Gene Stowe joins us on A Dog Called Diversity to share his journey with religion, writing, film making and community that includes a path through racial unity and justice. As the son of a Presbyterian preacher, Gene's narrative weaves through his experiences as a Catholic, a Muslim, and his current unaffiliated stance, offering a rare perspective on humanity as one's true community.
Gene brings to light a heartwarming saga of a small village, anchored in racial love and justice, that's remained his focus for over thirty years. This narrative defies the stereotypes and paints a history rich in acceptance and harmony. The story, powerful enough to inspire both a book and a documentary, is relayed with the warmth and wisdom that only a seasoned reporter like Gene can provide.
Gene has a continued dedication to uncovering the multifaceted history of Marvin, North Carolina. His humorous anecdotes about family life, interspersed with reflections on the village's evolution from a historical standpoint, remind us that change and growth can indeed lead to a more inclusive and just society.
Check out the trailer of Inherit the Land and Gene's book Inherit the Land here.
The Culture Ministry exists to create inclusive, accessible environments so that people and businesses can thrive.
Combining a big picture, balanced approach with real-world experience, we help organisations understand their diversity and inclusion shortcomings – and identify practical, measurable actions to move them forward.
Go to https://www.thecultureministry.com/ to learn more
If you enjoyed this episode and maybe learnt something please share with your friends on social media, give a 5 star rating on Apple podcasts and leave a comment. This makes it easier for others to find A Dog Called Diversity.
A Dog Called Diversity is proud to be featured on Feedspot's 20 Best Diversity And Inclusion Podcasts
Thanks for listening. Follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.
Gene Stowe joins us on A Dog Called Diversity to share his journey with religion, writing, film making and community that includes a path through racial unity and justice. As the son of a Presbyterian preacher, Gene's narrative weaves through his experiences as a Catholic, a Muslim, and his current unaffiliated stance, offering a rare perspective on humanity as one's true community.
Gene brings to light a heartwarming saga of a small village, anchored in racial love and justice, that's remained his focus for over thirty years. This narrative defies the stereotypes and paints a history rich in acceptance and harmony. The story, powerful enough to inspire both a book and a documentary, is relayed with the warmth and wisdom that only a seasoned reporter like Gene can provide.
Gene has a continued dedication to uncovering the multifaceted history of Marvin, North Carolina. His humorous anecdotes about family life, interspersed with reflections on the village's evolution from a historical standpoint, remind us that change and growth can indeed lead to a more inclusive and just society.
Check out the trailer of Inherit the Land and Gene's book Inherit the Land here.
The Culture Ministry exists to create inclusive, accessible environments so that people and businesses can thrive.
Combining a big picture, balanced approach with real-world experience, we help organisations understand their diversity and inclusion shortcomings – and identify practical, measurable actions to move them forward.
Go to https://www.thecultureministry.com/ to learn more
If you enjoyed this episode and maybe learnt something please share with your friends on social media, give a 5 star rating on Apple podcasts and leave a comment. This makes it easier for others to find A Dog Called Diversity.
A Dog Called Diversity is proud to be featured on Feedspot's 20 Best Diversity And Inclusion Podcasts
Thanks for listening. Follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.
Welcome to A Dog Called Diversity, and I'm actually recording with Gene Stowe today and I will get him to introduce himself for a minute. It's actually my first episode that I'm recording for 2024, which seems like a great omen to be speaking with Gene, so, but I thought I would start by how we, how we came to know each other, because I get asked all the time is it hard to find podcast guests? And when I started the podcast I thought it was going to be, but it's turned out not to be that case at all. And I came to me, jean, because he was interviewing me for a book that he is writing with. Todd Corley Probably said that incorrectly, and Todd is a very high profile diversity and inclusion leader, and so it was an honor to be interviewed for his book. But let's come to you, gene, and talk about you. Welcome to the podcast. To start with.
Speaker 2:It's great. I knew as soon as we talked the first time that I would hope for another time. So this is a subject near and dear to both of us and probably to most of your listeners, so always happy to talk about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you, and we've been trying to record the podcast for a little while, but Jean's had a really tough 2023. So I'm hoping that 2024 starts off a lot better. But why don't you tell us a bit about you, jean? Because you're probably not the usual profile of person I talk to on the podcast, but you have such a cool story, so let's learn a bit about you.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm not a very usual person in a lot of fields. I'm a son of a Presbyterian preacher and I had a long and winding religious journey. I was involved in the charismatic renewal in the 70s and 80s. I was in search of some place to live. As far as a community was concerned, religiously, that was a high thing for me. So I went through any number of Protestant denominations. I was Catholic for 14 years, I read the Quran and became Muslim for three years, and several years ago I decided okay, I fast forwarded through all this and now I'm going to be in the Alumni Association. So I'm what we call a nun, which is short for none of the above. I like them all. I've learned a great deal. I owe a lot to all of them. I didn't leave anything mad. I just was looking for this community, and what I realized, finally, was the place to find that community is in humanity, and that's enough for me. I don't need to identify with a particular subset of that, religiously or otherwise. So I'm unaffiliated politically, which is a remnant of my journalistic years and religiously. So I went to seminary when I thought I was going to take that track and got kicked out, which was a good thing and I wound up.
Speaker 2:I was a reporter for the Charlotte Observer here in North Carolina in the 80s and early 90s, which was very much that heyday kind of the last hurrah for print newspapers, and we were flourishing and we were doing great service in the community of that period that I discovered the story 31 years ago.
Speaker 2:Last month I discovered the story. That became something like my life's work and it was a story of racial justice and racial love that I still have never heard anything close to it in my life, and so it has been something I'm continuing to do research. I'm right now working on research of the little village where it happened, in the hopes of writing a prequel to the book and kind of setting the stage with all the people that were there. There's some pretty interesting things that the people in the past were just as confused and messed up as we are. They just didn't leave us enough information to prove it, except I stumbled across enough information to prove it. Uh, for this bunch and um, so it. But it is continuous for me, as I say, for over 30 years, to just try to to put together this story as completely as I can, because it's such a powerful story.
Speaker 1:Well tell us a bit about the story, because I know that you've written a whole book and you're producing a documentary as well. So tell us a bit about the story and why it, I guess, captured your attention.
Speaker 2:Well, when I was a reporter in July of 1992, I went to cover an interracial community festival at a Presbyterian church a white church in this little village in the country near here. And on the way there I was thinking I've covered these before. Here's what it's going to look like. Everybody will be in the same room but there'll be black people at these tables, white people at these tables, everybody will be nice. And then they'll go home. And I pulled into the parking lot and looked across the churchyard and these people were together. I mean, they were hugging each other. They were talking, laughing, telling stories. Their kids were playing together. They were eating together. I, laughing, telling stories. Their kids were playing together, they were eating together. I'd never seen Black and white people relating like that together anywhere else and I still haven't seen it anywhere else but Marvin, and I see it every time I go to Marvin. And, being a reporter, I said well, I want to find out how this happened. So I covered the festival. But then I made a note to do Black History Month story, which it was 31 years ago tomorrow that the story was published.
Speaker 2:I went back, called the pastor of the AME Zion Church and he got together some old people. We're sitting around a table talking about the old days in Marvin and one of them says well, we should take and show him the house. So we went down the road a ways back into the woods and there was this, what had been a grand house. It hadn't been lived in for a couple of decades but you could tell that it had been nice when it was built. And this is black people in Union County, north Carolina, which I just was blown away. I said where did your family come by such a house back in the day? And this 79-year-old man turned to me and said the white women raised my mama from the cradle and when they died they left us this land. And in that moment I knew that that would be my story. He didn't tell me it was 800 acres of land. He didn't tell me that over 100 cousins sued to break the will because if they left their land to Black people they were obviously incompetent. He didn't tell me that two white juries in North Carolina in the 1920s upheld the will and the black family inherited and because of that there was never any racial trouble in that little town, whereas the town where I live, which is 15 miles away, monroe, north Carolina, the home of Senator Jesse Helms, was one of the most race-torn cities in the Upper South. There was the Kissing Case, which you can look up. It was international Soviet propaganda. Because of the injustice here. There was a swimming pool next door to where I live now a public swimming pool that was closed to keep it from being integrated and there was a riot when the Freedom Riders came in 1961.
Speaker 2:So there's all this turmoil here and yet in Marvin these relationships we're on seven or eight generations now of these people being friends with each other. The community has become a very upscale suburb of Charlotte because we're so close, but there are still these historic relationships, especially between the black and white churches, where they still get together twice a year for this. They're still friends, they still relate like this and it's had a huge impact on the community and it's had a huge impact on me personally. So this is kind of the root of my passion for diversity and inclusion was just seeing that, yes, it can be done. Here is a place where it happened.
Speaker 2:For example, imagine a family, a black family, has 800 acres in a cotton economy.
Speaker 2:Well, it becomes normal to buy and sell land across the color line. So there's all these stories of black tenant farmers who were able to get government loans and buy their own farms and they were prospering and thriving there, and the relationships with the white people were so good that the young generation now, one after another, tells me they grew up there, they didn't know there was racism until they went to college, or they didn't know there was racism until they was 13 years old. Recently, a lady, a wonderful lady, told me that she was angry at her parents because they didn't prepare her for the racism. And her parents said what racism? Look around us. Everybody here gets along. There's nothing like that. And so the subtitle of my book is Jim Crow meets Miss Maggie's Will, and the spoiler alert is that Jim Crow loses, and he loses big. In some ways, you could one way to look at it is that it's what would have happened if the United States had done 40 acres and a mule after the Civil War, if they had made what's that? What's that Okay?
Speaker 1:For those of us who don't live in the US, we don't understand the racial history a lot of the time.
Speaker 2:This is a key piece of it. This is where we fail. After the Civil War General Sherman you may have heard of him, the Northern General after the march through Georgia he issued an order that gave 400,000 acres on the Georgia coast to former slaves and they were to get 40 acres apiece and the slogan was 40 acres and a mule. There were other orders that provided the equipment that they would need and they were going to become their own farmers on 40 acres. Andrew Johnson reversed that order and so it did not become widespread. But the idea was, if we break up the plantations and make these freed slaves players in the economy, then we can really have a multiracial democracy here. And that's what they got in Marvin belatedly belatedly but the woman who inherited had six children.
Speaker 2:When she divided the last of it among her children in 1952, they each got over 32 acres, so it's almost literally 40 acres and a mule.
Speaker 1:And 40 acres of it.
Speaker 2:Go ahead.
Speaker 1:Well, I guess I wanted to ask in your view, because I know you've spent a lot of time researching this story and this town was it? I mean, the catalyst is certainly the gifting of the land, but that alone doesn't erase racism. I don't think I'm happy to be wrong, but you know it's been many years since that happened. So how has that created that culture in that town over the years and how has the the culture been reinforced over those years?
Speaker 2:well, when.
Speaker 2:I talk about the book to groups, like I talked to a group in Charlotte last Friday. The talk in its current form is called Love and Justice and Martin Luther King said that you've got to have both love and justice. It's something like love won't dismantle the unjust structures by itself and justice won't unite diverse people by itself. But you have to have both of them. And what happened was they had both of them. They inherited the land.
Speaker 2:Maggie's mother had brought the man into the family when he was five in 1875. She apprenticed him and brought him up in the family as her own and then, when he got married and had the girl, he sent the girl to live with them and so they raised both of them and they were family to them. The other reason they won the trial is that all their cousins had abandoned them in their old age. This is not the white people saved the black people. It was more like the black people saved the white people because they were their only personal and emotional support in the later years when their cousins abandoned them. And the jury looked at that and said that looks like family to us. It's not biological family. There's no DNA. There's never been any evidence of you know any kind of sexual relationship or, you know, birth kind of thing. But they live together as a fictive family and they lived in this tiny little village. In this tiny little village you've got the white Presbyterian church on one side and the white Methodist church on the other side, and they lived in a grand mansion right between those churches, in the very heart of the village, and everybody accepted it.
Speaker 2:I asked a woman whose parents had testified at the trial on behalf of Maggie and she said people talked about those women. My mama told me and I said yes, I'm sure they did. What did they say? And she said those women were odd, but they were good and it just, I mean, it became a motivation for me. You can be odd if you're good enough, and they were both. So there's this family between these two churches. That is what Two antebellum white sisters and a 10-year-old black girl and everybody just goes along with it.
Speaker 2:You know that the black man gets to shop at the store and the black girl gets to go with Maggie to the big store downtown in Waxhaw nearby. And the guy who was manager of the store testified at the trial. He said except for the difference in their color, you would have thought they were equal.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh. Yes, he would right yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, and I, and what I say is that means they knew they were equal, they treated each other as equal. And he goes on because Maggie's a young woman and he says I mean Mitty is a young woman. And he goes on because maggie's a young woman and he says mag. I mean middy is a young woman and he says middy would want to buy something that was high priced and maggie would say it was too expensive and middy would pout and maggie would have to buy it. Because I said, hey, I had four daughters. That is family. Um, they just related to each other like that and the whole community accepted it.
Speaker 2:And there were people who didn't like it. One of the guys who witnessed the signatures to the will testified that he didn't know what was in the will. They didn't let that out and he wanted the will to be broken. And I thought about that a lot. You know there was opposition in the community, but it was a minority of the people and the thing that I came to was they had such a great life in that community that even the people who didn't like it liked living there because it was a good place to flourish, and so they put up with it. You don't have to win everybody. You just have to win enough to have a flourishing life that nobody wants to interrupt or disrupt.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think what you're saying as well. You don't always have to agree with what's happening, but I think you need to have the character enough to to accept it as being different from what you might like. Yeah, and get on right.
Speaker 2:Yeah and these women. They didn't evangelize for it, they just lived it. Yeah, um, I had the obituary of the older sister when she died and it talks about how she treated everybody honestly and everything.
Speaker 2:And it comes out and says twice whether they were rich or poor, white or black In her obituary in 1909, there's two mentions that she treated black people and white people the same in this rural farm village and that's what they did and it's hard to imagine and I'm really grateful for the generation that will come up to me and say well, this woman I was telling you about, I was doing a Zoom thing with a book club and she happened to be invited. So after the talk they turned to her and said well, what do you say about this? And she said it's exactly what Mr Stowe said. There was no racism when I grew up and my parents did not prepare me for it and she wasn't happy about it, but it was still the fact.
Speaker 1:How has learning this story and doing all the research that you've done and writing the book, how has it changed, I guess, your view of the world and your life?
Speaker 2:Well, I was talking about that religious journey and I've just finished writing a book about that and deciding what to do with that. And what happened in the course of writing the book was there was a point at around 2000, 2001,. When I was becoming disenchanted with the religious group that I was in at the time and I hadn't thought about this before. This was eight years after I had discovered the story and I tried to fictionalize it. I didn't have enough material to make it, you know, a full book length history, and I had just kind of staggered along and I had moved to Indiana by then and it was like I don't really want to do this religious thing so much anymore. I was kind of withdrawing from that. What will I do? And that's when I said I'll see if I can get this, the documentation to make this a full length history. And I did.
Speaker 2:I found a transcript of the trial in the North Carolina Supreme Court Library, so that by itself kind of broke it open. There was 300 pages of testimony or something like that, and so I'm going to be able to do this. And then I started doing interviewing. I was a teacher, so I was able to come to North Carolina and do research in the summers and it kind of consumed my life, you know, kind of filled up my life in a good way, when this other stuff was fading in the background. And then I realized when I was writing the book, this is what convinced me that all I needed was a human community. And I wrote a whole chapter about writing the book in my religion book and I quoted her whole obit and all that and I finally came to the sentence because this is how I learn is when I write things, that's when I know them.
Speaker 2:Um, and I wrote I don't have to share Sally Ross's religion in order to live in her community yeah and that's when I was liberated, you know, to say um, because and it was funny, because the two little churches there I knew that people went to both of them, the Methodist church and the Presbyterian church, and then the women gave the land for the AME Zion church, you know, they had all their different denominations but none of them found their identity in that. They found their identity in living together in this human community. And I had spent all of my life up to then finding my identity in one religion or another. And after I'd been through three or four of them, I realized, okay, they're all pretty good, but I'm going to quit thinking that I'm right and other people are wrong. That was a big turning point in the religious journey. Wrong, that was a big turning point in the religious journey. But then when I oh so this is what I was looking for, a human community like Marvin and you can. You can assemble that in more ways.
Speaker 1:You can talk to somebody in Australia and they're part of your human community yeah um which I think, that's that is so interesting about your journey to find religion, and which is really about community, and when I don't consider myself religious at all, um, but I often think there must be comfort, being part of the church and being part of the community and having people around you. That's really helpful and satisfying. What was it about the religions that meant you didn't find community, you didn't find that humanness.
Speaker 2:Well, the community that I experienced there, upon close examination, was a community created by saying what we were not. So you know we're Catholics and we do this, and so those guys over there are not Catholics and so watch out. Or the ecumenical community I was in and I don't know that this is necessary, and I know that there are plenty of religious people, my daughter among them, who I deeply admire and respect because they don't have this division factor in their religion. But the division factor is very latent, in religion at least, and, as you may know, it has become ascendant. In this country. You have, you know, very powerful people wanting this to be a white Christian ethnostate and that's in some ways the logical conclusion. You know it actually has the same basis as the Muslim jihadism you know, it's just which one are you going to do?
Speaker 2:Well, my conclusion is we're better off if we just do all of the above. I don't want to say none of the above. I wouldn't ban religion, and for a long time. I mean, part of this comes from being a journalist. I had one foot in the real world. Even the whole time I was religious, and so there would be these arguments about Christmas displays on the public square, and I would say I believe that you should have Christmas displays on the public square, but I think you should have everybody's displays on the public square that wants it. I want a crowded public square, not a barren kind of thing. So it's really inclusion, and the religions were at some level, almost by definition, exclusive.
Speaker 2:So I have a friend from the old days in the religion, in the 70s, uh, who has had a similar path, but he's a very happy episcopalian now out in california and he's read the draft of my religion book and we talked and he's what he he said. What he would like is that I would feel free to come out there and just participate fully in everything that they do, you know, down to if I wanted to have Eucharist because I said these things are beautiful things, they're beautiful experiences, but they can't be defining experiences if that means defining me as not that. And so we talked about that. Why can't we just have it be everything you?
Speaker 1:know, yeah, instead of, instead of having to uh to draw all these lines um one of the things I loved about living in singapore is that, as a country, as nation, they celebrate all the different religious holidays. So you celebrate Chinese New Year and Depavali, and Christmas and Easter, and there's public holidays for each of the religions, the major religions that exist in Singapore, and it's a really beautiful thing because you get to learn about all the different cultures and religions, um, which is the last thing I want.
Speaker 2:The last thing I want is for the world to lose out on the beauty and the wisdom and the celebration that religion can bring to it. I don't think you have to have the division and and certainly not the hatred that we're seeing here these days in order to have that, you know, but you do have to. The religious people, like my daughter, do have to say this is what I'm doing. See, my degrees are in religion, believe it or not, and biblical studies was the main thing. And I'd like to say that biblical studies was one of the paths out of religion for me, because I still love the Hebrew Bible especially. You know, I studied the whole thing, but I was focused on the Hebrew Bible and the prophets and just late in history, because it was a critique of all the oppressive religions and they didn't believe in afterlife until like 164 BCE. And people would say well, I wonder why they didn't know about that? And because I would teach it and I'd say what do you mean? They didn't know about it. They lived in Egypt, which was exhibit A for afterlife, and that's why they didn't believe it, because they saw that that focus on afterlife is what made the Egyptians oppress them, and if this is it, then you just do the best you can here, and the vast majority of the Hebrew Bible is just saying that. And you look at stories. They don't like to hear this, but you look at stories like Ruth and Naomi, and Naomi tells her daughter's-in-law you go back, go back to your own land and to your gods and it'll be fine. It's henotheism is the word for it. But uh, the hebrews for a long time thought, okay, yahweh is our god, but other people have their gods too, and they were fine with it. That there's just that. I mean that changed after they went to babylon, but there's a history there of how the thing developed. I guess that's another thing to say about why I am who I am.
Speaker 2:When I first started getting involved in religion around the end of high school so I had a brother who died last year, who was 11 years older than I am and he was getting a PhD at the time in English and he is the one who gave me my love for language and he was teaching me all these things and so and he was very afraid that I was going to wind up in an anti-intellectual movement, so he was desperately trying to rescue me from that.
Speaker 2:So he asked me if God made the best of all worlds, and I knew it was a trick. So I said I'll get back to you. And so when I came back I said I'm going to say yes, because he made history a feature of it, that the best is not what's static, the best is what changes and is able to evolve. And that's how I've looked at my life. You know, other people say they're afraid of change. Change is the thing that has made me the most happy in my life Is, yeah, I look around and some of my old friends from the old days are still doing the same things we were doing 40 years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And if that makes you happy it's not evident to me that it does but the thing that has made me happy is to change you know to embrace something new that comes along.
Speaker 1:Yeah, To learn right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, when I was, there was a poster in the hall when I was a religion major in Chapel Hill at the University of North Carolina and it's attributed to John Henry Newman, and there was this little plant growing up. You know this old post well. You know you're too young, but there were these old posters in the 70s that were these matte print things and you would plasti-tack them to the wall and that was in the hall of the religion building and the quote was to grow is to change and to be perfect is to change often.
Speaker 2:And I would just stand there and think about that and I think that kind of got into my heart. So I've always been eager to change tell me about your documentary well the documentary.
Speaker 2:One thing that happened was I moved back here to North Carolina in 2016 and politically in America around that time. That's when Donald Trump had arisen and these racial divisions were becoming very pronounced. It's only gotten worse since then and it kind of made my book more important to people and when I wrote it it was just this nice little history that happened back then, but thanks to Donald Trump, it became current events. You know these people. The world as has developed now looks very much like the world that surrounded these women at the turn of the 20th century in terms of the racism out there and the division and the violence, all the terrible things, and they stood against that in their community. So every day that goes by, it just becomes more important.
Speaker 2:So I started going around giving talks about it and that kind of thing, and a friend of mine, daughter's father-in-law makes documentaries. He's from Knoxville and so I was talking to her about it one time and she said, well, you should talk to him about making a documentary of that. So I did and he turned out to be friends with Silk Cozart, who's an American actor. He was in movies like White Men Can't Jump was his biggest movie, and then Conspiracy Theory. He was in some pretty big movies. Conspiracy theory he was in some pretty big movies and he lives in Knoxville. And so the producer, whose name is Jim Johnson, said if I can get Silk to do this with me, we'll do it. So Silk said we've got to do this movie. There's no story like this. He said I've never heard of any story like this where white people treated black people like that and the relationships were that close.
Speaker 2:So, um, and so he directs and narrates it and, and we were doing it on a shoestring, nobody got paid, everything was for love. And uh, the actors we recruited local actors the, the people who portray the black people are descendants of the black people, the people the guy who plays the doctor is the grandson of the doctor. The gold coin that he gives to the women no, that the women give to him after he delivers a baby is the gold coin that the women gave to his ancestor. Yeah, you can't. There's no way to say that in the documentary. So it's a lot cooler than it looks when you are just watching it.
Speaker 2:But they came down and filmed. And then COVID came, so they filmed in August of 19,. Because there was one of those celebrations at the churches and I said you have got to film the celebration at this church. This is the product of the story and we're not just going to do a documentary of the history, celebrations at the churches. And I said you have got to film the celebration at this church. This is the product of the story and we're not just going to do a documentary of the history, we're going to do its impact. And so they came down. I made the investment to get them to come down and they did that. And then they made a little trailer, which is one of the two that I think. I sent you the trailers, but they're little clips on YouTube, yes, and then COVID hit and we had been trying to get people to invest or to donate and we were struggling and we came into some it was actually COVID relief money for the arts that was just enough to do another round of filming with reenacted scenes, and so it's not just like your documentary, you know, with the old pictures coming in and out, but we recruited people to costume and dialogue and do reenacted scenes, to costume and dialogue and do reenacted scenes. So they came down and did that in March of 21. And then we went to premiere in October of 21. And we just it was a zero based budget, whatever we got, we spent and we did this premiere in October. And then we won the best historical documentary at the Hollywood Weekly Film Festival in Los Angeles the next month.
Speaker 2:And then, but we got a good distributor. We got a very large distributor and they looked at it and said we like this, but we want. And they looked at it and said we like this, but we want 10 more minutes in it. What and? Well it was, it was 47 minutes and it needed to be. Now it's an hour four, but, um, so we didn't have any money. So the producer, for no pay, took the whole thing apart summer before last, and put it back together with 10 more minutes and it's really powerful.
Speaker 2:Now Silk Cozart wrote a song about Marvin. That's at the beginning and the end, and when I see the current version, it is really I could see it on a streaming service. I was really happy with what they did the first time. What I loved about it is we premiered it in the old theater that I used to go to when I was in high school here, and it was a segregated theater, so the blacks had to sit up in the balcony. Well, we invited the family to come, the descendants so we had over 200 black people front and center of the theater. It was a great evening, and so now the we need. There are things like that we have to do that we don't have money for, like closed captioning and paying lawyers and accountants and getting insurance, so nobody sues us for using an image, and so what the producer tells me is we need fifty thousand dollars to get across the finish line with that and so and how can people talk to you about giving you some money for that?
Speaker 2:well, I have a facebook page called inherit the land um, that and uh. It's called Inherit the Land, great, and I'm pretty active on Facebook, not so much the page but personally too. And then there's just, you know, email or call, I guess would be the other things. We did an Indiegogo, we did two Indiegogos, and very little money came in. It was puzzling. But then you think about it, if we weren't talking about this and you weren't asking questions, it's very hard for somebody. There isn't anything like this. The way I describe it is when you try to tell somebody about a story. They keep trying to hang their hat but there's no hook there. They don't have anything to compare it to until they get really deeply into it.
Speaker 2:So it's not the kind of thing that people just kind of, you know, respond to in a at least in a significant financial way, until they know more. And it's to be honest, there are people, I would say left and right, who find fault with this story in some ways. Not everybody wants this story to come out. It interrupts both narratives. The left doesn't like the idea that there were any white people that did good that there were any white people that did good.
Speaker 2:So I've been accused of balancing. So what these women did kind of balances all the bad stuff that got done. And I go after that, because what these women do indicts the bad people. They should have known better. If these old ladies so their first cousin once removed was Walter Bickett, who was eventually the governor of North Carolina, and he wasn't just on their family tree, they had a picture of his son hanging in their living room and Walter Bickett gave a speech to dedicate the Confederate monument here in 1910. And he dedicated the Confederate monument to the veterans who came back and restored white supremacy. I had the speech. I've had it since high school. He explicitly says this was the greatest chapter in American history because you threw off Reconstruction and you made the world safe for white people. Essentially I have the whole paragraph and we got the paragraph in the revised documentary too. So it was worth it for that.
Speaker 2:Um, so that became the narrative here, and so that's why we had the kissing case and the swimming pool case and and the riot and and so the narrative in Marvin was what these women had done. Okay, I'm a writer, so I think narrative is where meaning comes from, and I think that the ascendant narrative in Monroe was white supremacy, the ascendant narrative in Marvin was love and justice, and you just look at the two outcomes and decide which one you want. And that's kind of how we framed the documentary. So there's this, this northern woman this is actually in the book too.
Speaker 2:When northern people started moving to suburban Charlotte here, um, I interviewed well, no, a friend of mine after I had moved to Indiana, went back and did another story out there and interviewed a woman from New Jersey who had a horse farm, because it was that kind of place, and she said my northern friends come and they're all nervous and upset because there's all these black people on the road. She said I tell them those are the best people you'll ever meet, this is the best place you'll ever live, and so we put that in the documentary. So you get to decide are you going to be like these fearful people? Are you going to be like this woman who has embraced the culture of Marvin? So it's impacted tons of people from all over?
Speaker 1:Yeah, when can people read the story? Where can they get your book?
Speaker 2:Oh, it's on Amazon. The university press of mississippi, um, who published it. They sell it um, or you can always come to north carolina. Here it's a great time of year I'd love to come all right. Well, we've got a guest room.
Speaker 1:Awesome, Awesome. When I'm in the States next, I'll come and visit and I want to visit Marvin. Read your book, get your book.
Speaker 2:Well, I'll introduce you to the people in Marvin and they have incorporated as a village now only in 1994, 1998. It was after I left and the people who are running the place are all from somewhere else. There's this large population of extremely wealthy people. It is the richest census tract in North Carolina.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so and they all work in Charlotte, you know, and they think they live in Charlotte and they don't know their own history. So the mayor came to the premiere and he has some sense of what this would be, and the prequel that I'm writing is all about what would be downtown Marvin if they had a downtown. So we're trying to just get this know. Here we are scraping for fifty thousand dollars when the houses in Marvin start at half a million yeah but we haven't been able to.
Speaker 2:Kind of crazy. Let it be done to the people who live there crazy.
Speaker 1:Well, I'll put all your contact details and all the links in the show notes of this episode. Gene, thank you so much for talking with me. We could talk forever because you're so interesting. You know so many things.
Speaker 2:Well, we could just talk sometime.
Speaker 1:I know we can, but thank you so much and it's been a delight having you.
Speaker 2:Oh well, thank you for the opportunity. This is what I do. I mean, this is like I say. I tell people I did two things in my life I raised six kids and I wrote a book, and the book still speaks to me.
Speaker 1:So some of the children do a majority of them do.
Speaker 2:Let's just put it down but that's the thing about having. That's the thing about having six. You can lose half and still have more than most people.
Speaker 1:So so true.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you, jane, thank you well, it was good to see you and good to talk to you again and, um, I hope it won't be so long in between.