pension. What did finally happen, I forget exactly what point in the chain of events that happened, but one of your ancestors eventually did give each of the folks living on the hill. The black folks gave them an acre. Is that right? Yes. In 1946, shortly after World War II ended, one of my cousins, who was operating the hill at the time, decided that he was going to get out of the cotton business, and that he was going to sell some land and convert the rest to cattle raising, and that meant laying off all of the sharecroppers, many of whom could trace their heritage to slave times, working that same plot of land. So he took the area where the former slave quarters had been, and he divided it up into one acre plots, and when he told the sharecroppers, "I'm not going to need your services any longer," he offered them a plot of land for free, if they wanted to stay, and then he offered to finance half the cost of building a new home on that land. And that was a severance pay, basically, because I think he knew that those families had relied on his family for four or five or countless generations, and that if he was going to fire them and not give them work anymore, he had to do something. I just recently read books by Woody Guthrie, called "A House of Earth." It takes place in Texas, and he talks about the levels of desperation in society. Being a sharecropper is somewhere, working for wages is somewhere. Most of the blacks who were there, did they go straight from being slaves to being sharecroppers, and did they also have a stage where they were hired help? There were different experiments shortly after emancipation with how the former slaves were going to work for their former masters. For as much talk about how the former slaves were now as free as anyone else, the Union troops who were in Texas at the time made it clear they did not want to see any black families on the road. They told the freedmen and the freedwomen, "Stay where you are, work for your former masters, cut a deal, come up with a contract, but don't go. There's no place for you to go. You're not welcome in the north. The Union troops aren't going to take care of you, so you need to find an accommodation where you live now." Initially, it was for wages. That didn't work out very well. Many times the white landowners just wouldn't pay at the end of the season. The sharecropping system developed where a family could agree to farm 40 acres of cotton and get the final third of the crop for themselves. That system didn't work out really well. Usually it was the white landowners who kept the books and they made sure that the black families barely broke even or were in debt at the end of the season so that they had to work the following season. The only thing worse than that was working for wages because you didn't work every day. The wages were maybe a penny, maybe a nickel a day. That was the worst place to work for wages. The bigger the plantation, the worse you were treated. I am somewhat amazed that in the interviews you did, you didn't hear the resentment perhaps, or maybe you did hear that. I'm not sure. One of the other threads that is pretty significant in this, I think in today's U.S. society, we tend to think of Democrats as advocating for civil rights. We find Republicans reluctant or not as unequivocally supporting civil rights. I think it was really in the 1950s where those two parties, the 50s into the 60s, where that leadership switched parties. Could you talk about your experience of that in Texas with the Republican Democratic Party? The Democrats in the South were always the conservative party from the end of the Civil War up until the 1960s really. You know, conservative politicians who are old enough to know and to remember will always say that the Democratic Party left them. They didn't leave the Democratic Party. In the age of Reconstruction, during the Jim Crow, during early civil rights movement, it was more than Republicans who were the political force for civil rights. My grandfather was a tried-and-true Democrat until Brown v. Board of Education, until Democrats started supporting the Civil Rights Movement, and that's when he quit and became one of the first Republicans in Texas, and they supported the most conservative, ultra-conservative candidates you can imagine. People who believed in segregation and wanted to continue enforcing it. I think this evolution from the Democratic Party being pro-South anti-integration, pro-segregation pretty much reached its end when President Richard Nixon started his southern strategy, which was to go in and convince the Southerners that the Republican Party was the true conservative party, that the Democrats were wild-eyed liberals who believed in integration and affirmative action and civil rights, and ruining their way of life, which relied on a stratification that kept blacks oppressed. So, in the 1970s, I think it was complete. Texas was finishing its transformation to being a Republican-majority state, but it was only the name of the party to change. The politicians themselves, they're the ones that switched the parties. You grew up in the time of desegregation and busing for racial integration in our schools. We mentioned a few things that you experienced about that, and I particularly want to know again, it would have been 1961, I think, when I lived in Victoria, Texas. I recall in Mrs. Berger's third-grade class that we had blacks in our class, and it's the first time coming from Wisconsin that I'd actually encountered blacks. Did that happen at different places in the state over a longer period? Yes, separate but equal required school districts to have separate facilities for black and white students. It was codified into Texas law, and it wasn't until Brown v. Board of Education that we began to see this change. Victoria is a pretty small town. It didn't have a lot of tax revenue, and as with many typical small towns with geographically large school districts, maintaining separate facilities with expensive and problematic. They were the first to integrate. It was almost like a huge sigh of relief to no longer have to maintain dual facilities when all they really needed was one facility because that's all the students that they had. You go to the big cities like Dallas and Houston, Fort Worth, San Antonio, where you had hundreds of thousands of students in a very geographically segregated setting, where there were black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods and there were almost no mixed neighborhoods. For those districts, desegregation was a lot more complicated. It was not only a question of how do we convince the local residents to accept it, and by all polling, most Texans remained opposed to a school desegregation into the 70s, but also physically how do you do it? How do you get these kids from different neighborhoods to different parts of town to make the schools mixed? That's why Dallas and Houston were two of the last school districts in the country to desegregate. What about Thomas and Hill and Marlin and the other small towns around your ancestral home? Do they integrate? It took them six years to integrate Marlin High School in the book, and also on the website I should note that a lot of these oral histories have been posted on the interactive portion of Tomlinsonhill.com, so anyone who wants to listen to these stories themselves can go to the website and listen to the oral histories from the people who provided them. Initially it was voluntary. The school board said, "Well, any black student who wants to go to Marlin High School May, and I interview the first black person to graduate from Marlin High School, and he talks about how difficult that was and how he had to work very hard to be accepted. But like many small towns, the school district was short on cash, and operating two separate high schools was expensive, and so within six years they merged all of the schools, even before Dallas and Houston did. To largely save money, and the school teacher, who I quote in the book, talks about how difficult it was to figure out how to take these students from the black schools who've been denied proper education, who did not have good teachers, who did not have good textbooks, how to catch them up to where the white students were humiliating them and without causing problems. So integration was such a mess, frankly, and such a challenge, and it really hurt a lot of people. You know, we have the period of slavery, we have reconstruction, we've got segregation, Jim Crow, all of that stuff. There's what's called now the new Jim Crow, which is really imprisonment for drugs. And I had this sense in several of the stories that you shared, that drugs were a real drag on the experience of and over the African Americans there, that they did get involved with drugs and drinking, and maybe that's a natural enough experience in face of oppression and a demeaning system. But did you have the sense that the new Jim Crow is still operational in Texas? Well, it certainly is, and I would hasten to point out that I also explore how my father used drugs and abused them and how they affected his lives, as well as Lydanian's father's use of drugs. Lydanian's father was, I said, a construction worker when he was in an accident and because permanent serious damage to his back and chronic pain, and he became addicted to prescription painkillers. Lydanian's step-brothers were prosecuted for drug crimes, usually petty dealing or possession, and those convictions kept them from getting on in life, kept them from getting better jobs, kept them from getting an education, because they had this felony arrest for something as small as maybe possession of one marijuana joint. So, I do explore that and how it has hurt the Black common sense today and set back that family enormously. But, as I said, drugs were not only on the black side of the family. My father abused them. I used and experimented with drugs when I was younger. You were in theater, right? You were in theater. You're supposed to do that. Right, but see, the difference is that, you know, if a cop caught me with a joint, he would crumple it up and throw it away and scream at me and threaten me, but he'd release me. If I'd been a Black common sense, I probably would have gone to jail. Which has tremendous effects right now, this day and age in Texas and elsewhere in the U.S. What's really important for me to explore as part of spirit and action is to find out what we can do to make this world better. And I think you're doing one thing that is absolutely crucial and that is naming the truth. I also sense that religion has played some important roles for various people. I think, I don't know if you mentioned that a lot of the abolitionists, that they were religious people. Of course, there was also the, as you said, the conservative Christians who were part of the KKK. I also had the sense that for Lydanian, that his very strong religious core to his family attacked him from giving in to temptation. How do you think on the net religion affected things in Texas? I think when you tally it all up, spirituality is a force for good and something that benefits all societies. But that doesn't mean that all spirituality is good or that all spirituality necessarily leads to better outcomes. Certainly, religion plays an important part of Lydanian's life. It really guided Lydanian's mom in raising her two young sons and daughter to live a moral life and avoid the trap falls of American society and how it treats African Americans. Myself, I'm a Buddhist and I don't believe in the supernatural but I believe in the need for compassion and truth-telling. That was a strong part of my motivation in telling these stories. It is not really to lecture someone but to just tell them, hopefully, a compelling story about two families that will help them better understand the world around them and show compassion to those whom they may not know personally. And again, if you listen to us, the book is Tomlinson Hill, website Tomlinson Hill dot com. You can find the link from nordonspiritradio.org. I had just a couple more questions. There was one thing that happened in your history that took me by surprise. I guess since you're facing up to racism, I guess I decided that you were a liberal and coming of age as I did in 1972, you were somewhat later than that. I think I was raised with less regard for the military than I did. But you went into the military and you re-opt. Did that help or hurt you or how do you see that part in your journey towards truth? I did join the military at the U.S. Army when I was 17 years old. It was 1983. I was a poor student in high school. I often joke that my choices were McDonald's, jail, or the military. And I chose the military. A volunteer military, I believe, offers a chance for someone like me to grow up, to learn some discipline, to see the world, to understand that there were things bigger than me. It allowed me to encounter people from all different cultures, from all over the country and all over the world, and take a broader worldview. So I'm grateful for that experience and I think it was important for me. I think sometimes the military service gets a bad rap. You finally left as Bureau Chief for the AP when one of your friends died. How did that come about? Why did that change you? Well, I'd lost maybe 10 friends up to that point covering war. I covered nine wars over 14 years. But this was Anthony Mitchell was the first person I'd sent on an assignment who didn't come home. I would expect him to die, but I knew that every Bureau Chief for the AP before me had sent someone to their death and odds were that I was going to do the same thing at some point. You try to train your people and you try to promote safety and good thinking, but in this case it was a plane crash. For me it was a final straw after 14 years of covering death and destruction. I'd seen, you know, everything from township violence to the fighting in the streets movie tissue to bombings of Torre Bohr in Afghanistan. I was in street fighting in Baghdad. And, you know, Sorrow builds up in a human body like a heavy metal. And there just comes a point that if you don't walk away, it's going to kill you. Well, then I'm glad that you walked away and you didn't end up being killed by it. One last thing, I asked you this way back at the beginning because you're airing dirty laundry. That's part of Texas and part of your family. Have you got recriminations from people? I mean, sometimes it's as simple as, no, we don't talk about that. Why are you talking about that? You know, we don't talk about religion or politics or sex in polite company. Have you received that kind of recriminations or something stronger? There are quite a few people who are angry with me. Everyone from, you know, my mother and father who question, you know, why did I have to put that particular story in the book to the people of Marlon who just say the past doesn't matter. Why are you dredging this up? All you're going to do is make people angry. So what's more dangerous, Houston or on site in Nairobi? You know, so far, all the recriminations have been behind my back or some anonymous posters on websites. No one's confronted me yet, so I don't know. I mean, we'll see. When I set off on this journey, my promise to myself was that I was going to cover my own history as if I was a foreign correspondent coming in from the outside, that I would treat everyone the same, whether they were alive or dead, black or white, and that it would be a foundation upon which we can look and say, "You know what, our ancestors did some great things, and they did some awful things, and we can learn from both. We can be proud and have a holistic point of view and use that knowledge to build a better future, to move ahead, to have the reconciliation that we all want, and that will benefit our country in so many ways." You know, I keep responding to my critics with that message, and some will never accept it, but I'm gratified by the number of people, particularly African Americans who've come up to me and said, "I've waited my entire life for a white person to acknowledge these things. Thank you." It is a brave and a necessary stance. I so much wish for the healing of our country, and whether it's truth and reconciliation in South Africa or the Gachachat courts that were after the Hutu Tutsi slaughter in Rwanda and Burundi, that healing step is so necessary. I just wonder if there's an additional step that's necessary. We talked earlier about 40 acres in the mule didn't apply to the blacks. The whites got that privilege, but the blacks started with a deficit compared to other folks. What are your thoughts about reparations or other forms of redressing some of the historical imbalance financially? I think it can't be as simple as just sending out a check, like a tax rebate to anyone whose family suffered under the past laws and norms of our society. I think there's a vibrant and wonderful debate going on about what policies could possibly have the intended effect of correcting the inequities of the last 10 or 60 years. I don't have those solutions. I'm a business columnist for the Houston Chronicle, but I'm not an economist. So there are ideas and there are things that need to be done, and I think that's an important discussion to have, and I hope it's one that our nation has soon. But to me, to make your case for reparations, you have to have, again, that shared understanding of what happened, that baseline of what is the history. What are we giving out reparations for? How much should we spend on this to have equity? What is our goal in this policy? And so, you know, I look forward to being part of that debate, and I hope that my book, Thomas and Hill, will serve as a foundation for that conversation. I think it will be a crucial piece in the discussion, Chris. Do you have any sense, Chris, what anyone can do to recognize and embrace their failings? I mean, I think that the slave owners were probably, for the most part, decent people with a horrible blindness around this one area where they believed the blacks were inferior, where they believed that it was okay to treat your possessions that way, and they couldn't acknowledge their fault, their sin, their defect in dealing with those folks. How does one get to the point where we look in our lives? I mean, for instance, I'm an example. I'm a vegetarian. I've been a vegetarian since 1976, and one of the reasons, amongst many, that I'm a vegetarian is because, for me, I have to have a different attitude towards animals, a compassion that you refer to in your Buddhist thing, which I get equally from my Quaker background. Do you have any sense what we can do? What are the steps we can take to help us remove the veil from our eyes so that we can be more just loving and compassionate today? I think the key is self-awareness, to be aware of our actions and the consequences of our actions, and to be open-minded about whether or not our assumptions are true. The one thing I was always told was that my ancestors didn't know any better. While my research shows that they did, there were voices in the community. There was a man named Ben Shields who lived next door to the Thomason Plantation, and he worked his land with paid labor, and he was a former slaveholder who traveled the world and come home and realized why crime slavery was. He spent the 1850s telling anyone who would listen, that there was a better way, and his neighbors chose to norm. I think the opportunity to be more just presents itself to us every day if we're open to it. That was true of my ancestors throughout our history, and I think it's true of us today. And do you have a sense for yourself, Chris, where that kind of, with full integrity looking at yourself, has changed what you do, how you live, how you live out justice? You know, I'm still struggling every day to be self-aware, and to show compassion on the scale that I would like to, or that my Buddhist faith teaches me that I should have. So I'm certainly not the one here providing answers. I do know from being in situations where people have tried to kill me, or people have been guns to my head, moments in which I wasn't sure if I was going to live, that humility and honesty and forthrightness are the keys to survival. And that no one has ever gotten ahead over a long term with secrets and lies. Again, we've been speaking with Chris Thompson in addition to having served as AP Bureau Chief in Nairobi, Kenya, and covering much of the wars in Africa for 11 years. Having been on the forefront, not just there in Japan and other places, he has vast experience seeing the world working well and working poorly. Fortunately, he brings honesty, a deep scathing honesty to his writing of the book, Tomlinson Hill, the remarkable story of two families who share the Tomlinson name, one white, one black, and their website is Tomlinsonhill.com. As always, you can find a link from nardenspiritradio.org. Chris, it's a very important effort. I really thank you for contributing to the pursuit of truth and healing through this absolutely crucial first step. Thank you for doing that and for joining me for spirit and action. Well, thank you for helping spread the message. And in line with this history of the changing racial situation in our country, I want to play you a smidgen of a song on exactly that topic. But you'll want to hear the whole song. So, to listen to the whole wonderful song and story, look for the bonus excerpt on nardenspiritradio.org and post a comment while you're there. Let's go out with David Masigill's song, "Number One in America." We'll see you next week for "Spirit and Action." Number one in America, David Masigill. ♪ ♪ In 1963 in my hometown Bristol, Tennessee ♪ ♪ Sitting on my mother's knee ♪ ♪ Watching him as an Andy on TV ♪ ♪ Even since Santa Claus on Christmas Eve ♪ ♪ Little girl is tugging head to sleep ♪ ♪ Singing I have a dog my own color please ♪ He said, "Honey, you can make the leaves." ♪ Just then came a call on a telephone ♪ ♪ It was the mayor asked if my daddy was home ♪ ♪ This was for his ears alone ♪ ♪ Mom and me listened on the second floor ♪ ♪ The mayor said the freedom rides on their way ♪ ♪ They'll be here by Christmas day ♪ ♪ Our laws they found to disobey ♪ ♪ 'Cause our schools as white as the Milky Way ♪ ♪ Well now we're really in a fix ♪ ♪ Can't let 'em show us our black countries ♪ ♪ But once we let the races meet us ♪ ♪ It's goodbye Jim Crow politics ♪ ♪ First it's 40 acres and a mule ♪ ♪ Then they wanna swim and I'll swim and poop ♪ ♪ Pretty soon they'll be wanting to go to school ♪ ♪ Where we were taught the golden rule ♪ ♪ Imagine them telling us how to live ♪ ♪ Imagine them telling us how to live ♪ ♪ Win number one in America ♪ ♪ In America, beat the drummer up the same ♪ ♪ Oh, the calming burning air ♪ ♪ Oh, to be number one ♪ ♪ In America ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Max Handel's first a right to vote ♪ ♪ Oh, I hear it as all she wrote ♪ The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World" performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit in action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ [MUSIC PLAYING]