Entrepreneurial Appetite
Entrepreneurial Appetite is a series of events dedicated to building community, promoting intellectualism, and supporting Black businesses. This podcast will feature edited versions of Entrepreneurial Appetite’s Black book discussions, including live conversations between a virtual audience, authors, and Black entrepreneurs. In this community, we do not limit what it means to be an intellectual or entrepreneur. We recognize that the sisters and brothers who own and work in beauty salons or barbershops are intellectuals just as much as sisters and brothers who teach and research at universities. This podcast is unique because, as part of this community, you have the opportunity to participate in our monthly book discussion, suggest the book to be discussed, or even lead the conversation between the author and our community of intellectuals and entrepreneurs. For more information about participating in our monthly discussions, please follow Entrepreneurial_ Appetite on Instagram and Twitter. Please consider supporting the show as one of our Founding 55 patrons. For five dollars a month, you can access our live monthly conversations. See the link below:https://www.patreon.com/EA_BookClub
Entrepreneurial Appetite
Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad with Tamara J. Walker
What drives Black Americans to seek opportunities beyond U.S. borders, and what do they discover about themselves when they leave? Dr. Tamara Walker's groundbreaking book "Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad" takes us on a global journey spanning a century of Black travel experiences that shaped both individual lives and international perceptions of race and identity.
Growing up in Colorado with a grandfather who served in the military overseas, Dr. Walker was surrounded by mementos from around the world that sparked her curiosity about travel from an early age. Her own formative experiences studying abroad in Mexico, France, and Argentina - where she confronted complicated racial dynamics as locals struggled to place her Black identity in their European-centered worldview - ultimately led her to pursue Latin American history and explore the broader story of African Americans abroad.
Unlike previous accounts that focus primarily on famous expatriates in Paris, Walker's narrative spans continents and decades, introducing us to both celebrated and ordinary Black travelers whose stories illuminate larger historical patterns. We meet Florence Mills navigating 1920s London and Paris, Black workers finding unprecedented opportunities in Soviet factories during the 1930s, and Herman DeBose, recruited to the Peace Corps from North Carolina A&T during the height of the Cold War, when America desperately needed Black representatives abroad to counter Soviet criticism of U.S. racial inequality.
Particularly moving are the post-WWII stories of figures like Mabel Grammer, who found purpose helping "Brown Babies" - children of Black American soldiers and German women - find adoptive families in the United States. Through these interconnected narratives, Walker reveals how African Americans abroad navigated the complex reality that their American identity sometimes afforded them privileges denied to local Black populations, especially in colonial contexts.
As global nationalism and xenophobia rise today, Walker's work raises profound questions about whether leaving America represents an escape from racism or simply an encounter with different forms of discrimination. Yet these stories ultimately reveal how generations of African Americans have created meaningful lives and legacies across the globe, expanding our understanding of what it means to be both Black and American on the world stage.
Subscribe to Entrepreneurial Appetite and join our Patreon community to support our work bringing these vital conversations to life. Visit The Wandering Scholar nonprofit to learn how Dr. Walker is making international education accessible to low-income students, continuing the legacy of global connection she documents so beautifully.
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Speaker 1:Once again, this is Langston Clark, the founder and organizer of Entrepreneurial Appetite, a series of events dedicated to building community, promoting intellectualism and supporting Black businesses. And today we have Professor Tamara J Walker, who is the Claire Toh Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Bernard College at Columbia University, and she is the author of Beyond the Shores A History of African Americans Abroad. And so, dr Walker, just so you know, the podcast has origins as a book club, and so I always like to start off asking the guests share your autobiography how did you become Dr Walker? And more specific to the book, because a lot of your story and your family history is wrapped up in a book as well. Tell us a little bit about your history and your autobiography as a traveler.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks so much for having me, and those questions are kind of connected, and one thing I say is that I wouldn't have been able to write this book had I not become a historian of Latin America, and I would not have become a historian of Latin America had I not had early experiences of travel. I grew up in Colorado. My grandfather was in the military and eventually settled, after being born and raised in Alabama and traveled all over the world. He and my grandma and my mom and her siblings settled in Colorado, which is where I was raised, and I went to public school until seventh grade when a teacher at my public school identified me for an opportunity to attend a local private school on scholarship, and that opened up a whole different world of opportunity and experiences. That really changed the course of my life.
Speaker 2:And I grew up in a family that valued education but whose members were not educated beyond high school. And here I went to this school that was called a college preparatory school, so the assumption was that by default, everybody would end up in college and so there was no question of if it was where, and so from seventh grade we were getting this really intensive college preparatory education, including studying foreign languages. I started studying Spanish in seventh grade and struggling with it because my classmates who had been there since kindergarten, had been taking Spanish since kindergarten, and that applied even to the other kinds of classes that we took. But it was a school that really prioritized really kind of expansive and innovative approaches to education and so, for example, when I was in ninth grade, it was a K-9 school at the time. Now it's K-8. But at the time it was a school that had a studying, because it was the era of the Cold War, we were studying Russia and some members of the class got to go to Russia. I was not among them because I was on scholarship and couldn't afford it, but it stuck in me, as I always call it, like my villain origin story because I didn't get to go on this trip and it's the thing that kind of planted the seed that with me to high school and I continued studying Spanish.
Speaker 2:I was finally able to go abroad with the high school program called Interim that my school offered and I got to go to Mexico and then to France and my experiences there were experiences that I end up writing about and beyond the shore, so I'm happy to talk about that. But they were also experiences that really got me interested in Latin America more generally and Latin American history and just being in a place where I could continue to speak Spanish. And so when I got to college, I knew that I wanted to major in Spanish. I knew that I wanted to study abroad, and by the time I was a junior, I studied abroad, in Argentina, and had a tremendously complicated experience, really difficult experience of being there.
Speaker 2:Experience, really difficult experience of being there, but one that really got me in the mind of a researcher, like, how did this place become so complicated when it came to matters of race? And it was a place that defined itself as European. It defined itself as a place where people were from Spain, they were from England, they were not indigenous, they were not black. The joke there is that Mexicans descended from the Aztecs, peruvians descended from the Incas and Argentines descended from boats, and so that's their sense of who they are. They're a place of European immigrants, which meant seeing me as a black person really was hard for them to make sense of. They assumed I was from Brazil, even though I was learning at the time.
Speaker 2:Argentina had its own history of African slavery, so I got back to college. I went to University of Pennsylvania for undergrad and I was like this place is just so weird and confusing and I want to know more about it. So then I ended up applying to graduate school to get a PhD in Latin American history and went to the University of Michigan, where I didn't ultimately end up writing about Argentina. I wrote my dissertation on Peru. I wrote on the history of slavery and dress in colonial Peru, and it was the experience of doing that work traveling to Latin America, traveling around the world to research and attend conferences that really got me thinking about Blackness and travel and my own family's relationship to the world of travel, given that my grandpa had been stationed at military bases around the world, had fought in World War II, and so it was all of those things that kind of came together to make me Dr Camera Walker and that also made me right beyond the shores I'm going to share a story with you.
Speaker 1:It wasn't in the script or anything like that, but as you're talking you're making me think about my wife, because maybe two or three years before I met my wife, she had taken a sabbatical from work and saved her money, stacked all her money and did like a trip around the world and hit all the continents except Antarctica, and I think she went to Argentina and Peru, she went to South Africa, she went to Europe, she did the whole thing.
Speaker 1:And so she has this really interesting adulthood, early adulthood, defining period of her life, where she just let go of America and went and spent life abroad. And it's also interesting that she randomly met a new friend here where we live in San Antonio who had just got done doing the same thing. Who's another Black woman Share a little bit about. I know you have this childhood experience where you didn't get to go, but you have these family experiences too. Talk about what it means to be a young adult and to take some time and to travel and to explore places outside of the United States and how that can help define who you are as an emerging adult.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that story and I love the question, you know, because I stayed in the same neighborhood I grew up in where I'd gone to public school. I stayed there when I went to private school so I had to travel all the way across town to get to my high school. That was in a really wealthy neighborhood and it was a predominantly white school where everyone's parents were doctors or lawyers or at least it felt like they were all doctors or lawyers, because how else could you afford the tuition for this school? And so I had grown up in this lower middle class neighborhood where people worked blue collar jobs or clerical jobs and we lived in small houses and it just every single day was such a head trip to go from my neighborhood to that side of town and to no longer really be part of the neighborhood in the way that I was. I wasn't going to the school bus stop with everybody else and I didn't have the same day as everybody else in my neighborhood, but then I didn't have the same afternoon or evening or weekends as the people at my school. So I always just felt really alone and odd at that point in my life and a bit alienated, and so I remember getting really lost in, like encyclopedias and books. I loved books, I loved just the escape of literature.
Speaker 2:And my grandparents had all these different mementos from their time abroad. They had these beer steins from Austria, they had foreign currency, they had chinoise revases. They had all these things that just told me that they had been other places. And that was the kind of impetus for me to ask them about where these things came from and the stories behind them. And so it planted this early seed of travel as an alternative to just my day to day. And then it started to plant this fantasy. Especially they had Ebony magazines and Jet magazines. Those magazines were always talking about travel. They were always talking about international travel, the African diaspora, people returning to Africa, going on routes, tours, and so it planted the sense in me that travel would have been an opportunity to at least feel less alien, have the chance to go to these places I'd been reading about in my classes, in my grandparents' living room, hearing their stories about going to similar kinds of places.
Speaker 2:So I don't think at the time I was processing it as finally I'm going to get to be the person I want to be, but it was really like finally I get to see these places with my own eyes and hear things with my own ears and just have this experience of the world that I'd been wanting for a really long time, and I think that kind of continued to be the way that I related to travel as just this kind of intellectual learning experience.
Speaker 2:But then of course it is this other experience of finding yourself and finding that even in difficult experiences you learn so much about yourself, like that's always the way I think about my time in Argentina, where I also felt alienated, also felt odd and kept getting stared at and being treated as just this kind of strange creature in this place that somehow, despite its own history, couldn't reconcile the presence of a Black person. It was even in those difficulties that I learned what I was made of and learned what I could stand and withstand, but also learn that I could flourish too in these environments that were so different, and I think the experience of going from my neighborhood to my private school every day prepared me for that. So in many ways I had a skill set to travel and navigate and have these cross-cultural exchanges. That came from that early experience that at first I thought was just kind of a burden and an albatross around my neck.
Speaker 1:But then, over the course of these experiences of travel, I was like oh, nothing prepared me better than those experiences yeah, I think I've done oh, my goodness, I've done over 100 episodes of the podcast, and not every podcast features an author or a conversation around a book, but it's probably been well over 70 books that I've read in preparation for an interview or interviewed an author or something like that, and not one book. Not one book has been this interesting mix of history and autobiography mixed in one, and so one of the things that I like about your book is that your experience is not divorced from the stories that you tell about other people, and as you read the book, you see the author's inspiration for writing the book, your inspiration for writing the book right, and so can you talk a little bit about how you organize the book and your reason for intertwining your stories with the stories of the historical figures that you talk about?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, well, thank you so much for saying that and for getting that out of the historical figures that you talk about. Yeah, yeah, well, thank you so much for saying that and for getting that out of the book. It was really, when I think about it, the thing I wanted to communicate most of all in the book was that there's this world of stories that we haven't gotten exposed to and that, at the same time, live within so many of us, not just the famous people whose names, you know, are household names, like Josephine Baker, james Baldwin, richard Wright and not just in Paris, right, because that's the place that's often synonymous with African-Americans going abroad but that those are stories that are in our own families and in really distant, far flung corners of the world. And so it was just important for me to put all those stories on the same playing field and to recognize the connections between them even, and to make them visible to readers, even if they have kind of heard some of these stories before but didn't really think about how they connected to this larger narrative. And even within their own families, they might've heard stories from their grandparents who were serving or stationed overseas and hadn't been able to kind of think about how that connected to a much larger history, and so the way I went about that was to make a series of decisions. So the book, the narrative spine of the book, goes decade by decade, from the 1920s to the present day, and looks at a person or a pair of people in a place or set of places that best exemplify what was happening for African-Americans in the US that made it necessary for them to pursue opportunities in other parts of the world.
Speaker 2:So in the 1920s I wanted to talk about the fact of African-American entertainers going to Europe, but I wanted to do it in a way that didn't just rehash Josephine Baker's story. So I chose this person who was often compared to Josephine Baker but whose life turned out very differently than hers. So that's why I focused on Florence Mills, someone who had followed a similar route and stood in Josephine Baker's shoes and some of her, her career choices, and who ends up in Paris but also goes to London. And I bring London in as a way of challenging readers' perceptions of all of Europe being equally welcoming of African-Americans in the 1920s, because London, unlike Paris, was a lot like the US, and for good reason, considering our shared colonial heritage, and vestiges of that were still visible in London, and so I wanted to showcase that. I also wanted to showcase within Paris the fact that Black Americans were not the only Black people there, that there were Afro-French people, and that France, because of its own colonial history, was a complicated place to be a Black person from the French empire, and that African-Americans got to see, in many cases, a better side of French history and culture than Afro-French people did French Black Parisians, people from Senegal, people from the Caribbean, et cetera. So I wanted to use people who could give me a window onto a wider range of experiences while also representing a larger phenomenon.
Speaker 2:And then I wanted to get out of the Europe frame, or at least the Paris frame, and so in other chapters I go to Uzbekistan to talk about the 1930s and to talk about the ways in which African-Americans were starting to be used as cudgels within the Soviet Union's conflict with the United States, and the Soviet Union was inviting African-Americans to come and work in its factories and agricultural industries in ways that were tremendously appealing to African-Americans who were finally getting opportunities to work in the fields for which they had trained in the US but were unable to find work in the US, and I also wanted to spotlight the fact that the Soviet Union was using African Americans and using them as weapons in this war for global dominance, and they were using them as discursive tools, so that it was a complicated picture. And then I go on like that, from chapter to chapter, looking at different people who were exemplifying what was happening at home and abroad, what was happening in these other parts of the world that made them beckon to African Americans and appealing to African Americans, and then I wanted to intersperse that with elements of my own personal and family history that spoke to those moments and that really underscored some of the connection. So I talked about my grandfather being born in the 1920s at the same time that this phenomenon is kicking off and that he comes of age during World War II and goes to fight in Europe and comes back to a country that doesn't respect or recognize his service. And I also wanted to talk about the experience of Black women during the World War II era, because we tend to only talk by and large about Black men when it comes to Black people in World War II, and I wanted to do it from a slightly different angle than the battlefield and instead to talk about the women who accompanied their husbands in the post-war era, people like my grandmother who went with my grandfather to Austria after World War II to help rebuild Europe.
Speaker 2:And I talk in a chapter about a woman named Mabel Grammer who accompanied her husband, oscar, to Germany following the war.
Speaker 2:And so that's where the personal connected to the larger historical story, that there were questions I never got to ask my grandparents, for as close as I was to them and for as interested as I was in their lives, there were things that I didn't fully understand that writing about someone like Mabel Grammer helped me understand. And then there were people that I wrote about who just reminded me of myself. At different points I write about a woman who went to Mexico as a teenager, as I did, and was able to experience sides of herself that she hadn't been able to experience in the context of her life in the US. And so I made all these choices to really kind of move back and forth between the personal and the larger communal histories and cultural histories, to also kind of blur the lines between them and to put people in these places. So that was a decision I made that I think was really, really tricky, but I also was really pleased with how it turned out.
Speaker 1:So I don't know if I owe you an apology or not, and the reason why is because I had initially forgotten that I had reached out to you about doing an interview for this book. So I'm going to tell you a quick story, okay, okay, and so I was at the library the black library in town, the historically black library here in San Antonio, the Carver Library and your book is one of the books that's like sort of on display in the library. I'm like, oh, my goodness, that's the book. I got to hit her up again, so, but I had, before I hit you up again, I started reading the book. Ok, so I wasn't reading the book as if I was preparing for a podcast interview, so I interacted with the book in a different way than I did other books, and so I think that there was and this is not to diminish the way I was reading the book I was just reading the book with a different purpose, and you mentioned Richard Wright, and when I heard Richard Wright went over there and he was trying to make movies, it expanded my view of who he was. When I'm hearing about all of these people, lawrence, that I never heard of, it expanded my view of just how many of us were going over there and how much work we did to rebuild Europe, and these aren't all like celebrities and superstars. Some of these people are our regular folks, and so there's a thing that I appreciate about your book, because there's definitely genius, there's definitely Black excellence in there, but there's also this sense of everydayness, the everyday Black person having an experience abroad throughout the history of the United States in these different decades that you cover. And I also appreciated that we go beyond Josephine Baker, james Baldwin and Richard Wright and we talk about some of the other people that you mentioned. So I also want to share that. I think us having this conversation comes up at a really interesting moment.
Speaker 1:Last weekend I went to Austin. Last weekend I went to Austin, and in Austin at the Texas History Museum, the Bullock Museum, they were doing a documentary and a panel discussion of Julius Rosenwald, and Julius Rosenwald was the CEO of Sears back in the day. I guess he wanted to be an owner, so, anyways, he was the Jeff Bezos of his day, right, because Sears was like Amazon, and at some point in the documentary it talks about how they had the Rosenwald Foundation fellows and all of these people, the Jewish. Rosenwald basically paid for them to go study abroad and learn different things. All these African-Americans before, a little bit after, the Harlem Renaissance and you hear the names Langston Hughes, james, the regular folks that you hear about, and so it's just I appreciate the opportunity to read this book for my own learning and my own pleasure and then connecting that to experiences that I've been having just doing random Black history stuff during the month. So I just wanted to point out that that's another thing that I appreciated about the book.
Speaker 2:Well, I love, I love that you bring up Rosenwald, in part because you know he was such a tremendous source of support for scholars, right Just to your point, that we're not just talking about actors and performers, but people who wanted to research different parts of the world and establish a sense of connection and community in all these different parts of the world. Like Zora, neale Hurston was a Rosenwald fellow. Elizabeth Catlett, this Black artist who was just featured at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, had a Rosenwald fellowship to go to Mexico, and so I really just think that those scholars are often kind of under-examined and I wanted, as a a scholar myself, to kind of center them and their experiences or make room for them and their experiences and do similar work in my book that they were doing in their time.
Speaker 1:And you know so much of the Black experience abroad that we think about historically is about Paris, and so of course, we know Baldwin went to Paris and all that.
Speaker 1:Talk a little bit about more about Paris, but then also share what it meant for you to write about going beyond Paris. I thought the story, one of the stories that was most interesting to me, was about the Black soldiers after, or the Black soldiers in Japan around the time of World War II and whatnot, and the stories of the children who were left behind, and I thought that that was quite amazing, because you know, we have family stories and you know, one of the family stories that we have is I don't know if I should share this on the podcast, but I'm gonna do it anyways it's like we kind of think like I'm gonna have some cousins like over in Korea or something, because my uncle went over there. You know, and it's one of the things we talk about and we joke about, but it might be true, and so there's some interesting history about, you know, us going to war for the United States and other places and having these relationships and leaving history behind, and so talk a little bit more about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the reason I started with Paris was because it is just the beginning of the story, right, it's the beginning of the kind of modern phenomenon of African Americans going abroad, but we can't end the story there, although I do end the book there, which I'll come back to. But it's just the start of this really rich story about so many other things, right, not just about finding opportunities to perform on European stages and to experience a sense of glamour. There's these other more complicated experiences that were out there. The example that you bring up about these children born to soldiers comes up in two chapters, like.
Speaker 2:The first chapter is the one about Mabel Grammer, who goes to Germany with her husband, oscar, and is really struggling with her own sense of self and identity because she had been a columnist in Washington DC when she lived there, when her first husband was a professor at Howard, and she had a really glamorous life as the society columnist and, for various reasons, ends that marriage, ends that career, ends up in Germany and in her first couple of months there experiences a real sense of depression. She was married and was the wife of a serviceman, but she was not a mother and, like those institutions, marriage, military motherhood really governed the lives of women during that time, and to not be a mother was to kind of be a bit out of place, and she was feeling the weight of that and had been hospitalized for what was likely depression, and her doctor at the time was really trying to kind of show what was probably tough love and to say you know, there's, there's some children who are suffering, and if you are upset about these things there's a way that you can help. And so there were these children who were known as Brown babies, who were the children of black soldiers who had had relationships with German women and who had left home, not willingly abandoning their children, necessarily, but not knowing that they had gotten these women pregnant. And those mothers were in many cases forced to put their children in orphanages, not because they didn't love them, but because they were part of families that didn't see them as German and didn't see them as part of the family, and so they were placed in these separate orphanages. So Mabel arrives in this context, in the aftermath of these children, and so they were placed in these separate orphanages. So Mabel arrives in this context in the aftermath of these children being born and being placed in these separate orphanages, severed from their maternal families, and the goal is to place them in Black families back in the US, knowing that they are probably not going to ever reunite with their fathers. They can at least reunite in some way with the culture of their fathers. And it's also her way of getting back into journalism, because she ends up writing in the same newspaper she used to write for, the Afro-American instructions on how to go about adopting these so-called brown babies. And so she's one figure who was really instrumental in the placement of over 500 brown babies back into or not back, that's an interesting word choice because they were just as German as they were black, right, but the notion at the time it was a common notion was that where they belonged was with their black families.
Speaker 2:And then there was another example in Japan, as you pointed out, of a Japanese woman actually, who was invested in placing these children who had been born to Black servicemen and Japanese women and orphaned for the same sets of reasons, in families back in the US. And she was a different sort of figure because she really didn't see them as Japanese. So where Mabel Grammer was really trying to just sort of embrace these children as Black children and deserving of homes, including in her own home, because she adopts several brown babies, mabel Grammer. But in the Japanese case she very much was focused on the fact that they were not Japanese and they did not belong in Japan. So a lot of them were adopted back into families in the US.
Speaker 2:And I tell that story by way of a man named Kim Bass who had gone to Japan in the 80s really kind of thinking about your wife with that sort of goal to just kind of have a bit of a sabbatical. You know he wanted to study Japanese. He had studied it in high school and had been to Japan in high school, wanted to go back when he was a young adult high school and had been to Japan in high school, wanted to go back when he was a young adult. And so he goes back to teach English in Japan and really finds his way into an acting career and a really interesting series of events. And one of his major film roles in Japan was playing one of these brown babies who is rescued by his father when he turns 18, when he's going to be trueled to stay in the orphanage and have to make decisions about what comes next.
Speaker 2:Just in time, according to the story, his father comes to take him to the US, and so I wanted to talk about those stories, and that's multiple stories wrapped up in one. That's a story about a woman who is searching for her purpose after really finding herself a bit unmoored, young man who is wanting to study a language that he had simply fallen in love with and wasn't motivated by by anything other than a desire to just have cool experiences, and who, in the process, stumbles into this, this TV and film career that ends up telling stories about the past, and so I just wanted to be able to capture some of that, and you can't capture all that by just focusing on Paris. You have to go to these other places and follow these other people, many of whom were really ordinary when they first arrived in these places and who ended up being part of this extraordinary history.
Speaker 1:I thought that one was amazing because when I look at media now the whole adopting of black children you don't see black people adopting black children. One because maybe you can't tell, because it's not as obvious as when a white person adopts a black kid, but it's not something that that is talked about as a tradition in black communities. So that one really hit hit me hard, because my two oldest siblings are adopted right and so that's part of the tradition in my own family. Those are other stories that I that I read. I was like, oh, I could see some of my family or some of myself in that.
Speaker 1:But I have to say my absolute favorite is the one about Herman DeBose, because he went to North Carolina A&T and I love my school, I'm with North Carolina A&T for undergrad too, and what's crazy is my first time abroad not including Canada, cause I was born in Buffalo, so that doesn't count, not including like a cruise vacation. My first time abroad to actually learn and learn about black folks was because North Carolina A&T gave me two study abroad experiences, one to Puerto Rico and one to Brazil, and so when I read about Herman it made me think about my sophomore and senior year in college, and so talk a little bit about him and why his experience and others experience with the Peace Corps was really pivotal to expanding opportunities for Black folks to be abroad, be learn and serve abroad.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he was such an incredible person to find and to interview and I've since been able to do book tour activities with him and one of the things I really wanted Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah, he's still alive, he's still with us. Yeah, yeah, he's in his seventies. I will put you in touch because I get so delighted to talk to you. Yeah, I'll absolutely put you in touch. And he I mean the thing that he is or embodies is Black storytelling Just at its just at its finest, because he's such a, he's a raconteur, right, he's just someone who can really set a scene and when I interviewed him, so I wrote and researched a lot of this book during COVID, so we were talking over Zoom and he just was able to set these incredible scenes. He talked, for example, about how he was recruited into even applying for the Peace Corps. So he talks about, you know, sitting outside the library, which you can picture right, like having gone there.
Speaker 1:I know that library. I know that library. I used to sit in the steps of that library and taught the girls just like he did.
Speaker 2:Oh my, God, I love that. Ok, he'll, he'll love that. And that's the thing I felt like I knew the library, just based on how he was telling the story and he just it was also a really funny story. Right, because of the story that is so relatable, like being young and seeing someone that you're attracted to and like wanting to talk to them and then it turns out that, like, she is a plant in many ways. Right, because the US was intentionally recruiting black people for its own efforts to win this war for global dominance during the Cold War period. And the US was trying to win friends abroad but understood that it could not win friends abroad when it was doing wrong by Black Americans. Right, that it was not living up to its ideals and not representing a multiracial democracy despite claiming to be one. And so the Peace Corps emerges at this key moment in US history and also in global history and Soviet history.
Speaker 2:And I just wanted to find someone who had participated in the Peace Corps at this moment to really understand what motivated them when they had other life paths before them, what made this life path appealing. And, on one hand, the story in Herman DuBose's case is one of being kind of taken in by this pretty woman who had been dispatched to A&T and other black college campuses, including Howard, to recruit black applicants, but also a story about someone who was trying to figure out the next steps in his life and finds this opportunity to obviously represent his country but, more importantly, to find himself and to establish a sense of pride in his own abilities and potential and to carve out a real space of opportunity and community connection right. He got to go to Africa in the 1960s during the Black Power Movement, right, and so I wanted someone in particular who had gone, not anywhere in the world for the Peace Corps, but to Africa, in particular during this moment when that was a place that so many Black Americans dreamed of going to, and to find out what that was like. Did it live up to the dream and to the fantasy, or was it more complicated? And it turned out to be quite complicated in his case.
Speaker 2:So he just was able to kind of take me, and therefore readers, through all those different layers, but in a way that just, I think embodied the importance of listening not just to the famous people and bold names, but the, the regular people among us who have stories that matter too, and it felt like such an honor to be able to get his story on record and to have that represent our grandfathers, our aunts and uncles, people who, when they were living through these things, didn't think that they would matter to the generations that came after, but that were so important and so connected to these larger stories, and so, in that way, it was also just really, really special to talk to someone who reminded me so much of my own family and who I was really able to honor in writing his story down alongside these other stories.
Speaker 1:Is there a story in a book that is particularly special to you?
Speaker 2:It's hard to choose. I mean DeBose's, for the reasons I just pointed out. Maple Grammars was one because it helped me understand my grandma. And you know I was writing this book during a period of loss, in that my grandmother and my grandfather had passed and then my oldest aunts and uncles were starting to pass and I was feeling that history slip away from me. But I was also really aware that the skill that I had as an historian was to dig through records and to also recognize when one person is more than just one person, that they're part of this bigger picture, and to kind of move back and forth between those things, to kind of recognize the importance of that one person just in and of themselves, without needing to represent anything bigger, but also to recognize when these connections were there. So I was picking people who also allowed me to kind of see some of my family and kind of honor the stories that I'd grown up hearing.
Speaker 2:Beyond that, I really liked writing about Philippa Schuyler, who I talk about in a chapter about the Vietnam era. That's where her story kind of reaches its dramatic conclusion, and she was someone who just reminded me of my younger self in many ways, just feeling like she didn't quite fit in any of the worlds that she was meant to belong to, and so I wanted to capture that, that that feeling, and that the way in which travel provides this escape hatch and this alternate way of being, and the pride that she clearly had gotten from having been to all these different parts of the world, from speaking multiple languages, from being able to connect to people from different places and to be kind of recognized for that skill set I just I it really resonated with me and I also, you know, wanted to capture in her story and in Florence Mills' story that this is also a story about tragedy, right, that travel is lots of things. It's adventurous, it helps us discover ourselves, it, you know, is romantic, it's all these things. But it's also, in the context of African-Americans leaving the US from the very first examples, a story about people being forced out and people having to go to other places to experience their full humanity, to work in their chosen professions, to have a shot at a real whole life, and so many of the people I chose to write about in the book are people who embody that as well.
Speaker 2:No-transcript.
Speaker 1:So a lot of things rose for me as I'm reading the book and we are recording this episode like a month into the to the new presidency, right and I've had this thought a long time, or I've wrestled with this thought a while and as I'm reading I'm thinking to myself at what point do black Americans view the US through the lens of sunk cost and decide to start leaving? But I developed that question before I finished the book. So the last chapter is pretty interesting and it kind of changes the way I think about the answer to that question and I have a theory. I remember there was an elder here in San Antonio that came in. Andrew Young came a few years ago and he was talking about I've been all over the world, seen a lot of places. There's no other place I would rather live than the United States. Now I'm like you're just saying that because you old. Is that an old boomer thing? Now I'm looking at things and I'm like, as things potentially get worse for us here in terms of opportunity and the ability to move up and be comfortable in the society and not to have all these pendulum swings back and forth progress and then lack of progress going, you know, are more and more black folks going to decide to just leave and move other places and be expats and live other and live outside of the country.
Speaker 1:Perhaps I had too much of a utopian view of what the Black experience is like abroad, because what we find is that, in all honesty, at some point I think, the mystique of being a Black American goes away when you're abroad and maybe that protection that we have as being Black, the Americanness of us, doesn't have the same buffer that it would 10, 20 years or if we had kids and they were brought. Would they be American black? Would they get the same treatment? Or would it get treated like other black folks who are in these abroad spaces?
Speaker 1:And the complexities of that. Because, as you said in the book, we could go someplace. The moment we open our mouth and that American accent comes up, we get treated differently. But the Black person in Paris who's from one of the French colonies they don't get treated the same way we do. And so what are your thoughts on that? Do you see a future where more and more Black folks are living abroad and having a better experience living outside the United States, or is this the anti-Blackness so pervasive everywhere, that we're just going to have to deal with it, no matter what.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think you've touched on so much of the complexity, right, that the first question I always ask is well, where would you go? Yeah, especially if the reason for leaving is the current political climate in the US, because what we're starting to see is that the same climate exists in so many of these other places, right, that there is a rightward shift, a white nationalist turn unfolding in Paris, right, and France and Italy, and all of these parts of Europe that we had previously kind of romanticized but that we now have to see for what they are, and that these places are inhospitable to migrants and immigrants. And even if Black Americans do experience a certain amount of privilege in those places, do our politics really allow us to indulge in that experience of privilege, while the people who look just like us, whose ancestors are our ancestors, are toiling away and being disregarded and treated by white Europeans as as nuisances, despite the fact that so much of Europe's wealth is built on the backs of those people, right? And so there's that complexity. And then, you know, I wrote this book when I was in Canada. I had a job for five years and a beautiful life for five years in Toronto, canada, and it was in the process of writing this book that I was like I don't know if this is where I should be anymore.
Speaker 2:For, as much as it was a respite during the first Trump presidency and it was a place that I was grateful to be during the COVID pandemic, because people listen to science and scientists and have some regard for the public good, I also was getting frustrated with the way that Canadians would romanticize their own history and gloss over their own histories of racism and dispossession. But I was also feeling this pull back to this place that my grandparents were from and feeling, in the absence of their presence, wanting some to some degree to be on the same soil that they were on. And in that I felt really connected to something that Paul Robeson had said that I keep thinking is really poignant for this moment. Moment because he had gone to Australia and was talking about the black power movement and also the civil rights struggle in the US, and these Australian TV hosts were like, well, why don't you go to Africa then? Like it sounds like things are really tough and not going your way in the US, so why not go back to the place of your, your ancestors? And he makes this really forceful point that the US is his, his place, that it was a place built by his grandparents and it belonged to him, right.
Speaker 2:And so there was this real sense, when I was writing the book and wanting to close out the story, of paying attention to that and those words and that sense of belonging and at the same time recognizing in my own self that I would not be who I am without travel, and I don't want to live a life without travel or even living abroad. Right, I cannot imagine my life without access to a plane and to these other parts of the world, and my love of travel, I think, comes through in the way I write about these places that I wasn't able to visit during COVID. I needed that experience of immersion in other places, and so I think both things are true, but it's complicated and you know people have their own reasons. After I wrote this book, I was in Mexico and I was talking to a scholar, lewis Miles at the University of Michigan, who writes about Black Americans in Mexico, and there were so many examples of mothers of young Black sons who were like I just don't want my son to get shot and this place will keep him from getting shot by the police, and that's that.
Speaker 2:That's real right. Like that you can't, you can't discourse your way out of that one. You know that's. That's a real black and white, you know scenario and so, and that's a life and death matter. So I also understand that side of it, right, this, this feeling that this place can take so much from you that you might not ever get back and that therefore these other places, with all the other stuff that comes along with it, are still better choices. So I also recognize, recognize all of that.
Speaker 1:As I mentioned, we have origins as a book club, and one of the things that I try to do with all of the authors is to share with us one of two things, or maybe both, and that would be if there was an additional chapter of the book. What would it be, maybe? Who would you focus on? What would it be about? Or what's next for you in your scholarship? What's the next book that maybe you're writing that we should be looking forward to?
Speaker 2:scholarship. What's the next book that maybe you're writing that we should be looking forward to? Yeah, so if I could answer both.
Speaker 2:There were so many people I wrote about or researched that I didn't get to write about in the book, and I ended up eventually being able to write about them in different ways in the form of articles that I published in Time and Smithsonian. So, for example, I wrote about a woman named Ada Bricktop Smith who was a nightclub empress in the 1950s and 60s and also in the 1920s. Her nightclub in Paris was a place where Lakes and Hughes and Paul Robeson all spent time, and then she picked up and went to Mexico in the 1940s and then ends up in Italy in the 50s and 60s. So I wrote an article retracing her steps in Italy for Smithsonian, and she was someone who just was such a connector in the same way that Langston Hughes is in all these people's stories and crossing paths with them. She too was this kind of connector and her club was the center of gravity. So I was glad to be able to write about her.
Speaker 2:And there are so many more people who I want to write about in different ways that I'm still trying to kind of figure out if that's in the form of another book or if that's in a more multimedia oriented format. But as far as the second question, I trained as an historian of slavery and always kind of go back to that as a subject that is still so rich and has so much to offer. And in linking my interest in travel to my interest in the history of slavery, I have been doing work on slavery and piracy, and so my next book is going to be about those interconnected worlds and the story of a black pirate.
Speaker 1:Oh, I want to read that. Yeah, that's how it's done. Somebody go make a movie out of that. That's that. I can see that being a movie, Well from your lips to God's ears.
Speaker 2:That's right, I got to write the book first, that's right.
Speaker 1:So Dr Walker, real quick before we go, talk about your nonprofit.
Speaker 2:So I founded, with a friend named Shannon Keating, a nonprofit called the Wandering Scholar, and this is a nonprofit with a dual mission. We make international education opportunities accessible to low income high school students, and then we also, with them and on our own, produce multimedia content that embodies our vision of engaged global citizenship. And we've been around since 2010, which means we've sent students all over the world. We've sent them to Costa Rica, to Senegal, to Peru, to Greece, spain, and so many of them are now fully fledged working people who majored in foreign languages when they went to college and who continue to travel to this day.
Speaker 2:And it was an organization that I founded because I wish that there had been something like that when I was a high school student, and it also is an organization that I know makes a huge difference in the lives of the people that we serve, in the same way that my early experiences of travel changed everything for me and changed the course of my life.
Speaker 2:So it's really a labor of love. And we have the students produce documentation projects, so they'll either make cookbooks about their experiences or photo essays or write poems. We had one student who was a spoken word poet, so he produced some poems about his time in Peru. So it's a creative outlet for people, and we also, as staff at the Wandering Scholar, produce a newsletter. It's a sub-stack newsletter called Postcards from TWS, and we issue monthly dispatches from behind the scenes at the Wandering Scholar but also just talk about the world of international travel, themes like overtourism and what travel is going to be like in this era, when being American is a really complicated identity and people are debating just who gets to be American, and so for folks who are interested, it's it's worth, it's worth checking out.
Speaker 1:Sure, sure. Thank you for joining us here on this episode of Entrepreneurial Appetite. Thank you for joining us here on this episode of Entrepreneurial Appetite, again for the audience. The name of the book is Beyond the Shores A History of African Americans Abroad. Check out the book. It's actually a fantastic read and this, to me, is like a book that you can read with your family, because each chapter is a unique story and so it's different than other history books in that regard, and it's very digestible and it has characters in it, even though they're historical figures. And so, dr Walker, again thank you for joining us here on today's episode.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me and thanks for reading the book so closely and asking such wonderful questions.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining this edition of Entrepreneurial Appetite. If you liked the episode, you can support the show by becoming one of our founding 55 patrons, which gives you access to our live discussions and bonus materials, or you can subscribe to the show. Give us five stars and leave a comment.