[BONUS]: Ernest Green From The Little Rock Nine | A Black History Month Reflection on Courage

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1:21Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, And to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com.

2:11Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to a bonus episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. You know, history is a messy thing. If your history makes you feel good, if it makes you feel happy, if it doesn't indict or judge or condemn or reveal something about what humans do and what society is capable of, it's probably not history that you are reading or hearing about. It's propaganda, right? And this is true, not just in history itself, but mirrored in like the family histories, we tell ourselves. I remember, you know, talking to a relative and my maternal family is from Germany. And I was asking them, you know, what was it like being in Germany during World War II?

3:00And, oh, it's so, so terrible and scary. And so just going on. And I finally just had to stop and go, you know, you were on the bad side, right? Like, I'm not that interested in hearing your sympathetic version of this narrative because you weren't doing the right thing. And so when I have studied history, I try to study history that makes me uncomfortable, that opens my eyes, that shows me other experiences. That's what we get to do when we read and we learn. We get to bring in other experiences into our own. It's a sad state of affairs that for a lot of the progress we've made and sort of having these discussions and bringing these narratives forward, there's now a huge backlash of them.

3:39Makes you think who's the real snowflake that we're canceling Black History Month or we're not letting government offices or military outposts talk about these. These are precisely who need to be talking about them. So anyways, I have read deeply on this topic. I just did an Instagram post of some of my favorite books. But for Black History Month, was thinking about one of the most moving interviews that I've ever got to do on the Daily Stoic podcast. A woman participated in the Stoicism 101 course a couple years ago, and she was asking about sort of race and diversity in Stoicism. This is just like basically for white dudes.

4:19And she sent me an email after and when we connected, and she dropped an incredible bit of information on me, which is that her father was Ernest Green. Ernest Green was one of the Little Rock Nine, the group of Black students who in 1957 were the first integrated students in Little Rock High School. Ernest was actually the first one to graduate in 1958. He was oldest. And what was so incredible about this is that I had just found out a few months earlier that my grandmother on my father's side had gone to Little Rock High School before it was integrated. And of course, no one had ever talked about this.

4:58This is not part of the story. When my parents were, you know, told me the history of this country, they weren't like, hey, and by the way, you know, your grandmother went to a high school that was funded by everyone's tax dollars, but only some of the citizens got to go there. And that that advantage would trickle down to us and to you and to your children. And that this is what we're talking about when we talk about the legacy of racism or injustice or unfairness, that it doesn't just affect the person immediately, but it ripples through. Right. And so it was a mind blowing, eye opening and wonderful conversation that helped me a lot as a person.

5:38And I wanted to bring that because Ernest has had an incredible life. He not only won a congressional gold medal awarded to him by President Clinton, but he went on to have a career in government. He worked in the Carter administration and just goes to show like when you give people shots and when you make hard decisions, it has this ripple effect, right? Every time we, it's like the famous RFK quote about every time we strike out against an injustice, it has this ripple effect. I just love doing the podcast because I get to talk to people that I don't think I ordinarily would get to talk to. And this one, I just, again, I pinch myself and I go, I can't believe I got to do that.

6:17And I think about it all the time. And I wanted to bring you that because it was an incredible conversation. I think you're really going to like it. I'll link to the video of this show notes if you want to watch it on YouTube. And I hope you enjoy this bonus episode of the Daily Soap podcast. And I will link also to those lists of some of my other favorite books in this genre, which I'm sure Ernest has read a good chunk of because he seemed like a well-read, very intellectual dude. Anyways, here we go.

6:48They didn't feel that, one, Black people could read, two, that they were going to look in a book. And I think that at each point, I had an opportunity, along with my friends, to disprove that they had the wrong view about who I was and what I could do.

7:14so so walk me through i think some people are familiar with the big day as they've seen it on television so many times or or heard about it so many times but walk walk me through the run-up to finding yourself at this historical moment well i i think you have to um you have to walk back to the Supreme Court decision of Brown versus the Board of Education, which outlawed segregation in public schools. And as I said, sometimes it seemed like a non-event, not an event, that Little Rock School Board was attempting to comply with the Brown decision that the Supreme Court handed down. Sure. And I'm like any 15, 16-year-old that I didn't pay a lot of attention to it.

8:18It didn't, you know, historic moments are not something you go outside your comfort zone to be involved in. But the spring of 1957, the Little Rock School Board was attempting to comply with the Supreme court decision, at least that's what they said. They asked for students who lived in the school district who were interested in volunteering to sign a sheet of paper. And I complied with that and signed the sheet of paper and didn't pay any attention to it. And as the summer of 57 rolled along. I had a summer job. I was the houseman at a country club in Little Rock. And I got a hamburger and a soft drink and made whatever the minimum wage was at that time.

9:18And I was a happy camper. Well, as the summer developed, it turned out that the governor of Arkansas said he was going to call out the National Guard to keep us from going to Central High School. And so you created this constitutional conflict. Again, you know, I'm like any other teenager. It doesn't check out as the most important thing for my summer. But it also meant that I had to pay a lot more attention to this event because I was the only one in the 12th grade, was the only one that at the end of the day, the Little Rock School Board decided to invite us to become the Little Rock Nine. My interest did get heightened though, when all of this activity around our going to Central High School developed.

10:24In fact, my shorthand said to me that if all this attention is being paid to this, going to the school, this has got to be some sort of big deal. And summer of 57, the governor, who was Orville Faubus, announced that he was going to, the night before we were to go to Central, that he was going to use the National Guard to bar us from entrance. And I thought from that point on, this must be something of importance. It was important, I guess, if I look at two events that sort of centered me. One was the Montgomery bus boycott, which involved Dr. King and Rosa Fox and a number of other people. And then the second event was the murder of Emmett Till.

11:29Emmett Till's murder was in the spring of 57, the Montgomery bus boycott began that winter. And you spent some time, you know, looking at events around civil rights. I didn't see myself as one of the shock troopers, But I thought that if this was going to change the way Black people were perceived, the way that they had an opportunity to interact, elimination of Jim Crow, all of these things leading up to a change that I thought was great for me. I believe that non-events were something that we shouldn't pay attention to. And then thirdly, I saw all of this as helping to improve the atmosphere around Little Rock for myself.

12:35So the other students were all much younger than you. So you, in effect, volunteered as opposed to your parents sort of signing you up for it. So your parents were activists as well, right? My mother was a schoolteacher. My aunt was a teacher. My grandfather was a postal carrier. And he had tried at some point to vote in the Democratic primary. And he was pushed away with the use of a gun, a rifle. My mother was also, and my aunt, involved in a court case for equal pay between black and white teachers. And the teacher who brought the suit, the moment she brought the suit, she was fired from Little Rock School District.

13:34and my mother and a number of other teachers pooled money together to provide income for her during the course of that year as she was the plaintiff. Anyway, the lawyer that handled that case for the black school teachers was Thurgood Marshall. So yeah, we were activists without spending a lot of time knowing that this was going to be the beginning of a revolution. And you were also an Eagle Scout, right? I was an Eagle Scout, become an Eagle Scout that spring. So before I was at Central High School, I said I always use my merit badges to figure out what I wanted to do next. And that helped me get through the idea.

14:29It must have been perplexing, right? You come from a family of people who are contributing to the community. You're an Eagle Scout. You have a summer job. You are a good student. How did it feel as a kid to have this sort of intensity of hatred and disagreement and objection to a person who is effectively doing everything right? That must have been strange to wrap your head around at such a young age. Yeah, well, you know, that's one of the inconsistencies of segregation and Jim Crow at that period of time, that the people that I knew, I knew that we had a doctor, we had a pharmacist, had a lawyer, Daisy Bates, who was publisher of the weekly newspaper.

15:26All these people were making a contribution. And yet, if you listen to the segregationists, they would say that the black community doesn't contribute anything, that they are obviously not making any impact, positive impact. and that we've got to figure a way to keep them segregated and keep them away from the majority community. So the day comes and you're there for your first day of school. I imagine this is the scariest moment of your life? Well, to have somebody with bayonets and rifles pointed that they're keeping me away, they're letting these other students go to class. It's a difficult issue to get your head wrapped around.

16:25But you also knew that being a Black person at that point in time, if they were working that hard to keep you out, it had to be something going on that was worth pursuing. And that this represented, to me, an opportunity to change the atmosphere, change the matrix of how we were considered worthless, and that it made me feel that I should be there. I mean, it was my opportunity to say that you got the wrong person. I'm obviously important and I want to be inside that school. I love that. That's such an interesting way of thinking about it. Yeah. The reason they were trying to keep you out is that it was very, very valuable.

17:21And they were trying to keep it for themselves, even though it was dressed up in racism and and hatred. it was really about self-interest. Yeah, and you came to the conclusion that you were making a real contribution to the community, much more so than they were willing to admit, and that segregation and Jim Crow and all of the rationale that they threw up to keep you out didn't make sense. I should be there. I'm going to stay there at that front gate until you let me in. Yeah, I interviewed George Raveling a few years ago. He's one of the pioneering basketball coaches. He was there on the steps of the Lincoln Monument when King gave the I Have a Dream speech.

18:13And actually, Martin Luther King gave him the speech as he walked down the stairs. And George was telling me that his grandmother would, every time she saw him, she would say, you know, George, why did the slave owners keep their money in books? Why did they hide their money in the books on the plantation? And he said, I don't know. And she said, because she thought the slaves would never look there. And he was saying that they knew books were valuable, but were trying to deceive him from thinking they were valuable. And that's precisely why he has spent so much of his life reading the things, precisely the things that they're trying to keep away from you are the things you deserve and should be seeking out.

18:55Well, I appreciate that because I was at the march as well and had an opportunity to hear Dr. King speak. Well, and I don't know whether you're aware that he came to my graduation, my high school graduation. I didn't know that. Yeah, he was giving a speech in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, which is maybe 20, 30 miles from Little Rock. And he decided that he wanted to witness my graduation. He came up, sat with the woman who I mentioned, Daisy Bates, and my family. And so I always say that I'm one of the few people in the world that had Dr. Martin Luther King at their high school graduation. But over the years, I had an opportunity to see him.

19:55And as I said, I was at the march for jobs and freedom. Dr. King was there. A. Philip Randolph was there. Marlon Brando was there. It was an event to be. I bet. So when you walk into that school for the first time, once you sort of get past the barriers and once you're inside, what was it like to be showing up your senior year of high school, which is difficult and strange and weird, even under normal circumstances? How did you navigate that year and get your education while so many people were, you know, probably rooting for and trying to make you fail? I think that because they worked hard at trying to make me fail, made me also stronger in terms of trying to succeed.

20:51I paid a lot of attention to the fact that I needed to study. In fact, I had a couple of tutors that were working with me. I had a course in physics that was really very difficult for me. But the reason I got through it is I had my tutor was a physics professor from the University of Arkansas Medical School. He was white. And every Saturday for the entire school year, he and I had tutoring sessions that helped me get through that. So there were people who were trying to see that I could succeed. But most of them, most of the students were really afraid being led by their families or their community that somehow they should fail.

21:56They shouldn't help us. Sure. They shouldn't reach out. And I think that it's a sad state when I look back at what could have happened that didn't happen. But I was committed that I was going to go through that year. I was going to succeed and that it was going to be a year in which I would pass my courses and hopefully get on to college. It must have been strange. As you said, some people were rooting for you, some people were rooting against you. At first, the governor sends the National Guard to keep you out, and then Eisenhower sends in the Airborne to let you in. It must have been strange that you're seeing the absolute worst and the best of people at the same time.

22:51Well, it was. And the fact that President Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne, which are elite troops, to help us get into school was another indication that this was a big deal. I needed to make certain that I succeed at it and that there were people around the country who cared, not just those in Little Rock or Arkansas who wanted to see me fail. How do you go through the world knowing that some of the people are really good and some of the people are really bad or that some people have been, you know, Martin Luther King talked about how we all have a north and a south in our soul. And there's a battle.

23:36Which side are you going to be on? How do you how do you navigate seeing up close the sort of the two paths that individuals could take? that seems like it would be hard to unsee. Once you've been screamed at by horrible racists, once people have thrown rocks at you, once people have threatened your family, how do you unsee that? Well, you knew growing up in Little Rock that this was an attitude that a number of people had. I was taught by my family and by my friends and my community that I had value. I was worth some. I was important to me. And that, as you mentioned, the coach who said that they hid their money in books because they didn't feel that, one, Black people could read, two, that they were going to look in a book.

24:35And I think that at each point, I had an opportunity, along with my friends, to disprove that they had the wrong view about who I was and what I could do. And that way, I could always read, and they wouldn't know that I had an idea where the money was. So I think particularly growing up, I felt this way. This feels like it was all a very long time ago. But I was just reading to my son. There's a children's book. My son's four. And Ruby Bridges wrote a children's book. And I'm reading the back of it. And she's only 66 years old. And you're 79, 80. It wasn't that long ago that this happened. Yeah, no, this was recent.

25:30In fact, we were a year before Ruby when she went to school in New Orleans. That Little Rock was the 57, I think. She was 58, 59 when she went to school in New Orleans. But no, this is less than 100 years. And we're still fighting ideas that culminate in racist views about what people can and can't do. And that's why I think it's important for you to read to your son that we're ready to take on these challenges. We're ready to disprove backwards thinking that people have about other people and that we're ready to show the world. And this is a changed atmosphere. This is a place that we're able to show that we can grow.

26:33We as a country have to grow. A world in which people, as Dr. King said, hopefully judged by the content of their character, not who they are. So race, justice, an opportunity to show that we all can make a contribution is where we are at this moment. I as I was thinking about all this, I I reached out to my family because my grandmother and her side of the family is all from Barreville, Arkansas. And and so I asked, I said, you know, did my grandmother was was the high school she went to segregated? And they said, actually, I guess the senior year of her high school, her the Barreville High School was destroyed by a tornado.

27:26And so she went to Little Rock High School. They sent her to Little Rock High School. I think this is 45, 46, the last year of her high school. She went to the same high school that you did. And it was interesting to me to think, one, again, this is not that long ago. I spent a lot of time with this woman when I was growing up, that my own grandmother went to high school 10 years before you did, and it was segregated. But the thing that struck me about it was it was never once talked about. Like, you know, we talk about privilege or we talk about advantages. It never once came up that my grandmother got to go to a high school that kept out a significant percentage of the population who still had to pay taxes, who still had an equal right to go there.

28:12It's interesting to me. We talk about sort of how advantages get passed down. Like, it's never been thought about in my family that we, you know, I think people go, oh, we're not racist, but we still don't think about how that racist system benefited us at the expense of another group. And I will add, my dad went to Europe and fought in World War I. Wow. Now, he went to France to help French. And when he came back, he couldn't vote. It's a series of positions that when you stand on your head, it doesn't make sense. They can't justify it. They can't logically explain it. It doesn't translate. And that's why I think as soon as we can get as many of these old vestiges of Jim Crow and segregation, whether they are statues or behavior or availability of opportunity, we have an opportunity, our generation, your generation, your children, to correct that.

29:31and make certain that we don't have to live in the past like we've done before. Yeah, and you mentioned Emmett Till earlier. I was reading an article, Wright Thompson wrote an article in The Atlantic about Emmett Till in the barn where he was killed. And the most stunning part of that piece that really brings home how recent some of this was, is that the woman that Emmett Till supposedly whistled at, although it sounds like she actually made it up, but the woman at the center of all of that is still alive. Yes, absolutely. And if you ask her what happened, she'll probably tell you she doesn't remember now.

30:15So that we are a nation that I think our strength is our diversity. And yet we fight hard not to recognize that. So that seems to me what we need to do, especially with generation of your kids, is make sure that all these blind alleys that we've been going up and down, that we get away from it and get on with recognizing who we are, why we can't be a better country than we are, and what our strengths are. I mean, it is mind-boggling that we're still fighting the Civil War and that we can't give it up for a better future that's right in front of us.

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34:22I'm really glad you brought that up because, you know, the irony of and maybe sometimes it's easier to see it in when you look at another country, right? The irony of Nazi Germany is that the Second World War is ultimately won in large part through the work of Jewish scientists who are driven out of Germany by the Nazis who come to America and Britain and do all sorts of important work for the allied cause. And I think that's one part of segregation and racism in Jim Crow that we don't think about. It's not just that it was morally wrong. It was also economically stupid in a profound way, because I think about the illustrious career that you've gone on to have and the work that many of the other members of the Little Rock Nine have gone on to do.

35:19Just being ordinary parents, raising good families, having good jobs, and to think that systematically the laws of this country prevented that from happening. If you had been born one year earlier or one year later, actually, you might not have been able to have the career that you've had or make the contributions that you've made because we would have been shooting ourselves in the foot by holding you and people like you down. Diversity is a strength, and yet, as you said, we seem to fight it at every step of the way. Yeah, well, I think that in a world that seems to become more diverse, that if we're going to recognize our strengths as a country, we've got to recognize our assets.

36:10And it seems to me that the fact that we are not a we are a multicultural country with people from all over the world, we need to get on with with proving why that's important and not see it as a hindrance. So you saw sort of raw, unadulterated, violent racism up front, right? You saw the crowd screaming at you. You saw like literal troops having to hold it back. That doesn't just disappear, right? It seems very distant now, but that didn't just disappear. Where does that energy go, you think? Where does the energy go? Well, that's a great question. It ought to go towards an improvement of opportunity for everybody in this country.

37:03And I think the sooner we figure that out, you know, hopefully leadership is going to spend some time trying to work on that. I think the president administration, obviously, a very important accomplishment to have a vice president of the country that is not a white male. Sure. That, in fact, that probably does greater opportunity for for young women to see Vice President Harris than it does to see her as a person of color. I think that, you know, you're recognizing that we are a different place. When you talk to your son and ask him, what does he see, you know, the opportunities in America? He would probably tell you he sees Martians, which wouldn't be bad because we spend all this time trying to get to Mars.

38:13And if anybody's up there, we're going to be shocked out of our pants. But we are at a point, we have an opportunity to look at the future as something different than our history. And I feel great about that. I see it in my family. I see it with my children, who are all adults and grown up and families that they have. Can America be different for the future than what we've seen it become in the past? And I'm an optimist. I believe that that's possible. And that's why I wanted to go to that school. And that's why I believe, you know, change is good. Well, and that was sort of my question. I think maybe we've told ourselves a story that as soon as the schools were desegregated or as soon as, you know, the Voting Rights Act was passed, that this all went away.

39:16And I guess what I'm saying is you saw these people up close. You met their children or maybe you went to class with them. they didn't magically get transformed just because Ernest Green sat next to them in history class or physics class. So how have you seen that evolution in people? I guess what I'm saying is it feels like we're having this reckoning now in the United States because we realize that just because we made a few changes doesn't mean that everyone's soul was transformed, that we suddenly grew out of this many-century-long tradition of thinking about things the wrong way. But you're answering the question, because it's more than just reckoning and sitting next to me in a physics class.

40:08It's a long history. And the but is that it can change. There are enough people who are willing to spend time trying to make it permanent, not just window dressing. Sure. And if anybody thinks that simply because we did one act or we made one change here or that - Or that we had a black president or a black vice president. All of that. It's not that it doesn't mean anything. It's just that we have been so long at trying to prove that people don't have qualities of change, that we don't know when change comes. And I'm a witness that change is possible, but it is awfully difficult. It is awfully difficult.

41:06And that what we got to do is get people committed to stay with it and not give up because we got some knuckleheads who want to resist change. I mean, I don't know where they're going to go. You know, they go to Iceland or someplace. They go to Mars, I guess. But they've got to be willing to accept the fact that we're all human beings and we've got something to contribute to the plus side of this country. Well, I love that you said that you're an optimist because I think people said that they use that as an excuse, but it's not enough to be you weren't just, hey, I think the future is going to be better or I think things will work out.

41:54Your optimism was also connected with the actions that you took. Right. So I think people sometimes think progress just happens. Of course, it does. But progress happens because individuals and groups come together and make progress together. And they and they continue to demand change. I think it's, as I said, my dad fought in World War I, and yet he was working on this abstract idea of equality. And when he came home, there were a whole ton of people who were resisting. He considered himself equal to me. Who does he think he is? Right. And I'm here to say that you and I and your kids and mine and my family and other members of the nine, a big world out there.

42:59But we're not going to give in to the knuckleheads that say change can occur and that I've got to live in the past. I'm going to want more. I'm willing to fight for more. I think we have an opportunity to make the change stick. Well, I'm so glad you brought that up because it is fascinating that you talked about how we stand on our head. We can't make it work. I just looked I just looked up Orville Fabus, the governor of Arkansas, who worked so hard to prevent you from going to school. He was in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 46. He was a major in the infantry, participated in D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge.

43:46So he goes overseas to fight fascism, to fight for freedom and democracy, and then comes home and is an active participant in the suppression of those very ideas at home. It's so baffling that I don't know how you make sense of it. I agree with you. I don't know how he makes sense with it either. Part of it was that we thought that Little Rock and Arkansas were a bit more progressive than some other communities in the South. That's why I thought that my first day at school, I would have an opportunity to meet some students who were interested in what I thought of the world. And I had an opportunity to figure out what they thought of the world.

44:42Mostly what I met the first week were students who were afraid to have any contact with me, that they were going to be ostracized. they were going to be told by their friends and neighbors that they couldn't have a relationship with me because I was going to turn them around. I don't know. I don't know what the outcome was supposed to be. But here we are, a new century, ideas that your grandmother who went to Central High, same that I did, didn't become the flaming communist of Arkansas, right? Right. She was a person that you still admired. And what I think is that your grandmother and other people who went to Central when I was there, we need to hear from them that the place didn't fall apart.

45:46Little Rock Central has had a number of students who have succeeded, done well. It was considered one of the jewels of the Mid-South in terms of the building. And I wanted to go there because I knew that it was a ticket to a better life. And that's what education has been centuries. So let's get on with it. I think it's worth pointing out because, again, we can tell ourselves a story about these things retroactively that sort of absolves us of responsibility. I'm talking about everyone but you in this case. But, you know, it seems like in retrospect, obviously, the governor of Arkansas was wrong, obvious that segregation was wrong, and that this was a sort of a really small minority that had hijacked things.

46:39But as I was saying, I just looked him up. According to Gallup's most admired man and woman poll of 1958, Orville Fabus was one of the 10 most admired Americans at that time. And so it's it's I think it's really important that we look at history and remind ourselves that oftentimes the right thing, the proper thing, what in the future will seem like a clear cut case of right and wrong. You know, society can get completely incorrect and that just how many people were on the wrong side of this issue as it was happening, probably including my own family. Again, it's the fact that we don't talk about it probably makes me think that we were on the wrong side of it.

47:22But I think it's important, you know, as issues happen today, that you don't just default to what all your friends and neighbors are thinking, because as we see with Jim Crow and segregation, these things that were unfortunately very popular at the time, we can be way off base. Well, I think recognizing that you can be on the right side of history, but it probably takes a lot and that the likelihood is that your neighbors are not going to applaud you. Yes. I think we've relegated Dr. King to God-like status. Now, there were many times when his efforts were being regarded as wrongheaded and going in the wrong direction.

48:11Yeah, I imagine he wasn't given a standing ovation at your high school graduation. Well, they didn't know who he was. And luckily, I think that the Little Rock police force didn't have any idea who Martin Luther King was, so that they couldn't point him out. But to his credit, he wanted to see my graduation, and I'm honored that he was there taking part of my graduation. Yeah, he probably risked his life to be there in some sense or another. Absolutely. Yeah, and in the end, he did give his life, right? It's not like he was so popular that we made him a saint, you know, in his own time. I mean, he was assassinated.

49:02That's part of the history, and it's important to remember that people who go against the grain are not necessarily the ones that we cheer on. Right. But let's recognize the fact that they make an enormous contribution to make this country what it is today. So how did you come to talk about all this with your own children? I imagine you wanted them to have a normal life and you probably also worried about their safety. And how did you talk to them about not just racism and its history in America, but how did you talk to them about, you know, activism and being of service and and and and values?

49:47How did you talk to them in your own family? It ranged from attempting not to bury them in the history, in my history, having them to discover it both on their own and with some help from me. Mackenzie probably will tell you that she discovered it on her own. But one day in a history class, the teacher brought out a picture of the nine. And she looked and saw that Terrence Roberts, who was with me, was one of the nines. And she had a perplexed look on her face. And I think that those of us who have been fortunate enough to be part of history, to show up in a history book, You want your kids to appreciate what you've done, and that's where we really were.

50:47All of them, I've spoken at their classes. Adam is my son who is a history professor. I've been at every level of scholarship that he's been, so that I've tried to make myself available to be the outside lecturer. and hopefully not to bury them in my history, but to recognize that we've tried to make a contribution to the country. And you served in the Carter administration, right? I was assistant secretary in the Carter administration for job training, employment and training. I spent four years there and then went from there to spend time on a Wall Street firm, Lehman Brothers. And now my wife is trying to get me to retire.

51:48I'm semi-retired. Every now and then I do a lecture like this. But I'm proud of my kids, the work that they're doing. and, you know, we continue to push on. I got a birthday coming up in September. That'll be the big AO. Wow. Could you have imagined as a senior at that first day of school at Central High School that this would be the trajectory of your life that you'd serve in a presidential administration that a Democratic, you know, governor from the South, no less. Could you have imagined that? No, the opportunity to serve for President Carter was great. I've known a number of presidents. Obviously, Bill Clinton is someone that I have a personal relationship with.

52:54President Obama went to his inauguration. So it's a moment that I cherish, but I always thought that if you gave me a shot, that this is the way it would turn out. I love that. And that I think, again, to go to this self-interested argument, and I read this once about Anne Frank. You know, you read Anne Frank's diary and you see this precocious, you know, beautiful young girl who's struck down in her prime, that she's really a stand in for generation of other talented young people that we would have never heard of. And I think when I think about your story, I think Americans should see both a triumph, but it's also a reminder you're a symbol of all the other talented, ambitious, confident young men and women who could have served in so many different capacities that were wrongly deprived of that opportunity.

53:55And people who remain deprived of opportunities for various reasons. Yeah, well, and I hope that people see the upside of it, that it's the opportunity that we've closed out a lot of folks. I'm sure my dad couldn't imagine, you know, things that have happened. But I believe that, you know, the future could be even brighter than what we've experienced. And there's no reason why we ought to cut off the lights and turn the lock on the door and not look for the future. Or how are we going to get more talent and get more plus out of it? Well, as America in the last year and a half has sort of begun to wrestle more publicly with some of these racial issues, something we should have done a long time ago, of course.

54:54How are you thinking about and what advice do you have to the next generation of Americans, period, black or white, about how we keep the flame going, how we keep moving forward where we can and need to make progress? What advice do you have? I think that my story, other stories prove the point that we don't look under all the right places to find talent. And my hope is that we've become a lot more inquisitive about where we search and seek out people to make a contribution to this country. And as I said, when we started this discussion, I'm an optimist about the future. But we got to work at it.

55:47And we got to believe that we can improve considerably where we're looking for talent and contribution and people who can make a difference. I want to continue to look for that difference. And I believe we can make it work. How do you think we can do a better job of that? Is it education? How can people do a better job looking for talent that, as you said, is not being given an equal shot? Well, I think you've got to be willing to look at lots of different corners and underneath cans and not just the usual. Let's not look at everybody who graduated from the Ivy schools. Let's see if we can't find some other places that people congregate and have, you know, maybe homeless shelters.

56:51We aren't looking for talent in all the right places, as the song says. My hope is that the last two or three years prove that we've got to be more creative about where we look and how we support them. Yeah, not just looking for them, but also thinking about the ways that our systems and our institutions are making it harder for people than it needs to be and thus preventing them from thriving and succeeding. I would agree with you wholeheartedly. Well, Ernest, this was truly an honor for me. I'm so glad that McKinsey connected us. And your story is very inspiring. And I'm honored to be able to tell people about it.

57:39And I hope you're with us for a lot longer. Well, thank you. And I look forward to getting this book written, getting my story told.

57:55Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoic.com slash email.

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