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Whooping. Spanking. Beating. Whatever you want to call it, corporal punishment was a central part of Lee's upbringing. Growing up, he was made to believe that it was a Black custom but as an adult he began wondering if it ended up doing more harm than good. In this episode, Lee speaks with Dr. Andrew Garner, a pediatrician who has studied the effects of corporal punishment on children, and how the nervous system is altered by it. Later, Lee speaks with Geoff Ward, a Professor of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, to discuss how corporal punishment has extended beyond the home, and into schools.TranscriptWe wanted to give a heads up that this episode includes talk of abuse, and acts of violence. You can find resources on our website, WhatHappenedInAlabama.org - listener discretion is advised.Hi - this is Lee Hawkins and we're about to dive into episode seven of What Happened in Alabama. This conversation is about corporal punishment in homes and schools. Beating, spanking, whooping, whatever you call it, that's what we'll be talking about. This is very personal to me because it's how I and so many of my peers were raised. We were taught that it was not only normal, but necessary. Today we're going to get into the short and long-term effects of corporal punishment on the physical, mental, and emotional development and well-being of children, often following them into adulthood. It's a heavy and important topic But you'll get a lot more out of it if you go back and listen to the prologue - that'll give you some context for the series and this episode. Do that, and then join us back here. Thank you so much. In February 2019, I had my final interview with my dad for this project. We talked for over 3 hrs. I had a deadline to hit, and because I had so many interviews already recorded I did one final interview with him, just to get specific questions answered without having to go back through all that tape. He did the final interview – and he answered some extremely difficult questions, with compassion, regret, and especially grace.Lee: And so how did you get into the whooping thing? Like you beating us with your belt? What made.. Like, where did you get that from?Lee Sr: That I can't say. I don't know, man. It was just a, some kind of a stress that I had, evidently. Lee Sr: it's hard to say how this shit went man.Asking my dad directly about this I realized that families often repeat certain patterns and cycles from generation to generation, without understanding why or where they come from. That four year process of interviewing my father about his upbringing in 1950-era Jim Crow Alabama shined a powerful light on why I was raised the way I was. But while I had gained a better understanding of some of the historical factors that shaped my upbringing, I still needed to understand the forces that prevented my father from breaking the cycle of belt whipping when we were kids. Lee: But what were the stresses that you were going through? Lee Sr: Things that I had seen my mom had to go through with people and shit and that was hard to push it. And so when I thought you guys did something, that was when I would, you know, get out of control like I did man, because that is out of control. I don't give a fuck how you put it. It was validating to hear Dad declare that hitting children with belts was wrong, and something that he profoundly regretted, and was genuinely sorry for, because I struggled for my whole life to understand the sentiment that Black children – especially – need to be beaten, even as I accepted it. I didn't need much more than to hear my dad acknowledge that no, we didn't deserve it – Black kids or not. Lee Sr: If it was up to me and the way I feel about things, I would've never done nothing like that. But I don't know how I got out of control like that. Something was back there in my life that did that and I know it.My mom told me that there were nights that my dad came to bed and cried after those interviews. Though I never saw those tears, it doesn't surprise me. Revisiting painful memories that led my father to try to whip us into perfection out of deep love and concern was obviously excruciating for him. Despite my belief in “honor thy mother and father” and occasionally unnecessary guilt, I didn't feel obligated to shield him from the pain he caused my sister Tiffany and me at times. I accepted that the burden of his actions was not mine to carry. Expecting a victim to accept the blame for a perpetrator's actions, fearing that a grown man might cry, just isn't fair.I was determined to lead my dad down the path to finally put these generational demons to rest, for both of us and for future generations of our family. If he cried, he cried. When I heard that dad cried, I saw it as a sign of empathy but not a reason to quit researching. As children, I wept, and Tiffany wept, through the hundreds of belt whippings we received. In fact, our mother would tell us: “Stop crying or I'll give you something to really cry about.” I now realize that perpetrators rarely recognize the extent of a victim's pain because they aren't the ones being beaten.My father's tears didn't change the reality of what they had done to us. His crying may have meant he finally grasped that his childhood impacted mine more profoundly than my parents had ever acknowledged. Our pain stung so much more than the feeling of a belt to the behind.Social justice activists talk so often about how violence impacts Black bodies, but my research, and my memories of my own childhood, have shown me that violence–including within the Black family and community– can also have potentially devastating effects on Black minds—especially the minds of children.With my mental health journalism training, I now understand why I was always on edge, like my parents. They feared the world, and I feared them. Sometimes I'd go to bed fully clothed, with three layers of clothing on for extra padding, preparing for the possibility of being pulled out of bed for a forgotten chore. This made me high-strung and hard to stay calm. Around age eight, I started blinking excessively when nervous. One Sunday in the choir stand, I couldn't stop blinking. After church, one of my Dad's friends mentioned it, "I think Lee Lee's got some kind of nervous tic." Dad dismissed it as teasing, ranting to my mom about it the whole ride home.But his friend was right. My nervous system was firing like crazy. Though I excelled in spelling and reading, I struggled in math that year. My parents thought I was clowning in class and believed more beatings would improve my scores. They'd yell, "You're being the class clown for all those white friends of yours." They didn't realize I needed extra help from a teacher or tutor. Instead of focusing on math, I'd sit at my desk and worry about the belt whipping I could get for writing down a wrong answer, which made me blink even more.Neither my father nor I connected my nervousness to the beatings. We saw the belt as temporary pain. But it hijacked my entire system. As an adult, I've dealt with stress, but nothing compares to the constant stress I carried as a child. I don't know how I never developed an ulcer. Imagine an adult experiencing the unpredictability of being overpowered and whipped several times a month, then having to perform at their best the next day. That's what I went through… as an eight-year-old.What broke my heart as a child was that my mother told me that she gave my teacher permission to hit me if she wanted to. My teacher never did, but she clearly knew I was getting the belt at home. That trend of many schools failing to protect students from violence, or even exacting violence themselves, impacted me in so many ways. One clear way was the reality that my Dad rarely if ever got hit by his parents, but he did get hit plenty of times at school, which, I believed normalized the idea of child beating in his mind at a young age.And today, Alabama is one of seventeen states that still allow corporal punishment in K-12 public schools, with the schools mostly striking Black children and those with disabilities. In 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the UCLA Center for Civil Rights Remedies reported that Black boys are nearly twice as likely to be hit compared to white boys, and Black girls are struck at over three times the rate of white girls. This, all despite the fact that Black students behave similarly to white ones. Today, hitting school children is legal and most prevalent in states where enslavement was legal. Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas represent over 70% of all corporal punishment in U.S. public schools, according to the SPLC. Children at some schools are hit nearly twice a month. Notably, during the 2015–16 school year, one Mississippi school reported 871 instances affecting 57 students, averaging 15 times per student. Another school in the same state noted 60 instances for just four students, also averaging 15 times per student. A few years back, before my dad died, my Dad and his sister, Aunt Toopie, talked about the beatings they received at school while growing up in Jim Crow AlabamaLee: Did they whoop the kids in school, was it a strict thing?Lee Sr: Yeah, we got our ass kicked every time we were late, I know that. Aunt Toopie: And stand in the corner.Lee Sr: And when you did something in class you got your ass kicked.Aunt Toopie: They had belts in school in them days.Lee Sr: They had that board of education. If I was late for school, you'd go right to the principal's office, and he'd tell your ass up about three times with that paddle, with holes in it. That paddle was a piece of oak wood, and it had varnish on it and it had holes. They had drills holes in it. It was custom made. It said board of education and he'd have you bend over and man, that thing, them holes in that thing, would leave little dots on your ass.” Being hit at school burned a permanent memory in my dad's brain - he normalized it when he became a father, handing down the Alabama-born anxiety to another generation, to me. After the conversation with my dad where he apologized for whipping my sisters and me, I tried to have a similar one with my mom. But it went very differently. "We didn't beat you,” she said. “We spanked you."I was disappointed to hear her deny how severely she and my dad beat my sister Tiffany and me. But I also understood why she would say what she did. There's almost a collective agreement in society that so-called spanking is supposedly lighter than a beating…kinder and gentler and never abusive or harmful. It's much easier to stomach the narrative that there are acceptable forms of violence to use against children; even though that same violence would never be acceptable to use against an adult. Which is why I give my dad so much credit for being honest and not trying to minimize what they did.My dad finally understood the full spectrum of damage the American whip had caused generations of our family. We often think the worst of corporal punishment are the welts and physical pain. But through my own experience and my research, I know the real pain is from the belt's access to the victim's mind. My parents didn't know these beatings and the mental stress of having to constantly look out for danger all around me, made it harder for me to focus, triggering my nervous system into fight or flight, causing bouts of anxiety that followed me into adulthood. This led me to find experts on the effects of corporal punishment on the body and mind.Dr. Garner: The thing that separates kids from adults is they're still under construction. Their brain, their physiology is still under development. And so what happens in childhood doesn't stay in childhood. That's Doctor Andrew Garner. He's a primary care pediatrician in Ohio who has studied the effect of corporal punishment on children. I wanted to talk to Dr. Garner to understand the physiological changes that occur in children when they are hit. Whether you hit them with your hand, a belt, a paddle, regardless of how hard or how often you hit them, it's all corporal punishment. I'm someone who refuses to get nostalgic about the beatings of my childhood. I would never high-five my friends and say I needed it, I loved it, or credit it as the reason I stayed out of trouble or became a productive citizen. It's not funny to me, mainly because it took me years to rewire my system. But I don't want to unfairly judge people either, especially those who don't have the information. Once I delved into history, I gained a deeper and clearer understanding of why so many people I've known—especially Black and white people from the South—have often celebrated and even laughed fondly about the use of corporal punishment. Many have no idea that, when we really look closely at America's historical foundation, hitting children is akin to setting up a system of white supremacy or a mini plantation in their living room. Later in this episode, I speak with Professor Geoff Ward, a Professor of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, to discuss how corporal punishment has extended beyond the home into schools across the South, mainly the states and counties where slavery was legal and lynching was most prevalent. We talk about the institutionalized use of corporal punishment and how deeply ingrained it is in our history. But for now, let's get back to Dr. Garner.The conversation mentions violence and abuse against children, sensitive listeners please take care. [break]Lee: I think there are many people who believe, well, if I just hit the kid a few times on the butt with my hand, that's a spanking. If I hit a kid with a belt that's a beating, or if I don't if I hit a kid with a belt, but I don't hit them hard..as hard as the guy up the street who's hitting his kid with the extension cord, then that's not a beating. Dr. Garner: That's all violence. Right. So, you know, corporal punishment is a negative consequence, for unwanted behavior. But that negative consequence is the use of force and is intended to cause pain or discomfort. So that's violence. So, you know, whether or not you're trying to split hairs between, a spanking or a beating, it's still the use of violence to coerce, and control and modify another person's behavior. And we know that in order to continue changing that behavior, the violence needs to escalate over time. So it's a slippery slope. I can recognize this slippery slope in my own life. My parents started out with a few hits when I was little and over the years it escalated to something much more serious, to the point where getting hit with a leather belt for five minutes was normalized. In fact, their punishment increased to slaps across the face and attacks that were even more severe. And this was from two parents, who, like most of the parents we knew, felt like, if they truly loved their children, they needed to kick it into high gear and show us that life wasn't going to be fair and that nobody was coming to save us, especially because we were Black. I can see how this happens. Dr. Garner: You may think that in the short term, you're doing a good service to your child because you're trying to teach them something. But in the long run, we know the outcomes are worse. There's clear data, you know, increased risk of child abuse, because you have to eventually increase the negative stimuli to try and change the behavior. Part of the problem with corporal punishment, it's a double whammy. In addition to the anticipation, like you're saying what bad thing is going to happen to me? There's also the loss of safety, because one of the things that the the one of the ways that we buffer adversity is through relationships. And now there's, there can be a loss of trust, in the, in the relationship. And that to me is really interesting that, it's not just the, the, the fear of the pain as you were talking about. It's also the loss of trust that when is this going to happen. Where when am I safe? When am I safe? Lee: Well, never. I was never really 100% safe in my home or outside in the world. Never. There was never a time that I felt safe. And I also feel like my parents did that by design. I don't think they wanted me to ever feel safe, because I don't think they believed that a Black person in America is ever safe. So I believe that they wanted me to feel the hyper vigilance and the hyper cautiousness that they, in the generations before them, felt because they didn't believe enough in the system of America. Another thing is that when you said you have to increase the punishment if you're going to use this system, that's exactly what happened to me. And I know my dad. I know that he…lost control and did not know what he was doing. And I think at that time he got to a point where he realized, what have I done? What have I become? Dr. Garner: I think where we break down sometimes is trying to decide what's more important, you know, is it the connection or is it the structure? Well, they're both important. You need to have connection. So kids trust the instruction you're giving them. But the way I think about it is it's a lot easier to teach a kid what they should do than to keep from doing something you don't want them to do. Lee: But it's also forcing us to understand that children are multiple times smaller than adults. And so we if we apply some empathy here, we have to understand that even if you're hitting a child once or twice, you're still multiple times larger than the child, and the child may not have a bruise. Or the bruise may go away. But it's really this person who's supposed to be taking care of me, who is the only thing in this world I love, and this person who is providing meals and food and shelter for me is hitting me. Oh, he's going to hit me again. But for some reason, children have a different standing in society. They're the most vulnerable in the society, but they have the least protection. Dr. Garner: Yeah. It's crazy. The thing that separates kids from adults is they're still under construction. We know if there is significant adversity, and there aren't opportunities to turn off the body's stress response that can result in a thing called toxic stress. Right. So toxic stress is this inability to turn off the stress response. And it can literally change who we are at the behavioral, at the cellular, even at the molecular levels. We know that adversity can sort of become biologically embedded and and changing the way our genomes work. Lee: And this is just even with just hitting a child once or twice occasionally. Right? Dr. Garner: Absolutely. I mean, that's the point, is that we have to understand the way brains develop. Brain development is an experience driven event. It's the experiences that happen that drive brain development. And so the question is, what are those experiences in childhood, are they adverse in the sense that they're leading to expectancies of bad things and always being on edge, or are they nurturing to the extent that people get me? I have agency and things are going to be positive in the future. So those early experiences are truly foundational and they can influence the way we see ourselves and the way we see other people and the way we see our future.For me, belt whipping taught me not to ever trust anyone, including and especially my parents. I loved them, but I never fully trusted them and rarely confided in them. And that turned me into an adult who simply refused to trust another human being. Despite the active social life I've always had, my childhood groomed me to be a rugged individualist, putting all my trust in God and myself. I never put even an ounce of faith in the idea that another person would not be capable of betraying or letting me down. And in relationships with girlfriends -– especially if they wronged me in any way – I developed the very unfortunate ability to be able to walk away from them and never look back and never miss them. And I often wanted to be able to be vulnerable and feel some level of paralysis or regret, but I always could just keep going.The beatings also made me perfectionistic. My mantra became, “if you want something done right, do as much as you can by yourself, because most people will almost always fall short and disappoint.”At a very young age, I just adopted the posture that I was on my own, and that I should not count on anyone or expect anyone to come up with a net and try to catch me if I fell. And also I also believed that you should always keep people out of your personal business, because in most cases, they'll take your plans, your confiding in them about your most vulnerable feelings or moments, or the smallest mistakes and weaponize them to try and hurt you. And that's how my father was. And yes, he came from a family of Jim Crow survivors and had family members murdered, but I believe a lot of this view of the world I've seen in my family, especially in my case, came from being beaten as children. These beatings – and yes, I have finally given myself permission to call them abuse – just wreaked havoc on my capacity to receive love without skepticism. Even now, I mean, speaking this, I'm wondering if this revelation will somehow be used against me by somebody down the line. But at least I can recognize it now. My new mantra is, “I'm free and I'm safe.” And to be fair, I'm a lot better than I used to be, and I can't say that the skepticism hasn't helped me a great deal – especially in the media business – but I wouldn't wish that level of steel-heartedness on anyone. I asked Dr. Garner to break down what happens to a child's nervous system when they get hit or know there's a possibility they're about to get hit. He said there are three biological pathways. Dr. Garner: The most simplest and the most evolutionarily, primitive is freeze, right? So you may see that the deer in the headlights type thing. Right. And so the first temptation is to freeze, if I be small and don't move, maybe the threat will go away.The second, which you might recognize, is fight or flight. Dr. Garner: And that's where you have a release of all kinds of biological mediators. Cortisol and epinephrine, that basically make your blood pressure high, make you ready to fight or run away. Those hormones are very useful in the short term. So if you see a bear, you can run away fast. But if that if that stress response isn't turned off through the presence of safe, stable, nurturing relationships and that constant bathing in those physiologic mediators of stress is there that results in changes. Changes at the molecular level, changes at the cellular level changes the behavior that really can change who we are. And we call that toxic stress. The third response is to affiliate, that means our ability to collaborate with others, to seek help when there's a threat. It's part of the reason humans have existed so long as a species. But Tiffany and I didn't have that support. There was no escaping the belt. Dr. Garner: Where are my friends? Who's going to help me through this? The problem is, for a young child, the friend is the person who's beating you. So you've really sort of lost that that ability to turn off the stress response from an affiliate response. You're really stuck in flight or flight, and if you're constantly bed with those hormones, again, that's going to lead to a child who's going to be more defiant, more aggressive. Not be able to think things through, not be able to think about the broad perspective because you're. Constantly in fight or flight mode. You're constantly in survival mode instead of relational mode. Lee: Right? Yeah. And if you can think about this to bring some empathy in here for people to understand, if you were hitting a dog and a dog who depends on you for everything, is experiencing this toxicity in this toxic environment, you can actually see a lot of times when dogs are abused because you'll go to pet them and they kind of squirm. Sometimes they might bark, sometimes they might even try to bite you. And that's because they've been abused. Children are the same, right? I mean, children can have some of the same effects that we see, in dogs, that we empathize with. Children who are treated the same way in their home. Can have that same impact. Dr. Garner: But here's the good news. And this is the really fascinates me, is that the more we learn about the biology of adversity, the more we learn about toxic stress and how adverse experiences become biologically embedded and really affect life course trajectories. That same biology underlies how positive experiences get embedded. Right? And that that is the good news, right? So adversity is not destiny in any way, shape or form. In the last few years, there's been a really interesting thing called biobehavioral synchrony, which is a big phrase, but what it means is in those moments of magical connection that you have with another being in particularly between parent and child, there's literally an alignment of the brain waves of the autonomic functions of hormone levels and behavior. Right. And so we sort of know this intuitively that emotions can be contagious. Right? So, if a child's crying, the sibling mates are crying and specters may join an angry mob so it can go in the negative way, but can also go in a positive way, in a sense that engaged and trusted caregivers, they literally have the ability to hack in remotely and turn off the child stress response. Dr. Garner explained that you can see this in action if you look up the still face experiment on Youtube. It's a famous psychological study that was first conducted in 1975 by the psychologist Edward Tronick. Dr. Garner: Basically they take a young child about a year old, and usually it's a mother, and they bring him into the laboratory and they have three two minute blocks. The first two minute block is engaging, so they're just playing back and forth. It literally they call it serve and return - the baby coos the mom responds. And it's really this biobehavioral synchrony. You can literally see it happening for you. And then they tell the mom to turn away and then turn back and to not engage for two minutes. And if you watch the video it is viscerally painful because the child noticed there's a rupture in the synchrony and does everything they can to try and get back engaged, everything they can to get back engaged. And then they tell their mom to turn back again, and now to start to repair. And it's palpable. The children's relief immediately. Oh, we're back again. You're back again? I'm safe. You got me. The important thing is, is there repair, right? And the most recent evidence suggests that it's the latency to repair that's associated with secure attachments and distress tolerance, that ability to say the goodness is coming. We're going to get back together again. It's really, really important. And so, again, that's great news for parents. We're not going to be perfect. We're all going to make mistakes as parents. We can't always be perfectly engaged. The important thing is it's all about repair. It's the ability to come back and become back engaged and basically be saying that, child, your perspective is important to me. The relationship's important to me. And it's way more important for me to be kind than right. Lee: Yeah. And I think that that's one of the challenges for me as part of people from the African-American community who had my experience. For me, knowing that my parents loved me and knowing that that love could be shown, but then the next minute I could be being beaten with the belt. And then they're loving me again. And then I'm beaten with the bel,t going back and forth. I do wonder…I do believe that there were there were some kind of protection outcomes that came from the love that was shown, but the unpredictability of it was, was very difficult because the relationship to violence was weird. Like it because violence was almost framed as love. Dr. Garner: Yeah. That's one of the one of the big paradoxes, I think, of corporal punishment is that having been a victim of corporal punishment, that increases your risk of being a victim of other physical violence down the line, which is sort of counterintuitive. But I think it gets at what you were saying there is that leads to what those expectations of what love are.And throughout my research, I found disturbing instances where enslavers used Bible verses to justify corporal punishment and enslavement. This deeply troubled me as both a Christian and a Black man. I've often heard the phrase "Spare the rod, spoil the child," which, contrary to widespread belief, isn't even in the Bible. And even still, this metaphorical use emphasizes guidance and care rather than punishment. Dr Garner's wife is a Methodist pastor, and I talked to him about how people have often manipulated and weaponized scriptures and proverbs to justify and advance slavery, whipping, and their own agendas. As a result, generations of people have come to believe that it is moral, righteous, and holy to beat children. Dr. Garner: I think it's very upsetting when, these scriptures are being used in a way to propagate violence, when clearly that is not what Christ's intention was. He said, bring the children to me. Bring the children to me. Right. He didn't say, bring them to me so I can whip them. Right. Said, be like a child. Be be like a child. Be empathic. Be full of wonder. Right. And somehow we sort of lost that. So, discipline, you know, comes from the Latin word to teach. Right? So it doesn't mean to punish. Right. And of course there are multiple types of punishment, which actually runs the spectrum right from, a loss of privileges, right. So, you know, if you, you lose your driver's license, if you speed too much, right, to possible incarceration and then all the way to physical harm and even even death. Right? So punishment is the, are those negative consequences. They're imposed for undesired behavior. But punishment is only one form of discipline. And the more we know about it, the more we know it's actually not as effective in the long term and actually can cause potential harm. Lee: And what I love about this research that you've done in everything that you're sharing with us today, is that you're showing that a child's brain is being wired as we go, right, that we're creating the future adult every day when we're working with that child. What do stress toxins do to the body in terms of health? Dr. Garner: Toxic stress, which can be precipitated by any number of different forms of adversity, is associated with basically all of the leading causes of death. Right? So if you want to look at, asthma, you want to look at cancer, do you want to look at suicide and mental health issues. You want to look at obesity. You want to look at substance abuse. Right. So I mean, there's no doubt that, when we are programmed to expect adversity, that we're going to find ways to try and cope. And so if you think about it, you know, people overeat and abuse substances and, are promiscuous for a reason. In the short term, they turn off the stress response. But in the long term, the worse health outcomes down the line. Right. And so, yeah, I mean, I think your point, though, that the brain is, is being made over time is really important, and so are the relationships. And so one way I think to try and frame all of this is affect regulation, how we handle our emotions. Because if you have an angry parent who's spanking a child, the message to the child is when you get angry, it's okay to hit right. And so, that's not what we really want for our kids in the long run. We actually want them, to learn that it's okay to have strong emotions. It's okay to be angry. It's okay to be frustrated. But when you have those emotions, what can we do with them? How can we channel them? Dr. Garner has worked with parents and treated children as a Primary Care Pediatrician for more than two decades. He co-authored the book "Thinking Developmentally: Nurturing Wellness in Childhood to Promote Lifelong Health" and the American Academy of Pediatrics' Policy Statement on Preventing Childhood Toxic Stress and Promoting Relational Health. As a speaker, he focuses on early brain and child development, preventing childhood toxic stress, and promoting early relational health, and he considers himself to be an advocate for all children and their families. Lee: And what do you tell parents when they bring their children in to be treated about corporal punishment? Dr. Garner: One, to heal any wounds that they've had as a parent? Because we've talked before, parents tend to parent the way they were parented. So, I'm going to want to know, what the stressors are in their life with, what the stressors were when they were kids. What a good question often is, what, did your parents do that you want to make sure you do for your kids? But then also, what are the things your parents did that you want to make sure you never do for your kids? As kids get older, I'm going to help them understand, that it's really not the behavior you want to focus on. That a child's behavior is always telling us there's something they need or something they want. And what we need to do is trying to interpret it and help them figure out a better way to have that behavior met. And so this starts really early, you know, with temper tantrums in 3 or 4 year olds. It's really not about the behavior. It's the emotion that's driving the behavior. And if we can help parents understand that, then we can help parents help their child say, look, you're allowed to be angry. You're allowed to be frustrated, allowed to be disappointed. But when that happens, we're not going to yell and scream. We're going to do the things that bring us joy. We're going to try and, spend some time doing some Legos or some coloring, teach them how to cope instead of just saying stop. The problem with, with corporal punishment and all punishments is it's basically saying, don't do this, don't do this, don't do this. And then the child, then in, in sort of in their own mind, thinks there's something wrong with me. Because I feel this way and the message needs to be, you're allowed to feel that way, but when you feel that way, do this instead. If the parent is able to say, I'm so sorry I lost it, I'm so sorry I used those harsh words. I'm so sorry I was demeaning. I'm going to try better and we're going to work together to build this relationship. Then that's what those kids are going to do someday, right? I mean, I tell kids that empathy is a superpower. It is an absolute superpower. Not everyone has it, but we can teach it. And when you have it that allows you to repair, that allows you to have relationships. After speaking with Dr. Garner I want to believe that if more well-meaning parents knew hitting their children can also harm their brains and emotional health as opposed to just being temporarily painful, fewer would do it. However, in a country where hitting children is part of a centuries-long pattern of violence, and amid a system that offers the smallest people the least protection, I understand why many believe hitting children is beneficial, especially for Black children.But now that I'm out of that situation, I do view it as abuse and a legacy of my country's legal system and culture, and the enslavement and torture of my people. And it's not just in the home - in 17 states across the U.S. corporal punishment is legal in public schools. Most of these states allow educators to hit students three times in the rear with a long wooden board. And in all states except for just a few, corporal punishment is allowed in private schools.To help me understand it more I reached out to Professor Geoff Ward at Washington University in St Louis. He's a historical sociologist and the director of the Washington Slavery Project. Some of his work connects the dots between the history of lynching in southern states with the modern usage of corporal punishment in schools today. I've had a couple conversations with Professor Ward, the first time was about 2020. I spoke to him again more recently to learn more about the logic of racial violence, how it intersects with our judicial system and how we can break the cycles of racial violence. Lee: You know, before when we talked, we talked a lot about racialized social control. Can you give us a definition, to hold on to here? Prof. Ward: I think a good place to start would be is to recognize that we live in a racialized social system, a society where rewards are allocated along racial lines, where meaning is constructed along racial lines, things like, you know, reliability or, beauty, or intelligence, morality, are riddled with racial logic because we live in a society where race has sort of been infused in the way we relate to and understand each other, the way the society has been organized. And in that context, social control becomes racialized. And social control generally describes the definition and enforcement of norms. And social control can be informal, you know, a sideways glance or a disapproving look. But we also have systems of formal control. And that brings in the State. And our regulatory systems, our courts, our criminal legal system and so forth that are part of the system of social control. And, you know, all of that complex is racialized.I remember reading Professor Ward's work and being shocked by his citation of a 1901 Alabama constitutional debate over the legality of whipping prisoners, in which a county official remarked that “everybody knows the character of a Negro and knows that there is no punishment in the world that can take the place of the lash with him.” And he noted, that juvenile court records from 1930s-era North Carolina reveal that court-ordered whippings were reserved almost exclusively for Black boys and girls, given “widespread feelings among white county juvenile court judges that whipping is the most effective way of handling delinquent Negros."Another court official noted a common diversionary practice of “sendingdelinquent Black boys downstairs with a big police officer to have themflogged” prior to release.Prof. Ward: So this was a an example we, we used from the historical record in the article I mentioned where we examined how histories of racist violence, particularly lynching, relate to patterns of corporal punishment in contemporary public schools. Where we found that, that net of other factors, every additional lynching in the history of a county increased significantly the odds that a child would be corporally punished in a school in that county. This was after accounting for things like how, the funding of the school, the racial makeup of the school, whether it's urban or rural, how experienced the teachers are, how religiously conservative the residents of the county are, and so forth. And in that article, we used the story you're referring to to provide some context for how this relationship could come to exist. How is it that contemporary schools, likelihood of using violent strategies of school discipline has anything to do with the history of slavery or lynching in in that county? What is the story there? What are the mechanisms that connect the past to the present? And we cited that example because it speaks to the racial logic of corporal punishment, the idea that African-Americans are not fully human, are not sentient beings, can cannot be, influenced through, you know, appeals to things like morality or decency or logic, you know, white supremacism historically asserted that that Black people could not think deeply about anything. And so you and so this what this judge is saying in this case and we found numerous examples of this, judges, legislators, you know, rationalizing corporal punishment. And was saying that, you have to appeal, you have to reach, you have to address African-Americans through pain. Lee: Yeah. Prof. Ward: Because, because the you can't reach them through the brain. Lee: Yes. And and what I love about your research is that you've really just blown the doors off of this and shown that the public record is full of governmental rationalizations of violence against Blacks, even after emancipation. you show that African-Americans have always been framed as warranting more violent control strategies. And this is deeply rooted in the idea that we are not fully human. Is that something that you just have seen all through your research? Prof. Ward: Well, yeah, it is, I know it has to also be said that that, you know, racialized social systems are contested. You know, this this idea, this attempt to dehumanize African Americans, never actually fully succeeded. It resulted in a tremendous amount of oppression and pain and violence and death and so forth. But, simultaneously, you know, my research is also showing that Black communities and their allies are countering these measures. But even with respect to the juvenile justice system in my book, ‘The Black Child-Savers' is mostly about how generations of Black women organized, beginning in the 1890s, to dismantle this Jim Crow juvenile justice system. And, they were fundamentally motivated by their own recognition that Black children and people were, in fact, fully human and fully capable of realizing the benefits of a more enlightened approach to social control. One that focused on, on child welfare and development. You know, the system that was being developed for white kids, who were not being subject as much to this, yeah, this brutality. And so they did create, you know, other kinds of institutions and practices that also have to be kept in mind as we think about the sort of how this history unfolded. Lee: You talk about the connection between corporal punishment and the history of lynching, which is really an incredible contribution to this body of work. Lee: Are you still seeing the trend in which, historical areas where lynching was the most prevalent tend to correspond to the amount of corporal punishment that's being done in a particular school district? Prof. Ward: There certainly have been study after study showing that that that histories, area histories of lynching and other racialized violence, predict contemporary patterns of of conflict and violence and inequality. Things like, Black victim homicide rates today and, patterns of vote suppression and white supremacist mobilization, you know, and, white political conservativism, things like Black infant mortality or racially disparate infant mortality, differences in heart disease. I mean, all kinds of contemporary outcomes have been shown by social scientists to be associated with histories of racial violence in, in specific areas. So I would I would imagine that, you know, that that the relationships we saw with respect to corporal punishment in schools, have not suddenly gone away. Understanding how governmental institutions have historically ensured that Black children are subjected to corporal punishment, including in schools, helps me see why my parents feared they had to use violence to protect me. They were conditioned by a system of legal white supremacy to equate violence with love. Like agents of the state, they and generations of Black parents saw violence as a necessity, convinced that nonviolent reasoning wouldn't work with a Black boy.As a result, while my parents were opposed to police violence, they turned our living room into a whipping station, becoming indirect agents of the very police brutality our people protested. Each generation in my family had a hypervisible white police officer who symbolized the need to beat Black children. For my father's generation, it was Birmingham's white supremacist "Commissioner of Public Safety" Bull Connor. In my generation, it was the officers who brutalized Rodney King, and epithet using Officer Mark Fuhrman from the O.J. Simpson trial. For Millennials and Gen Z, it's Derek Chauvin, who murdered George Floyd. It felt as if my parents unconsciously partnered with America's most racist police elements to enforce violence and keep their Black son in line.As I delved deeper, I saw similar patterns among some Black educators and religious leaders. Despite the disproportionate use of corporal punishment against Black children, many administrators and school board members advocated for its use. Legendary psychiatry professor Alvin Pouissaint once told me he once traveled to the South to lobby for the repeal of corporal punishment, only to find that Black educators and leaders were some of its most vocal proponents. One of the school board members who once adamantly advocated for corporal punishment in Mississippi was also a prominent pastor in the Black church. He was one of the many people I'd studied who used the Bible to justify their pro corporal punishment stance Prof. Ward: I think one of the issues here, which relates to what we're talking about in terms of Black religious leaders, is there's an issue here of a kind of sovereignty where local community figures in a context of generally diminished power, economic power, political power, are holding on to a form of power that they do have, which is in the home, through the church, and saying, look, don't, let this, you know, social research fool you. And don't listen to these people who aren't from here and don't know our ways and aren't part of our church. We know what works, we've been whipped and we're fine, and listen to me, and I think there is a fair amount of, you know, manipulation on this issue that is about really about power. About holding on to power, holding onto power in community context, but also asserting power, as you mentioned, in the context of the home. In a society where, you know, there is so much humiliation and alienation, and and refusal of influence on things like, policy and practice and so forth. We commemorated Doctor Martin Luther King Junior, and I was part of an event at my university where we specifically focused on his theme - beloved community. And, our conversation is making me think about, you know, some of the basic, you know, fundamental, tenets of this concept of beloved community, which include that we are stuck in a society marked by, you know, a chain of violence, you know, where we're just in this situation where violence is seemingly a constant. It's almost how we communicate. He talked about how our society is organized by fear and resentment and that fear, you know, the politics of fear and resentment... We for good reason often in that in that context, think about, you know, white reactionary politics. But but our conversation today is also about how fear and resentment contribute to other communities and, and their politics and that are, that are part of this larger chain of violence. If we're ever going to realize this idea of a beloved community, you know, that is a community organized by mutual understanding and universal goodwill. And King, King stressed that to get there, we'd have to reckon with these realities of how our politics of difference breed violence, breed fear and resentment. We'd have to get to a place of mutual understanding and goodwill and, and, you know, for example, to see our to see how, we have common interests in an issue like corporal punishment, whether it affects us directly or not, we have interest in creating a society where we aren't, reifying a culture of violence starting in the high chair, or assuming that there is also going to be an electric chair. How do we get to that place where we collectively disavow, violence as a means of social organization? Lee: Geoff Ward, thank you so much. This has been powerful. And we'll keep the dialog going. But thank you for the wonderful work that you're doing. Fabulous. Keep up the good work. Prof. Ward: Thank you. Lee, it's great to talk to you again. Lee: All right, brother.For years, I had an inner voice that told me, "My parents hate me." So much around us in America, from Black comedians who entertain and electrify crowds with their jokes about beating Black kids, tells us that there is often great contempt for Black children – that they hold the lowest standing in society and therefore should be violently punished with impunity. It takes a countercultural, conscious Black parent to see that every Black child deserves life, liberty, happiness, and positive reinforcement every day.These interviews helped me understand that the first step towards breaking this toxic belief—that violence with Black children is a necessity—is recognizing that they possess bodily integrity and innate intelligence and are neither superhuman nor subhuman, even if the broader society doesn't always see them in that light. We must be careful about internalizing the historical belief that Black children are built differently than white children and can endure more pain. The reams of science proving that corporal punishment has harmful long-term effects apply to them too. I believe that my parents and others unconsciously internalized these classically American beliefs about Black children. We have experienced every facet of America, from its deepest injustices to its greatest achievements. Because of that, it is easy to embrace the prevailing philosophies of this country that we played a heavy hand in building—we are deeply interwoven with its history and its belief system. But those who continue to advocate violence against Black children in homes and schools must reject those racist beliefs and instead embrace a new paradigm that sees and nurtures the full potential and worth of our children.There's a gospel song that says, “He saw the best in me when everyone else around could only see the worst in me.” We need more Black parents and communities to take the lead in seeing the best in our children. I hope that, armed with information about the generational and ongoing cycle of governmentally codified violence against our children, combined with the ever-evolving neuroscience showing that even the anticipation of being beaten can trigger the brain in ways that lead to anxiety in adulthood, more parents—Black and of all races—and school administrators will make a conscious decision to retire the hand, tree branch, belt, and wooden boards of the slavery and Jim Crow eras. We need to breathe life and affirmation into all children, ensuring they grow up with the support and validation they need to thrive, both at home and in society.If corporal punishment was designed to protect Black children, did it really help when it came to growing up in a predominantly white neighborhood? Black kids and the American Dream - that's the next episode of What Happened In Alabama…CREDITSWhat Happened In Alabama is a production of American Public Media. It's written, produced and hosted by me, Lee Hawkins.Our executive producer is Erica Kraus. Our senior producer is Kyana Moghadam.Our story editor is Martina Abrahams Ilunga. Our lead writer is Jessica Kariisa.Our producers are Marcel Malekebu and Jessica Kariisa. This episode was sound designed and mixed by Marcel Malekebu. Our technical director is Derek Ramirez. Our soundtrack was composed by Ronen Lando. Our fact checker is Erika Janik.And Nick Ryan is our director of operations.Special thanks to the O'Brien Fellowship for Public Service Journalism at Marquette University; Dave Umhoefer, John Leuzzi, Andrew Amouzou and Ziyang Fu. And also thanks to our producer in Alabama, Cody Short. The executives in charge at APM are Joanne Griffith and Chandra Kavati.You can follow us on our website, whathappenedinalabama.org or on Instagram at APM Studios.Thank you for listening.

When Lee got the results back from his DNA test, he was stunned to discover that he had pages and pages of white cousins. All his life he'd been under the impression that 95% of his DNA traced to West Africa. This discovery opened up a new historical pathway, one that traces all the way back to 17th century Wales. In this episode, Lee takes us on the journey to discover his white ancestry. Later, Lee sits down with two newly-found white cousins to understand how differently history shaped the Black and White sides of one family. TranscriptLee Hawkins (host): We wanted to give a heads up that this episode includes talk of abuse and acts of violence. You can find resources on our website whathappenedinalabama.org. Listener discretion is advised.My name is Lee Hawkins, and this is What Happened In Alabama.[intro music starts]Back in 2015, I took a DNA test and found out some pretty shocking information. I always thought that I was 95% West African but it turned out that nearly 20% of my DNA was European. This revelation raised so many questions for me and led to years of research that would change my understanding of my own upbringing forever. Today I'll share that with you. We're going to go all the way back to 17th century Wales to uncover the path my ancestors took from Europe to the American South and how that, through slavery, led to me.I'll talk with experts and newly discovered white cousins to explore the history that connects the two sides. I want to find out how my family's experiences on the opposite ends of slavery and Jim Crow shaped our beliefs and our understanding of American history. But you'll get a whole lot more out of it if you go back and listen to the prologue first – that'll give you some context for putting the whole series in perspective. Do that, and then join us back here. Thanks so much. In many ways, the seeds for this project were planted in 1991, during the first trip I remember taking to Alabama.[cassette tape turning over, music starts] Tiffany: He would play an album on repeat. That's my sister, Tiffany. I call her Tiff. It's 1991, she's sitting in the backseat of our family's car, driving from Minnesota to Alabama. Tiffany: Dad used to like still stay up to date on, you know, pop culture, current music. There were certain songs that he would be like, “Oh, I like that,” you know, like Tony! Toni! Toné! It Feels Good. And things like that.My dad hated flying. He'd seen too much in his life, and he related flying to so many of the musicians he loved: Otis Redding, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Buddy Holly. They were all his contemporaries, and they all died in air crashes. So instead, we drove.I was 19 years old, and I was attending college at the University of Wisconsin Madison. At that time, I had just really gotten into the school newspaper. I was thinking about becoming a journalist or maybe a lawyer, but at that point, writing was more intriguing to me. I was excited about this family trip to Alabama, and I had no idea what was coming.Tiffany: Yeah, so Alabama, it's been kinda a, a mystery for me throughout my life because I wasn't able to ask questions that anyone would ask when you're wanting to know things about your parent.One of the big reasons my dad wanted to go to Alabama was to interview my great-Uncle Ike. He was the eldest patriarch of the family in Alabama, and he owned a farm near Greenville, dad's boyhood town. But most importantly, because he was in his 90s, he knew a lot about family history. And Dad had a lot of questions. I remember getting to Uncle Ike's and sitting in the living room, and across from me sat a caramel-skinned, white-haired man. For me, his reflection was like looking into a mirror and adding 70 years.Uncle Ike was in his early 90s, but those high cheekbones and blemish-free skin made it harder for me to believe that he was a day past 75. It was also hard to believe we were actually in Alabama, with Dad finally standing before his legendary, long-lost uncle, with a tape recorder in his hand. It was a trip we'd been talking about for months. Dad wanted to learn as much as possible about the Alabama family he left behind. Lee Sr.: Well, it's definitely, it's been a blessing to get to see you. As interested as I was in journalism, I was far from having the experience and interview skills to feel confident taking the lead. Plus, I knew that Dad needed this, so I deferred to him. The fact that he grew up there meant his questions would be far better than anything I could just randomly think of. But hearing his questions and how basic they were showed me just how far he'd strayed from his Alabama roots. Lee Sr.: Let me see, um, you were telling me about my father Lum. Now, how many brothers and sisters did he have? Most of the conversation was going over family tree details. Simple things like, how many siblings did my father have? And what were their names? We sat in that living room and asked Uncle Ike questions for just over an hour.Uncle Ike: I understand that all of them were named [unclear].Lee Sr.: Oh, we had a aunt, uh –Uncle Ike: Colby…When Uncle Ike answered, I struggled to catch every word of his southern accent. It was so thick, I thought it might even be a regional dialect, one that was unique to what my dad always humorously called, “LA,” Lower Alabama. I marveled at how quickly Uncle Ike started reciting family members. Even at his age, his recall, it was as swift as a rooster's crow at dawn! Lee Sr.: Oh yeah, Aunt Jem. I remember her…As we talked, my eyes began to drift to the fireplace, which was decorated with family photos. There, I saw a framed, weathered photo of a white man looking like he'd been plucked from a vintage Field and Stream ad. He appeared part outlaw, part GQ model. He was in hunting attire. There were hounds at his heels, and it looked like he was gripping a musket. Why, I thought, would Uncle Ike have a picture of some random white man hanging over his fireplace? Lee Sr.: Now this, what's this guy's name? Is this George Pugh up here on this picture? Uncle Ike: No, that's Isaac Pugh. Lee Sr.: That's your father? Uncle Ike: Yeah. They called him Ike, but his real name was Isaac. That made him my great-grandfather, Isaac Pugh Senior. I looked closer at the photo, into his eyes. His gaze was a determined one, as if he was daring me to look into the records and find out more. Who was this white man?[music starts]That day was more than 30 years ago. Since then, I've learned so much more about our family history. Seeing that picture of Isaac Pugh Senior on the mantel opened up an entirely new branch of my family tree – a white branch – that I had no idea existed. Digging through the records and existing research, I was able to trace that line all the way back to 17th century Wales.I recognized that I couldn't fully understand my family's experiences in America without uncovering the history of our white blood relatives on the other side of enslavement and Jim Crow. I had so many questions. Why did they come to America? What did they do when they got here? And most importantly, how were they connected to me? [sounds of a boat on water, sea gulls]In 1695, a man named Lewis Pugh boarded a boat near his hometown in Northwest Wales to sail for what was then called, “The New World.” The journey was long and grueling. Many people didn't survive. But the ones that did held on by a combination of luck and faith. Faith that the land that they were headed towards would help them prosper. He landed in Virginia, likely as an indentured servant. Several years later, he met and married a woman named Anne. The couple purchased land in Richmond County. They built a home, had seven kids, and many more grandchildren. Two of their great-grandchildren, the brothers Jesse and Lewis Pugh, decided to move south to Alabama at the start of the 19th century. The first thing they had to do was to get land. And to achieve that, they had to overcome one major obstacle. Chris: Well, it's important to remember that whites wanted Indian land from the moment they first stepped into the Americas. And so Indians have been removed since 1492, of course. This is Chris Haveman.Chris: Let me just talk briefly about terminology and the use of the word “Indian.” I've interviewed dozens and dozens of Native people throughout my career, and prior to talking to them, I always asked how they would prefer to be identified, and almost universally they say “Indian” or “American Indian.” Now, these folks tended to be a bit older, and as the younger generations come of age, the term seems to be falling out of favor, and when it does, historians including myself will adapt and adjust accordingly.He's an author of two books on the removal of Indigenous peoples from Alabama and Georgia to present-day Oklahoma, and a professor at the University of West Alabama.I've come to Professor Haveman to help me get a lay of the land in 19th century Alabama, when Jesse and Lewis Pugh arrived in the state around 1810.When the brothers got to Alabama, they were in Muscogee territory. The Muscogee were a loose union of multiple Indigenous groups, and they had millions of acres. Tribal leaders also use the name “Muscogee Nation.”Chris: Really, the story begins after the War of 1812, when whites decided that they really wanted that, that nice, nutrient rich soil in central Alabama. Over the years, throughout the 17 and early 1800s, this land was whittled away through treaties.The federal government started sending commissioners down to remove the Muscogee – and to do this, they had to coerce them into signing treaties first. This was done all over the American South and the rest of the country – and by the time the removal really got going, the Muscogee nation had already lost a large part of their land. But they were resisting. Chris: Commissioners were sent out, and Indians did not want to give up their land. And so a lot of times they resorted to threats, they resorted to some other shady tactics. And you had whites streaming into the Creek Land and they would, you know, just establish their farmstead illegally in the Creek Nation. Sometimes it would just overrun a Creek homestead and kick the family out and commandeer their crops for their, as their own. A lot of times they would get Creeks hooked on alcohol and uh, sell them merchandise on credit, get them indebted to them, and then they'd force them to give up their property as collateral. And things get really, really bad. Lee: What was the philosophy that was used to justify that? Chris: Conquest. The whites wanted it, and they were gonna take it regardless. There was no real justification, moral justification for it other than whites had the racist premise that they were civilized and the Indians were “savages” and that the whites could make better use of the land than Indians.Jesse and Lewis Pugh became landowners, both running plantations. They founded a church in Troy, Alabama, called Beulah Primitive Baptist Church. It still stands today. In my research, I found an article honoring the church. The paper hailed the brothers as “those daring ones, who braving the perils of the wilderness, came here and reclaimed this fair land from the planted savage.” The “planted savage,” I now know, refers to the Indigenous people who lived on the lands across the American South and beyond.Professor Haveman told me that on top of forced removal, there was a great deal of Muscogee land ceded by the tribe, but the conditions of these transactions make it hard to say how voluntary these handovers actually were. Chris: In 1832, the federal government gives a proposition to the Creek Indians, and they say, ‘Look, if you cede the rest of your land to us, we will allow each head of family to take 320-acre plots of land.' And this is where everything really goes downhill for the Creek Indians, because they gave up their sovereignty, uh, in exchange for a title or a deed. But what it does is basically, and I think you have to ask, it was so one-sided in favor of the federal government. You have to ask yourself, ‘Why would the Creek Indians agree to this?' And I think that they agreed to this because whites had illegally trespassed on their land so much between 1827 and 1832 that they realized that you know, whites usually liked a deed or a, you know, a title to their land, a piece of paper, something you could say, “This is my land.” And I think the Creeks tried to adopt that in order to stave off this encroachment that whites were giving on their land.So they, they had this deed and this title, and they thought that that would prevent whites from streaming onto their land, but it didn't. It actually, it just opened up massive amounts of fraud for them. And so you had 5 million acres of land in the Creek Nation in 1832. When this was ceded, all 5 million acres of land went to the federal government, and then parcels of 320 acres were then given to each Creek family. If you add up the over 6,000 families times 320 acres, it only comes out to like 2.1 million acres. And so almost 3 million acres of land will now be opened up for white settlement. And so the thing that they were trying to prevent – whites from encroaching on their land – is now gonna become legal.[music]On a January evening in 1837, Lewis Pugh was in his plantation fields in Alabama with his overseer. By this point, he owned land and enslaved people. That night, a man quietly snuck onto the roof of a house that overlooked the Pugh family cemetery on the plantation. The man fired a rifle from the top of the house, killing the overseer. Immediately afterwards, a swarm of 60 Muscogee swooped down on the plantation field. They killed Lewis, one of his sons, and an enslaved baby, who was in his mother's arms. Four enslaved men tried to defend themselves, the women, and the plantation. The Muscogee killed them too. The story captured the country. Lee: It was in every major newspaper across the country, uh, that Lewis Pugh, a prominent white settler, had been killed, um, and murdered by the Creek Indians. Why do you think it was so important that it be framed in that way? Chris: It made national news because the thing whites feared the most was an Indian uprising. And it's one of the reasons that whites who, um, had no means to become large-scale cotton planters still wanted the Indians gone because they were constantly terrified that Indians would rise up and attack them. Uh, and they had, you know, somewhat of a legitimate reason to be scared because whites treated the Indians so terribly and stole their land and, you know, created all these problems for them.It's clear that the Muscogee didn't just fold and concede their land. They retaliated, determined to defend it. And I can't help but think about it from the perspective of those enslaved people who died, fighting alongside their enslaver, to protect his life and his land – that's how closely their lives were intertwined. I'm still very curious about them, because they, too, might've been my relatives. Not long after I took that DNA test and first found out about the Pughs, I found a last will and testament belonging to Jesse Pugh, the brother of Lewis Pugh, the man who was murdered by the Muscogee in Alabama. In the will, it stated that Jesse enslaved a young girl named Charity, who was kept in bondage by the family into her adult years. Not long before Emancipation, she gave birth to a biracial son who she named Isaac Pugh. That was the white-looking man whose photo I saw on the mantel at great-Uncle Ike's house. Isaac Pugh, my great-grandfather. Doing my DNA test couldn't have been any simpler. I went online and ordered the $100 test, and the next day, I got a small box in the mail. Inside, I found a vial, and returned my saliva sample the following day. In just a few weeks, I got an email with my DNA results. It shows you who your cousins are, from first, all the way to distant. I had pages and pages of cousins, including many who were very, very white. I'm talking blond with blue eyes. There were a lot of Pughs in there. I was stunned by the sheer volume. One genealogist told me he had never seen anybody with so many pages of cousins who had also taken DNA tests. At that point, I had more than 216 fourth cousins or closer. One of the descendants was a man in his late 80s named Lloyd Pugh. We both descend from Ann and Lewis Pugh, but our relation wasn't close enough to show up on my DNA chart.Lloyd lives in Petersburg, Virginia, and last year I went to his house to meet him with my producer, Kyana. You'll sometimes hear her in the background throughout the interview.Lee: It's a nice, quaint neighborhood with a lot of brick homes in a colonial-style design typical of Virginia, I think. I met Lloyd through a man named Jim Pugh, another newly discovered cousin, but coincidentally, I've known Jim for 30 years through my early work as a journalist, back in Wisconsin. He was a PR guy for the state chamber of commerce. Every month, I called him for a comment on the employment rates. I wouldn't say we were friends back then, but we definitely liked each other. And then, through an odd twist of fate, I found out that we were related. Jim: When you reached out to me and say, “I think we're cousins,” I was like, “What?!” Let's do a call.I'd always noted that he had the same last name as my Grandma Opie, but it was only through an exchange on Facebook after I'd taken the DNA test, that Jim and I compared notes and figured out that we were both tied to the Pughs of Wales. Once Jim and I reconnected, he told me he had an elder cousin who was a family historian of sorts. That person was Lloyd Pugh.Lee: Oh, he has, okay, an American flag on his house and one on his car. [laughs] And here we are. [seat belts unbuckling] Let's go get started. Lloyd has worked on this long before genealogy exploded in the mainstream. His research is in the archives of the Library of Virginia. He has binders full of information he's gathered over the years on the Pughs. Lloyd: That book right there is one that's on the early, early Pughs. Lloyd is 88 years old. He's a tall, lean, active guy, full of warmth and southern charm. He was born and raised in Petersburg, a city known for being the site of a nine-month siege back beginning in 1864 that ended up costing the Confederacy the Civil War. Lloyd is absolutely fascinated with the Civil War, especially the Confederate side. He has tons of relics in his home, everything from swords and rifles to cannons, decommissioned bomb heads, and bullets. He also has a huge painting of General Robert E. Lee, hanging right above his couch. Lee: Why do you have a picture of General Lee in your front room? Lloyd: Because it's a part of my heritage. It has nothing to do with being anti-Black or slavery. It's just part of my heritage in that I had three grandfathers that served under Lee. [music starts]Lloyd and I couldn't be more polar opposite in our views about the Confederacy. But I didn't go to Virginia to condemn or to convert him. I went to his house to talk to him about history, our shared history. And he was interested in talking about it too. So he and his daughters invited Jim and I over, and we had a conversation that helped me understand how the white Pughs would come to shape the Black side of my family for generations. [music]Lee: Well, thank you everybody. Um, the man of the hour is Lloyd. Because Lloyd has done a tremendous amount of work around the Pugh family history. And really, I want to thank you, Lloyd, for opening up your home and showing us this museum of incredible Civil War history that you have, and also helping me gain a better understanding of my own history.Um, it's, uh, it's bittersweet to understand how we're connected, but it's also, the power of it is that I wouldn't know this history if we hadn't worked together to understand it and to identify it, and part of my goal in doing this work is to inspire other people across racial lines to do this work. Um, and it is hard, but we both love it, right? Lloyd: Right. Lee: Okay, so, uh, you've done a tremendous amount of work on the Civil War, and we'll get into that, but you've also done a lot around the Pugh family, and I think it's important to talk first about how the Pugh family got to America.Lloyd: There were actually three migrations. One migration of Pughs went to Norfolk, and from Norfolk, they went down through North Carolina, South Carolina, on into Alabama, and in that direction. Lee: That's my line. Lloyd: That's his line. Our line of Pughs landed at, uh, Richmond County, which is the upper neck over on the, uh, near the, on the east, west side of the Chesapeake Bay, and they migrated on down through, uh, came this way, Chesterfield, on to Amelia County, and eventually they end up on the, uh, east side of the Appalachian Mountains.And the third group came in, in New York, and they migrated down the west side of the Appalachian Mountains into Tennessee and Kentucky on down in that direction. So there are three distinct lines of Pughs, and I was happened to be the one that migrated down through the Chesapeake Bay into Richmond County.Lee: What did the Pughs do here initially? Lloyd: Farmers. Tobacco was king in Virginia. They raised other crops. They had to raise, uh, food crops, but the money crop was tobacco. Tobacco was critical to the expansion of the slavery economy in America, so it doesn't surprise me that the White Pughs were involved in the tobacco trade. But through talking to Lloyd, I learned more about their interactions with Black people, specifically through a man named John Boyd Pugh. He's Lloyd's great-grandfather, and he fought on the Confederate side of the war. In fact, he was so committed to the Confederacy and the slavery it represented, he refused for months – after being captured and imprisoned near the end of the war – to take the oath of allegiance to the United States. It blew me away to learn how deeply committed people I share heritage with were to white supremacy – John Boyd Pugh and others believed devoutly in it. They practiced it, and were willing to die for it. And after the war, he became an overseer for a prominent family named the Baylors.Lloyd: And the Baylor family, signers of the Declaration of Independence, founders of Baylor University, some kind of way found out about my grandfather, John Boyd Pugh, and they offered him the oversee of New Market Plantation, which is in Milford, Virginia.His salary was one fourth of all the crops, plus $50 a month salary. And so he took the job, and he moved from Albemarle County with his family up to Milford to New Market Plantation. And he was the overseer of that plantation, right there at Bowling Green, Virginia. When I heard that, my mind went back to all the books I've read in my research, including The Half Has Never Been Told, by Edward Baptist, which clearly outlined the role of overseers as the drivers of productivity on plantations, many using whipping and other torture techniques to get the most out of enslaved Black people. Baptist explained that on many plantations, overseers held the enslaved to strict quotas. They'd weigh the crops and assess the work at the end of the day, and if the quota wasn't met, the person would be whipped in front of all the other enslaved people, to make an example out of them.Hearing that I not only share heritage with enslavers, but also overseers, I was absolutely stunned. I began to see how far back the whip could be traced in my family.Lloyd stipulated that because John Boyd Pugh did his overseer work after Emancipation, he believes he probably wasn't involved in whipping. Lloyd: When John Boyd went to Newmarket, this was after the Civil War. So they had to have hired labor. And I think, I doubt that there were the whippings and the lashing and so forth when you have hired workers because they could say, “I'm leaving,” and just walk off the farm, so, yeah. To be fair, it's possible that Lloyd is right – maybe John Boyd Pugh was one of the few exceptions; an overseer who never resorted to violence. But I doubt it, and here's why: in my research, I found the archive to be packed with proof that whipping continued to be a foundational aspect of overseer duties for decades after Emancipation into Jim Crow.Lee: This is the hard part, you know, for me, because, you know, I think when I first talked with you, Jim, you were telling me that your great – great-great- grandfather was an overseer. And I didn't know – or you didn't know – what an overseer was, and when I looked at, you know, a lot of these movies that you see, the overseers are the guys that drove the production of the, of the plantation. Um, and that, for me, is just, that's inextricably tied with the capitalistic, sort of, reality of building America and how so much of the productivity was driven at the plantation level. How did you feel when I explained, especially the part that whipping was a big part of overseer work? How did you feel about that?Jim: Well, you know, you don't really know what you don't know until you find out. And that's when you learn about it, you know, 'cause you don't, you think of, um, overseeing, uh, like a agricultural operation today, you wouldn't have that 'cause you have machines, you know? So, um, but yeah, that was pretty, pretty shocking to find out about that, but it's also the reality of what, the way the world was at that time, you know. [music starts]My mind went back to that interview with my Uncle Ike in 1991, when he told us about Grandma Charity. He told us that when he was a kid working on his father, Isaac Pugh Senior's farm, she would beat the kids if she felt they weren't being productive enough. This, from a woman who was enslaved by Jesse Pugh, a cousin of John Boyd Pugh. It's almost as if, once she became emancipated and the family got its own farm, she became the overseer, and her grandchildren, the free labor. Lee: I've been always fascinated by the way, when we built our country, just how deeply rooted it was, not just in slavery, but also in the establishment of the land, how people got their land, you know, um, particularly from, from the Indigenous people.And I think that the problem, just in my opinion, is that everything is so controversial that people have decided they don't even want to even begin to study this work. And there, of course, are many, many academics who write powerfully beautiful detailed accounts of all of this history. Um, Doug Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, um, Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told.And in a lot of this stuff, they give really detailed accounts of the economy of slavery and also the Civil War, and the way all of the different range of realities that were at stake as our country was starting to form itself into what we now know today. Um, when you study the Civil War and the Confederate side of it, what, how do you relate to that history in terms of your un– do you know anything about John Boyd Pugh or was the, the oral history lost?Lloyd: I knew absolutely nothing. No one in the family shared anything, ever shared anything with me. And what was learned, learned through my research. Clearly, family secrets are preserved on the white sides of the family, too. Dark secrets like the violent role of overseers, the fact that land was stolen, and the identity of white men who fathered Black children, were not often openly discussed. And those lies of omission make it harder for future generations of whites to acknowledge the causes of generational disparities and trauma – through ignorance or cognitive dissonance. But this work – especially the DNA testing – exposes the lies, and people doing it have to prepare themselves for unsettling discoveries. This work isn't about agreeing on everything. It's about opening up the family bibles and records to access information that neither side would have without the other. So it requires a rare form of tolerance, and a spirit of unity as opposed to division on the issue of genealogy. The truth is that I feel like I was blessed. I was fortunate to stumble on a white guy who I'd known for 30 years, and we discovered we were cousins. We already had trust between us, and he opened up the door for me to meet Lloyd. And the timing was perfect. Lee: I think for me, and especially the fact that, that you're basically a Republican dude [laughs] who, uh, you know, really like, and deeply rooted in the Republican party, um, and, and that you're a Republican dude who took me through to make this introduction so I could meet Lloyd so that we could study this together, to me, defies all of the conventional wisdom, which is that we're all divided and we're all, um, to be, you know, enemies on the other side of the issue.Jim: Well, Lee messaged me. I had posted about the, the trip where we did, we followed Lee's retreat back to Battle of White Oak Road. I think that was our last stop, and then we came home. And Lee, he said, ‘I, I see your, I think we're related.' And I said, I messaged him back and, and I'm thinking, ‘I don't want to put a bunch of this stuff in writing,' right? 'Cause I'm being like, it's not, this is sensitive stuff. I mean, we're dealing with race, and this is a war –Lee: You knew the political, the political – Jim: Yeah, I'm working in operatives, and he was working for the Wall Street Journal! And I'm thinking, ‘This is gonna be, this is not, this is gonna end bad,' right? So I, I said, “Lee…” He's like, “I think we're related.” He goes, ‘I've been doing family research. There's Willoughby and Spotsworth –.' And I said, ‘Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That sounds about right.' He said, ‘Can we do a call?' 'Cause I'm thinking, I want to, I want to turn off the typewriter. There's nothing good that's gonna come [Lee laughs] from this if it's typed forever and ever.And we did a call, and he's like, ‘Yeah.' And I said, ‘Well, how do you know?' He said, ‘I did 23andMe. And my DNA goes back to Wales,' and I said, ‘Well, you know, welcome to the family.' [laughter]Lee: And then I said, ‘I want my reparation.' Jim: Yeah.[laughter]And as the conversation continued, we drilled down deeper into the undeniable proof of our ancestors being enslavers, and Lloyd plainly stated the facts: Lloyd: Okay, let me, let me confirm that. I'm looking at the will of John Pugh in December 1827. His will, one negro hired by the name of Harry, worth $300. One woman, Judy, worth $200. One young man named Abram, $400. This is actually in the will, so that goes directly in our line, so there's, I mean, that's the proof of our line owning slaves.Lee: Do you feel guilty about it? Lloyd: No. Lee: Tell me what you think about it.Lloyd: It was a, it was a time. It's just like the Confederate statues in Richmond. It was history in a time, and you can't destroy it. Even though they've taken them down, they're still there in the minds of people, and they are people who are gonna keep them alive.Jim: But we're not white supremacists. Lloyd: No. Jim: We're not white supremacists, and that's the thing people need to understand. It's so easy to just shortcut from, ‘You're a conservative Republican or you're a libertarian or whatever' to, ‘You're a white supremacist,' and that's just not the case. I don't hold white people of today responsible for slavery and the actions of their ancestors. We're not responsible for the sins of our forefathers. But we should take responsibility for the present and the future by being transparent and honest about history. I know I joked with Jim about reparations, but that discussion isn't just between the white and Black families tied to slavery; it's between Black American descendants of slavery and the U.S. government, which includes states that enforced racist laws. Contrary to what many assume or imply, reparations wouldn't be about individual white citizens personally compensating Black people; it would be government obligation, funded by taxpayers like any other public expense – infrastructure, education, or foreign aid. Taxpayers don't get to opt out of funding highways they don't use, just as those from families who didn't own slaves can't opt out either. Slavery fueled America's economic rise – on the backs of Black people, largely on stolen land – a legacy from which today's Americans still benefit, no matter when they came here. [music starts]All in all, I spent two days with Lloyd, his daughters, and Jim. We had dinner and we talked a lot. He told me more about his life, like how he spent most of his career as an educator and superintendent, even helping oversee the desegregation of schools. I realized our families share many common values despite all our differences.Lee: When you hold all these documents and all the binders you've made, thinking of all the Pugh history, what do you feel?Lloyd: First of all, I feel thankful that I'm the result of all of that, that I'm able to carry on the family line. I just look at the Pugh family across the years as just good, sound, solid business people who did what they were supposed to do, and stayed out of jail, and paid their taxes, and didn't beat their families, and just good old southern Christian families is the way I look at it. The information I received from Lloyd deepened my understanding of why so many slavery-era customs appeared in my childhood. It helped me with my quest to begin to trace the whip back to the very plantation where it started. For me, that's part of where the healing comes from – not from any kind of validation I'd seek from Lloyd and Jim, but from the information that's allowed me to draw my own conclusions and undertake my own healing work. The Pugh family history is intertwined with America's story, from the Revolutionary War through the Civil War and into the Jim Crow era. Lloyd and I come from the same family, but our experiences reflect opposite sides of the American history it's rooted in. Meeting Lloyd helped me piece together our family history. It also triggered a need in me to uncover the story of how the white Pughs in America treated the most disenfranchised and exploited person in this saga, my great-great-grandmother, Charity, the matriarch of my family.That's on the next What Happened In Alabama.[outro music]CREDITSWhat Happened In Alabama is a production of American Public Media. It's written, produced and hosted by me, Lee Hawkins.Our executive producer is Erica Kraus. Our senior producer is Kyana Moghadam.Our story editor is Martina Abrahams Ilunga. Our lead writer is Jessica Kariisa.Our producers are Marcel Malekebu and Jessica Kariisa. This episode was sound designed and mixed by Marcel Malekebu. Our technical director is Derek Ramirez. Our soundtrack was composed by Ronen Lando. Our fact checker is Erika Janik.And Nick Ryan is our director of operations.Special thanks to the O'Brien Fellowship for Public Service Journalism at Marquette University; Dave Umhoefer, John Leuzzi, Andrew Amouzou and Ziyang Fu. And also thanks to our producer in Alabama, Cody Short. The executives in charge at APM are Joanne Griffith and Chandra Kavati.You can follow us on our website, whathappenedinalabama.org or on Instagram at APM Studios.Thank you for listening.

Around 1910, Black farmers collectively owned over 16 million acres of farmland. A century later, over 90% of that land is no longer owned by Black farmers. In Lee's own family, the acquisition and loss of land has been a contentious issue for nearly every generation, sometimes leading to tragic circumstances. In this episode, Lee heads back to Alabama to meet his cousin Zollie, a longtime steward of the family land, to learn more.Lee is later joined by Jillian Hishaw, an agricultural lawyer and author, who has devoted her life to helping Black families keep their land. They discuss the tumultuous history of Black land ownership and what Black families should do to keep land in the family.TranscriptLee Hawkins (host): We wanted to give a heads up that this episode includes talk of abuse and acts of violence. You can find resources on our website whathappenedinalabama.org. Listener discretion is advised. Hi, this is Lee Hawkins, and we're about to dive into episode four of What Happened In Alabama. It's an important conversation about the history of land in Black communities – how it was acquired, how it was taken, lost, and sometimes given away, over the past century – but you'll get a lot more out of it if you go back and listen to the prologue first. That'll give you some context for putting the whole series in perspective. Do that, and then join us back here. Thank you so much. [music starts]Around 1910, Black farmers collectively owned over 16 million acres of farmland. A century later, 90% of that land is no longer in the hands of Black farmers. Economists estimate that the value of land lost is upwards of 300 billion dollars.This is an issue that's personal for me. There were large successful farms on both sides of my family that we no longer own, or only own a fraction of now. How we became separated from our land is part of the trauma and fear that influenced how my parents raised me. I want to get to the heart of what happened and why. That's the goal of this episode. I'm Lee Hawkins, and this is conversation number four, What Happened In Alabama: The Land.Zollie: I may not have money in my pocket. But if I have that land, that is of value. That is my – my kids can fall back on this land, they'll have something.That's Zollie Owens. He's my cousin on my dad's side, and Uncle Ike's great-grandson. Zollie lives in Georgiana, Alabama, not far from Uncle Ike's farm. Uncle Ike is a legend in my family. He was my Grandma Opie's brother, and very much the patriarch of the family until he passed in 1992. I only met him once, back in 1991 when my family drove down to Alabama. But his name and presence have held a larger-than-life place in my psyche ever since.Zollie: And so that was instilled in me back then from watching Uncle Ike and my uncles, his sons, do all that work on that land.For the first time since my visit with my family in 1991, we're headed back there. Zollie's lived his whole life in this town. It's where he played and worked on the farm as a kid, where he got married, and where he raised his family. And because Uncle Ike had such an influence on him, he's made working and farming the land his life. I would say that out of all my cousins, the land is the most important to him. And that was instilled in him through Uncle Ike. Zollie: This man. I don't know if he was perfect, but he was perfect to me. I didn't see him do anything wrong from my understanding. And reason being, because whenever he said something, it generally come to pass.He was extremely respected and well-liked. So much so that years after his death, his impact is still felt.Zollie: I have favor off of his name now today. When they found out that I'm his grandson, I get favor off of his name because of who he was. And that's not for me to just go out and tear his name down, but it's to help keep up his name.Lee: Oh, that was one thing that was mentioned about credit – that way back in the day he had incredible credit around the town. That even his kids, that they would say, “Oh, you're Ike's kids. You don't have to pay. Pay me tomorrow,” or whatever, [laughter] which was a big deal then, because Black people didn't get credit a lot of times. Black people were denied credit just based on the color of their skin. But he seems to have been a very legendary figure around this town. Zollie: Being amenable, being polite, speaking to people, talking to 'em about my granddad and everything. And so once I do that, they get the joy back, remembering, reminiscing how good he was to them – Black and white.[music starts]Cousin Zollie spent a lot of time at Uncle Ike's when he was a kid. Like all my cousins who knew Uncle Ike, he had fond memories of him. Zollie: He passed when I was like 12 or 13, but I remember him sitting me in my lap or sitting on the shoulder of the chair and he would say, “Man, the Lord gonna use you one day, the Lord gonna use you. You smart, you're gonna be a preacher one day.” And like so many of the men in my family, Zollie is very active in the church. In fact, he became a preacher, and even started a gospel group. And he's preached at Friendship Baptist, where the funeral services for my Grandma Opie were held.We bonded over both growing up in the music ministry, listening to our elders singing those soul-stirring hymnals they'd sing every Sunday.Lee: And now, of course, they didn't even, I realize that a lot of times they weren't even singing words. They were just humming –Zollie: Just humming. Lee: You know? Zollie: Oh yes. Lee: And then the church would do the call and response. And the way that that worked, somebody would just say [singing], "One of these days, it won't be long," you know, and then –Zollie: [singing] “You're gonna look for me, and I'll be gone.” Lee: Yup. [laughter][Lee humming] [Zollie singing]Lee: Yeah. [Zollie singing]Lee: Yeah. [Lee laughs]Uncle Ike owned a 162-acre farm in Georgiana. Zollie and his wife took me back to visit it. The farm is no longer in the family, but the current owner, Brad Butler, stays in touch with Zollie, and he invited us to come and check out the property. Zollie: There was a lot of pecan trees, which he planted himself. Kyana: These are all pecans? Brad: Yup, these are pecans. These are, the big ones are pecans. That's a pear.Zollie's wife: And that's a pear, okay.Brad: Yeah.Lee: Did he plant that too? Zollie: Which one?Lee: The pecans? Zollie: Yes, he did. Yes, he did. Brad: But now, come here. Let me, let me show you this pear tree. This pear tree will put out more pears than any tree you've ever seen in your life. Lee: Oh, yeah?Brad: Yup, there'll be a thousand pears on this tree.These are all trees Uncle Ike planted decades ago. It was an active farm up to the 1980s – and a gathering place for family and so many other people in the region. The property is split up in two sides by a small road. One one side is where all the pecan and peach trees are. The other side has a large pond about twice the length of a pro basketball court. Beyond that, it's all woods. [walking sounds]As we walk, I look down at the ground beneath my feet at the red soil that many associate with Alabama and other parts of the deep south. It's a bright red rust color, and it's sticky. There's no way to avoid getting it all over and staining your shoes. Lee: Why is the dirt so red here? Zollie: It's been moved in. Lee: Okay.Zollie: The red dirt has been moved in for the road purpose – Lee: I see. Zollie: It get hardened. And it is hard like a brick, where you can drive on it. The black dirt doesn't get hard. It's more ground for growing, and it won't be hard like a brick. Zollie's referring to what's underneath this red clay that makes the land so valuable: the rich, fertile soil that makes up the Black Belt – a stretch of land across the state that was prime soil for cotton production. This land wasn't just valuable for all the ways it offered sustenance to the family, but also for everything it cost them, including their blood. When I was 19 years old, I found out that Uncle Ike's father, my great-great-grandfather, Isaac Pugh Senior, was murdered. Isaac Pugh Senior was born before emancipation in 1860, the son of an enslaved woman named Charity. His father remains a mystery, but since Isaac was very fair-skinned, we suspect he was a white man. And the genealogy experts I've worked with explained that the 18% of my DNA that's from whites from Europe, mainly Wales, traces back to him and Grandma Charity. The way it was told to me the one time I met Uncle Ike, is that Isaac Pugh Senior lived his life unapologetically. He thrived as a hunter and a trapper, and he owned his own farm, his own land, and his own destiny. And that pissed plenty of white folks off. In 1914, when he was 54 years old, Isaac was riding his mule when a white man named Jack Taylor shot him in the back. The mule rode his bleeding body back to his home. His young children were the first to see him. I called my dad after one of my Alabama trips, to share some of the oral history I'd gotten from family members.Lee: When he ran home, her and Uncle Ike and the brothers and sisters that were home, they ran out. And they saw their father shot full of buckshot in his back. Lee Sr.: Mm mm mm. Mm hm.Lee: They pulled him off the horse and he was 80% dead, and he died, he died later that night.Lee Sr.: With them? Wow. Lee: Yeah.Soon after Isaac died, the family was threatened by a mob of white people from around the area, and they left the land for their safety. Someone eventually seized it, and without their patriarch, the family never retrieved the land and just decided to start their lives over elsewhere. Knowing his father paid a steep price for daring to be an entrepreneur and a landowner, Uncle Ike never took land ownership for granted. He worked hard and eventually he bought his own 162-acre plot, flanked by beautiful ponds and acres upon acres of timber. [music]Over four years of interviews, Dad and I talked a lot about the murder of Isaac Pugh Senior. Uncle Ike told us about it during that visit in 1991, but years passed before I saw anything in writing about the murder.Before that, I'd just been interviewing family members about what they'd heard. And their accounts all matched up. For years, some family members interested in the story had even gone down to the courthouse in Greenville to find the records. On one visit, the clerk looked up at one of my cousins and said, “Y'all still lookin' into that Ike Pugh thing? Y'all need to leave that alone.” But they never gave up. Then, I found something in the newspaper archive that would infuse even more clarity into the circumstances surrounding the murder of my great-grandfather Ike Senior. It brought me deeper into What Happened In Alabama, and the headline was as devastating as it was liberating.There it was, in big, block letters, in the Montgomery Advertiser: WHITE FARMER SHOOTS NEGRO IN THE BACK. The shooting happened in 1914, on the same day as my birthday.It read: “Ike Pew, a negro farmer living on the plantation of D. Sirmon, was shot and killed last night by a white farmer named Jack Taylor. An Angora goat belonging to Mr. Taylor got into the field of Pew and was killed by a child of Pew. This is said to be the reason Taylor shot the Negro. The Negro was riding a mule when he received a load of buckshot in his back.”My dad was surprised to hear all the new details. Grandma Opie herself only told Dad that he'd died in a hunting accident. Lee: Do you realize that when your mom's father was killed, she was nine?Lee Sr.: She was nine?Lee: She was nine. And she never told you that her dad was killed? Lee Sr.: Well, let me think about that. My sisters told me that. Not my mom. My mom didn't talk about anything bad to me.I asked Zollie about Isaac, and if he ever remembers Uncle Ike talking about his father's murder. Zollie: No, I never heard that story. No, no, never. Not that I can remember him mentioning it. No sir. I can't say that I'm surprised by this answer. By now, I've seen how so many of our elders kept secrets from the younger generations, because they really didn't want to burden us with their sorrow. But I couldn't help but think, “If these trees could talk.” Walking around the family property, I feel the weight of history in the air. To me, that history makes the land valuable beyond a deed or dollar amount.Uncle Ike's farm is no longer in the family. It wasn't taken violently the way his father's farm was, but it fell victim to something called Heir's Property, which as I realized talking to Zollie, can be just as heartbreaking and economically damaging to generations of Black landowners. Zollie: I may not have money in my pocket. But if I have that land that is of value, that is money. [music starts]When Zollie was younger, he lived on part of Uncle Ike's land and he paid lot rent every month. When Uncle Ike passed in 1992, he had a will. In it, he left the land to his living children, but it wasn't clear how it should be divided up. His son, Pip, was the only one living on the land, so that's who Zollie paid rent to. But when he died, there was no documentation to prove that Zollie had been paying rent. Zollie: And so when it came up in court, I did not have no documentation, no legal rights to it.After the death of a property owner, and without proper estate plans, land often becomes “heirs property,” which means that the law directs that the land is divided among descendents of the original owners. The law requires “heirs” to reach a group consensus on what to do with the land. They inherit the responsibility of legal fees to establish ownership, property fees, and any past debt.Zollie wanted to keep the land in the family. He was ready to continue farming on it as he had been for 17 years. But some other family members weren't interested. Many had long left Georgiana and the country life for Birmingham or larger cities up north, like my father and his sisters. Some didn't want to take on the responsibilities of maintaining the land.Zollie: The part of the land that I was living on, on the Pugh family estate, it got sold out from up under me. I could have never dreamt of anything like that was gonna happen to me. Where I would have to move off the family land. The family didn't come together. They couldn't even draw me up a deed to take over the spot I was on. In the South today, “heirs property” includes about 3.5 million acres of land – valued at 28 billion dollars. Heirs property laws have turned out to be one of the biggest factors contributing to the loss of Black family land in America. It's devastating not just for the loss of acreage but the loss of wealth, because when the court orders a sale of the land, it's not sold on the market, it's sold at auction, usually for much less than it's worth. Brad: When this thing sold at auction, Hudson Hines bought it, and they cut the timber. That's Brad Butler again. He bought Uncle Ike's farm at auction in 2015.Brad: And we were just gonna buy it, kind of fix it up a little bit and then sell it and go do something else. Towards the end of our tour, my cousin Zollie turns to Brad and makes him an offer. Zollie: You know, some of the family, like myself and Mr. Lee, want to get together and make you an offer. Would you be willing to sell? Brad shakes his head and points to his son, who's been hanging out with us on the tour of the land. Brad: Not right now. Now right now. This is, this is his. And we've done so much trying to get it ready.It's his land, he says. His son's. It's heartbreaking to hear, but I didn't expect any different. It makes me think about Uncle Ike and if he ever thought things would pan out this way. After the property tour with Brad, Zollie invited me over to his house, where I asked him how he thinks Uncle Ike would feel. Zollie: He would be disappointed. That just the way, my memories of it and the way he, he did, I believe he would be disappointed. I really would. Lee: And he did the right thing in his heart by leaving the land and putting everybody's name on it. But then that ended up making it harder –Zollie: Yes.Lee: Right, and I don't quite understand that, but, because everybody's name was on it, then everybody had to agree. If he would have left it to one person, then you could have all, that person could have worked it out. Is that how – Zollie: Yes, that is correct. Lee: The law works?Zollie: And then when the daughters and the sons, when they all passed, it went down to their children. And that meant more people had a hand in it now and everybody wanted their share, their portion of it. Because they're not used to the country living it, it didn't mean anything to 'em. It was just land. Lee: So it sounds like a generational thing. Zollie: Yes. Lee: And especially if you're, not only if you're not used to the country living, but if you didn't grow up there –Zollie: If you didn't grow up there.Lee: And you didn't really know Daddy Ike.Zollie: Mm hm. Lee: Is that also –Zollie: Yep.Lee: A factor?Zollie: I can see that. Yes.Lee: Okay. Zollie: Oh yes.Lee: Man, this is so interesting because it happens in so many families –Zollie: It does.Lee: Across the country. It really does. And this land out here more and more, it's getting more and more valuable.Zollie: Oh yes. It's just rich. Some parts of it is sand, but a lot of part – and it's, the stories that I've been told, Bowling is up under a lake. There's a lake flowing up under Bowling. Lee: Oh.Zollie: That's why it's so wet all the time in Bowling, and it is good for growing because the ground stays wet. That wet ground is fueling an agricultural economy that so many Black farmers – like my cousin – have been shut out of. It's enough to turn people away from farming altogether. I couldn't imagine being a farmer, but Zollie wasn't deterred. After leaving Uncle Ike's land, he and his wife purchased a plot and built a house on it in 2021. It's on the edge of Georgiana, six miles away from Uncle Ike's old farm. It's a four-bedroom, three-bath brick home which sits on three acres Zollie owns. He said it was important for him to own so that he could leave something behind – and he's already talked with his children in detail about succession planning. Lee: What I love about you is that you are one of the people who stayed. Zollie: Yes.Lee: And you are our connection to the past, which we desperately need. Because I think a lot of people feel like, ‘Well, where would I work in Georgiana,' ‘Where would I work in Greenville?' And then they end up leaving and then they lose that connection. And I think a lot of us have lost the connection, but you're still here with a farm. What does it mean to have land and to have a farm? What does it mean to you? What's the significance to you?Zollie: My kids can fall back on this land. They'll have something. Like when it comes to getting this house. My land helped me get my house built this way. And so I thank God for that. [music starts]I'm so glad that I was able to sit with my cousin Zollie and hear his story. Growing up in a suburb outside of a major city, the importance of land was never really impressed upon me. In some ways it felt regressive to make your living with your hands, but I understand so much clearer now how powerful it is to be connected to the land in that way. Imagine how independent you must feel to be so directly tied to the fruits of your labor – there's no middleman, no big corporation, and no one lording over you. When you have land, you have freedom. What must that freedom have felt like for the newly emancipated in the late 1800s? And how did it become such a threat that in the past century, Black people would lose over 90% of the farmland they once owned?Jillian: Land is power, because you not only own the soil, but, it's mineral rights, you know, which is what my family have, you know, is airspace. You know, you own everything when you, when you own acreage. These are some of the questions that led me to Jillian Hishaw. She's an agricultural lawyer with over 20 years of experience helping Black families retain their land. She previously worked in the civil rights enforcement office of the US Department of Agriculture, or USDA, and she founded a non-profit called FARMS that provides technical and legal assistance to small farmers. She's also the author of four books including Systematic Land Theft which was released in 2021. In our wide-ranging conversation, we talked about the history of Black farmland, how it was gained and how it was lost, and what people misunderstand about Black farmers in this country. Lee: I mean, you've done so much. What drew you to this work? Jillian: My family history. My grandfather was raised on a farm in Muskogee, Oklahoma. And when they relocated to Kansas City, Missouri, which is where I was born and raised, my great-grandmother moved up several years later, and they hired a lawyer to pay the property tax on our 160-acre farm. Our land was sold in a tax lien sale without notice being given to my grandfather or my great-grandmother. And so where my grandfather's house is, there's an oil pump going up and down because the land had known oil deposits. So that's why I do what I do. Lee: Okay. And I mean, wow, that, that is just such a familiar narrative. It sounds like this is a pervasive issue across the Black community –Jillian: Yes. Lee: How did Black people come to acquire farmland in this country? And when was the peak of Black land ownership? Jillian: Yes. So the peak was definitely in 1910. According to census data and USDA census data, we owned upwards to 16 to 19 million acres, and we acquired it through sharecropping. Some families that I've worked with were actually given land by their former slaveholders and some purchased land. Lee: Wow. Okay. And that dovetails with an interview that I did with my uncle in 1991 who told me that in his area of Alabama, Black people owned 10 to 15,000 acres of land. And when he told us that, we thought, ‘Well, he's old, and he probably just got the number wrong.' But it sounds that that's true. It sounds like Black people in various parts of the country could own tens of thousands of acres of land collectively. Jillian: Yes, yes, I know that for a fact in Alabama because I finished up school at Tuskegee University. So yes that is accurate. Your uncle was correct. Lee: Okay. And when and how did many of these families lose the land? Jillian: So the majority of land was lost after 1950. So between 1950 and 1975, we lost about half a million Black farms during that time. The primary reason why it was lost in the past was due to census data and then also record keeping. With the census data, they would state, ‘Oh, well, this farmer stated in his census paperwork that he owned 100 acres.' But then the recorder would drop a zero. Things of that nature. And so also courthouses would be burned. So let's take Texas, for example. There were over 106 courthouse fires. And a lot of those records, you know, were destroyed. Now, ironically, often during those courthouse burnings, the white landowners' records were preserved and, you know, magically found. But the Black landowners' records were completely destroyed, and they have no record of them to this day. Now, the primary reasons for the present land loss is predatory lending practices by US Department of Agriculture. Also, lack of estate planning. Lee: So for our family in particular, I mean, I never really understood the heirs property and how that ended up causing our family to have to, you know, get rid of the land or sell the land. Can you tell me about heirs property? What is it and why has it disproportionately affected Black landowners? Jillian: So over 60% of Black-owned land is heirs property, and the legal term is “tenants in common.” But, you know, most Black folk call it heirs property. And heirs property begins when a, traditionally a married couple will own the land outright in their names. And so it'll be Mr. and Mrs. Wilson. And if they don't have a will and they die, what's called intestate, and they die without a will, the state takes over your “estate distribution.” And when I say estate, that's all of your assets that make up your estate. So your property, your house, your car, your jewelry, your clothes, everything. And the state will basically say, ‘Okay, well, since you died without a will, then all of your living heirs will share equally,' you know, ‘ownership in whatever you left' in, you know, with Black farm families, that was the land, that was the homestead, that was the house. And so say Mr. and Mrs. Wilson pass away without a will, and they have 10 kids, and then those 10 have 100 kids and so forth and so on. And so, you know, five generations later, there's 300, you know, people that own, you know, 100-acre, you know, or 200-acre farm outright. And if one of those 200 heirs sells to a third party, oftentimes it's some distant cousin in LA or Pennsylvania for whatever reason, and they just sell their rights, to a developer often, that developer basically takes the place of that, you know, third cousin in LA. And they'll go around, like in the, you know, the Bessemer case in South Carolina, and they'll, you know, get another third cousin in San Francisco and in, you know, Arizona and in Houston and then they'll go to the court and they'll force the sale of the remaining, you know, 195 heirs because 200 were owners in what's called a court partition sale. And that's how we lose 30,000 acres each year so fast, so quick. Lee: Wow. And this is exactly, very similar to what happened to my cousin Zollie. I mean he was just heartbroken, because he didn't have the money to do it himself. And so he ended up getting some other land, but it was really hard for him. People talk about this in the context of saying, “We lost the land.” But there are others who might say, “Well, you didn't lose the land. You sold the land because you couldn't come to an agreement.” Is this a strategic way to wrestle land away from families? Jillian: Yes. In, in part. But, you know, Black people also have to accept responsibility. You know, I, I've tried years to get families to agree. I mean, you know, you have to come to some agreement. You can't just, you know, bicker about stuff that happened in 1979. I mean, you have to get past your own differences within your family. And that's part of the problem. And the families need to come together to conserve their land. Because, you know, I'll tell you right now, if my family had it any other way, we would come together to get our land back. I have taught workshops and written books. You know, I've written about four or five different books, and families have taken those books, you know, attended the workshops, and they've cleared their deed, you know, and it's heirs property. And so what I'm saying is that it can work. And I wish more families would, would do that because I've seen it work. Lee: We definitely don't want to take a victim mentality, but the legacy of white supremacy in this country sort of positions us to have tense relationships, because there's a lot of unaddressed things that happen, and there are a lot of secrets that are kept. [music]Lee: Tell me about the clashes over land between whites and Blacks. What did they look like, especially in the period following the Civil War? Jillian: So during Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction, we all know about the “40 acres and a mule” program and how, you know, within a year the land was given and then taken back. But there were landowners, particularly Black, of course, that got to keep the land, and some were located in South Carolina, primarily South Carolina, Georgia, and a few areas in Alabama. Of course, there were clashes with, particularly when the patriarch passed away, similar to to your ancestors. Whites would go to the land and force the Black mother and wife off of the land, and they would set the house on fire and just force them to, to get off the land. When she shared those details, I thought back to the family members who told me about Isaac Pugh's wife and my great-grandmother, Ella Pugh, and the horrifying situation she found herself in, with more than a dozen kids, a murdered husband, and a mob of men on horses coming by every night, screaming for them to leave. That's the part of this story that the newspaper article didn't contain. Uncle Ike said, “They were jealous of him.” He talked about Taylor, too, but also about a band of whites that he believed were working with him. The news reports said the murder was about livestock, but according to Uncle Ike, it was about land. The assaults on my family and many others were orchestrated, and institutional. And the attacks on Black landowners wasn't just about one white man resenting a Black man. The damage was often done by groups of people, and institutions, including government agencies like the United States Department of Agriculture. Lee: What was the impact of Jim Crow on Black land loss? Jillian: Well, it was definitely impactful. You know, again, going back to the, 1950 to 1975, half a million farms were lost during that time, and the equivalent now is 90%. We've lost 90% of the 19 million acres that we owned. You know, according to the 1910 census data. And, a lot of that is due to, you know, Jim Crow and, you know, various other factors. But, you know, this was predatory lending, particularly by USDA. And so you also need to look at USDA. And the reason why you need to look at USDA is because it's “the lender of last resort.” And that's basically the hierarchy and the present foundation of the USDA regulations right now. And it's admitted guilt. They, they've admitted it, you know, from the 1965 civil rights report, you know, to the CRAT report to the, you know, the Jackson Lewis report, you know, 10 years ago, that they purposely discriminate, particularly against Black farmers. And it's due to predatory lending. You look at the fact that between 2006 and 2016, Black farmers made up 13%, the highest foreclosure rate out of all demographics. But we own the least amount of land. And so, you know, that right there is a problem. Lee: What is the state of Black land ownership today and where is it really trending?Jillian: To me it's trending down. The '22, '22 USDA census just came out last month, and the demographic information will be out, I believe, June 26th. But, we own, you know, less than 2% according to the USDA census, but I believe it's like at 1%, because they include gardeners in that, in that number to inflate the numbers. But, but yeah. So it's, it's trending down, not up. Lee: Okay. And what do people get wrong about Black land ownership in this specific history? I mean, I know that there are everyday folks who have opinions that they speak about freely, as if they're experts, but also educators and journalists and policy makers and lawmakers. I mean, what do they get wrong about this history? Jillian: They portray the Black farmer as poor, illiterate, and basically don't know anything, but that's for, you know, that's far from the truth. I know families – five-generation, four-generation cotton farmers that own thousands of acres and are very, you know, lucrative. And so the, this portrayal of the, you know, the poor Black farmer, you know, dirt poor, land rich, cash poor is just a constant. And a lot of my clients don't even like talking to reporters because of that narrative. And it's, it's not true. Lee: I feel like it's missing that the majority of this land in this country was acquired unfairly. And on the foundation of violence and on the foundation of trickery – Jillian: Yes.Lee: And legal maneuvering. And I don't see that really as something that is known in the masses. Jillian: Correct. Lee: Or acknowledged. Is that true or –Jillian: That's true. Lee: Or am I off?Jillian: Yes. That's true. But with Black folk it wasn't, it's not true. So Black people earned the land. They, they worked, they paid, you know, for it. It wasn't acquired through trickery and things like that compared to the majority. You know, the 2022 USDA census, you know, 95% of US farmland are owned by whites. You know, as you know, similar to the 2017, you know, USDA census. And so that is often, you know, the case in history. That it was acquired through violence. Lee: Mm hm. And how would you like for the conversation around Black land ownership to grow and evolve? Where's the nuance needed?Jillian: I believe the nuance is through – like you referenced – financial literacy. We need to retain what we already have, and that's the mission of my work, is to retain it. And so we've saved about 10 million in Black farmland assets, you know, over the 11 years that I've been in operation through my non-profit. And it's important that we focus on retention. You know a lot of people call me asking, ‘Oh, can you help me, you know, find land, buy land,' but that's not my job. My job is to retain what we have. In my family's case, I wonder if the inability to reach an agreement on whether to keep Uncle Ike's land in the family would have been different if the younger generations would have had a chance to talk with Uncle Ike about the hell he went through to acquire it. Or maybe if they'd all had the opportunity to learn about the history of Black land loss and theft even in more detail. I just don't know. But what's clear is, though I don't hold any resentment about the decision, I do think it's just another example of how important studying genealogy can be. Not just the birth dates and the death dates, but the dash in between. Learning about our ancestors, and what they believed in, what they went through, and what they wanted for us. I know that's what a will was intended for; but in Uncle Ike's will, he thought he was doing the right thing by leaving the land to his children equally. I don't know if he knew about heirs property law. But even if he did, I suppose he never dreamed that the future generations would see any reason to let that land go. Not in a million years. [music starts] Lee: And what do you think about the debate around reparations, especially as it relates to land? I know that there was a really hyper visible case of a family in California that got significant land back. Do you think justice for Black farmers is achievable through reparations? Jillian: I believe it is, but I don't know if it's realistic because it's based on the common law. It's based on European law and colonial law. And so how are we supposed to get reparations when, you know, we can't even get, you know, fair adjudication within, you know, US Department of Agriculture. And so we're basing it, and we're trying to maneuver through a system that is the foundation of colonial law. And, I think that that will be very hard. And I think that we should take the approach of purchasing land collectively. Where are the Black land back initiatives? When are we gonna come together, you know, collective purchasing agreements? Lee: You're blowing me away. Jillian: Thank you. Lee: And I just really want to thank you for this work that you're doing. I believe that as a Christian, I'll say that I believe that what you're doing is God's work. And I just hope that you know that. And I just wanted to, to really just thank you. On behalf of my family, I thank you so much. Jillian: Thank you.Talking with Jillian Hishaw helped me clearly see that the racial terrorism and violence against my Black American family and countless others under Jim Crow was not solely physical but also economic. Hordes of white supremacists throughout America felt divinely and rightfully entitled to Black land, just as their forefathers did a century before with native land. They exploited unjust policies and the complacency of an American, Jim Crow government that often failed to hold them accountable for their murders and other crimes. Before Malcolm X yelled out for justice “by any means necessary,” Jim Crow epitomized injustice by any means necessary. This conversation deepened my understanding of the deadly penalty Black Americans paid for our determination, for daring to burst out of slavery and take our piece of the American Dream through working hard and acquiring land. Since 1837, I've had a family member killed every generation, and this reporting helped me understand why so many of them were killed over land and the audacity to move ahead in the society. So to see the deadly price family members paid only to see it lost or sold off by subsequent generations that are split as to how important the land is to them is truly eye-opening, something I see more clearly now.To understand part of the root of this violence, I have to travel back to uncover a part of my history I never thought about until I started researching my family. It's time to meet the Pughs – my white ancestors from across the Atlantic. Next time on What Happened in Alabama. What Happened In Alabama is a production of American Public Media. It's written, produced, and hosted by me, Lee Hawkins.Our executive producer is Erica Kraus. Our senior producer is Kyana Moghadam.Our story editor is Martina Abrahams Ilunga. Our producers are Marcel Malekebu and Jessica Kariisa. This episode was sound designed by Marcel Malekebu. Our technical director is Derek Ramirez. Our soundtrack was composed by Ronen Landa. Our fact checker is Erika Janik.And Nick Ryan is our director of operations.Special thanks to the O'Brien Fellowship for Public Service Journalism at Marquette University; Dave Umhoefer, John Leuzzi, Andrew Amouzou, and Ziyang Fu; and also thank you to our producer in Alabama, Cody Short. The executives in charge at APM are Joanne Griffith and Chandra Kavati.You can follow us on our website, whathappenedinalabama.org or on Instagram at APM Studios.Thank you for listening.

“Song Writing with Ryan and Lee” “You're FIRED JOE” “Trump's Bronx Rally” “The Rise of AI”

Lee always knew that his father grew up during Jim Crow, but he never really understood what that meant as a child. In school he was taught that Jim Crow was all about segregation - separate but unequal. It wasn't until Lee started asking his dad more questions about Jim Crow as an adult, that he realized that it was much, much deeper than he could've ever imagined. In this episode, Lee sits down with Dr. Ruth Thompson-Miller, a professor at Vassar College and co-author of Jim Crow's Legacy, The Lasting Impact of Segregation. Together they detail the depths of terror that characterized the Jim Crow era and discuss why it's important to tell these stories.TranscriptLee Hawkins (host): We wanted to give a heads up that this episode includes talk of abuse and acts of violence. You can find resources on our website whathappenedinalabama.org. Listener discretion is advised. [music starts]Hi, this is Lee Hawkins, and we're about to dive into episode three of What Happened in Alabama. It's an important conversation about the intergenerational impact of Jim Crow, how it affected the way my family raised me, and why it matters today. But you'll get a whole lot more out of it if you go back and listen to the prologue first – that'll give you some context for putting the whole series in perspective. Do that, and then join us back here. Thank you so much. [musical transition] Jim Crow survivor. This isn't a common term, but it's what I use to describe my father and family members who grew up during this time in American history.Jim Crow was a system of laws that legalized racial segregation and discrimination through state and local legislation – mostly in the South – for close to a hundred years. After slavery – from 1877 until 1965 – Black people living under Jim Crow continued to be marginalized, even though they were “free.” Housing, education, and access to everything from healthcare to public parks was all separate, and definitely not equal. This history affected how my father was raised, how his siblings were raised, and – even though I wasn't born during Jim Crow – how I was raised.The fact is, there are millions of Black Americans alive today – 60 years or older – who survived Jim Crow and were never defined as a group, acknowledged, or even compensated for their experiences. Instead, Jim Crow survivors are sandwiched between the anger around slavery, and the glimmers of hope from the Civil Rights Movement. It's a time that's talked about in shorthand. We're taught that the worst of it was separate drinking fountains and bathrooms, and sitting in the back of the bus. But this wasn't the extent of what my father, my family, and countless others went through. Not even close. So that's what we tackle in this episode. The lasting legacy of Jim Crow.Seven years ago, when I was on the phone with my dad, he told me a story about his childhood in Alabama during Jim Crow.Lee Sr.: Yeah, me and my sister, me and my, uh, cousin be walking to school, and this one little, little ass boy, we knew we could kick his ass, but he'd come over every day and we'd be going one way and he'd be passing us. He'd run into one of us and just push us, just bump us. And we, we couldn't do nothing, man. We were scared, you know? We, you know, we could kick his ass, but we would have had to pay the price. Lee: So what could happen if you would have beat his ass?Lee Sr.: Oh, they probably would have hung our asses, man, or anything. See, it wouldn't have been no kid getting in fights, it would have been these niggas touched this white boy. That was always there, Lee. [music starts]My dad was 10 years old when this happened. Only a decade into his life and he already knew what he had to do to stay alive: stay in his place. This was his reality growing up under Jim Crow.Dad grew up in Greenville, Alabama, a small town of a few thousand people, just about an hour south of Montgomery. His father worked at the railroad and the sawmill, and his mother was a homemaker. They were part of a strong Black community with businesses and churches. And while separate, they interacted with white neighbors in an uneasy existence. But despite all this, Dad was constantly on edge.Lee Sr.: The white folks that, you know, we literally came in contact with in the neighborhood, my dad used to go over and help them cut trees and mow lawns and stuff like that. Of course, when you went downtown, that's a different story because, you know, you had to give them the right of way, you know. Lee: So what did that mean?Lee Sr.: That mean if a white person's coming down the street, you gotta kinda stay over to, out of their way. Don't get close to them. Try not to, you know. Same with the cops, you know, if they on the street, you just walk by them, that's easy, you know what I mean? It was, it was that sensitive, you know. Sensitive. I always marveled at Dad's word choice.This sensitivity manifested as fear for his mom, my Grandma Opie Pugh Hawkins. And she passed that fear down to my dad. My relatives described her as a nervous, jittery woman who used to grind her teeth and drink Coca Cola by the eight pack to keep going every day. She taught my father not to trust white people and to be very cautious with them. One of his most vivid childhood memories is from a trip to a local department store with Grandma Opie.The trip was supposed to be uneventful, just another day shopping for household necessities, people laughing and having conversations as they shop for deals. Lee Sr.: And they had water fountains in the store, one over there for the whites, and one over here for the Blacks. And I, I didn't care. I didn't know the difference. I went and drunk out of the white one. Now you might think you know where this is headed. A little Black boy drinks from the wrong fountain, and all hell breaks loose. But that's not what happened. No one even noticed. But all hell did break loose.Lee Sr.: My mom just went crazy, man. To protect me, she went crazy, because you couldn't miss me over there drinking. So instead of having them come hang me, she did, you know, went into her act, you know. [music starts]Grandma Opie unleashed a wrath dad had never seen before – he was four or five years old at the time. Boy, she yelled, swatting him repeatedly on his butt, “I told you not to go near that fountain. That's for the white folks.” This show was a protective instinct.Grandma Opie only beat Dad a few times as a kid, and every time she did it, it was in public to keep him in line with the rules he was still too young to know or understand. But things were different at home. Grandma Opie and her husband, my grandfather Papa Lum, they never laid a hand on Dad there.He was the baby of the family, showered with love. Grandma Opie had him when she was 43, and by then she and Papa Lum were past their whooping years. He was Grandma's miracle baby and constant shadow. He even slept in the bed next to her.Lee Sr.: I never told anybody that, but I did, yeah. That's what I did, I was in the middle. I only had a little while with her being healthy.When he was about six years old, Grandma Opie fell sick with kidney disease. She made several visits to the doctor, and dad would wait at home patiently for her after each one. Lee Sr.: We used to get on our knees every night, every night and every morning, but especially at night. And when my mom was sick, I could hear her praying to God, you know.Over the years, her health worsened, until eventually, when my dad was around 12, she was confined to bed rest. Shortly after that, family members began visiting from as far as California to pay their respects. Lee Sr.: She had talked to me a lot before she died.Lee: And what were some of the lessons? Lee Sr.: Oh, she's just telling me, ‘I ain't gonna be here much longer.' You know? And I, it was hard for me to get that in my head. I couldn't even, I denied that shit all the way, you know? But she was telling me that I'm gonna have to grow up faster than I really was supposed to. You know, ‘You're gonna have to try and get along,' and, you know, ‘Listen to your older sisters and brother.' She died telling them to take care of me. That's what happened there. Only a few years ago did I learn the full story behind Grandma Opie's declining health and passing. The main medical facility in Greenville at the time was LV Stabler Memorial Hospital.It was a segregated hospital, meaning in this case that the same white doctors and nurses treated everyone, but in separate facilities. White folks received their care in a state of the art building. Black folks could only be seen across the street in a little white house with just 12 hospital beds.This is where Grandma Opie was treated. The last time she visited that hospital, they wouldn't admit her and sent her home. Instead, a few hours after she was turned away, the doctor came for a house visit. He told the whole family, “I'm going to give her this shot, and if it doesn't work, there's nothing more I can do.”He administered the shot, packed his supplies, and left. No one knows what was in the shot, or what it was supposed to do. Grandma Opie died of kidney failure at the age of 56. This happened in 1961. At the time, life expectancy for black people was 64. For white Americans, it was 71. A whole seven more years of life.Lee Sr.: You know, that was a real devastating thing for me when I lost my mommy. I just can't even, you know, I, shit, I couldn't, uh, I couldn't make it through that man, you know, 'cause I fell asleep during the funeral, and that was just like, trying to just get it out of my mind, you know? Big sleep came on me, man, and by the time it was over, then I was waking up, you know. In the nights following Grandma's funeral, Dad stayed haunted.Lee Sr.: For a whole week or so, I was having nightmares like a motherfucker. That's one thing. I was going crazy.Grandma Opie's dying wish was that her youngest children be moved out of Alabama to Minnesota to live with one of her oldest daughters, my dad's sister. Aunt Corrine and her husband LC were in their early thirties when Grandma Opie died and had moved to Minnesota years before.Aunt Corrine honored Grandma Opie's request. Just two days after Grandma Opie's funeral, Dad and two of his sisters were packed into the back of Aunt Corrine and Uncle LC's Ford Fairlane headed up the interstate to start a new life.I never had the honor of meeting my grandmother Opie, but I thank God for her. She had a strong spiritual intuition. One of my aunts called her “the holiest woman I've ever known.” She had a divine foresight that told her she needed to get her babies out of Alabama. Lee Sr.: When I left Alabama something came out of me man, a big ass relief. And I didn't even know where I was going, but it was a big ass, just, man, like a breath of fresh air, man.[music starts]In trying to understand my dad and how he raised us, yes, with love and with care, but also with fear that manifested as belt whipping, I turned to research. I traced this violence centuries back in my own family. I learned that Grandma Opie's father was murdered when she was just nine years old. She went outside to see his bullet-riddled body slumped over his mule, with his feet still in the stirrups. And my grandfather – Papa Lum – his dad was also murdered, when he was just five. Both of them were killed by white men who were never brought to justice. This is what Jim Crow means to me: violence and fear.To connect the dots between my ancestors' experiences and my own, I read dozens of books and talked to experts, like Dr. Ruth Thompson-Miller. She's a professor at Vassar College and co-author of Jim Crow's Legacy: The Lasting Impact of Segregation. She spoke with almost 100 Jim Crow survivors as part of her research, and coined the term “Segregation Stress Syndrome.” This refers to the chronic, painful responses to the individual and collective trauma that Jim Crow survivors endured. Over the course of my research we talked a number of times, but I started by asking Dr. Thompson-Miller why she took on this area of study.Dr. Thompson-Miller: I went to, um, the University of Florida to get my bachelor's degree in anthropology. And I had this interesting experience. I took a class with this older white gentleman called Dr. Fagan who, I have to say, Dr. Fagan literally did save my life. And so he had said to me that he wanted me to try to talk to people who lived through Jim Crow.I only knew minimal stuff about it. I mean the history that you learn in school. And so I was naively going out there to ask folks, “How did you cope?,” I mean, “How did you get through the day to day with everything being separated?” And I gotta tell you, what I learned from those folks who were willing to share with me, even through their own pain, was something that has changed my life forever.Lee: I'd like you to kind of get in deeper into telling us about the research that you did. What kinds of people did you talk to? Who were they?Dr. Thompson-Miller: Um, well, I interviewed nearly a hundred folks and most of the African Americans that I interviewed were women, um, in their, you know, sixties and seventies, eighties, nineties. Some were educated. Um, some were just domestic workers. So they ranged from, uh, you know, different, uh, socioeconomic statuses. And it took a few interviews before I started getting troubled, like I knew I was looking at something, but I was missing something. And then it hit me one day. I was interviewing this woman in her house. It was the middle of the day, it had to be noon, it was, it was very sunny. And I walked in the house and it was so dark I couldn't even see my, my tape recorder and my pad and stuff. And they had the drapes and everything was really closed up. And so, um, she didn't want to be tape recorded, this woman, she must have been in her seventies, I believe. And I had to constantly reassure her that nobody would know that it was her that was talking to me.Because people were still afraid, people are still afraid, right? So she told me, this incident that happened to her. I think she was elementary school age. She said that one day she went with her mother to work. Her mother was a domestic worker and she had washed this white man's, you know, shirt, and there was a spot on the shirt that she had missed and she talked about how, you know, he was yelling and screaming at her mother, how afraid she was for her mother. And, um, there wasn't anything that she could do. And her mother was apologizing and begging him to forgive her. And, and my God, and she starts crying. And it hit me what I was looking at.I was looking at people that were suffering from trauma that's never been addressed. This happened over 70 years ago and she's still emotionally responded to it. And I said to her, “Listen, we can stop. I'm really sorry that this happened to you.” And she said to me, she said, “No, I don't want to stop. I want people to know what I went through.” [music starts]And what these folks really told me was that they never shared things with their children. They kept it all to themselves. Why? Because they really wanted to protect their children. They didn't want their children to be angry. They didn't want them to, you know, to react to whites in a particular way because they knew, as their parents, what these children might experience and they didn't want that for them. And they thought that it would help them to be, for lack of a better word, to live a like normal childhood if they didn't understand what came along with living under this extreme system of oppression.Lee: I want to interject here because I think that that's a really profound contradiction that you've pointed out. And that's the one thing, is that so many of our elders wanted to protect us by not telling us the stories. And that's almost like a coddling thing. But then on the other side, we're we're going to whip them to protect them. And somehow something gets turned off in the brain that makes people think that the best way to go about this is to whip them.Dr. Thompson-Miller: Oh, my goodness. Absolutely. I mean, listen, I got, I got whipped. You know, my father was always the one that, you know, did it. But I think he felt like he was protecting us because he got whipped really badly by his father and by his stepfather. So this is the way that you're socialized. And you don't even know where this stuff comes from, but it absolutely comes from that connection. There's hundreds and hundreds of years of history that has gotten us here where we are, the way that we are. This theme of protection surfaced many times in my conversations with Dr. Ruth Thompson-Miller. It wasn't just protection through punishment. It was also about shielding some children from the truth of the atrocities they endured – and the fractures it caused in the Black family dynamic. Dr. Thompson-Miller: There was a, um, a man, uh, that I interviewed, and he told me about kitchen babies. They called them kitchen babies. I said, “Kitchen babies, what is that?” He said, ‘Those are the babies that black women had when they were raped by the person who came to your house to maybe bring ice.' Or, you know, these traveling salesmen would rape women and they would get pregnant and they would call them kitchen babies.One woman told me about a particular case in her family where she said her mother and her grandmother, she said, would have gone to their graves with this information, but she had a cousin that told her about a member of their family, a woman who was working, doing domestic work, like, you know, cleaning this woman's house who happened to be the town prostitute.And so there was this white guy pretty well known in the community who visited this prostitute, a white woman prostitute. And so one day the man came over and the woman was gone. And so he raped the girl. And so she never told anybody what happened to her. She didn't run home and tell her family that he had raped her. But then she got pregnant. And she explained to her family what happened, that this man had raped her. So they were going to go see the man. And the family told her father, you have to send her out of town. You can't say anything to him. Send her out of town. Send her away, let her have the baby, and don't mention it.And this woman told me that this happened to a lot of women during Jim Crow. And it wasn't women, these were girls, right. And a lot of families kept this stuff a secret, to the point where you had this term called “kitchen babies,” where you have men who, some men would stay even after, um, their wife uh, had a child that was biracial. Um, but a number of men left. And you know, this is something that has always bothered me. This notion of protecting. Protecting the women, the girls in your family. And when that almost seems impossible, I think there's a certain amount of shame in, you know, humiliation. Because, I mean, one thing that most men are socialized to do is to protect. And when you can't even protect your own, what do you do with that?It's hard to comprehend. Some Black men could not always protect their wives and children in their own homes. And out in the world, they were scapegoats. Can you explain more?Dr. Thompson-Miller: I saw an example, and I mean and I had people tell me about lynchings, how, you know, like young men, and I'm sure some of this went on if, you know, a young white woman was fooling around with black guys or flirting or whatever and she got caught, she would say that they raped her. And one woman said, ‘I remember they went in a home, and they took these boys out – they were just boys – out in the middle of the night, and they lynched them.' And you know, it always reminds me of Emmett Till, and they focus on Emmett Till, but that happened everywhere.It's really frightening, you know, and I don't think we'll ever know the number of people that have been lynched in this country. They say it's thousands, but, you know, there's so many books about it, but we'll never know how many people really got lynched. That's what I believe. The number's a lot higher than we really know about. For me, one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life was sitting at the Legacy Sites in Montgomery as part of my research. One is a memorial that honors thousands of Black people who were lynched or murdered between 1877 and 1950. Their names are on more than 800 columns. To see that little children – four year olds, six year olds – were even lynched, and they all left families behind.The museum presented story after story of Black people being killed without any evidence or even a trial, or trials by all-white juries. Many were lynched for things like not stepping off the sidewalk for a white person to pass, talking too confidently to white people, for owning land, and for attempting to vote.And as I passed the rows and rows of names, I thought: if neither of my murdered great-grandfathers' names were on those memorials, how many other thousands of Black people were killed, whose names and stories will never make it into a museum, or be kept secret from future generations by their own families? Throughout our conversations Dr. Thompson-Miller shared example after example after example of the horrors of Jim Crow, resulting in what she calls, “Segregation Stress Syndrome.”Dr. Thompson-Miller: You know, the interesting thing about Segregation Stress Syndrome and how I came up with it was, I just looked at the post traumatic stress literature initially. I looked at the fact that like when you're in war, that's an event that happens. So you may be in war for a couple of years and then you come home and you get help and you're out of that situation, but for Black folks, you never get out. And so you went from slavery to Jim Crow, you might not have been in chains, but during Jim Crow, it wasn't much better. Yeah, you were able to have some stuff, but it could have been taken away from you at any given moment, and everybody knew that.And so it's this collective experience that people are having at the same time with, with no way, uh, and no recourse when bad things happen to you. So you just have to hold it in, you know, you have to eat your anger. And so that trauma, that collective trauma, keeps happening over and over again. And in every day that you live, you're running into something and it manifests itself in different ways. First of all, you pass it on onto your children, you know, you pass the trauma on. And I suspect that, you know, folks telling me their stories, I didn't realize they were passing it on to me, you know, and with Segregation Stress Syndrome, it's not just, you know, these traumatic experiences. It's this institutional betrayal. So institutions, you know, the judicial system, the medical system, you know, the educational system, they're supposed to be there, uh, for everybody, but unfortunately, when things happened to Black folks, they had nowhere to go. These institutions that were supposed to be there, equal justice under the law, that didn't mean that for them, so now you have this second class citizenship where everything that you believe about, you know, America, it really kind of gets thrown out the window.Lee: In our last interview and in previous conversations, we talked about your trip to South Africa. Dr. Thompson-Miller: Yes. Lee: And you interviewed people and they lived through apartheid. And it started to occur to you that that's what Black people went through in America. Dr. Thompson-Miller: Yes. Lee: What do you think about the use of the term apartheid in reference to Jim Crow? Dr. Thompson-Miller: I mean, I think you have to use it. You can't honestly say that Emmett Till was killed. He was viciously and violently tortured and murdered by people just because he was Black. And if you're uncomfortable with the term apartheid, well, to be honest with you, white South African, they actually were inspired by the system of Jim Crow in this country, which is where they got their system of apartheid. I remember being a kid in the 1980s and participating in marches against South African apartheid. What I didn't know is that this system – and also Hitler's regime – was modeled on Jim Crow. The dictionary defines apartheid as a policy or system of segregation or discrimination on grounds of race. This definition is applied specifically to South Africa in the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam Webster, but just as easily could have been said about what Dad lived through in Alabama. Lee: What do you want people to understand about Jim Crow that they don't know already? You know, um, it's important for us, you know, we just talked a lot about the experience of living under it and the impact on families and communities, but if you really were to look back over the years and to feel like there's something more that you want to drive home, that you, the most important thing that people need to know about Jim Crow and Segregation Syndrome and everything that undergirds that, what would it be?Dr. Thompson-Miller: This is really hard because, you know, I think it, it brings me back to thinking about my father, and I just think it's really important to forgive people for not being honest, um, for hiding stuff that they thought that would be better for you if they did hide it, um, for not fighting back, um, because there's got to be something in particular about people who did fight, who did protest, who did get beaten, who got bitten, and who had water hoses on them that made them do something different.I'd like to know what that was so we can get it in more people, um, and not be, you know, these passive people that just have this stuff happening to them. So I think I, I would like to, to look at that and, um, just try to figure out a way to get people to heal.Lee: Which kind of leads me into that next question and that final question, why do you think this research is still important? Why is it so important that we do this now? I just added my piece that I believe that not just white Americans, but Black, Black people, Black descendants of slavery and Jim Crow, but also our brothers and sisters who are immigrants need to know this history.Dr. Thompson-Miller: So unless you really understand where we've been, and I mean it's an, it's an old cliche, you don't know, you know, if you don't know where you're, you're going, you know, it could happen again or however they say it, but that is actually true, you know, and I think that, in, in order to, to ensure and to help people understand why they do the stuff that they do.I just want Black folks to really start valuing themselves more. Because what you are saying is like, we value everybody else and want to help everybody else, but we're the last one in line to get valued, even, even by our own people and even by ourselves. And I think that's something that's been, you know, pushed into us from inception.And, um, people need to talk to their families, um, while you still can. That's all I say. Everybody go interview your grandma, your grandpa, or your auntie, or your uncle who's of age and who lived through Jim Crow, and hear what they went through, and you'll look at them differently, I promise you – in a better way, in a more respectful way, than you do now. That's my advice. Lee: And that's a wonderful way to end, you know, in the words of Alex Haley, regardless of the opinions that people may have of him, there was one thing that he said that always resonates with me with this work: when an elder dies, it's like a library burned down, and once it's gone, it's gone.Dr. Thompson-Miller: Yes. Lee: Sister, thank you. Dr. Thompson-Miller: Exactly. Lee: God bless you. I love you. Dr. Thompson-Miller: Oh, thank you so much. God bless you, too. Love you, too. Be well now. Lee: Okay. Dr. Thompson-Miller: Okay. Bye bye. I don't know if Dr. Thompson-Miller truly understands how grateful I am to her for venturing into this rare area of study around the effects of Jim Crow. It helps me validate my previous understanding that my work and my family's experiences are not an isolated experience.And it made me feel for my father's parents. Who wouldn't be impacted by having their father murdered as a child? When a family member is murdered, so much attention at the time is put on mourning the person in the casket, but what about the health and well-being of the people surrounding the casket – especially the children – who have to find a way to keep going, carrying all that pain? And then, my father's father was murdered as well.They did a lot of praying – which in our family, is often seen as enough – but my professional training and experience makes me realize that, on top of faith, therapy, self-care, and other strategies can help. Otherwise we can't really call this post traumatic stress, because the “post” implies that it actually ended. In my father's case, he was a middle-aged man before he could even talk in-depth about any of this.I hope that people whose families have been through any kind of government imposed atrocities and/or apartheid – Jim Crow, the Holocaust, Japanese internment, any kind of apartheid or political persecution, anywhere in the world – can give themselves permission to investigate these atrocities and how they truly impacted their families. I hope they can work on finding solutions together, as families. My conversation with Dr. Thompson-Miller also helped me truly understand why my father and some of my elders were so captivated with the discoveries I made about our family history. With each passing year, they became more eager to share their memories with a sense of urgency.Here's me and my dad talking with his sister, my beloved Aunt Toopie. Lee: You know, it's important because when y'all are gone, it's over. These future generations – Lee Sr.: Yeah, that's true.Lee: They're not gonna be interested in it. And when, when they get old enough to be interested in it, it's gonna be gone. Aunt Toopie: That's right. Lee: All the people who know are gonna be gone. So as a journalist –Aunt Toopie: That's right. Lee Sr.: Yeah, and it's gonna be more important even then than it is now.Aunt Toopie: That's right.Lee: Right. And I feel like I use all, I'm using all my journalism for other people's stories, so I feel like I need to, um, use it for my family story. Listening to our discussions about how important sharing family history is, it chokes me up a bit, especially now. Dad and Aunt Toopie are no longer with us. When I ventured into my family's history as landowners and settlers and how much of the blood of my ancestors was spilled just on the basis of their desire to buy land and live out the American dream, I got an even deeper understanding of how and why Jim Crow was so deadly. That's on the next What Happened In Alabama.[closing music]CREDITSWhat Happened in Alabama is a production of American Public Media. It's written, produced, and hosted by me, Lee Hawkins.Our executive producer is Erica Kraus. Our senior producer is Kyana Moghadam.Our story editor is Martina Abrahams Ilunga. Our producers are Marcel Malekebu and Jessica Kariisa. This episode was sound designed by Marcel Malekebu. Our technical director is Derek Ramirez. Our soundtrack was composed by Ronen Landa. Our fact checker is Erika Janik.And Nick Ryan is our director of operations.Special thanks to the O'Brien Fellowship for Public Service Journalism at Marquette University; Dave Umhoefer, John Leuzzi, Andrew Amouzou, and Ziyang Fu; and also thank you to our producer in Alabama, Cody Short. The executives in charge at APM are Joanne Griffith and Chandra Kavati.You can follow us on our website, whathappenedinalabama.org or on Instagram at APM Studios.Thank you for listening.

Growing up in a middle-class suburb in the 1980s often felt idyllic to Lee. It was the age of crank calls and endless summers playing outside. The Hawkins kids were raised by their parents to excel in everything they put their minds to — and they did. They were model students at school and in their community. But at home, a pervading sense of fear and paranoia governed the household. In this episode, Lee sits down with his younger sister Tiffany to discuss the tensions at home. Later, he talks with psychotherapist and trauma expert Brandon Jones to uncover the roots of his parents' fears, and how it dates back to slavery and the Jim Crow era in the United States.RESOURCESPost Traumatic Slave Syndrome | Dr. Joy DeGruyTranscriptLee Hawkins (host): We wanted to give a heads up that this episode includes talk of abuse and acts of violence. You can find resources on our website, WhatHappenedInAlabama.org. Listener discretion is advised.Hi, this is Lee Hawkins, and we're about to dive into episode two of What Happened in Alabama. This one's about family and how policies impact parenting. There's a lot to get into. But you'll get a whole lot more if you go back and listen to the prologue – that'll give you some context for the series and this episode. Do that, and then join us back here. Thank you so much. [music starts]Family. There are so many variations of what this unit is. For me, it's mom, dad and my sisters. No matter what your family looks like – be it blood or chosen – there's a shared experience of people who know you inside and out, who've seen you grow. There's a common language for your memories, an ease when you're together.This journey I've been on to understand how I was raised and the histories behind who I am today starts with the people who know me best and have seen me at my highs and my lows. They bear witness to stories in the far reaches of my mind and fill in the gaps when my recollection isn't clear.Growing up in Maplewood, Minnesota, there are a lot of memories. Understanding myself means understanding my parents, my grandparents, and all the people who came before them. [musical intro]I'm Lee Hawkins, and this is What Happened In Alabama. Episode 2: Meet the Hawkins. [music starts]In many ways, I grew up in a picture-perfect American family: mom, dad, three kids. Me and my two sisters, Tammi and Tiffany. Tiffany: I would be outside from sunup to sundown playing with the neighbors. We'd always have a game of kickball or softball, fight over, you know, whose ball it was or if the person lost the game, they'd take the ball and want to go home or kick it over the neighbor's fence. I mean, we really had a great time with that aspect growing up. That's Tiffany. Looking back on our childhood with her brings back so many great memories. We were children and teenagers of the '80s, and that was an almost magical time to grow up in. Tiffany: You know, we'd go play in the woods or you know, ding dong ditch or, you know, the phone calls that we would make pranking people. I mean, these are things that could have –Lee: Oh the prank calls on the three-way? Oh man. Tiffany: Yeah, you know, I was really mad when they came out –Lee: That was some funny stuff though.Tiffany: That caller ID really messed us up, you know, caller ID ended all of that. [Lee laughs] Because we used to really get people in some binds there. I mean, if social media was out there, we coulda made tons of money off of those calls that we were genius –Lee: Oh man, we would be blowing up. [Tiffany laughs] We would be so rich if we were, if social media was out now, our show would be the bomb. Our prank call show. [Tiffany laughing] Oh my gosh. Tiffany: Yeah, it would've. It would've. Like I said, we had fun as kids. But there were some tense times, too. Mom and Dad were strict.Tiffany: You know, it's just like them coming home from work. Like, is, are all the chores done? Like, what kind of mood are they gonna be in? Like, are we gonna get yelled at or beat today, or you know, what's gonna happen? You never knew. You were constantly having to live with this, you know, fear. And you had no control over how, what was gonna happen. Lee: Right, and then our parents would come home, and they were like military inspectors, and they would go over – Mom would go over and make sure if there was a, you know, if there was a smudge on the mirror, then that meant you were gonna go – she was gonna come into your room, drag you out into the living room, and beat you down. And tell you, [yelling] “There was a smudge on the mirror!”Tiffany: [laughing] It's so crazy because, yeah.Lee: And we laugh now because there's that thin line between comedy and tragedy, right, that's what they say. And I think that now that we made it out – we made it out, Tiff. We made it. Tiffany: Yeah. But for the grace of God. Our parents raised us to be perfectionists. We were super high achieving kids. Both Tiff and I were elected class president, me four consecutive years, Tiff three consecutive years. She was the homecoming queen and a star athlete. And I was known more for my activism and was elected YMCA Youth Governor of the State of Minnesota. We had lots of friends and were often thought to be role models. But at home, we were sometimes seen as falling short, and the penalty for that was the belt, or verbal tirades from our disappointed parents.It's a hard thing to talk about, because I can't in good faith paint my parents as evil monsters who just wanted to abuse us, because they weren't. In fact, they didn't see it as abuse. And neither did we. We were a close family, and we loved our parents, and I know they loved us. Our parents were and are good people. They were active in the church, they were amazing neighbors, and they made a lot of sacrifices to raise us into the productive citizens we've become. That said, they, like a lot of our Black friends' parents, could be really mean. Over time, my research into the history of my family and my country, revealed an explanation for that.Before I go too deep into this, I should mention that Tiffany and I – and our family's experiences – don't represent that of the whole Black community. We're speaking about ourselves. The terror our family went through during enslavement and Jim Crow made our parents feel that they needed to be brutal with us. A few months ago, I sat down with Tiffany to talk more deeply about how we were raised trying to make sense of our parents' fear and trauma and how it impacted us. The focus on hard work, getting ahead and the American Dream – all things Mom and Dad thought would keep us safe. You'll also hear parts of my conversation with Brandon Jones, Executive Director of the Minnesota Association for Children's Mental Health. He helps us process how this tension between some Black parents and their children manifested as trauma in every generation going back to slavery. We had to follow the rules, and the penalty of not following those rules was almost always violence at home and social condemnation in the world outside. The interviews with Tiffany and Brandon helped me see it so much more clearly.Tiffany: You know, being the youngest comes with a lot, where I had siblings – and you and Tammi were, I think in that day and age, were quite a bit older than I was, but not really because, you know, five and seven years older. But we were, still had this closeness. Lee: And what do you remember about me? How was I as a kid? Tiffany: You were very animated. I remember that you were always very talented at everything you did. You could sing and dance, and you were always a leader, a leader of the pack. You were never, did the same as everyone else, and I thought that was a great thing. You also were mischievous, I think. [laughs] At times you could be: “Oh, Lee Lee.” “Oh, what's Lee Lee done now?” Lee: Right. 'Cause we called it “hyper.”Tiffany: He's always getting in trouble.Lee: On my way to prison. Tiffany: Yeah, well, yeah. [laughter]Lee: Or to get killed by the police. One of the two. ‘We better whoop his ass.'Tiffany: The paranoia. Yeah. Looking back, I now see we were under a lot of stress, even though we also had fun as kids. But the pressure to never make any mistakes – under the threat of the belt – was constantly weighing on us. The understanding was that if we messed up as kids – even buying a candy bar without getting a receipt – that would go on our records and could be brought back by white people, even years later, to destroy our futures and lives and careers as adults. So we avoided a lot of trouble. But when we did really well, especially against white kids, our mother sometimes seemed reluctant to celebrate with us. It was almost as if our success and our confidence and our belief in ourselves as Black kids sometimes frightened her. Lee: Did you feel supported when you were achieving all these things?Tiffany: No. You know, at times in, I had, you know, two different – and depending on which parent you were talking about, I mean, Dad supported us in everything. But there were still limits to that. I mean, I felt like they were glad to have something that was keeping me busy and out of trouble. But never really embraced the fact that that could have been something that I took a lot further. I'm not sure why Mom was like, you know, with pretty much anything that we did almost, as to keep us in our place in some way, she would also make it, always make it feel like, ‘Yeah, that's great and everything, but it's not really that important,' you know? ‘It doesn't mean anything.' Lee: And also, ‘Why do you think that you can be this or that?' ‘Why do you think –,' you know? Did you get that? I got that all the time, right in the midst of accomplishing things.Tiffany: Oh, I got that a lot. Or, ‘Why do you have to be –,' yeah, ‘Why do you have to be always doing stuff?' Like, ‘Can't you just be satisfied with this?' Like, ‘Everybody else isn't doing that.' That was another thing that drove me crazy, is hearing about what everybody else's kids were doing. And it was like, ‘Yeah, but I mean – and that's great and I'm glad that they are – but do you see what I'm doing? Everybody else's kids aren't doing this.'Lee: But that was when we would get beat. I remember a time Tiffany had a big track meet leading up to the state tournament. But it coincided with a family trip down south. When they picked me up on the way down, I asked Tiffany how her track season was going. When she told me she'd qualified for this meet, I was furious, because it was a huge opportunity. I didn't understand why my parents didn't let her go to the meet and join us on the trip later. But Tiffany and I knew not to push. Lee: You and I have talked about the play Fences – August Wilson's Fences – and Troy Maxson and how he despised his son coming home saying, “Dad, I got a football scholarship, and they're gonna pay the way. They need you to sign off for me to go to college for free,” and Troy Maxson said, “You're not going.” Because he was a major league, he was a Negro League baseball player, and his dreams got dashed and he really resented the opportunity and the freedom of that next generation. And I always look back, and I think back to how Mom used to tell us about Grandpa Buddy, which was so hard to hear, because Grandpa Buddy was so supportive of us, but she would say that Grandpa Buddy thought she should just get married and not go to college or anything. “You're just a woman, so just go get married. Why should I spend money on college?” And so it seems like in our bloodline – not on Dad's side of the family, but definitely on Mom's side of the family – every generation kind of resented sometimes the next generation's opportunities of, you know, that it was like, ‘Yes, I'm providing this for you, and we're going to make sure you have braces, and we're going to make sure that all of your needs are met. We're not gonna hug you. We're not gonna tell you we love you. We're not gonna baby you, we're gonna beat excellence into you. But then when you become excellent, we're also gonna resent you because we didn't have the same opportunity that you had.'Brandon: Well, we have a lot of old parenting techniques that were picked up and conditioned from slavery that have continued on. Doctor Joy DeGruy talks about this in her book, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. Brandon Jones is the executive director of the Minnesota Association for Children's Mental Health. He also consults for other organizations in developing culturally relevant and trauma-informed mental health services for children throughout the state. When I told him this story, he immediately recognized the connection to slavery and Jim Crow. Brandon: One of the things that really just blew my mind is the downplaying of achievement of our children in kind of – it's, it's in a, it's in a joking way, but it was a protective measure on the plantation where you would have Black parents, mostly mothers, who would downplay the achievements of their son or their daughter because they didn't want their child to be sold off or moved to another part of the plantation where they couldn't keep an eye on them or protect them. Lee: Right, they would have a talent for playing the violin or something, and the fear was that Massa's gonna sell him to be, and say, “Oh, this Negro plays the violin and he can work during the day,” and get a pretty penny for that person and then they'll be separated from the family. Brandon: Right. So there was a protective measure to keep kids close to their parents.Hearing that from Brandon actually made me feel a lot better, because when I was a kid, I just thought our mother hated us. But it's not that simple. Looking back, I now see she was under a lot of stress, working a full-time job as a nurse and a health coordinator at a major corporate assisted living center, raising us, taking care of our dad, and being the matriarch who made a lot of sacrifices for us. And quite often, she'd have chest pains, which is a telltale sign of a heart attack. And I'd say 90% of the time she complained of chest pains, it would be because we upset her; usually if we disagreed with her, were perceived as talking back, or even if we looked at her in a certain way she didn't like. That really scared us, but it horrified our dad. He would transform into an attack dog and just haul off and slap us, and then order us all to get into the car so we could take our mom to the emergency room. It got to the point where that scenario just kept playing out. Tiff and I couldn't tell if she was really having pains or if she was using it as a weapon of punishment. We were scared for our mom. And for ourselves.Tiffany: Yeah, I can laugh about it now, but it was actually terrifying as a kid because, you know, I can remember several times that she did this, but one in particular when she pulled that having chest pains thing. And maybe she was having chest pains, maybe that was a sign of her anxiety, but I also know that she knew how to use that to play that card with Dad. You know, the ambulance was called, it was all of this. And Dad looked me in the eye, and he said, “If anything happens to my wife, I'm gonna kill you.” And I believed that. I mean, he was so scared that something was gonna happen to her. And it scared me so much that I caught a cab from there and left, because I was afraid that something was gonna happen and Dad was gonna kill me. Lee: Other moms that we knew, if someone threatened their child, especially their husband, and said, “I'll kill you,” then they would say, “No, don't do that. Don't do that.” And a lot of black women that we know from the church would have said, “Uh uh, you're not gonna threaten my child's life.” [Tiffany laughing]Lee: But our mom was just like silent, like, and she would look at us like, ‘Yeah, see? He'll kill you for me. He'll kill you for me.'Tiffany: Yeah, it would give her fuel. And we didn't know enough then. And also I feel like we – they knew how to isolate us in that way. We were fearful of ever communicating what we were going through at home, because one of the reasons, I think we didn't even realize that this was not normal behavior because we knew, you know, other friends that would say that their parents spanked them. We thought we were getting spanked, you know? It wasn't until later we realized this was a lot more than getting spanked, I mean, ya know? And so then that's when I realized when I did start sharing with people and they would be looking at me like, ‘Are you crazy?' Like, ‘What are you talking about?' Like, ‘That's horrible.' Like, people would be affected. And I'm like, ‘Why are you so affected by that?' That's not a normal spanking. This is not normal behavior. But I didn't know that until after. We never could tell family business. You remember, we were always told that? “Don't tell family business.” [music starts]And of course, years later, my father opened up about how, when he'd beat us, he'd scream, “Don't ever disrespect your mother! I would give my life for five minutes with my mama!” And be beating us and going into a whole explanation of how sweet and kind his mother was. And the more he'd say, the harder he'd swing that belt. His mother died of a kidney infection when he was just 12 years old, and I think when she died, he never got over the pain and the guilt of feeling like he didn't protect his mother. So he wasn't going to let that happen again in his adult life. I guess he addressed that pain by protecting our mother from us. I wish my dad would've just talked about his grief and explained what it felt like to be in that helpless position and how much losing his mom affected him. Maybe if he did, life at home would've been more peaceful.Tiffany: I'm sure there were a lot of people that had no idea that this was going on in our household. Lee: Mom to this day to me has said, “We've never beat you with the belt. We never hit you with the belt. We only spanked you.”Tiffany: Yeah. Lee: And we were hit hundreds of times with the belt. Tiffany: Yeah.Lee: And to this day –Tiffany: With a belt, comb, shoes thrown at us. Lee: Slapped –Tiffany: I mean – Lee: Slapped across the face.Tiffany: Slapped. Tackled. Lee: Thrown down the stairs. Tiffany and I both got the belt. But we were also sometimes punished in different ways, depending on the parent, and depending on the moment. Tiffany: Through therapy, I realize some of the things, some of my paranoia, some of, you know, the anxiety that I have were triggered from situations that happened during my childhood. So like getting locked in a house that you couldn't leave, and if there was a fire, would have burned in. Not being able to access the phone if there was an emergency because it was blocked so that you couldn't make calls out. There could only be calls that were coming in. You know, being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night…[laughing] this is almost embarrassing to say – because someone ate the Breyers ice cream. I mean, like – Lee: But Tiffany, like, okay, so you said that it wasn't until you started talking about it with other people that you started to realize that this was not normal, right? But I remember when I was a kid, I think part of the reason I didn't completely implode at that time and it took like many, many years later for me to break down was because I thought, ‘Well, we're Black kids.' Mom and Dad programmed us, and I guess society programmed me – I don't want to speak for you – but it programmed me to believe, ‘This is what Black kids have to get. I'm a Black kid. And being Black, Black people –.' And mom would say, “This is a Black custom. We whip our kids. This is what Black people do.” And so I just believed that because I'm Black, I have to be beaten because this is our heritage and this is who we are. And Black kids are not allowed to have that level of freedom. [music starts]My parents were among the approximately 70% of Black parents who believe in hitting kids. Out of all the ethnic groups in America, Black households believe in it at the highest rates, and in the 17 states where corporal punishment is still legal in schools, Black children are hit more than children of any other race, and their parents are most likely to sign forms allowing teachers to strike their children. Once again, I'm not saying this is the case for all Black families, but in my home, and in the homes of many of the Black kids I grew up with, it was framed to us as being a Black custom. I asked Brandon Jones about this.Brandon: Unfortunately, due to our own historical trauma and our adaptation of intergenerational trauma that has become culture, spankings or whoopings have become primary. And what ends up happening is you have a lot of kids who are spanked or whooped as a first approach towards discipline without other methods of means happening. And you get a lot of shame as well that takes place when parents don't whoop or beat or use corporal punishment to their children. Other Black parents or family members will encourage you to do so or ask you, “Why are you not spanking your child?” Or, “Why are you talking to your child about what's going on? That child needs their butt whooped,” and things of that nature. Like these are very common conversations and interactions that happen within the Black community. In hindsight, a lot of the reasons for my whipping was because I was often asking questions. Yes, as a student leader, but especially as a Black kid. I wasn't afraid to speak out. I never felt like I couldn't compete, or any anxiety about being Black and having lots of friends of all races. And my parents would say, “Be careful at that school. Watch what you say, and don't get cocky with these white people.” And I feel like I got punished for not being afraid and staying in my place, for that unapologetic curiosity and confidence to ask questions and express opinions. And of course, I made it worse by becoming a journalist. I was in my thirties before I began to question the way we were raised. Until then, I think I too believed that Black kids needed to be treated this way, to keep them out of the criminal justice system or to be able to work in corporate America without being kept out because they stole a candy bar from Walgreens when they were nine. But Tiff was much smarter and braver than me. She knew it was wrong as a child. As a parent, she broke that cycle in our family and talked a lot about the need to focus on healing. Tiffany: A lot of people have been through different childhood traumas that are horrible, but it's what you do to try and reverse that. So I've spent most of my adult life, and I know you have too, trying to heal, you know, and sometimes it's exhausting going to a therapy session and coming home and all this stuff is drug up and, you know, you just feel defeated. But I also know that it has caused me to be a better mother. Because that was my biggest fear, is when I started having children, I did not want to repeat the cycle. So I haven't, I never spank my my children. And I try to, you know, talk to them about things. And I always want them to feel like they could come to me about different things. Now, there were times when I'll say, and they'll, they could tell you too, like I saw little Lee Roy or Roberta in me, you know, especially with, like, the explosive, you know, or yelling. And that would make me feel horrible, you know, some of the things, the verbal things that I've had to catch myself saying. But the difference between that is that, you know, once I was able to calm myself down and really critically think about what had just happened, I will always give someone an apology about my behavior and how that impacted them. It doesn't mean that it didn't affect the person, you know, because words hurt. But I have, you know, tried to live a life where I'm not continuing the cycle. And I just constantly working on it. You know, there's things that still trigger me. Lee: Right. And I remember when you and Tammi started having kids. That was when it triggered something in me that made me confront Mom and Dad. Because I was also afraid that they were gonna try to beat them, to beat my nieces and nephews. And I remember I was vicious, you know, I was, I had a vengeance in me and saying, ‘Don't you dare repeat that cycle another generation.'Tiffany: Mm hmm. As a journalist in 1999, around the time Tiffany and I started recognizing all this, that was when the first version of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study came out, showing that traumatic childhood experiences can stalk people and increase the likelihood of mental illness, substance abuse, and chronic health problems. Subsequent updates to the research showed that childhood trauma can shorten life expectancy. That's when I started thinking consciously about how adults – of all races – have this responsibility to protect children. But that doesn't mean trying to beat safety into them. And yes, there are political, social, and economic realities that caused my parents to legitimately worry. But it's my hope that for new generations, we put down the belt and find a way to give a child a peaceful home without screaming, violence, and constant uncertainty about when the next outburst could happen. That said, this is a very complicated conversation to have, because despite it all, I wouldn't be the person I am today without my parents, my dad especially. And I'm talking about all the good things – his unwavering encouragement and belief in us, his omnipresence in our lives, and his undeniable devotion as a husband and a father. My sister Tiffany feels the same way too. Tiffany: I get people that tell me all the time about the way that Dad changed their life or how invested he was in them. And even just to, like, call them and say, “Hey, remember what we talked about, that thing you were going to do? Did you ever do it?” You know, he was always a great person for that. Lee: He was an incredible motivator. He was someone who wanted to see us go to the next level and far beyond what he could have ever dreamed. For our whole childhood, our dad's life before us was a mystery. We couldn't even ask about it. We just knew the basic facts. He was born in Alabama and moved to Minnesota after his mom died when he was 12 years old. But beyond that, any clues about his childhood would appear at the most unexpected times. Tiffany: I still have never seen a picture of him as a child. And any time I did try and bring things up, like, “What was your mom like or your dad like?,” we would either get told to be quiet, not by Dad, but by Mom, like, “Shhh, don't, we're not gonna talk about that. You know that it's really hard for your dad.” Sometimes having these kinds of conversations about the difficult things that have happened to us can feel like poking an old wound. But I believe that the wound needs to breathe before it can be healed. And that's really what this conversation with Tiff was. It was healing. As part of this project, I also talked with my mom. She sat down for an interview on the fourth anniversary of our dad's death. She answered some very hard questions about why she was so hard on us, and she cried, because it was a tender day. And I realize now it's not fair or true to make the blanket statement that our mom didn't support us. For example, she came out and did the interview – not because she was dying to do it, but because she did it to support me and this podcast.And the conversation with Brandon really helped me further process the reality that our mother was afraid that our success would make us targets for white racists. Yes, when we were younger, she pushed us to excel. But once we got older and got into the limelight in spaces where it mattered, it was frightening for her. Lee: What were your fears for me as a Black boy in Maplewood?Roberta: It was because of the, we just don't know how other people would accept you. And one of the things about it is that you were really outspoken and all that, but some, they hated, I mean some were haters. And we, and their parents too. But we were afraid for you, that something would happen. Because things have happened. That's the complexity of coming from a family like mine. Our mom may not have shown up in the way some people think a mother should. Still, I believe she did love us. She worked hard, sacrificed and gave us what we needed. And I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful for my sisters. Tammi prefers her privacy, but she still came out with Mom and talked with us, for me. And Tiffany, too. This couldn't have been easy for my baby sister. She didn't show up because she wanted to be in a podcast talking about her life and her childhood pain. My mother showed up for her son, and both of my sisters showed up for their brother. For me. Lee: I love you so much, sis. Tiffany: Aww I love you, too.Lee: I want to thank you for the courage that you've exhibited in everything you've done to support me in this at times where I was so alone. Tiffany: Yeah. And I just want to say thank you for the opportunity, because this has been healing for me, and I know I've thought about you a lot, I've prayed for you. I can't imagine what it was like with all the research that you've gone through. Having to be there and go through and process all of the things while your regular life is going on and then in the midst of this, to lose our father. I think this is an important part of your legacy, and I think it is going to really change the way that people view things. But yeah, the time has come.[music starts]All of this encouragement, this support, that's what love looks like to me. And I'm so happy about that. During this whole process, I had so many family members who poured out a lot of memories and feelings, facing up to parts of their Black experience that they may not have ever discussed. Especially my dad. And all of that, really, was the starting place for all this. When I started working on this project, I knew I'd have to go back to where it all started with my dad in Alabama. But I had no idea even where to begin. So I started researching and asking questions, and pretty soon, I realized that this was so much bigger than him. It's not just his story, it's America's story.CreditsWhat Happened in Alabama is a production of American Public Media. It's written, produced, and hosted by me, Lee Hawkins.Our executive producer is Erica Kraus. Our senior producer is Kyana Moghadam. Our story editor is Martina Abrahams Ilunga. Our producers are Marcel Malekebu and Jessica Kariisa. This episode was sound designed and mixed by Marcel Malekebu. Our technical director is Derek Ramirez. Our soundtrack was composed by Ronen Landa. Our fact checker is Erika Janik.And Nick Ryan is our director of operations.Special thanks to the O'Brien Fellowship for Public Service Journalism at Marquette University; Dave Umhoefer, John Leuzzi, Andrew Amouzou, and Ziyang Fu; and also thank you to our producer in Alabama, Cody Short. The executives in charge at APM are Joanne Griffith and Chandra Kavati.You can follow us on our website, whathappenedinalabama.org or on Instagram at APM Studios.Thank you for listening. Next time on What Happened in Alabama. He died tellin' them to take care of me, that's what happened there. There's a reason why you're killing each other. There's a reason why, you know, you don't have land. There's a reason why, you know, they've criminalized your body and put you in prison for free labor.

Girl meets a local hot musician and one thing leads to another. (erotic Coupling)By KMcT. Listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories.A new message alert pinged up on Lee's phone.Andy: I'd really like it if you swallowed my cum right nowHa! She thought to herself, I guess that means our first date was a success.Lee: I guess we'll have to see each other again then 😉Andy: What are you doing today?Andy: Do you want to come over? :)Lee thought for a moment, she had plans to meet friends in a few hours, but she had a couple of hours before then…Lee: You know what, I'm feeling spontaneous - why not? I can come over in 30-40min when I've had my ☕Andy: See you soon 😘Lee dropped her phone on the bed beside her and flopped back into the pillows grinning. She met Andy a couple of days ago after matching with the musician on Tinder and had been thrilled to discover he lived two streets down from her. They had spent two hours in a local pub chatting about topics ranging from capitalism and its impact on creativity, LGBTQI rights, travel and touring, d&d, relationship anarchy and sex menus.As they walked from the pub back to their respective homes, Andy laughed and said,“I still can't get over how close we are to each other. Its just so… Conevient.” He ended with a wink.“I know, it's kind of the dream right? If we have as much chemistry behind closed doors as we do in the pub it's pretty ideal.” Replied Lee with a grin.“Well, that assumes we see each other more than once.” Andy says slyly with a little side eye.Lee countered, “there's nothing wrong with an up front one night stand, but you have to admit the first time you fuck someone new is never the best. It's so much better once you know that if you kiss them just here, for example,” and with that Lee brings her hand up to her throat and caresses a sensitive spot with a wink across to Andy, “that it will instantly make them weak at the knees and breathless… Well, that's when you really have some fun.”At this point they reached her corner and stopped abruptly.“Oh, this is me. Thanks, I had fun!”Andy stood slightly lost for words as she smiled and hugged him goodbye. He'd never come across anyone quite like this tall, curvaceous woman with short, wild green hair and genuinely seemed to want to listen to his thoughts on the world and was so incredibly up front about sex.There had been undeniable chemistry between them but the date had ended with a chaste hug goodbye on the corner. Andy decided not to go in for a kiss because he wasn't comfortable with pda on a street corner….They had messaged back and forth over the next few days with Lee sharing her sex menu and Andy sharing his first attempt at one with her in return.She noticed that he mentioned cumming several times, including liking seeing it in the mouth, down the throat, on the face and it made Lee squirm and press her thighs together with excitement. Lee had a bit of a secret cum fetish, but her last few partners had not liked to focus on bodily fluids leaving her somewhat frustrated on that score.It's not that she ever wanted to get pregnant, but there was something undeniably hot about people loosing control and squirting or jizzing in a great gush as they cum. Lee privately watched gifs and videos of cunts and asses oozing creamy white cum as she masturbated with her big dildo. Reading Andy's sex menu she could see they were going to get along just great.Lee debated how she felt about fucking Andy if he didn't want to see her again afterwards. She was always a little nervous behind her confident exterior with new sexual partners. Being 5 foot 10", size 20 with G Cup breasts and an arse that had been described as munificent, bountiful and lush (among other epithets) and almost translucent white skin, she was used to treating men, especially straight men, off the Internet with caution. But he had come across as a very genuine person and a good egg when they met, and although she would prefer something more like friends+ or a regular booty call, it had been over a month since she had any action. Lee figured, better decent sex once than none at all right?She sighed, sat up, drank most of her coffee with a big swig and headed to the bathroom to quickly shower and get ready for her hook up.25 minutes later, with only a little bit of nervous energy making her stomach flutter, she strode out the door and made the 3 minute walk to Andy's flat. She was wearing a sheer black bra with matching knickers, a faded old racer-back vest with Felix the cat strained across her enormous boobs, a short tartan skirt, knee-high green socks and tall lace-up boots. Over it all was a knee length black coat, making it slightly less obvious to her neighbours that she was off out for a booty call.Andy answered the door wearing a white t-shirt, white underwear and a baseball cap, causing Lee to giggle as she realised she probably hadn't needed to bother with the sexy lingerie. Still, it made her feel more confident in herself as she followed him inside.After pouring them both drinks, Andy led her into the bedroom. Music was playing, but otherwise it was calm, clean and comfy. It was sparsely furnished but had a drumkit in one corner, keyboard and mixing desk in another, guitars and a set of platinum records over the fireplace.“Wow! Well that's pretty freaking cool.”“Not really,” Andy said, leading her away from the records and towards the bed. “They don't really mean anything, you know? It's not the best thing I've done, or will do and I try not to let that get stuff like that get in the way of my creativity.”They sat on the bed together, continuing the conversation and Lee realised she was going to have to make the first move. Her hot musician was unexpectedly a little shy!She smiled up at him and, touching a finger gently to the brim of his cap said,“As much as I'm enjoying the conversation, I think it's time you take this off and we see if we make out as well as we talk.”Andy made a pretend surprised face,“oh its like that is it?” and grinned like the cat who got the cream continuing, “OK, OK, OK!” as he tossed his hat and pulled Lee in for a kiss.As they finally connected, lips and tongues sliding and pressing insistently together, Lee let out a low moan. She brought her hand up, rubbing her fingers through the short hair on the back of his head, and pressed her big soft tits up against his chest.Hands drifted, stroked and groped with increasing passion and enthusiasm as they both lost themselves in the chemistry and heat building while they made out like teenagers. Andy ran his hands up Lee's thigh and under her skirt, squeezing and kneeding her fleshy ass and making it jiggle.As Lee ran her hands over Andy's well-defined arms, shoulders, back and chest, he graduated from her butt to her boobs, eventually pulling off her top and reaching around to undo her bra, kissing the base of her neck and shoulder as he undid the clasp. There was an audible click as the hooks came apart and Lee's big, soft, pillowy tits ballooned out of confinement, her large nipples quickly coming to attention.“wow!” Andy licked his lips as he weighed Lee's huge tits in his hands, enjoying the way her flesh spilled out between his fingers. His large hands dwarfed my her soft globes.He quickly stripped naked before lowering his head to kiss and lick at one pert nipple while gently squeezing the other before swapping sides. His cock ached as he sucked firmly at Lee's nipple and lashed it with her tongue. Lee sighed with pleasure, rubbing her panty covered pussy against his thigh. The cloth of her skirt rode up and rubbed against Andy's now hard, thick cock and he moaned into her teet.Andy looked up from Lee's breasts, a trail of spittle connecting his bottom lip to her flushed, shiny wet nipple.“I wanna fuck these titties. Can I squeeze my cock between them?”Lee giggled, “of course! I'd love to.” and, pulling off the last of her clothes wriggled into position propped up on some pillows so Andy could wrap his big, hard dick in her soft tits. He slowly thrust his hips back and forth groaning as she pinched her nipples and used them to add more friction around his thick rod.She couldn't help but admire his dick as it slid back and forth. It was large and girthy, with a swollen, mushroom-like head that promised all sorts of pleasures to fuck.“I think you could use a little more lubrication.” she said with a filthy grin before sticking out her tongue so it licked the tip of his broad, blunt head as it emerged from the valley of her cleavage. She rubbed her thighs together as she imagined it plunging in and out of her wet cunt.Tilting her head down further, but looking up to maintain eye contact, Lee gradually took more and more of his thrusting member as it pushed up between her boobs.“Holy shit you give good head!” Andy exclaimed as he felt his balls tighten at the overwhelming pleasure of being enveloped in tit-flesh and sucked into her warm wet mouth and the broad lapping of her tongue on the underside of his cock head.Spurred on by his response, Lee leaned further down, sucking Andy's cock down her throat and holding it there as the muscles spasmed, controlling her gag reflex and enjoying the smooth texture and weight of his thick prick on her tongue and filling her mouth.Andy cried out and groaned. Occasionally thrusting back and forth and fighting the overwhelming desire to unload down the back of her throat right then.Lee pulled back, gasping for air, grinning as she wiped the drool from her chin. Her cheeks were flushed and eyes sparkling with excitement and lust.“Fucking hell girl, that was incredible!” Andy panted for breath as he tried to regain control. It was all he could do not to pull her down and thrust his naked cock into her glistening pussy. She had clearly enjoyed the blow-job too.Lee sat up and kissed him passionately, tangling tongues together before leaning back and spreading her legs wider.“Well I think it's only fair you demonstrate your skills in return then.”Andy didn't need to be told twice and dove face first between her thic thighs. He started out with long, broad strokes with the flat of his tongue up her flushed lips. Immediately he could taste her juices and with the slightest pressure he slid up and around the entry to her cunt and up onto her swollen clit.“Damn your wet.” he moaned into her before sucking onto her clit and flicking it with his tongue.“Oh; fucking gods, oh yes, fuck me yes! Just like that - oh fuck me yes.” Lee screamed before devolving into a series of deep purrs and moans. Her back arched and she dug her fingers into the sheets with the unexpected intensity. She was so turned on it was only a couple of minutes before she started trembling and her cries became louder as she came with a great quivering gush.Andy released his hold on her clit, kissing it softly before lapping gently at the nectar flowing from her hole. As muscle tickled at the spongy opening of her hole he felt it practically being sucked inside and proceeded to tongue-fucking her.As Lee regained her senses after that first orgasm, and settled into quiet growls and purrs as she enjoyed the stimulation, Andy decided to give her greedy cunt more of what it wanted. Lifting his head, lips glistening with her juices he kissed Lee and she enthusiastically kissed back, groaning with pleasure at the taste of herself on his lips.Andy reached down and slowly slid two fingers into her wet hole. They sunk in easily, despite her tight tunnel gripping him firmly and rippling as he pressed against her g spot.After kissing her one last time, he made his way down her body with his lips, pressing kisses to her soft, smooth skin. Trailing down from her neck to her shoulders, across her breasts, over her soft, rounded belly and finally between her legs. As his fingers continued their slow drag back and forth through her flexing, quivering tunnel, he went back to sucking and licking at her clit.Lee felt the slow heat between her legs quickly stoke to an inferno, one hand holding Andy's head pressed against her sensitive mound as the other gripped tightly at the sheets.Her moans and growls grew more erratic as finally, with a shout, Andy sunk his fingers in deep, curling to stimulate her g-spot as he latched on and sucked on Lee's now red and sensitive clit. Wave upon wave of overwhelming, toe-curling pleasure crashed into Lee as she came hard.Her vision blurred and she lost control, writhing in pleasure with utter inhibition and joy. Andy looked down on her flushed, glowing body as she caught her breath. Periodically shivering as aftershocks, tiny orgasms flowed over her.Lee came again as Andy gently withdrew his fingers from the tight embrace of her cunt. He lay down beside her and they softly made out for a few minutes as Lee caught her breath.“Ah! You really give great head. Thank you” Lee murmured between kisses.“So do you.” replied Andy and gently pushed her head towards his cock, hard and leaking a trail of precum. Lee took the hint with enthusiasm, diving down to suck him deep in her mouth before proceeding to lick and suck and kiss at his cock. Whenever possible she looked up at Andy, causing him to swear and groan even louder.He could feel the pressure building up quickly, getting harder and hard to keep under control as this succubus of a woman bobbed up and down his length looking him in the eyes like this was the most fun she could have on a Saturday morning. It was filthy and hot and made his balls heavy with cum.“Oh fuck, I'm gonna blow my nut. You're too good at this.” Andy groanedLee pulled her mouth of his cock with a lewd pop and slowly tugged his erection at her lips, with a thoughtful expression on her face.“If you come now, will it take you long to recover? I guess it's a question of whether you want to fuck me and cum in my pussy, or cum now and eat me out again…” making it clear that whatever he decided, she expected more for herself.“Oh fuck, I want to do both! I'm going to cum in your mouth.” Andy cried out.Lee dived back down on his cock, sucking him deep in her throat and tipping him over the edge. Andy's eyes rolled back and he thrust his cock deep into her mouth as the first rope of thick cum went straight down her throat. Lee pulled back taking the next load in her mouth. She opened wider and looked Andy straight in the eye and stuck her tongue out against the tip of his cock aiming it at her mouth as he blew several more loads across her lips.As he finished what seemed like one of the most intense orgasms of his life Andy looked down into those big brown eyes, sparling with mischief as Lee presented her mouth full of cum before tipping her head back and swallowing it all. Andy's cock gave another feeble pulse in response and she sucked the last drops from his slowly softening prick.“I really want to fuck you but I couldn't help myself. That was incredible, I can't explain how hot it was to see my cum in your mouth and watch you swallow.”“That's OK, I mean, I definitely want to feel your cock in my cunt, but that was a lot of fun” Lee moved up and kissed Andy, wriggling against him to show she wasn't done yet.“OK, lie back down. I have some making up to do.” Andy laughed as Lee enthusiastically wriggled into position and spread her legs for him.Andy settles down between Lee's legs, kissing and biting her thighs and enjoying her soft smooth skin against his lips as he teased her.Once she was breathing faster and more shallow in anticipation, he dove in, licking her soaking wet pussy, sucking on her clit and flicking it with his tongue. Lee felt utterly flooded with tingling pleasure, arching her back and pushing her hips up towards Andy's mouth, searching for more.Andy reached round and pulled her thighs, gripping her to his head and bringing her wriggling under control. Eventually he moved one hand across and started teasing her entrance with the tip of his finger.“More, please.” sighed Lee, and Andy sunk two fingers deep into her tight channel. He slowly sawed them in and out, twisting his wrist slightly to increase the sensation.He could feel her pushing against him, quivering and juices dripped down his wrist. Lee could feel that coil of pleasure getting tighter and stronger, getting increasingly close to tipping over the edge.“Please. Please can I have another finger.” she managed to gasp, words increasingly beyond her grasp. Andy obliged and stretched her tight he with another finger, sliding deep to the knuckles and grinding into her full pussy. He could only imagine how it would feel to push his cock into the hot vice and felt it twitch and begin to fill with blood at the thought as he watched Lee arch and her eyes roll back as her mouth formed a silent O as she quivered and came.Far from being done, Andy redoubled his efforts, tickling her love button with his tongue and sliding his fingers in and out, igniting already sparking nerves to crash another orgasmic wave.This carried on for several minutes, alternately sucking and tickling Lee's clit as his fingers squelched lewdly back and forth in her cunt, grinding deep and flexing against her g-spot. She lost control, thrashing and cumming over and over until she had to tap out.She lay, panting in a puddle of her squirt and juices as she slowly came back to herself and caught her breath.Occasionally she would tremble and flex as aftershocks from all the orgasms flowed over her. Andy lay beside her, stroking her thigh slowly and keeping her grounded.Eventually Lee remembered her words again and thanked Andy for the incredible head. They lay naked and chatted about the sex and some of their other exploits, periodically kissing and stroking each other.As Lee got up and started getting dressed to go meet her friends, Andy watched her reverse strip tease from bed.“I think I could get to be a fan of spontaneous hook ups with a cute local musician.” Lee smirked as she pulls up her knee-high socks and looked for her boots.“I mean, it would be rude not to when we're so close and you give such good blow jobs” Andy laughed in reply.“Besides, there's so much more fun things we can do.” Lee suggested with a grin, tying her laces.“I'm kind of regretting cumming so fast, but also that was so hot. I really loved seeing my cum in your mouth.”Lee leaned in for a goodbye kiss. “Me too.”With that, she practically skipped out the door to meet her friends for brunch.… Will they see each other again?By KMcT for Literotica

Girl meets a local hot musician and one thing leads to another. (erotic Coupling)By KMcT. Listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories.A new message alert pinged up on Lee's phone.Andy: I'd really like it if you swallowed my cum right nowHa! She thought to herself, I guess that means our first date was a success.Lee: I guess we'll have to see each other again then 😉Andy: What are you doing today?Andy: Do you want to come over? :)Lee thought for a moment, she had plans to meet friends in a few hours, but she had a couple of hours before then…Lee: You know what, I'm feeling spontaneous - why not? I can come over in 30-40min when I've had my ☕Andy: See you soon 😘Lee dropped her phone on the bed beside her and flopped back into the pillows grinning. She met Andy a couple of days ago after matching with the musician on Tinder and had been thrilled to discover he lived two streets down from her. They had spent two hours in a local pub chatting about topics ranging from capitalism and its impact on creativity, LGBTQI rights, travel and touring, d&d, relationship anarchy and sex menus.As they walked from the pub back to their respective homes, Andy laughed and said,“I still can't get over how close we are to each other. Its just so… Conevient.” He ended with a wink.“I know, it's kind of the dream right? If we have as much chemistry behind closed doors as we do in the pub it's pretty ideal.” Replied Lee with a grin.“Well, that assumes we see each other more than once.” Andy says slyly with a little side eye.Lee countered, “there's nothing wrong with an up front one night stand, but you have to admit the first time you fuck someone new is never the best. It's so much better once you know that if you kiss them just here, for example,” and with that Lee brings her hand up to her throat and caresses a sensitive spot with a wink across to Andy, “that it will instantly make them weak at the knees and breathless… Well, that's when you really have some fun.”At this point they reached her corner and stopped abruptly.“Oh, this is me. Thanks, I had fun!”Andy stood slightly lost for words as she smiled and hugged him goodbye. He'd never come across anyone quite like this tall, curvaceous woman with short, wild green hair and genuinely seemed to want to listen to his thoughts on the world and was so incredibly up front about sex.There had been undeniable chemistry between them but the date had ended with a chaste hug goodbye on the corner. Andy decided not to go in for a kiss because he wasn't comfortable with pda on a street corner….They had messaged back and forth over the next few days with Lee sharing her sex menu and Andy sharing his first attempt at one with her in return.She noticed that he mentioned cumming several times, including liking seeing it in the mouth, down the throat, on the face and it made Lee squirm and press her thighs together with excitement. Lee had a bit of a secret cum fetish, but her last few partners had not liked to focus on bodily fluids leaving her somewhat frustrated on that score.It's not that she ever wanted to get pregnant, but there was something undeniably hot about people loosing control and squirting or jizzing in a great gush as they cum. Lee privately watched gifs and videos of cunts and asses oozing creamy white cum as she masturbated with her big dildo. Reading Andy's sex menu she could see they were going to get along just great.Lee debated how she felt about fucking Andy if he didn't want to see her again afterwards. She was always a little nervous behind her confident exterior with new sexual partners. Being 5 foot 10", size 20 with G Cup breasts and an arse that had been described as munificent, bountiful and lush (among other epithets) and almost translucent white skin, she was used to treating men, especially straight men, off the Internet with caution. But he had come across as a very genuine person and a good egg when they met, and although she would prefer something more like friends+ or a regular booty call, it had been over a month since she had any action. Lee figured, better decent sex once than none at all right?She sighed, sat up, drank most of her coffee with a big swig and headed to the bathroom to quickly shower and get ready for her hook up.25 minutes later, with only a little bit of nervous energy making her stomach flutter, she strode out the door and made the 3 minute walk to Andy's flat. She was wearing a sheer black bra with matching knickers, a faded old racer-back vest with Felix the cat strained across her enormous boobs, a short tartan skirt, knee-high green socks and tall lace-up boots. Over it all was a knee length black coat, making it slightly less obvious to her neighbours that she was off out for a booty call.Andy answered the door wearing a white t-shirt, white underwear and a baseball cap, causing Lee to giggle as she realised she probably hadn't needed to bother with the sexy lingerie. Still, it made her feel more confident in herself as she followed him inside.After pouring them both drinks, Andy led her into the bedroom. Music was playing, but otherwise it was calm, clean and comfy. It was sparsely furnished but had a drumkit in one corner, keyboard and mixing desk in another, guitars and a set of platinum records over the fireplace.“Wow! Well that's pretty freaking cool.”“Not really,” Andy said, leading her away from the records and towards the bed. “They don't really mean anything, you know? It's not the best thing I've done, or will do and I try not to let that get stuff like that get in the way of my creativity.”They sat on the bed together, continuing the conversation and Lee realised she was going to have to make the first move. Her hot musician was unexpectedly a little shy!She smiled up at him and, touching a finger gently to the brim of his cap said,“As much as I'm enjoying the conversation, I think it's time you take this off and we see if we make out as well as we talk.”Andy made a pretend surprised face,“oh its like that is it?” and grinned like the cat who got the cream continuing, “OK, OK, OK!” as he tossed his hat and pulled Lee in for a kiss.As they finally connected, lips and tongues sliding and pressing insistently together, Lee let out a low moan. She brought her hand up, rubbing her fingers through the short hair on the back of his head, and pressed her big soft tits up against his chest.Hands drifted, stroked and groped with increasing passion and enthusiasm as they both lost themselves in the chemistry and heat building while they made out like teenagers. Andy ran his hands up Lee's thigh and under her skirt, squeezing and kneeding her fleshy ass and making it jiggle.As Lee ran her hands over Andy's well-defined arms, shoulders, back and chest, he graduated from her butt to her boobs, eventually pulling off her top and reaching around to undo her bra, kissing the base of her neck and shoulder as he undid the clasp. There was an audible click as the hooks came apart and Lee's big, soft, pillowy tits ballooned out of confinement, her large nipples quickly coming to attention.“wow!” Andy licked his lips as he weighed Lee's huge tits in his hands, enjoying the way her flesh spilled out between his fingers. His large hands dwarfed my her soft globes.He quickly stripped naked before lowering his head to kiss and lick at one pert nipple while gently squeezing the other before swapping sides. His cock ached as he sucked firmly at Lee's nipple and lashed it with her tongue. Lee sighed with pleasure, rubbing her panty covered pussy against his thigh. The cloth of her skirt rode up and rubbed against Andy's now hard, thick cock and he moaned into her teet.Andy looked up from Lee's breasts, a trail of spittle connecting his bottom lip to her flushed, shiny wet nipple.“I wanna fuck these titties. Can I squeeze my cock between them?”Lee giggled, “of course! I'd love to.” and, pulling off the last of her clothes wriggled into position propped up on some pillows so Andy could wrap his big, hard dick in her soft tits. He slowly thrust his hips back and forth groaning as she pinched her nipples and used them to add more friction around his thick rod.She couldn't help but admire his dick as it slid back and forth. It was large and girthy, with a swollen, mushroom-like head that promised all sorts of pleasures to fuck.“I think you could use a little more lubrication.” she said with a filthy grin before sticking out her tongue so it licked the tip of his broad, blunt head as it emerged from the valley of her cleavage. She rubbed her thighs together as she imagined it plunging in and out of her wet cunt.Tilting her head down further, but looking up to maintain eye contact, Lee gradually took more and more of his thrusting member as it pushed up between her boobs.“Holy shit you give good head!” Andy exclaimed as he felt his balls tighten at the overwhelming pleasure of being enveloped in tit-flesh and sucked into her warm wet mouth and the broad lapping of her tongue on the underside of his cock head.Spurred on by his response, Lee leaned further down, sucking Andy's cock down her throat and holding it there as the muscles spasmed, controlling her gag reflex and enjoying the smooth texture and weight of his thick prick on her tongue and filling her mouth.Andy cried out and groaned. Occasionally thrusting back and forth and fighting the overwhelming desire to unload down the back of her throat right then.Lee pulled back, gasping for air, grinning as she wiped the drool from her chin. Her cheeks were flushed and eyes sparkling with excitement and lust.“Fucking hell girl, that was incredible!” Andy panted for breath as he tried to regain control. It was all he could do not to pull her down and thrust his naked cock into her glistening pussy. She had clearly enjoyed the blow-job too.Lee sat up and kissed him passionately, tangling tongues together before leaning back and spreading her legs wider.“Well I think it's only fair you demonstrate your skills in return then.”Andy didn't need to be told twice and dove face first between her thic thighs. He started out with long, broad strokes with the flat of his tongue up her flushed lips. Immediately he could taste her juices and with the slightest pressure he slid up and around the entry to her cunt and up onto her swollen clit.“Damn your wet.” he moaned into her before sucking onto her clit and flicking it with his tongue.“Oh; fucking gods, oh yes, fuck me yes! Just like that - oh fuck me yes.” Lee screamed before devolving into a series of deep purrs and moans. Her back arched and she dug her fingers into the sheets with the unexpected intensity. She was so turned on it was only a couple of minutes before she started trembling and her cries became louder as she came with a great quivering gush.Andy released his hold on her clit, kissing it softly before lapping gently at the nectar flowing from her hole. As muscle tickled at the spongy opening of her hole he felt it practically being sucked inside and proceeded to tongue-fucking her.As Lee regained her senses after that first orgasm, and settled into quiet growls and purrs as she enjoyed the stimulation, Andy decided to give her greedy cunt more of what it wanted. Lifting his head, lips glistening with her juices he kissed Lee and she enthusiastically kissed back, groaning with pleasure at the taste of herself on his lips.Andy reached down and slowly slid two fingers into her wet hole. They sunk in easily, despite her tight tunnel gripping him firmly and rippling as he pressed against her g spot.After kissing her one last time, he made his way down her body with his lips, pressing kisses to her soft, smooth skin. Trailing down from her neck to her shoulders, across her breasts, over her soft, rounded belly and finally between her legs. As his fingers continued their slow drag back and forth through her flexing, quivering tunnel, he went back to sucking and licking at her clit.Lee felt the slow heat between her legs quickly stoke to an inferno, one hand holding Andy's head pressed against her sensitive mound as the other gripped tightly at the sheets.Her moans and growls grew more erratic as finally, with a shout, Andy sunk his fingers in deep, curling to stimulate her g-spot as he latched on and sucked on Lee's now red and sensitive clit. Wave upon wave of overwhelming, toe-curling pleasure crashed into Lee as she came hard.Her vision blurred and she lost control, writhing in pleasure with utter inhibition and joy. Andy looked down on her flushed, glowing body as she caught her breath. Periodically shivering as aftershocks, tiny orgasms flowed over her.Lee came again as Andy gently withdrew his fingers from the tight embrace of her cunt. He lay down beside her and they softly made out for a few minutes as Lee caught her breath.“Ah! You really give great head. Thank you” Lee murmured between kisses.“So do you.” replied Andy and gently pushed her head towards his cock, hard and leaking a trail of precum. Lee took the hint with enthusiasm, diving down to suck him deep in her mouth before proceeding to lick and suck and kiss at his cock. Whenever possible she looked up at Andy, causing him to swear and groan even louder.He could feel the pressure building up quickly, getting harder and hard to keep under control as this succubus of a woman bobbed up and down his length looking him in the eyes like this was the most fun she could have on a Saturday morning. It was filthy and hot and made his balls heavy with cum.“Oh fuck, I'm gonna blow my nut. You're too good at this.” Andy groanedLee pulled her mouth of his cock with a lewd pop and slowly tugged his erection at her lips, with a thoughtful expression on her face.“If you come now, will it take you long to recover? I guess it's a question of whether you want to fuck me and cum in my pussy, or cum now and eat me out again…” making it clear that whatever he decided, she expected more for herself.“Oh fuck, I want to do both! I'm going to cum in your mouth.” Andy cried out.Lee dived back down on his cock, sucking him deep in her throat and tipping him over the edge. Andy's eyes rolled back and he thrust his cock deep into her mouth as the first rope of thick cum went straight down her throat. Lee pulled back taking the next load in her mouth. She opened wider and looked Andy straight in the eye and stuck her tongue out against the tip of his cock aiming it at her mouth as he blew several more loads across her lips.As he finished what seemed like one of the most intense orgasms of his life Andy looked down into those big brown eyes, sparling with mischief as Lee presented her mouth full of cum before tipping her head back and swallowing it all. Andy's cock gave another feeble pulse in response and she sucked the last drops from his slowly softening prick.“I really want to fuck you but I couldn't help myself. That was incredible, I can't explain how hot it was to see my cum in your mouth and watch you swallow.”“That's OK, I mean, I definitely want to feel your cock in my cunt, but that was a lot of fun” Lee moved up and kissed Andy, wriggling against him to show she wasn't done yet.“OK, lie back down. I have some making up to do.” Andy laughed as Lee enthusiastically wriggled into position and spread her legs for him.Andy settles down between Lee's legs, kissing and biting her thighs and enjoying her soft smooth skin against his lips as he teased her.Once she was breathing faster and more shallow in anticipation, he dove in, licking her soaking wet pussy, sucking on her clit and flicking it with his tongue. Lee felt utterly flooded with tingling pleasure, arching her back and pushing her hips up towards Andy's mouth, searching for more.Andy reached round and pulled her thighs, gripping her to his head and bringing her wriggling under control. Eventually he moved one hand across and started teasing her entrance with the tip of his finger.“More, please.” sighed Lee, and Andy sunk two fingers deep into her tight channel. He slowly sawed them in and out, twisting his wrist slightly to increase the sensation.He could feel her pushing against him, quivering and juices dripped down his wrist. Lee could feel that coil of pleasure getting tighter and stronger, getting increasingly close to tipping over the edge.“Please. Please can I have another finger.” she managed to gasp, words increasingly beyond her grasp. Andy obliged and stretched her tight he with another finger, sliding deep to the knuckles and grinding into her full pussy. He could only imagine how it would feel to push his cock into the hot vice and felt it twitch and begin to fill with blood at the thought as he watched Lee arch and her eyes roll back as her mouth formed a silent O as she quivered and came.Far from being done, Andy redoubled his efforts, tickling her love button with his tongue and sliding his fingers in and out, igniting already sparking nerves to crash another orgasmic wave.This carried on for several minutes, alternately sucking and tickling Lee's clit as his fingers squelched lewdly back and forth in her cunt, grinding deep and flexing against her g-spot. She lost control, thrashing and cumming over and over until she had to tap out.She lay, panting in a puddle of her squirt and juices as she slowly came back to herself and caught her breath.Occasionally she would tremble and flex as aftershocks from all the orgasms flowed over her. Andy lay beside her, stroking her thigh slowly and keeping her grounded.Eventually Lee remembered her words again and thanked Andy for the incredible head. They lay naked and chatted about the sex and some of their other exploits, periodically kissing and stroking each other.As Lee got up and started getting dressed to go meet her friends, Andy watched her reverse strip tease from bed.“I think I could get to be a fan of spontaneous hook ups with a cute local musician.” Lee smirked as she pulls up her knee-high socks and looked for her boots.“I mean, it would be rude not to when we're so close and you give such good blow jobs” Andy laughed in reply.“Besides, there's so much more fun things we can do.” Lee suggested with a grin, tying her laces.“I'm kind of regretting cumming so fast, but also that was so hot. I really loved seeing my cum in your mouth.”Lee leaned in for a goodbye kiss. “Me too.”With that, she practically skipped out the door to meet her friends for brunch.… Will they see each other again?By KMcT for Literotica

Girl meets a local hot musician and one thing leads to another. (erotic Coupling)By KMcT. Listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories.A new message alert pinged up on Lee's phone.Andy: I'd really like it if you swallowed my cum right nowHa! She thought to herself, I guess that means our first date was a success.Lee: I guess we'll have to see each other again then 😉Andy: What are you doing today?Andy: Do you want to come over? :)Lee thought for a moment, she had plans to meet friends in a few hours, but she had a couple of hours before then…Lee: You know what, I'm feeling spontaneous - why not? I can come over in 30-40min when I've had my ☕Andy: See you soon 😘Lee dropped her phone on the bed beside her and flopped back into the pillows grinning. She met Andy a couple of days ago after matching with the musician on Tinder and had been thrilled to discover he lived two streets down from her. They had spent two hours in a local pub chatting about topics ranging from capitalism and its impact on creativity, LGBTQI rights, travel and touring, d&d, relationship anarchy and sex menus.As they walked from the pub back to their respective homes, Andy laughed and said,“I still can't get over how close we are to each other. Its just so… Conevient.” He ended with a wink.“I know, it's kind of the dream right? If we have as much chemistry behind closed doors as we do in the pub it's pretty ideal.” Replied Lee with a grin.“Well, that assumes we see each other more than once.” Andy says slyly with a little side eye.Lee countered, “there's nothing wrong with an up front one night stand, but you have to admit the first time you fuck someone new is never the best. It's so much better once you know that if you kiss them just here, for example,” and with that Lee brings her hand up to her throat and caresses a sensitive spot with a wink across to Andy, “that it will instantly make them weak at the knees and breathless… Well, that's when you really have some fun.”At this point they reached her corner and stopped abruptly.“Oh, this is me. Thanks, I had fun!”Andy stood slightly lost for words as she smiled and hugged him goodbye. He'd never come across anyone quite like this tall, curvaceous woman with short, wild green hair and genuinely seemed to want to listen to his thoughts on the world and was so incredibly up front about sex.There had been undeniable chemistry between them but the date had ended with a chaste hug goodbye on the corner. Andy decided not to go in for a kiss because he wasn't comfortable with pda on a street corner….They had messaged back and forth over the next few days with Lee sharing her sex menu and Andy sharing his first attempt at one with her in return.She noticed that he mentioned cumming several times, including liking seeing it in the mouth, down the throat, on the face and it made Lee squirm and press her thighs together with excitement. Lee had a bit of a secret cum fetish, but her last few partners had not liked to focus on bodily fluids leaving her somewhat frustrated on that score.It's not that she ever wanted to get pregnant, but there was something undeniably hot about people loosing control and squirting or jizzing in a great gush as they cum. Lee privately watched gifs and videos of cunts and asses oozing creamy white cum as she masturbated with her big dildo. Reading Andy's sex menu she could see they were going to get along just great.Lee debated how she felt about fucking Andy if he didn't want to see her again afterwards. She was always a little nervous behind her confident exterior with new sexual partners. Being 5 foot 10", size 20 with G Cup breasts and an arse that had been described as munificent, bountiful and lush (among other epithets) and almost translucent white skin, she was used to treating men, especially straight men, off the Internet with caution. But he had come across as a very genuine person and a good egg when they met, and although she would prefer something more like friends+ or a regular booty call, it had been over a month since she had any action. Lee figured, better decent sex once than none at all right?She sighed, sat up, drank most of her coffee with a big swig and headed to the bathroom to quickly shower and get ready for her hook up.25 minutes later, with only a little bit of nervous energy making her stomach flutter, she strode out the door and made the 3 minute walk to Andy's flat. She was wearing a sheer black bra with matching knickers, a faded old racer-back vest with Felix the cat strained across her enormous boobs, a short tartan skirt, knee-high green socks and tall lace-up boots. Over it all was a knee length black coat, making it slightly less obvious to her neighbours that she was off out for a booty call.Andy answered the door wearing a white t-shirt, white underwear and a baseball cap, causing Lee to giggle as she realised she probably hadn't needed to bother with the sexy lingerie. Still, it made her feel more confident in herself as she followed him inside.After pouring them both drinks, Andy led her into the bedroom. Music was playing, but otherwise it was calm, clean and comfy. It was sparsely furnished but had a drumkit in one corner, keyboard and mixing desk in another, guitars and a set of platinum records over the fireplace.“Wow! Well that's pretty freaking cool.”“Not really,” Andy said, leading her away from the records and towards the bed. “They don't really mean anything, you know? It's not the best thing I've done, or will do and I try not to let that get stuff like that get in the way of my creativity.”They sat on the bed together, continuing the conversation and Lee realised she was going to have to make the first move. Her hot musician was unexpectedly a little shy!She smiled up at him and, touching a finger gently to the brim of his cap said,“As much as I'm enjoying the conversation, I think it's time you take this off and we see if we make out as well as we talk.”Andy made a pretend surprised face,“oh its like that is it?” and grinned like the cat who got the cream continuing, “OK, OK, OK!” as he tossed his hat and pulled Lee in for a kiss.As they finally connected, lips and tongues sliding and pressing insistently together, Lee let out a low moan. She brought her hand up, rubbing her fingers through the short hair on the back of his head, and pressed her big soft tits up against his chest.Hands drifted, stroked and groped with increasing passion and enthusiasm as they both lost themselves in the chemistry and heat building while they made out like teenagers. Andy ran his hands up Lee's thigh and under her skirt, squeezing and kneeding her fleshy ass and making it jiggle.As Lee ran her hands over Andy's well-defined arms, shoulders, back and chest, he graduated from her butt to her boobs, eventually pulling off her top and reaching around to undo her bra, kissing the base of her neck and shoulder as he undid the clasp. There was an audible click as the hooks came apart and Lee's big, soft, pillowy tits ballooned out of confinement, her large nipples quickly coming to attention.“wow!” Andy licked his lips as he weighed Lee's huge tits in his hands, enjoying the way her flesh spilled out between his fingers. His large hands dwarfed my her soft globes.He quickly stripped naked before lowering his head to kiss and lick at one pert nipple while gently squeezing the other before swapping sides. His cock ached as he sucked firmly at Lee's nipple and lashed it with her tongue. Lee sighed with pleasure, rubbing her panty covered pussy against his thigh. The cloth of her skirt rode up and rubbed against Andy's now hard, thick cock and he moaned into her teet.Andy looked up from Lee's breasts, a trail of spittle connecting his bottom lip to her flushed, shiny wet nipple.“I wanna fuck these titties. Can I squeeze my cock between them?”Lee giggled, “of course! I'd love to.” and, pulling off the last of her clothes wriggled into position propped up on some pillows so Andy could wrap his big, hard dick in her soft tits. He slowly thrust his hips back and forth groaning as she pinched her nipples and used them to add more friction around his thick rod.She couldn't help but admire his dick as it slid back and forth. It was large and girthy, with a swollen, mushroom-like head that promised all sorts of pleasures to fuck.“I think you could use a little more lubrication.” she said with a filthy grin before sticking out her tongue so it licked the tip of his broad, blunt head as it emerged from the valley of her cleavage. She rubbed her thighs together as she imagined it plunging in and out of her wet cunt.Tilting her head down further, but looking up to maintain eye contact, Lee gradually took more and more of his thrusting member as it pushed up between her boobs.“Holy shit you give good head!” Andy exclaimed as he felt his balls tighten at the overwhelming pleasure of being enveloped in tit-flesh and sucked into her warm wet mouth and the broad lapping of her tongue on the underside of his cock head.Spurred on by his response, Lee leaned further down, sucking Andy's cock down her throat and holding it there as the muscles spasmed, controlling her gag reflex and enjoying the smooth texture and weight of his thick prick on her tongue and filling her mouth.Andy cried out and groaned. Occasionally thrusting back and forth and fighting the overwhelming desire to unload down the back of her throat right then.Lee pulled back, gasping for air, grinning as she wiped the drool from her chin. Her cheeks were flushed and eyes sparkling with excitement and lust.“Fucking hell girl, that was incredible!” Andy panted for breath as he tried to regain control. It was all he could do not to pull her down and thrust his naked cock into her glistening pussy. She had clearly enjoyed the blow-job too.Lee sat up and kissed him passionately, tangling tongues together before leaning back and spreading her legs wider.“Well I think it's only fair you demonstrate your skills in return then.”Andy didn't need to be told twice and dove face first between her thic thighs. He started out with long, broad strokes with the flat of his tongue up her flushed lips. Immediately he could taste her juices and with the slightest pressure he slid up and around the entry to her cunt and up onto her swollen clit.“Damn your wet.” he moaned into her before sucking onto her clit and flicking it with his tongue.“Oh; fucking gods, oh yes, fuck me yes! Just like that - oh fuck me yes.” Lee screamed before devolving into a series of deep purrs and moans. Her back arched and she dug her fingers into the sheets with the unexpected intensity. She was so turned on it was only a couple of minutes before she started trembling and her cries became louder as she came with a great quivering gush.Andy released his hold on her clit, kissing it softly before lapping gently at the nectar flowing from her hole. As muscle tickled at the spongy opening of her hole he felt it practically being sucked inside and proceeded to tongue-fucking her.As Lee regained her senses after that first orgasm, and settled into quiet growls and purrs as she enjoyed the stimulation, Andy decided to give her greedy cunt more of what it wanted. Lifting his head, lips glistening with her juices he kissed Lee and she enthusiastically kissed back, groaning with pleasure at the taste of herself on his lips.Andy reached down and slowly slid two fingers into her wet hole. They sunk in easily, despite her tight tunnel gripping him firmly and rippling as he pressed against her g spot.After kissing her one last time, he made his way down her body with his lips, pressing kisses to her soft, smooth skin. Trailing down from her neck to her shoulders, across her breasts, over her soft, rounded belly and finally between her legs. As his fingers continued their slow drag back and forth through her flexing, quivering tunnel, he went back to sucking and licking at her clit.Lee felt the slow heat between her legs quickly stoke to an inferno, one hand holding Andy's head pressed against her sensitive mound as the other gripped tightly at the sheets.Her moans and growls grew more erratic as finally, with a shout, Andy sunk his fingers in deep, curling to stimulate her g-spot as he latched on and sucked on Lee's now red and sensitive clit. Wave upon wave of overwhelming, toe-curling pleasure crashed into Lee as she came hard.Her vision blurred and she lost control, writhing in pleasure with utter inhibition and joy. Andy looked down on her flushed, glowing body as she caught her breath. Periodically shivering as aftershocks, tiny orgasms flowed over her.Lee came again as Andy gently withdrew his fingers from the tight embrace of her cunt. He lay down beside her and they softly made out for a few minutes as Lee caught her breath.“Ah! You really give great head. Thank you” Lee murmured between kisses.“So do you.” replied Andy and gently pushed her head towards his cock, hard and leaking a trail of precum. Lee took the hint with enthusiasm, diving down to suck him deep in her mouth before proceeding to lick and suck and kiss at his cock. Whenever possible she looked up at Andy, causing him to swear and groan even louder.He could feel the pressure building up quickly, getting harder and hard to keep under control as this succubus of a woman bobbed up and down his length looking him in the eyes like this was the most fun she could have on a Saturday morning. It was filthy and hot and made his balls heavy with cum.“Oh fuck, I'm gonna blow my nut. You're too good at this.” Andy groanedLee pulled her mouth of his cock with a lewd pop and slowly tugged his erection at her lips, with a thoughtful expression on her face.“If you come now, will it take you long to recover? I guess it's a question of whether you want to fuck me and cum in my pussy, or cum now and eat me out again…” making it clear that whatever he decided, she expected more for herself.“Oh fuck, I want to do both! I'm going to cum in your mouth.” Andy cried out.Lee dived back down on his cock, sucking him deep in her throat and tipping him over the edge. Andy's eyes rolled back and he thrust his cock deep into her mouth as the first rope of thick cum went straight down her throat. Lee pulled back taking the next load in her mouth. She opened wider and looked Andy straight in the eye and stuck her tongue out against the tip of his cock aiming it at her mouth as he blew several more loads across her lips.As he finished what seemed like one of the most intense orgasms of his life Andy looked down into those big brown eyes, sparling with mischief as Lee presented her mouth full of cum before tipping her head back and swallowing it all. Andy's cock gave another feeble pulse in response and she sucked the last drops from his slowly softening prick.“I really want to fuck you but I couldn't help myself. That was incredible, I can't explain how hot it was to see my cum in your mouth and watch you swallow.”“That's OK, I mean, I definitely want to feel your cock in my cunt, but that was a lot of fun” Lee moved up and kissed Andy, wriggling against him to show she wasn't done yet.“OK, lie back down. I have some making up to do.” Andy laughed as Lee enthusiastically wriggled into position and spread her legs for him.Andy settles down between Lee's legs, kissing and biting her thighs and enjoying her soft smooth skin against his lips as he teased her.Once she was breathing faster and more shallow in anticipation, he dove in, licking her soaking wet pussy, sucking on her clit and flicking it with his tongue. Lee felt utterly flooded with tingling pleasure, arching her back and pushing her hips up towards Andy's mouth, searching for more.Andy reached round and pulled her thighs, gripping her to his head and bringing her wriggling under control. Eventually he moved one hand across and started teasing her entrance with the tip of his finger.“More, please.” sighed Lee, and Andy sunk two fingers deep into her tight channel. He slowly sawed them in and out, twisting his wrist slightly to increase the sensation.He could feel her pushing against him, quivering and juices dripped down his wrist. Lee could feel that coil of pleasure getting tighter and stronger, getting increasingly close to tipping over the edge.“Please. Please can I have another finger.” she managed to gasp, words increasingly beyond her grasp. Andy obliged and stretched her tight he with another finger, sliding deep to the knuckles and grinding into her full pussy. He could only imagine how it would feel to push his cock into the hot vice and felt it twitch and begin to fill with blood at the thought as he watched Lee arch and her eyes roll back as her mouth formed a silent O as she quivered and came.Far from being done, Andy redoubled his efforts, tickling her love button with his tongue and sliding his fingers in and out, igniting already sparking nerves to crash another orgasmic wave.This carried on for several minutes, alternately sucking and tickling Lee's clit as his fingers squelched lewdly back and forth in her cunt, grinding deep and flexing against her g-spot. She lost control, thrashing and cumming over and over until she had to tap out.She lay, panting in a puddle of her squirt and juices as she slowly came back to herself and caught her breath.Occasionally she would tremble and flex as aftershocks from all the orgasms flowed over her. Andy lay beside her, stroking her thigh slowly and keeping her grounded.Eventually Lee remembered her words again and thanked Andy for the incredible head. They lay naked and chatted about the sex and some of their other exploits, periodically kissing and stroking each other.As Lee got up and started getting dressed to go meet her friends, Andy watched her reverse strip tease from bed.“I think I could get to be a fan of spontaneous hook ups with a cute local musician.” Lee smirked as she pulls up her knee-high socks and looked for her boots.“I mean, it would be rude not to when we're so close and you give such good blow jobs” Andy laughed in reply.“Besides, there's so much more fun things we can do.” Lee suggested with a grin, tying her laces.“I'm kind of regretting cumming so fast, but also that was so hot. I really loved seeing my cum in your mouth.”Lee leaned in for a goodbye kiss. “Me too.”With that, she practically skipped out the door to meet her friends for brunch.… Will they see each other again?By KMcT for Literotica

Lee Salz is a sales management strategist and author of several books including Sell Different! and Sales Differentiation which helps sellers win more deals at the prices they want. Lee discusses why this is important especially when the differences between your product and the competitor's product are very slim. Lee explains that how you sell is equally important as what you sell, if not more so. He shares how to sell to decision influencers, as well as the reasons why top sellers put their buyer's needs before their own. Lee also digs into the buying experience and how to ask horizontal and vertical questions during discovery. HIGHLIGHT QUOTES Create a matrix of outcomes to guide discovery meetings - Lee: "You reverse engineer the meeting and you start by asking yourself this question, 'It was a great meeting if I accomplished what?' Identify the outcomes that would make for a great discovery meeting. And if you think of it in terms of a matrix, the left-hand column, here are the desired outcomes." "The subsequent columns are, what am I going to ask? What am I going to say? What am I gonna do before, during, and after the meeting to achieve each one of those desired outcomes? So what questions am I gonna ask? Only the ones that correlate with the outcomes on my list." Horizontal and vertical questions for discovery - Lee: "Horizontal questions parallel the scanning process. They're scan questions, they're superficial questions to acquire some data points. But that's what the dentist is doing when he is going tooth by tooth, he's scanning. But then when the hook sticks, that's when the analysis happens and we don't do that enough. And that's what I refer to as vertical questions. Getting a complete picture, a 360-degree picture of that particular data point. A lot of times I see salespeople ask questions for one reason. You know what that is, Andy? To have something to write down." Skills practice may seem like a drag but it is necessary - Lee: "Love me on payday. Love me when you make President's Club just like mom and dad made you eat your vegetables. That's what sales management needs to do with their salespeople and make sure skill practice is happening religiously." Find out more about Lee and get his books in the links below: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leesalz/ Website: http://selldifferentbook.com/ More on Andy: Connect on LinkedIn Get Andy's new book "Sell Without Selling Out" on Amazon Learn more at AndyPaul.com Sponsored by: Revenue.io | Unlock exponential growth with an AI-powered RevOps platform | Revenue.io Scratchpad | The fastest way to update Salesforce, take sales notes, and stay on top of to-dos | Scratchpad.com Blueboard | World's leading experiential rewards & recognition platform | Blueboard.com Explore the Revenue.io Podcast Universe: Sales Enablement Podcast Selling with Purpose Podcast RevOps Podcast

Lee, Mark and Keegan take a quick look at the new fixture list just released for the 22/23 Premier League Season. #NUFC have drawn newly promoted Nottingham Forest #NFFC at home to launch their season; how do the TUP team think we'll do in that game, and how do we think the first 10 games of the season will go? Listen now! (p.s. apologies for the dodgy audio in this podcast, particularly at the very start from Lee) You can listen to us for FREE on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and Google Podcasts. FOLLOW US: Website: http://www.toonunder.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/toonunderpodcast Twitter: @ToonUnderPod Email: toonunderpod@gmail.com

Episode 16: David Massey Salesforce Career Conversation with ROD. David talks about how he found his way into Salesforce. Originally a Salesperson at a travel company, he was one of the unlucky ones having to figure out a new career due to the impact of covid.  In less than two years, David has become a Salesforce Certified Consultant and now helps others to obtain their own certs. Lee Durrant: Hello, it's Lee Durrant here, with another episode of RODcast. We dive into people's Salesforce careers to find you little nuggets of inspiration that might help you in your Salesforce career. I'm pleased to say that joining me today is Dave Massey, who is-- I've lost count, but multiple certified Salesforce consultant and author of davejmassey.com, a website designed to help you learn Salesforce.   Hi, Dave, have I introduced you right there, mate? Is it author? Are we going to go with that?  David Massey: Yes, we'll go with author and thanks for having me, Lee. It's a pleasure to speak to you.  Lee: No, you too. We haven't spoken before, which, frankly for me, is a bit rare on this podcast because I've played it safe. I normally just talk to people that I know, but I couldn't help, like probably a lot of people in the Salesforce ecosystem, couldn't help noticing what you're up to and thought, from a selfish point of view, it'd be great to get you on our podcast and talk about your relatively short journey so far in Salesforce and the very quick rise to being a little bit of an influencer.  If you don't mind, perhaps giving us a very quick overview of who you are, then we can talk about, I guess, what's happened to you in the last few years if that's all right?  David: Yes, that's perfect. Where I am now is I'm an eight-time certified Salesforce consultant, working for a company called ThirdEye Consulting based out of London. Literally, two years and a week ago, I was actually a travel agent. It was only the 30th of March, I actually discovered Salesforce 2020, so the 30th of March 2020 was the first time I saw it. Prior to that, I'd worked in sales and service for a good 10, 15 years, selling everything you can think of from cars, to windows, to vacuum cleaners, to TVs, broadband, the works. Sold all of it and I found myself working in the travel industry.  I've been really successful. I'd been in it again, for about seven years at that point. I was doing really well with my sales team and when I say travel agents, technically, it's like a tour operator. Everything was custom built, everything was tailor-made, flights, hotels, transfers, trips, seven or eight week holidays, so something quite bespoke.  Again, was doing really, really well. Then COVID hit and as COVID hit, as most people know, in the travel industry, it is essentially minimum wage and then you earn all your money through commission. That's just the nature of the beast in sales, as you know. Yes, I walked into the office after COVID had hit and was just faced with the fact that I'd lost 50% of my commission overnight and all the other commission was going into a holding pot.  It couldn't really be touched, because it needed to be there to obviously keep everything going. It was a bit of a shock to walk into that. I'm married, I've got two kids, we've got a house, a mortgage, I've got a big dog that eats more than me. It was one of them where I had to look around and think, "Right, what am I going to do?"   Lee: You were made redundant, were you? Or what happened?  David: No, I wasn't made redundant. Literally, I just had to work full time through it, working from home because again, particular with the travel industries, it wasn't a case of, "Oh, right. Well, COVID shut down, lockdown, nobody does anything." Because we still had to manage all the flights, the hotels. Again, this is a bit people often didn't realize is we were working behind the scenes for minimum wage, working 10, 12 hour days because we're going through time zones to...

In episode 85 of Pop Culture Weekly, Kyle McMahon talks with the cast of Apple TV+ series Dr. Brain. The beautifully shot, South Korean sci-fi mystery stars LEE Sun-kyun, LEE You-young, PARK Hee-soon, SEO Ji-hye & LEE Jae-won.-----------Watch celebrity interviews at: https://www.facebook.com/realkylemcmahon/videosor Kyle McMahon YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/officialkylemcmahonRead the latest at http://www.PopCultureWeekly.comFollow Kyle on:Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/kmacmusicFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/realkylemcmahonInstagram: http://www.instagram.com/kmacmusicYouTube: http://www.youtube.com/officialkylemcmahonWebsite: http://www.kylemcmahon.mePop Culture Weekly twitter: http://www.twitter.com/popculturepodca

This is the second part of our conversation with the Program Manager of the Pentagon Renovation, Lee Evey. Our guest, Lee Evey, was the program manager of the Pentagon Renovation from 1997 - 2002. When Lee arrived on the Pentagon project, it was in chaos. He tells us about how he got offered the job, his first day on site, and how he was able to rally the troops around one singular purpose. Here are some facts about the project - - $1.22 Billion budget from congress to renovate all 5 wedges of the pentagon - 25,000 people working in the building, who could not be disturbed. - 4,000,000 lbs of asbestos per wedge - A national tragedy happened on site. You're going to hear very little from us during this interview. We were so interested in what he was saying, we just let Lee go and tell us what he wanted to tell us. When you get in a room with someone like Lee -- You shut up and listen. Thanks for joining us this week! Make sure you check out our sponsors Trimble ProjectSight - https://projectsight.trimble.com/ CompanyCam - https://companycam.com/constructionbros Please consider subscribing! SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL Like us on LinkedIn! Like us on Facebook! Follow us on Instagram! Eddie's LinkedIn Tyler's LinkedIn (Our day job)

Our guest, Lee Evey, was the program manager of the Pentagon Renovation from 1997 - 2002. When Lee arrived on the Pentagon project, it was in chaos. He tells us about how he got offered the job, his first day on site, and how he was able to rally the troops around one singular purpose. Here are some facts about the project - - $1.22 Billion budget from congress to renovate all 5 wedges of the pentagon - 25,000 people working in the building, who could not be disturbed. - 4,000,000 lbs of asbestos per wedge - A national tragedy happened on site. You're going to hear very little from us during this interview. We were so interested in what he was saying, we just let Lee go and tell us what he wanted to tell us. When you get in a room with someone like Lee -- You shut up and listen. Thanks for joining us this week! Make sure you check out our sponsors Trimble ProjectSight - https://projectsight.trimble.com/ CompanyCam - https://companycam.com/constructionbros Please consider subscribing! SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL Like us on LinkedIn! Like us on Facebook! Follow us on Instagram! Eddie's LinkedIn Tyler's LinkedIn (Our day job)

Want to know how you can elevate and accelerate your life? If so, then this episode is for you. Today, the girls are joined by Lee Cordell who shares the steps you can right NOW to propel your life forward! You'll hear more about: Two things that are necessary to finding balance in your life An interesting mental shift Lee had to make to in order to succeed The surprising realization Lee made about her own life (and why you might feel the same way) Questions you should be asking yourself at the end of the day What “zone of genius” truly means How saying yes to the scary things can propel you forward What's really going on when you feel overwhelmed by making a decision Why learning how fear shows up for you is important How she created a planner without planning to create What can help you to keep going forward when imposter syndrome sets in The number of times people need to hear your message The hardest lesson Lee had to learn And so much more! Let's take a listen! Resources: IG: @LeeCCordell @Thewriteplanners FB: @thesuccessfulfilledwoman Websites: www.Thewriteplannerco.com www.leeccordell.com Erin's Instagram: @erin_travelsforlife Rachel's Instagram: @iamrachelbrooks The Confident Woman Podcast Instagram: @theconfidentwomanpodcast Quotes: You can do whatever you want but there's no guarantee any of it's going to work.” - Lee “You know you just have to lower your standards in places and let things go.” - Lee “Nothing is original” - Rachel “When you're in your zone of genius, in order to truly live there, you have to come from a space of being in faith and not being fear based.” - Lee --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/theconfidentwoman/message

Colonoscopy can be an uncomfortable topic, but the fact is that it saves lives. Dr. Jennifer Lee discusses common excuses for not getting the test, who should be screened and why colonoscopy is so important.   TRANSCRIPT Intro: MedStar Washington Hospital Center presents Medical Intel where our healthcare team shares health and wellness insights and gives you the inside story on advances in medicine. Host: Thank you for joining us today. We’re talking with Dr. Jennifer Lee, a gastroenterologist at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. Welcome, Dr. Lee. Dr. Jennifer Lee: Hello. Thanks for having me. Host: Today we’re talking about colonoscopy and the national campaign 80 percent by 2018. The goal is to increase the colorectal cancer screening rate to at least 80 percent of eligible adults by the year 2018. Colonoscopy is the gold standard of colon cancer prevention and with regular screening, precancerous masses called polyps often can be removed before they turn into cancer. Dr. Lee, why do people avoid colonoscopy, a screening that can effectively prevent devastating colorectal cancer? Dr. Lee: I think for many reasons patients would avoid colonoscopy. One is maybe they don’t want to know. But I think the biggest reason is they find it to be uncomfortable, or, you know, who wants to come in and have something inserted in their backside? Host: Could you discuss why someone wouldn’t want to know? Dr. Lee: Yeah, I think some patients know that you maybe they have symptoms. Maybe they have a little bit of bleeding. Maybe they have a change in their bowel habits. And so they kind of suspect that something’s wrong, but, you know, you don’t want the devastating news of cancer, which is why screening colonoscopy is so important. We do it in asymptomatic individuals, and the goal is to prevent cancer. I often get asked, “Is colonoscopy the only way to screen for colon cancer?” And the answer is no. We have other noninvasive ways to screen for colon cancer, and they’re very good. But colonoscopy is a test of cancer detection, but also cancer prevention, and it’s because we’re able to take off polyps and prevent them from growing into colon cancers. Host: What are some of the alternatives if someone is really averse to colonoscopy? Dr. Lee: They’re mostly stool-based tests. Your primary care doctor can provide it. We provide it, as well. The oldest method which is fecal occult blood testing or, FOBT or otherwise known as guaiac testing. But there are better tests now and those include the FIT test and the Cologuard. Host: Are those tests done at home or at the doctor? Dr. Lee: They are done by providing a stool sample, so they are arranged through the doctor, but most patients just, sort of, do it at home. I think a misconception is that your doctor is supposed to take your stool sample with a rectal exam in the office, but it’s supposed to be a spontaneous stool sample. Host: How do you discuss colonoscopy and why it’s so important with your patients if they come in with fear or anxiety about the test? Dr. Lee: The way I describe it to my patients is the hardest part is the prep. You can’t eat the day before. You are drinking a laxative that potentially is not the best tasting laxative.  And then you have to stay by the toilet. And you know, I tell my patients to think of it as a cleanse and I think people get that. And then by the time you’re coming in, you just have an IV inserted and you get to take a nap. After you take your nap, you wake up, you’re done. So, it’s not as bad as people think it is. I think if you ask most of the patients in recovery, they will tell you that. “Yeah, it wasn’t that bad, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be,” and I’ve had patients say “I’m going to go tell my friends it wasn’t that bad. I’m going to send them all here.” As a field, gastroenterology is moving towards more advanced procedures in the care of colon cancer patients. And so, we do have experts—our advanced endoscopists—who can take care of advanced polyps, large polyps and even very, very early cancers. I’ll give you an example. I had a patient who came in for colonoscopy, average risk, completely no symptoms. You would not think that the patient had any...was at any increased risk for colon cancer. We did find a mass on colonoscopy that was suspicious for cancer. We took biopsies. The same day, I called the colorectal surgeon, and we were able to get them in to see the colorectal surgeon that same week. The pathology results were available the next day, and the patient had a curative resection for colon cancer. Host: When should a person of average risk of colon cancer start getting screened? Dr. Lee: Yeah, average-risk individuals should start getting screened at age 50 unless they’re African-American, in which case they should start their screening at age 45. Increased-risk individuals would include those with a family history of colon cancer. Those patients usually start their screening at age 40, or even before. Host: Why should African-Americans start earlier than other cultures? Dr. Lee: We’ve seen, epidemiologically that African-Americans are, more prone to colon cancer, and so therefore we want to prevent colon cancers. So, really focusing on preventive care, we want to catch them earlier. Host: If a patient has a loved one who should be screened, you know, because of their age or their risk factors, what advice could you give that individual to share with their loved one to help nudge them along and schedule that colonoscopy? Dr. Lee: You know, you think of it as any other cancer screening test—mammogram, you know, for women, GYN exams. It’s just like those, and it’s so important because you could prevent this potentially devastating disease. It’s absolutely preventable. So, while the thought of it may be displeasing, I think the end result is you are reassured and to know that you’re taking care of your body and making sure that you have a clean bill of health. Host: What do you feel is your role in the 80 percent by 2018 national campaign? Dr. Lee: Personally, this is day in and day out, this is what I do. I want to prevent colon cancer. I do colonoscopies. I remove polyps. That is, so much of what I do, and I’m such a big believer in preventive care that, you know, I feel very passionately about it. You know, I’m like a colonoscopy cheerleader. You know, like get your colonoscopy.  While it may seem a strange, topic to be excited about, it, nevertheless it’s—I am excited about it. If we could reach 80 percent, that’d be amazing, you know, and I think that, you would be saving lives, you would be saving healthcare dollars, for just, you know, one day of being hungry. You know, and I’ve done the one day of being hungry. It’s bad, but it’s, you know, you live through it, and then you can think about the meal that you’re about to have after your colonoscopy. Host: What do you feel needs to happen at a local or a national level to reach that 80 percent goal or even exceed it? Dr. Lee: You know, I think that having that part of, uh, general health be at the front of your...your mind. I think our primary care doctors are doing a great job of identifying who needs to be, screened, and so providing, access to colonoscopy, I think, is crucial. We do many of them, but there, you know, we need to do more.  And so, thinking about any patient that you are seeing --do they need to be screened, yes/no? And, if they do, send them over.  And, these days the prep is not as bad as it used to be. It’s a—we have lower volumes, better tasting things. Host: Are there any risks involved with colonoscopy? Dr. Lee: Sure. I think some patients are afraid of the complications of colonoscopy and absolutely there are complications, but I often tell them that they’re rare—the complications are quite rare--you know, 1 in 10,000, less than that even, and that’s a great aspect of having your procedure done at Washington Hospital Center. We are big believers in the multidisciplinary team approach, so we work closely with surgeons and other colleagues in case something does happen, but I should say that we are experts, we’re experts in colonoscopy, and we’re good at what we do, so patients are in good hands when they come see us. Host: Thanks for joining us today, Dr. Lee. Dr. Lee: Oh, thank you for having me. Conclusion: Thanks for listening to Medical Intel with MedStar Washington Hospital Center. Find more podcasts from our healthcare team by visiting medstarwashington.org/podcast or subscribing in iTunes or iHeartRadio.

Doctors know that celiac disease is a real medical condition, but too many people treat it like a trendy diet choice. Dr. Z. Jennifer Lee discusses the dangers of gluten exposure in patients with celiac disease.   TRANSCRIPT Intro: MedStar Washington Hospital Center presents Medical Intel where our healthcare team shares health and wellness insights and gives you the inside story on advances in medicine. Host: Thank you for joining us today. We’re talking with Dr. Jennifer Lee, a gastroenterologist at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. Welcome, Dr. Lee. Dr. Jennifer Lee: Hello! Nice to be here. Host: Today we’re talking about treatment options for celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder in which patients suffer intestinal damage after eating gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye. There are currently no effective celiac disease treatments approved by the Food and Drug Administration, but a promising new drug is headed into phase two clinical trial. Dr. Lee, could you give us a brief overview of what celiac disease is and how it affects patients’ quality of life? Dr. Lee: Sure. Celiac disease is a disease process which falls under the spectrum of gluten-related disorders. It is something that we know a lot about. It’s a genetically-based disease. It happens to genetically susceptible individuals where upon intake of gluten, they can get a reaction. It’s an immune mediated reaction. And so, what we used to tell patients, was that they were allergic to gluten. So, as we delve a little bit deeper into the topic today we’ll see that there are other gluten-related disorders that result in symptoms even without the diagnosis of celiac disease. So, another one would be wheat allergy. And another one that is actually quite commonly talked about these days is non-celiac gluten sensitivity. But getting back to celiac disease, the patients can manifest in many different ways--It can be chronic diarrhea, it could be bloating, it can iron deficiency anemia. And so, it needs to be on our minds when we see patients with these possibly non-specific symptoms. Host: Why is the advancement of this drug, Nexvax2®, into phase two clinical trial exciting for the celiac community? Dr. Lee: So, it’s exciting and not. Right now, as you mentioned, there are no medications for celiac disease. We have a very good treatment for celiac disease and it’s dietary--we avoid gluten, and it works for the vast majority of our patients with celiac disease. But, the difficulty is inadvertent gluten intake. Sometimes there’s cross contamination if you’re eating out. It can be an issue, and so I think it would be nice to have some sort of medication that helps with that. It’s also important to remember, though, that this is a phase two trial, and so, again, the majority of drugs that go in to phase two trials actually don’t make it past phase two. So, while it is exciting, I think we have to keep in mind that the most important thing is gluten avoidance. Host: How is it that a disease as common and well-known as celiac disease has no effective treatments? Dr. Lee: I think it’s because it’s a complex disease. It’s a genetically based disease. However, not everybody who has the genetic predisposition gets celiac disease. It’s a very complex thing, and where you have the propensity, genetically, and then you have other factors, and we’re not entirely sure what all those factors are. And so, it’s difficult to pinpoint or target something exactly. The medication that’s in trial now, the target would be a genetic target but, we don’t know with 100 percent clarity what causes it. So, it’s hard to say. Host: How long would a person have to suffer symptoms before they go see a gastroenterologist for a possible celiac diagnosis? Dr. Lee: You know, I’ll be honest with you, I’ve seen the whole spectrum. I’ve seen patients who’ve had diarrhea for many months without a diagnosis and they come and we’ve made the diagnosis at that point. But I’ve also seen patients who don’t really know that they’re anemic and they have iron deficiency anemia and we find that on testing and we’ve been able to make a diagnosis that way. Host: What are some of the common and more uncommon symptoms of celiac disease? Dr. Lee: Within celiac disease, very commonly we’ll have chronic diarrhea, weight loss, joint pains, even headache, rashes. So, as you can see, some of them can be very non-specific. And the important thing to note here is even across the different gluten-related disorders, you can get these types of symptoms. For instance, non-celiac gluten sensitivity and celiac disease can both present with brain fog - that’s a very common complaint that you hear about. So, very important that patients with these symptoms see a gastroenterologist and nail down a diagnosis. Host: How can gastroenterologists help patients understand whether they have celiac disease or another gastrointestinal condition? Dr. Lee: There are significant differences in long-term health consequences, depending on what you are diagnosed with. It’s very important to be diagnosed with celiac disease because, down the road, you need to be monitored for certain things like autoimmune diseases, even certain cancers, down the line. Whereas non-celiac gluten sensitivity and even wheat allergy may not necessarily result in this same long-term sequelity. Host: If a person’s really struggling with these symptoms, what would you recommend as their first action to get care? Dr. Lee: To definitely come see a healthcare professional. Whether that be their primary care doctor or if they want to come straight to a gastroenterologist, that’s...you know, we are happy to see these patients. Diagnosis involves some blood testing, and, in most cases, an upper endoscopy, where we take samples of the small intestine to evaluate for any signs of inflammation. Host: Could you talk a little bit about your patient population? Dr. Lee: Absolutely yes. I would say, when we first started learning about celiac disease, you would think that it was a disease found only in Caucasians or those of European ancestry. But now we’ve learned that really it can be in any population, any race. And, to follow that, it’s in anybody of any age. It’s commonly diagnosed in childhood, but I have made plenty of diagnoses in adulthood. Host: What kind of damage do you see in your patients after years and years of symptoms? Dr. Lee: I think the most dramatic patient I’ve seen, and dramatic being that when I first met him, he was emaciated. I mean, he had lost so much weight. He showed me a picture of his driver’s license and how he was before his symptoms started - and they didn’t start until he was in his 40s. But he looked like a completely different person. The weight loss was very marked. And so, after making the diagnosis and after starting him on a gluten free diet, and seeing him in follow-up afterwards, it was like seeing a brand-new person. It was amazing. I still keep in touch with him, to this day, you know, there’s not much that I need to do for him now that he knows exactly what he can eat, what he can’t eat. He has appropriate follow-up. We check his vitamin levels once in a while. But, I think it’s just...it’s such a great feeling when you see that they have returned to, you know, their normal life. Yes, they need to change the way they eat but it’s possible to feel healthy and to feel like you can go out and have a normal life. There’s data to suggest that, in children, the thought of having celiac disease produces anxiety and reduces quality of life. And so, we know it is something that people think about and worry about so I think, you know, even in the quality of life aspect--eating out, being social--it’s rewarding to see that we can, you know, get someone to that point. Host: How is it that a disease that has genetic components can manifest so late in somebody’s life? Dr. Lee: There’s so much that we still don’t understand about celiac disease. We are not sure why, in one person, it would manifest in childhood and another it manifests in adulthood. Host: What do you say to people who say, “Oh, celiac disease is just a trend and it’s not real.” Dr. Lee: I think I just tell them what we know, based on the evidence that we have. What trials we’ve done. And I explain to them that there IS a spectrum of gluten related disorders - celiac disease, wheat allergy, non-celiac gluten sensitivity. And, you know, it can be a bit of a fad thing. I mean, right now we’re all hearing about a gluten free diet. I would say that many people who are on a gluten free diet don’t have a gluten related disorder. But there are a subset of people who don’t have celiac disease yet feel very poorly on a gluten containing diet. So, these would be the non-celiac gluten sensitivity patients. And, you know, it is a very poorly defined disease but yet, it’s there. There is some evidence to suggest that there may be a little bit of inflammation in these folks as well but we’re very early on in our research in that aspect. You know, all three of these conditions have overlapping features, which is why it can be confusing. So, with the fad diet - of a gluten free diet - it’s, I think, both a good and a bad thing. I love that it allows my celiac patients to have more possibilities, especially going out to eat. Many restaurants offer a gluten free diet now and I think that’s great because before, patients were stuck with very little to eat. They would have to cook at home, stick to maybe like a tiny little space within the grocery store where the gluten free stuff was. But now, you know, the possibilities are much more. However, having said that, because it is a bit of a fad, I think some people tend to maybe roll their eyes at it and say, ‘Oh well, you know, you don’t really have some allergy or sensitivity or whatever, you’re just following this fad diet.’ And so, the danger in that would be that maybe like a restaurant person would not take it as seriously and not take into account the cross contamination that’s possible. I mean, some people with celiac disease really just take that one exposure and they can, you know, throw them into their symptoms. So, it’s both a good and a bad thing. But, again, it’s important, you know, from patient to patient like, to know what it is that you have and what is potentially life threatening and what is not. I just want to bring up another point and that to test positive for celiac disease, you have to be on gluten at the time. So, you have to be eating gluten and so you’re therefore not feeling well, but you need to have that exposure in order for us to pick it up on our testing. Host: You mentioned that there are three main conditions. Could you give us a small recap of each of them? Dr. Lee: Sure. Well, there’s celiac disease and that, we’ve spoken about, it’s in genetically susceptible individuals. They have this proven inflammation in their small intestine resulting in a gamut of symptoms. There’s wheat allergy and that is your typical ‘quote/unquote’ food allergy where you, you know, can potentially get anaphylaxis to it. And then there’s non-celiac gluten sensitivity and that’s the very poorly defined one. But, again, there can be a lot of common symptoms. But, I think that, based on my patients, what I usually hear, is the abdominal pain, the fatigue, and the brain fog. Those are three of the very common ones for gluten sensitivity. Host: Are there any health benefits for going gluten free for people that don’t have a gluten sensitivity or celiac disease? Dr. Lee: That’s a good question and I think it’s going to be a bit of a complex answer. When people tend to take out gluten they do take out a lot of carbs and so, you know, limiting your carb intake can be healthy. But what are you replacing that with? Are you replacing it with, you know, a bread that you’re buying in the gluten free aisle, in which case, that’s actually a heavily processed food item. It can be very high in calories and so it makes a difference what you’re replacing that food with. One thing we do need to think about though is, are there any consequences of going on a gluten free diet. And the answer to that is potentially yes. We do have some studies showing that there can be nutrient or/and micronutrient and vitamin deficiencies, you know, even ten years down the road. And these are based on our celiac patients, but we think it’s due to them being on a gluten free diet for a long period of time. We’ve seen some data showing that patients who have been on a gluten free diet for a prolonged period of time are more obese than patients who have not been on a gluten free diet. And then not to mention the cost. You know, it’s very...it’s not cheap buying the foods from the gluten free section. Host: I’ve noticed that a lot in grocery stores, it seems like any kind of health product seems to be more expensive than the assumed not healthy product. Dr. Lee: And I think part of that is a little bit of marketing preying on consumers. If you’re in the shampoo aisle and you see a shampoo labeled gluten free and it’s three times the price of regular shampoo, people don’t necessarily know that. They just think that gluten is bad, and they may buy the shampoo that’s gluten free, but really that makes no difference. There was one small study suggesting that in adults who follow a gluten free diet, they may be at risk for cardiovascular complications because, the thought process was that they were consuming less whole wheat. But again, very early on in our research regarding this. You know, the most scientific way to go about it would be to remove gluten from your diet and then you’ll notice that you feel better. And when you reintroduce gluten, do it in a blinded fashion. Then introduce something that you may or may not know whether it has gluten or not and see how you feel. Maybe your friend knows, maybe your friend knows which bread is the, you know, gluten free bread and which one’s the regular bread. But, I think mostly, it’s how you feel - how you feel on it, how you feel off of it. Host: Thanks for joining us today, Dr. Lee. Dr. Lee: Oh, you’re very welcome. Thanks for having me. Conclusion: Thanks for listening to Medical Intel with MedStar Washington Hospital Center. Find more podcasts from our healthcare team by visiting medstarwashington.org/podcast or subscribing in iTunes or iHeartRadio.

March 22: Last Night at the Spur-Last Night for LeeThe decision has been made to fire Lee after tonight's gig. It's a sad but necessary thing. After some discussion, it is determined that it is Dave's turn to fire the drummer (John fired Bob, Kevin Fired Jesse). Dave has recently gone through some assertiveness training at work and feels this will be a nice “final exam” to his training. We all look forward to a band without Lee, but no one enjoys hurting Lee (well maybe John ha ha).The band sets up in record time. It's nice to be able to sit down for a full 45 minutes before we play. As usual, it's cold in the Spur, and Lee sits apart from the band. The first two sets are tight, and sounding good. This has one fan Geoff Rowlands greeting the band in between sets. It's Geoff's birthday and he came to the Tangled Spur because he knew we were going to be here. He is ON FIRE about the band. He has his picture taken with the band (a slight hint of irony as it will soon be outdated). He tells Dave how he came in a few weeks ago, and when he saw that we weren't there, he turned around and walked out. At one point Geoff takes a flyer and notices that Seth's name is missing (old flyer design was mistakenly given to the Spur). Upon filling in the missing blanks on the flyer, Geoff walks into the bathroom. While Geoff is still in listening distance Lee blurts out, “What a Freak!” (Nice!). That's right Lee, the one thing we don't want is people who REALLY THINK WE KICK ASS. Geoff hands Seth his address and wants to be put our mailing list (mental note to Dave - start mailing list).The drumming is all over the place. Lee stops the song Little Rock for the second week in a row in the wrong place. His playing has been taking a steady decline for the past few months regardless of any comments from the band (slow down - in slow songs). With this kind of playing, he's going to make tonight's dismissal easy.By the third set, the band's batteries start to go low. A few slip ups here and there. Dave goes into “la la” land during Ain't going Down ‘till the Sun Comes Up. Dave also gets distracted as Kris decides to dance with a scum bag. John draws a blank in My Maria. My Maria goes over very well at this bar (after kind of falling flat at Cappy's). John's wife Rhonda surprises us all as she jumps up on stage an sings back up on Mercury Blues. Erin Tippin's biggest fan is at the bar tonight so the band pulls Ain't Nothing Wrong with the Radio and Workin Man's Ph.D. out of their butt. The crowd is much more rock-oriented and wants to hear Sweet Home Alabama or any Lynard Skynard tunes. We probably should learn one frickin Skynard tune. We have groups of drunken men who are blitzed strutting their drunkenness on the dance floor. One guy actually performs the “Watermelon Crawl.” At the end of the evening, many people stop to tell us how good we are- cool.The band rips down in record time and gets back to the house. A dark cloud looms over the house.In the basement, the band distributes the $275 that they made at the Tangled Spur. The band has perched themselves on miscellaneous speakers and such. They all stare at the floor. It's time for Dave to fire Lee. A brief pause. Then Dave starts his speech. He wants to avoid any arguing. He doesn't want to hurt Lee (but knows this will). Rather than tell him he sucks, Dave decides to focus that he just doesn't “fit” in with the band's vision. When he open's his mouth, this is what comes out:Dave: “Well we do have some band news, to talk over here, and basically Lee it deals mainly with you.Um, the fact the you used to beat us here to practice... and that time is no more. (Lee nods in agreement).There was a time, in all honesty, that you knew songs better than Me and Kevin and John, who had been playing them for months, - that time is no more.Lee: “Uh, huh.”There was time when, uh, you know... your attitude ... you're ... you're a lot happier to be in this band than some of us were. And I don't know, lately it just doesn't seem that way... and then ...... it's like lately ..... the last couple of weeks... especially last week...I know you said that one thing to that one customer about you know, “You better get on your knees and pray for a fuckin' miracle if we're gonna learn a new song.” And yet you were the one that months ago I heard out of your mouth say... you know, that, “This is a business and we have to treat it like a business” ........so ........We thought about this a lot. We talked it over as a band, and you're a good drummer and you're gonna to fit, but basically, we just don't think we can move forward with, with your attitude - and not so much your attitude- your..your. just......... a difference of opinion on how to...to run the band and ...and..basically we want to basically divide up the drum set give you your cymbals and..and thank you for the time you've been here. Um,,,,,”Lee: “You give me my drum heads too then?”Dave: “Well the heads you basically wore out.”Lee: “Oh,”Dave: “I mean you're basically leaving the drum set the way you found it.. is how we want to do that.”Lee: “Whatever.”Dave: “Um...You know it's like I said,...your..your just the.. the direction we want to go, we just don't think that's where you want to go...from your actions and things like that...so...........with that .....(long pause).....”Lee: “So in other words, I'm terminated.”Dave: “Pretty much, yeah.”Lee: “All right, well...”It turns out that Lee has the band's cymbals at his house. While we had hoped to make this the last interaction with Lee, there will be one more. A swapping of equipment. This will happen this week sometime.Lee goes upstairs. A silence fills the air. The four remaining members stare at each other. It's over.The band is slightly puzzled at the lack of fight. It made things easy. Lee didn't offer one - not one- excuse, plead, anything. He uttered the typical drummer response to getting fired: “Whatever.”January 15, 1996:Kevin explains how it's not due to a lack of talent, but just a difference of opinion in how the band should sound. Jesse responds with, “Whatever. Do what you want.”Upstairs the band discusses the actions taken with Maria and Kris. Dave had recorded the firing (again the assertiveness training) and thought if it went bad he could use it as a learning tool. We all feel bad. More for the fact that Lee is kind of used to being fired (he's gone through a quite a few jobs during his stay). The band tries to make themselves feel better by reminding it was Lee's actions that he CHOSE to do, (repeatedly) that lead us to fire him. The lack of rebellion in his response leads everyone to believe that he really didn't want to be in this band.We recall some of his biggest blunders (again possibly trying to make ourselves feel better). We talk about the fact that Ron (the awesome drummer from a few weeks back) has turned us down. He has given us a number of a high school student (NOT!). Dave will be in touch with Jack Beam this week. Kevin will be getting a number for the drummer of the band “Little Country” who has recently quit. We have a few leads, so we're not too worried. We know in the long run, this will be for the best. With a glimpse of Ron, we also know how much better we can become.We're all glad to have a break. This will give us a chance to rework the song list. Scout the competition and bars, and get ready for our next move. Our next gig is May 31 for some outdoor festival. We will also have to start planning for Kevin's departure later this Summer.March 25: Jack Beam Comes to JamJack comes over to audition for a temporary position. His attitude is awesome, as is his playing. He is just a talented as Ron. With Jack's position being “I want to be temporary” it makes no real sense for him to join at this point. We still have time to find a drummer. It's too bad he couldn't join for real.The band has to put out an extra 22 bucks for drum gear (Sticks and a high hat clutch) to replace the stuff the Lee “forgot” to leave behind.Later in the week ,Lee calls Kevin to again stress how he wants his heads back. Kevin tells him to call John. John basically says that Lee STOLE our clutch, and that we will call it even. This should be the last we hear of Lee.

Lee is internationally known for his methods and approaches to saving marriages. For over 25 years, he has been helping people around the world to save, restore, and create the relationships they desire and deserve. He is the author of the book, How To Save Your Marriage In 3 Simple Steps, and creator of the Save The Marriage System, as well as numerous other resources. Lee also has a podcast - The Save the Marriage Podcast, which is one of my favorite podcasts on marriage/relationships. In today’s show, we talk about fertility challenges, and how they can impact a relationship, why some couples don’t survive fertility challenges, and what you can do to strengthen your relationship so fertility challenges don’t destroy your relationship if you’re faced with them. Topics discussed in today's episode When couples are struggling, is it usually a communication issue or a lack of connection? The 3Cs of saving your relationship/marriage: connection, change & create a new path How does infertility impact a relationship? Is it possible to compromise on having children? What is the difference between couples who survive infertility and couples who don't? Do men and women deal with infertility differently? The grief associated with infertility, and how it can be expressed in different ways by different people The impact that sex on demand or sex for a purpose can have on a couple The 5 Love Languages When is it time to call it quits? Connect with Lee You can connect with Lee on his website, listen to his podcast on iTunes and on Facebook & Twitter Resources mentioned Save the Marriage | Dr. Lee Baucom Save the Marriage Blog | Dr. Lee Baucom Save the Marriage Podcast | Dr. Lee Baucom Thriveology | Dr. Lee Baucom FFP 074 | Resurrection Year | Maintaining Hope Through Infertility | Sheridan Voysey Join the community! Find us on the Fertility Friday Facebook Fan Page Subscribe to the Fertility Friday Podcast on iTunes! Music Credit: Intro/Outro music Produced by Sirc of (The Nock)

On this episode, Lee Harrington returns from Rope Camp and share about Jute rope (and really understanding different ropes); on what do we need, and do we really need it; about being authentic; and about our tribe. And much more.    Got a question or comment for Lee? You can "Ask Lee" at Lee@passionandsoul.com And you can find all things Lee Harrington at passionandsoul.com Comments? Suggestions? Questions? Contact the EA Podcast at dananddawn@eroticawakening.comRead the EA blog right here (http://www.eroticawakening.com)Visit our discussion group in Fetlife (fetlife account required)Give us a call and leave us a voicemail at 206-309-0054

Lee Harrington is joined this week by Mollena Williams and Dan & dawn as he leads a discussion on consent. They range in topic from how to say no, how to say yes, negotiation, the Consent Project, safe words and linguistics. Lee and Mollena also share some very personal examples where consent was not respected.  Plus, bathhouses, sneaky penis and a bucket of worms.  Got a question or comment for Lee? You can "Ask Lee" at Lee@passionandsoul.com And you can find all things Lee Harrington at passionandsoul.com Comments? Suggestions? Questions? Contact the EA Podcast at dananddawn@eroticawakening.comRead the EA blog right here (http://www.eroticawakening.com)Visit our discussion group in Fetlife (fetlife account required)Give us a call and leave us a voicemail at 206-309-0054

On this weeks show, Lee Harrington shares about rope! Rope authenticity, rope bliss...and not letting the idiots and one true way folks get you down. Plus, stacks of funny and personal learning stories from the bondage journey of the author of "Shibari You Can Use".  Music on today’s episode is from the album Torrent by Pocket Universe Got a question or comment for Lee? You can "Ask Lee" at Lee@passionandsoul.com And you can find all things Lee Harrington at passionandsoul.com Comments? Suggestions? Questions? Contact the EA Podcast at dananddawn@eroticawakening.comRead the EA blog right here (http://www.eroticawakening.com)Visit our discussion group in Fetlife (fetlife account required)Give us a call and leave us a voicemail at 206-309-0054

This week, Lee is joined by Aiden Fyre to discuss their path toward the sacred path to Mastery and Slavery, sharing their journey together and how they got there. They share about their own recent commitment & ownership ceremony, their paths in faith, definitions for M/s, D/s, and Topping & Bottoming, and far more.You can find out more about Aiden at AidenFyre.com.  Music on today’s episode is the song Joie De Vivre from the album Yami Kallima by Pocket Universe Got a question or comment for Lee? You can "Ask Lee" at Lee@passionandsoul.com And you can find all things Lee Harrington at passionandsoul.com Comments? Suggestions? Questions? Contact the EA Podcast at dananddawn@eroticawakening.comRead the EA blog right here (http://www.eroticawakening.com)Visit our discussion group in Fetlife (fetlife account required)Give us a call and leave us a voicemail at 206-309-0054

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Asra Rasheed CEO, RRKidz Date: October 25, 2010 NCWIT Entrepreneurial Heroes [music] Lucy Sanders: Hi this is Lucy Sanders, the CEO of the National Center for Women in Information Technology or NCWIT. And this is another in a series of interviews that we're doing with women who have started IT companies. Just really fabulous entrepreneurs with lots and lots of great advice for people who are thinking about becoming entrepreneurs. With me is Larry Nelson from W3W3, hi Larry. Larry Nelson: I'm so happy to be here, this is a great series. Lucy: Well and W3W3 is a great partner and their podcasts are hosted on the NCWIT site as well as the W3W3 site. Also Lee Kennedy, serial entrepreneur and CEO and founder of Bolder Search, she's also an NCWIT Director. Welcome, Lee. Lee Kennedy: Thank you. It's great to be here. Larry: Yeah. Lucy: Well, so we've got a person that we're interviewing today that really likes to play and game around. OK. I mean this is great. I think we're going to have a fun time with her, her name is Asra Rasheed and she's the CEO of RRKidz. And RRKidz develops and publishes engaging and interactive content for today's digital kids. And she really has had a very accomplished career as an entrepreneur and you'd say this, she's a serial entrepreneur like you are, Lee, very successful. And she loves gaming. She's actively been engaged with the women in Gaming International, something that is near and dear to NCWIT's heart. So Asra, welcome. Asra Rasheed: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me today, it's a real pleasure to be here. Lucy: Well so tell us just a bit about RRKidz and what's going on, what's the latest. Asra: So RRKidz basically is a division of Burton-Wolfe Entertainment and Burton-Wolfe Entertainment was formed LeVar Burton. Some of you may know him from Star Trek, Jordie, and of course from Reading Rainbow. And Mark Wolfe is a producer who also worked on Terminator Three. So the two of them came together and they really thought that there was a need in the market for good quality fun learning experiences for kids and that's when they decided to launch RRKidz, January of this year. And I came on board as CEO of their company in April and RRKidz basically represents today's digital kids. We have an opportunity to educate this generation and future generations but what we see happening is that children now are spending less time in front of the television set and more time in front of devices such as their iPhone, online, and even their iPads believe it or not. So we're very excited to be able to bring explorative learning experience for kids but also more important, we want this to be the right place for parents and educators as well. Lucy: Well that sounds pretty exciting and maybe you'll be able to get William Shatner away from, what was it, Priceline? [laughter] Asra: Yes. Larry: And I interviewed Leonard Nemoy about three weeks ago, so. Lucy: Oh my gosh. Asra: Wonderful. Lucy: We're a Star Trek kind of crowd. Well Asra tell us a little bit about how you first got into technology. Asra: I have always had this fascination with technology. I'm a very creative entrepreneur. I love sort of drawing things and sketching things out and I became very fascinated with technology back in let's say 1999, 2000, when websites were sort of becoming the big thing. And I started exploring that market and I noticed there was a really big opportunity for companies, smaller companies and mid-size companies to sort of take advantage of the online space and they just really didn't know how to adopt the platform. And so I found that to be the sort of opportunity where I could help them design what they wanted to do but also bring in technology and tie the two together. And so in 2000, you know it was interesting, everyone was saying, "You have to be online, " and "Oh I just got this great website and I spent about fifty thousand dollars for it, " and I said, "Wow, you know that's an awful lot to be online." And what I did was I tapped into my resources offshore and created a development team which allowed us to bring costs down on developing websites. And so that was sort of my first entry into technology, certainly a learning experience for me. Lucy: Absolutely. Tapping into offshore development resources back then well, that was just starting to happen. Lee: And it certainly leads into our next question about being an entrepreneur and why you like being an entrepreneur. Because definitely tapping into offshore resources is pretty entrepreneurial. Asra: That's a good question. So, I always go back to saying that my entrepreneur spirit comes from my parents. Ever since we were kids, we all grow up in this home where both my mom and dad started their own companies and they're first generation immigrants here to the US. And I really admire them for what they did. They came here. They're educated here and they started two companies which were both very, very successful. So, my father would actually take me to his office every summer and I would have to sit there and take note on everything he did. He had a factory back then and that factory was based in Taiwan. So, that was sort of my first kind of exposure to offshore resources. I had a chance to get on to the assembly line, he manufactured for us lighting fixtures of all things. And even back then, I was trying to figure out how you could make that more exciting than just it being a light bulb. So, that was sort of my first entrepreneurial offshore experience. But in general, my mom as well, she started a company. She manufactured sil plants. She created silk flower arrangements and sold them to Price Club back then. So, I've always been surrounded by people who have been very entrepreneurial and they've also been risk takers which is sort of one of the things that you need to be when you are an entrepreneur. Lee: That is pretty interesting they're both sort of manufacturing companies. I'm just as a side note in Washington this week and there's a big discussion going on about building manufacturing capability again in this country really, really a big discussion. So, that is coming back around. Larry: Now, you mentioned your parents and the major influence that they have on you. Were there other people in your life that were very supportive and mentors along the way? Asra: Yeah, I have been very blessed to have such wonderful mentors along the way. It's been such an honor to work with some of the most successful people in my industry. And yes, I have several mentors. I actually have a group of mentors who I turn to anytime I have to make sort of a big decision professionally. One of them has been my old CEO at one of my companies. I Gotta Play, who has been my mentors for the last eight years and he has taught me so much of who I am today. And then of course, I've got different mentors. I think it is really important to have mentors who bring strengths in different areas. You developed that personal relationship over time. And you need to feel comfortable with them because you really need to be able to tap in to them when you are making decisions. And they shaped away I think. So, yeah, I've been very fortunate to be able to go to those mentors whether it is in technology, whether it is in production, whether I need help with and investment opportunity. I have a great sort of foundation, a platform of mentors that I love to access. Lee: I'm curious about you have a great set of mentors and you turn to them for advice. And I am just curious how you taken what you've learned from them and factored it in to how you mentor others today. Asra: Recently I have been mentor to a lot of women and women in games. And it's been quite satisfying, very fulfilling to me. I think what I have learned from my mentors is that I try to pass along is I want to be a good listener and I want to be able to be there. If they're good, challenging times. As an entrepreneur, we all know that we have our set of challenging moments and there are times where you need to be able to call upon your mentor and sort of say, hey, I'm going through this and it is frustrated and need your advice and direction on it. Something that I learned from my mentor is early on I was able to pick up the phone and be able to talk to them and discuss whether it is an opportunity or challenge, they were a little bit... I think the other thing off of that is you really need to be very transparent at your mentors. They are your friends to guide and you should be able to go to them with sort of anything that you'd like to talk to them about. That's important. A lot of times, anyone of these things that I learned was I was always fearful of sharing too much and I think that you should be open and be able to share whatever you can because that is where your goal is the most benefit. So their advice is their help. Lee: That's a really good point because sometimes the thing we're fearful of is the thing we need to figure out. You had just mentioned there were a number of tough things you had to do and some of them, you went to your mentors, what do you think has been the toughest thing you've had to do in your career? Asra: There has been some challenging moments in my career and I would say by far, you know, one of the things of an entrepreneur, you start of with this idea. And that idea comes from you questioning sort of, "What if this worked like that?" or "What if there was this?" And then that builds into an idea and then you say, "Well, you know, there's an opportunity here for me in terms of space." I do know one of the challenging thing for me has been a lot of times, you all start this as your baby and many times, you're just fearful of changing or shifting direction. And there are times that you just have to in order for your business to succeed. So you know, my biggest advice to entrepreneurs is, you have to know when it's time to make a change and there are some tough times out there. So, if there times where you have to downsize as much as you don't want to. I remember, there was a time, I had to downsize my staff at I Gotta Play and I would say that was the toughest thing for me to do. And more recently, I think you just need to be able to know when it's time to make a shift in your strategy, in your direction. I think a lot of time what happens is entrepreneurs will sort of hold on to what they started, and often times, that may not scale. You need to know when to make a change. So those are the challenging experiences and of course I've learned from them. Larry: Let me ask you a different kind of question. You've been a mentor, a mentee and a mentor, but in addition to that, if right now, if you're sitting across the table with someone who's exploring the possibility of becoming an entrepreneur, what advice would you give them? Asra: I would say to them, to be committed to what you're doing and be passionate about what you have embarked on. Those are the two things that are absolutely required of an entrepreneur, commitment and passion. You have to have to drive to get to the challenges, to benefit what the success that this will bring you. Not all days will be good. And the other thing that I would advise would be, you know, a lot of times I speak with entrepreneurs and they have this great idea that I would say, before you embark on the start up do your research, do your homework, make sure there is a clear market opportunity. I would also strategize, build out a road map, you need to be able to sort of sustain yourself through this time because it can be challenging but so rewarding. So, that's the advice that I would give, and be passionate about what you do. Really it's not just about the money, that will come, but really be passionate about what you're doing. Lee: You're clearly very wise in the advice that you give. Just curious, if you could tell us, other personal characteristics of yours that you may give you advantages as an entrepreneur. Asra: For personal characteristics, I would say that I am very driven. I would also say that as an entrepreneur and more so as a leader, you have to be balanced and that's very important. So particularly, when you're dealing with other people, you need to be able to articulate yourself very well, be able to communicate your message and it really is all about relationships. I think one of my personal characteristics is I have been able to build relationships, build a network. That network that you build is so valuable, and I always say that you can know everyone out there in your industry but unless and until you make use of your network, you're not leveraging it. And I think that's one of the things that has helped me as an entrepreneur greatly. Lucy: Well, one of the things we're always curious about being an entrepreneur, usually is a pretty crazy life in general and how do you find balance, how do you bring balance between your personal and professional life? Asra: You have to find time for yourself and that's one thing that I learned very quickly as an entrepreneur was I found myself in front my computer all the time, I found myself working all the time and at some point, you burn out. You do get burned out and that's when I realized that I needed to make a shift in my lifestyle and I needed to make a more conscious effort about balancing my life. So for other things that I enjoy doing. I enjoy doing activities outdoor. That helps me sort of stay away from all of my electronic devices and that's difficult to do in this day and age. I really make a conscious effort to spend time with my family. That's important. It is tough to bring balance as an entrepreneur. It is a challenge and you have to prioritize what is important to you and it is interesting. You want to be the best in everything you do. You want to be the best as far as family is concerned. You want to be the best Chief Executive Officer and just know that it's OK to not make it to every single event that your child is at. And I would say that I struggled with that at the beginning and then I said, OK. I'm going to take a step back and I am going to prioritize and try to balance sort of everything that is going on. OK, I'll put my family provides a lot of balance in my life. Lucy: Well, so you are in a new position now, CEO of RRKidz. You really have achieved a lot. This is a bit of an odd question for someone who is in a new CEO position but let's just see if you have any thoughts about what's next for you or if the RRKidz position is going to be enough for a while. Asra: Well, certainly the RRKidz position is going to be enough for quite some time. I am really excited about RRKidz. It is an opportunity for me to do something that I've been very passionate about which is taking technology today and applying good content, trying those together and delivering it to kids. So, I am extremely excited about the future with regards to RRKidz. Yeah, I do see myself being a mentor. That is something that has been very obviously satisfying and fulfilling. I also enjoy advising a lot of different companies and I see that in my future. The reason why I enjoyed it so much I once was working with start up launch entrepreneurs and having been able, having the opportunity to see all the different things that people are doing. There is so much going on out there and it's really just fascinating to me to see how many people sort of recognize these different market opportunities and then embarked on a start up. I would love to sort of become an adviser. I don't know when that is going to happen but certainly not right now as what I have at RRKidz. Lucy: Well, I have... I'm sure our listeners are going to be interested in the answer to this final question which is I am just tackling on. It is not on the list but I am going to ask it anyway. Give us a little bit about the women in games international work that you are involved with. What does the group do and what is on their horizon? Asra: Sure, so women in games have been around for several years. The game industry is predominantly, it has been men and it is an area when I started my game company which was an online video game rental service. I started it back in 2002. And I was probably one of maybe a handful of women in the industry and it's very, very intimidating. It has changed and it continuous to change was that the entry of casual games and social games. We see more women entering into the space. We see more women becoming readers and executives. And we as women in games are sure to represent those women and we are here to advocate the inclusion of women in the game industry. That is something women in games as an organization that has been something very near and dear to me because I will tell you that in my years in the game industry it was quite challenging to be a woman in a minority. So, that is sort of what we are doing with women in games. The organization has been growing. There are more women that reach out to us every single day asking how they can get involve. We have chapters across United States and in Canada. So, we are very excited about the future of women in games and really just being the stage for women to be recognized for all of the contributions they've made to the industry. Lucy: Awesome. Larry: Yeah, great. Lucy: Thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate your taking time away from your busy schedule to talk to us today. And I want to remind or listeners that they can find this podcast at w3w3.com and NCWIT.org. Larry: And download it 24/7. Asra: Thank you. Larry: Thank you. Lucy: Bye. [music] Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Asra RasheedInterview Summary: Asra Rasheed describes herself as a very "creative entrepreneur ... I like to draw and sketch things out." As the daughter of two entrepreneurial parents, she credits her success to her upbringing and being surrounded by people willing to take risks. Release Date: October 25, 2010Interview Subject: Asra RasheedInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry Nelson, Lee KennedyDuration: 19:55

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Candace Fleming CEO and Co-founder, Crimson Hexagon Date: April 19, 2010 Entrepreneurial Heroes Interview with Candace Fleming [music] Lee: Hi, this is Lee Kennedy. I am a board member for the National Center for Women and Information Technology, or NCWIT, and I'm also the CEO of Boulder Search. This is part of a series of interviews that we are having with fabulous entrepreneurs, they are women who have started IT companies in a variety of sectors, all of whom have just fabulous stories to tell us about being entrepreneurs, and with me today is Larry Nelson from W3W3. Hey Larry. Larry Nelson: I'm very happy to be here, and this is a wonderful so reason and you make sure you pass these interviews along to others that you know would be interested and they can give it here at NCWIT.org or W3W3.com. Lee: Great, and I also have Lucy Sanders, who is the CEO of NCWIT. Hi Lucy. Lucy Sanders: Hello. Lee: Great to have you. Well, and just to get right to it, we are interviewing Candace Fleming. Candace is the CEO and co-founder of Crimson Hexagon. Crimson Hexagon's technology analyzes the vast social Internet, so blog posts, forum messages, tweets et cetera, and it's done by identifying statistical patterns in the words used to express opinions on different topics. And the product is called Foxtrot, and it helps you to develop your listening approach to many different Internet channels. So without further ado, I would love to introduce Candace, and have her tell us a little bit about her background and experience. Candace, welcome. Candace Fleming: Thank you, it is great to be here, I am excited about this opportunity to share. Lee: Well, if you could tell us just little bit about Crimson Hexagon, that would be great. Candace: At a very high level, what Crimson Hexagon does is, we have technology that goes out and find millions and millions of blogs and forums and tweets, product reviews and things that are probably available on Facebook, and reads them all everyday and can summarize opinions that are being expressed. So in some ways it's a little bit like an automatic opinion poll, but you are not actually asking a poll question because you are really just harvesting values from conversations that are already happening. Lee: Wow. Candace: And we are a 15% company based here in Boston. Lee: So basically, you have got bots or robots that go out and hit all of these different social sites and pull back the data and then analyze it, is that kind of a nutshell for our novice technology listeners? [laughter] Candace: It is that idea where we get data from lot of different sources, we license some data streams, we also do our own call link, but it is not so much the data collection that is special about what we do, it is really in the content analysis of what we do. So if you imagine, I think a lot of your listeners are familiar with Google Alert, were you can very efficiently and very quickly use keywords, and every day multiple times a day, you will get an email in your in-box with the links to mention of those words. But the problem is, when you start to build a large brand or you have a large company, there are so many mentions that it is nearly impossible to stay on top of them. We end up speaking with marketers and brand managers or PR agencies who sit down with a list of 30,000 links and they say, "How do I make meaning out of all this?" So our technology really allows you... It quantifies for you in that list of 30,000 links, what percentage of people are saying they like a specific feature of your product or what percent of people are saying they actually like your competitor's product better or really getting down to the opinions of what's being said. Lee: So we could use it to figure out what people are saying about Larry. Larry: Uh oh. Candace: Exactly. That's right. Larry: That's a different dinner gig. Lee: I'm liking this more and more. Candace: The only limitation is that people have to actually be talking about the topic. Lee: Oh don't worry, we've got plenty of info, don't worry. Lucy: So Candace, back to you. We'd love to hear about how you first got into technology. Candace: Ever since I was little, I have been noticing how technology improves our lives every day. My dad was an electrical engineering professor, and so we were always talking about science and technology and new innovations and seeing how the world progressed. And so, I've been thinking about it from a very early age, and went on to get an engineering degree in college and have always done work in my professional career around technology and algorithms and the application of technology. Larry: Oh. Lucy: So as a little add on, what technologies do you think are cool today? Candace: Well, of course our technology. Lee: Of course, you want a list. Candace: I could be honest, that I'm very biased about that. Actually I think there are a couple of things, I think there are some really neat consumer electronics coming out like they talk about 3-D TV or the Nexus One phone. But even maybe a little bit less mainstream, I heard about a technology that a Harvard biologist named Pete Gergen developed in microbial fuel cells, and it sounds like a lot of big words, but essentially what he's developed is a way to harness energy as microbes that decompose organic matter. And what that means is you can basically take a bucket of trash, stick one of his apparati into it and have light, or have enough to charge a cell phone. Stuff like that, if you think about the implications of that for third world countries or differences parts of our lives, I think it's incredible. So there's a lot of good stuff laying around. Larry: Yeah. Wow. I'm ordering one of each. Candace, let me ask this. What is it about being an entrepreneur that turns you on? Talk about that. Candace: I think for me it was all about this particular opportunity. I didn't set out to one day start a company of my own necessarily, and so in this instance I saw a huge opportunity that was so exciting that I wanted to literally drop everything and get this off the ground. I think in general, nothing is more exciting for me than pulling together a team and seeing what we can collectively accomplish. And I think in small companies, you really can see the impact of that. Where I walk into our conference room for a team meeting, and a year and a half ago these people didn't even know each other, and now they're doing things for big brands and big name companies, and really doing things that even the people on their team never knew they could accomplish. Lee: Well and forming those teams and forming something from nothing is really an exciting part of entrepreneurship. Now Candace, you mentioned that your father from a very early age was talking about technology, talking about engineering, and we find that that's very typical, especially for women. That their father or mother played a role in their early sort of sense of technology. Can you tell us a bit more about who else influenced or supported you in your career paths, or role models or mentors? Candace: So I would have to say that number one on that list is actually my husband. Lee: Yay husbands! Lucy: Yay! Candace: His name is Lee Fleming. And you know I was at a breakfast on Friday and there was a female entrepreneur who said, "Well you know, everyone knows the saying 'Behind every good man is a good woman,'" and I say the exact opposite is true as well, especially as it applies to start-ups. Behind every entrepreneur, especially if it's one who is a family, there's got to be a supportive spouse there." And so I think my husband wanted me to do this even more than I did. And so even before day one, when I heard about this opportunity, he's been helping me every step of the way. Quite literally, because he happens to be a professor at Harvard Business School, and he teaches a class on commercializing technologies and innovations, so I get some good coaching over the dinner table. Lucy: That's pretty handy! Candace: Very handy! Other than my parents, of course, who have been so supportive along the way, my co-founder, actually, who is also a professor at Harvard, his name is Gary King. He's the one who invented the algorithms that we've commercialized. So, from day one, he has said, "I think you're the one who should grow this company, I think you can make this happen and I want to work with you to do this." So having someone who believes in you so completely, and stands by you every step of the way, and is so fantastic to work with is a great gift. Lucy: That is really exciting. Lee: I downloaded his paper to read. Candace: Did you read it? Lee: Not yet, it was a little long for me, but I downloaded it for plane reading. Lucy: We just had interviewed somebody about advisory boards, and I'm thinking you've got these great built-in advisory boards. So to switch topics just a smidge from all these wonderful things, what's the toughest thing you've had to do in your career? Candace: It's actually what I'm doing now, but more specifically, starting and growing a successful company. Basically, in 2008 which is when we had the worst economic meltdown since the Depression, is by far the hardest thing that I've ever had to do. Or, at least chosen to do. But, as I'm sitting here, we just finished putting together our financial plan for the year, and I think it's going to be a great year. I feel like we've made it through and we have a lot of momentum. But, the economy has not been necessarily the friend of any entrepreneur, I think, in the last 18 to 24 months. Lee: You're right. Lucy: That's the truth. Lee: It hasn't been good to anyone. Larry: Yeah, well, boy, that's an interesting lead-in to the question I'm going to ask, and that is: If you were sitting down right now with an entrepreneur and you were going to give them some advice, what advice would you give them today? Candace: That's a great question. I would say maybe three things. First, and I mean this both perhaps literally and figuratively, eat your broccoli. Eat your broccoli because it's good for you, and it will make you healthy. But, figuratively, I mean being an entrepreneur, there are a lot of things that you need to do that are good for you even though you may not want to do them. They're good for the company, they're good for your own personal growth, and so I would say don't shy away from those things. The second thing, also I mean both literally and figuratively is to play team sports. I think, literally, go out there and play volleyball and basketball, soccer, because I think playing in a team is actually very much like working in a small company. You have the same small team environment, you need to give and take and you have rules in a company just like you do on a sports team. Learning about leadership and teamwork, I think sports is an incredible way to learn that. And then the last thing is again, both figuratively and literally, put things to bed earlier than you want to. [laughter] By that, I mean definitely get more sleep than you want to get, but metaphorically, don't set perfection as the bar for everything. I think that in many, many cases good is enough. And if I had learned earlier, I think I would have saved myself a lot of time and stress. Lucy: Well, so, my next question is about the characteristics that make you a great entrepreneur. What we just saw in that last answer was one of them is wisdom. [laughter] Lucy: So, perhaps you can, other things that come to your mind when you think about yourself and entrepreneurship. Those characteristics that you think give you an edge. Candace: I think that I'm an optimist. I think entrepreneurs have to be willing to look reality in the face and convince themselves to see the rosy side of it, perhaps. [laughs] You need to say you can be so focused and drive for something even though there are going to be a lot of obstacles in your way. The second thing is I'm not scared of hard work. That's something that I think is crucial to being able to get a company off the ground. I think the last thing is I'm fairly direct and honest. I think when you're working in a small company environment, there's - somewhat thankfully from my perspective - there's not as much politics. You sit in a room with people, you decide things and you get things done. There's not ten layers of approvals. So, I think being straightforward with people and being honest with people really carries you a long way in being successful, particularly in a small group. Lucy: I have to agree with all of the above. When you have that small group, you just have to be really direct and honest. Candace: Limit to cycles. Lucy: Yeah. Candace: That's it. Lucy: It really does. So, Candace, one of our favorite questions is with building start-ups and being an entrepreneur, as you'd mentioned earlier, it's a ton of work. So, how do you bring balance into your personal and professional life? Candace: Yeah, I think this is a great question. As I thought about this, I have, perhaps, an ironic take on this. And, that is I view my family as an enabler of my professional success. I think that I have a fantastic husband, I mentioned earlier. I have two little kids. I have a two-year-old and a six-year-old. I actually started Crimson Hexagon when my two-year-old was two weeks. Lucy: Oh, my goodness! Lee: Oh, my God! Candace: There is no better way to give you perspective back in life than when you come home from a hard day of work and you get tackle-hugged by these two little people before you can even put your briefcase down. [laughs] So, I actually think that, by having a family, it allows me to be successful at work. Because I work just as hard as the next person and just as many hours. But, I think the trick is, even if it's 15 minutes that you sit down and talk with them in a day, you make that time. And, that time gets paid back to you in a thousand different ways that help you in the rest of your life. So, I just think you have to make sure that you spend time on each, even if the time is very little. But, mentally, it's what keeps me balanced. Lucy: Absolutely the case. Those are great ages for kids, just great, full of energy. So, Candace, you've already achieved a lot. What's next for you? Candace: I have achieved some good things, but I don't view myself as being done here. [laughs] I plan to continue running and growing small companies. I think that what we're doing here at Crimson Hexagon is so exciting. This type of activity is something I want to do for a long, long time. Lucy: Crimson Hexagon is exciting. That is just a cool company. And, I feel like I want to make a plug for a Boulder-based company that's one of your partners. Because we have a lot of Boulder listeners here. Room 214 is a partner of Crimson Hexagon. So, we're just excited about that. If you come out here to Boulder, you need to stop by. It would be great to have you. Thank you so much, Candace. We all appreciate your time. I want to remind listeners where they can find this interview. Larry: At W3W3.com as well as NCWIT.org. Lucy: All right. Thank you very much, Candace. We appreciate it. Lee: Yes. Candace: Thank you. Larry: Bye-bye. [music] Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Candace FlemingInterview Summary: Data is abundant on the web, and information is free. But meaning is what matters, and uncovering it requires a good deal more than counting keyword mentions across the social web. Crimson Hexagon's technology – based on groundbreaking work conducted at Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science – distills meaning about brands, products, services, markets and competitors from the online conversation. Release Date: April 19, 2010Interview Subject: Candace FlemingInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry Nelson, Lee KennedyDuration: 16:28

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Lee Kennedy CEO and Co-Founder, Tricalyx, Inc. Date: September 17, 2008 Lee Kennedy: TriCalyx [music] Larry Nelson: This is Larry Nelson with w3w3.com, Colorado's voice of the technology community. We link people's organization to unique and valuable resources. And we are at a very valuable resource today. We're here at the National Center for Woman and Information Technology, NCWIT, and of course we've got the boss here, Lucy Sanders. Lucy Sanders: Hi, Larry. Welcome. Larry: And you've got a very special interesting guest. Lucy: That's right. Lee Kennedy, welcome. Lee Kennedy: Thank you. Lucy: CEO of TriCalyx and serial entrepreneur at that, but here's what we like also about Lee, she's also on the NCWIT Board of Directors and gives that a lot of her personal time and woman in IT entrepreneurship, so extremely excited to be interviewing you today. Larry: And I'm sure everybody knows, Lucy you are the CEO of NCWIT. Lucy: I guess that's right. On any given day. Larry: On any given day. Lucy: On any given day. Larry: You've got a great team here too. Wonderful board and the things that you do are just absolutely phenomenal. I'm just happy to be a tiny part of it. Lee: Me too. Lucy: Well, thank you. Larry: Lee, just give us a little overview about what your company does and what it is. Lee: TriCalyx is a company that helps people grow their business online on the web. So we do everything from software development, building people web applications, online marketing, search engine optimization, anything to help them grow their business. Larry: Search engine optimization is becoming more and more popular. Is that something you feel is just an extra add-on or is it pretty essential? Lee: I think it's part of your basic marketing. If your product and your company can't be found on the web, you're at a real disadvantage from your competition. Lucy: What do you think about some of the social networking software? How are you seeing that working into how people want to grow their business on the web? Lee: That's a great question, Lucy, because a lot of companies are trying to figure out how they can grow their business doing advertising or being present on social networks. And it's still in that early phase where there's not a clear path on how to do that. Lucy: Well, it's a popular topic for sure. Larry: That's for sure. Lee: It is popular because there's millions and millions of people that spend time on Facebook and all the other social networks, but for the most part, most of those people are there to talk to their friends, and not look at advertisements. Larry: Now, Lee, you've got a very interesting background. You've been CIO for WebRoot Software. I know you've done a bunch of work with Brad Feld and some of his troops. What made you then really want to become an entrepreneur? Lee: Yeah, it really starts back as early as being an early girl. My dad was an insurance agent and I remember going around the neighborhood selling these little first-aid kits that he had. [laughter] Lee: I can't even remember why I was doing it, but I just loved getting out and starting businesses. I would even go to the local Salvation Army and bargain with them with their prices for things. Lucy: Get out of here! [laughter] Lee: I'm not kidding you. Lucy: So, it sounds like the sales part of this was intriguing. The marketing piece? Lee: I've always loved the sales and marketing and then my background is technology, which I loved because I just found it where there was always so many puzzles to solve. Lucy: It sounds like your parents had something to do with indirectly with starting you on this entrepreneurial path. Who else has influenced you? Lee: Well, I don't know if it was -- who influenced me to be an entrepreneurial, but my sister was definitely a bit influence on my life. She's 12-and-a-half years older and has always been the most fabulous person I've ever known, just can do anything, is smart, never let's anything daunt her on her path. Larry: Now would you consider her a role model or a mentor? Lee: She was a role model because I always saw her go after whatever she wanted and achieve it. Lucy: You were at WebRoot in the early days. What did you learn there as an entrepreneurial? Because that's been a success story. Lee: Yeah, I've been at a number of other successful startups before WebRoot, so I felt like a learned a lot at those companies, but the thing that was probably the most interesting at WebRoot was, when I came into WebRoot we were a small 20-person company, just a few million in revenue. But the market of spyware and anti-spyware was just about to boom, and I think all the experience I had told me it was like, "This market was hot and we have to go for it." And so, once I was hired, they had me build an enterprise division, it was our number one goal to get that product out there, to get the reseller base, to get the customers as fast as possible, because we knew that first-to-market was going to be the winner and that's what we were. We were able to capture that market right when it exploded. Larry: With all those experiences, let me ask this: what's probably the toughest thing that you've had to do in your career? Lee: That question, as you know, I've been on the other side of these interviews. Lucy: Selling first aid kits? Lee: Yeah! [laughter] Lee: That was tough. I didn't like that. There's a lot of things that were tough. A lot of the people we've interviewed talked about having to let people go or fire them, and that's definitely a hard one. Nobody likes to be fired and it's a terrible thing to fire people, but there's been a few other things that we really, really hard. I think cold calling is the worst thing on earth to have to do. And I had to do that in some of my early sales job. The other thing that was really, really tough was leaving a phenomenal job that paid well and had a great reputation and going and being nothing and starting my own business. Because you're in a position of power and security and then to just start something from scratch takes a lot of courage, and that was a tough thing to do. Lucy: What about cold calling did you find hard? Lee: There's a lot of things: rejection, the hanging up of the phone on the other end. But I guess it was the monotony. For me, it was just over and over, picking up the phone and expecting something different to happen, when most of the 99% of people didn't want to hear from you. Lucy: It's a bit like nonprofit fund-raising. [laughter] Lee: There we go! You keep hoping the answer will change. Lucy: No, somebody told me once and I carried this in my heart that a "no" is a just a first step to "yes." Lee: Yeah! Lucy: And they don't really mean "no" until they've told you "no" three times. Lee: Yeah. Lucy: And so, that's one of the things I've really had to remember. So, Lee, after all these different experiences, and you're sitting here with somebody who's considering being and entrepreneur, what kind of advice would you give them? Lee: You know, throughout my career, some of the best experiences I've had were working -- one of the companies was called Net Dynamics, and we sold that company to Sun Micro, and I have to say some of my best experiences came from that company, and it was working with some of the most talented people I've ever worked with. They were all smart and energetic and aggressive. In one year, I probably learned more than 10 years than at some of the other companies, because we were just doing everything right and learning from each other and making changes. What I suggest is, if you can get out of college, try to work with the brightest company, the smartest people, and get great mentors because they can all help you learn a lot quicker. Lucy: Don't you find that you're in that kind of situation where you're working on a great team, that you often don't know at that moment that that is a fabulous team? Sometimes you have to stop and be grateful for that because you get 10 years, 20 years down the road and realize, "That was really -- we had it all together there." Lee: I knew. I knew they wore, because I had been at a number of companies. I was, oh gosh, in my early 30s then, and I knew. I have never worked with such a great team, whereas in some companies you'll have some bright people but you'll have some people who are really slow and it's hard to get things done. It was just a great learning experience. Larry: Brad Feld -- who's quite a supporter of NCWIT also -- I interviewed him a few weeks ago and he pointed out with his team, the team he has over there at the Foundry Group and these are people he wants to work with the rest of his life. And so I think that's quite an extraordinary thing. Lucy: That's high praise! Larry: Boy, I'll say. Lee: Yeah. Larry: Isn't that the truth. Lucy: Maybe he'll hire me! [laughter] Larry: Me too! Lee: Maybe for life! [laughter] Lucy: For life! Larry: You're going to make another switch? No. You mentioned earlier, that you are got this marketing piece and you're also a techie, it sounds like kind of an interesting balance. Are those the characteristics that make you a strong entrepreneur? Lee: I think it helps a lot being in the field I am because in starting TriCalyx, I was fortunate in that I helped start a lot of businesses and knew all the marketing and knew how to get out and do the sales. But also having the technical experience, it's great because you can really talk from a first person perspective. It gives you more credibility with the people you're meeting with. Lucy: I'll add in another one for you because you mentioned it earlier, but I thought it was important enough to perhaps return to it, and that's this notion of reinventing yourself. You said it was hard, but you've been quite successful in doing it over and over and over again, which leads me to think of two things. One is, just because it's hard it means you shouldn't and can't do it, and that the reinvention process is so necessary for learning. It's really important to start over and not always to be so entrenched. Lee: That is such a good point, Lucy, because out of all the experiences, I think I value the learning piece the most. And probably in the position I am in now, I am learning more than I've learned in years, and I love it. I get up every morning so excited and it can be something as silly as in an application I learned how to do something on the technical back end. With my partners, they're laughing because I'm excited about learning about HTML and learning a bit of PHP. And they're like, "Oh, you really are a nerd!" Larry: In the past interviews with L, L and L - that's Lucy, Lee and Larry - the subject came up about how do you bring balance to your personal and professional lives. And of course the three of us have heard a wide range of replies. What's yours? Lee: I'd have to say having an ex-husband that is phenomenal as a dad. He's really helped me to having a career, because having three kids, that would of been impossible if I had a traditional husband that worked lots of hours and expected the woman to pick up the slack. And it's been just the reverse. He's really been a fabulous dad and helped out when I was working long hours. Stressful... Larry: We haven't heard that one before. Lucy: No, but I would say that would make a big difference! Larry: Yes, exactly. Lucy: That's for sure. So, you've achieved a lot with lots of companies, lots of learning. What's next for you? Can you see past TriCalyx or are you still in there writing code and having fun? Lee: No, we already have a plan. We want to keep TriCalyx, the aspect of TriCalyx being a service business but we also want to have an off-shoot business that is a software company, that has a service on the web. So we've been writing some code and bouncing some different applications about and hopefully we'll launch that later this year. Larry: Wow, well, we'll have to interview her again. Lucy: Again. Well because you're Lee, I want to ask you one final question that we don't usually ask people. Lee: I feel special. Lucy: Yeah. You give back a lot of your time to worthwhile causes here in the state of Colorado, and perhaps you can just spend a minute and say why that's important. We have found that entrepreneurial community is quite generous, here locally with their time and in this space. Perhaps a word or two about giving back? Lee: Yeah, my career was mostly in Silicon Valley up until seven years ago. I moved here to Boulder and one of the things that was so, so refreshing about moving here is about the spirit of giving back. I was amazed at how many people introduced me to other people and would spend hours of their time in trying to get me networked into the area. It just made me feel like, "Gosh, what a wonderful environment to raise and live with my kids" So, I wanted to do more of the same. The other thing is, being a woman in technology, earlier in my career and through college, there weren't a lot of other women. I was in engineering and I've always felt like it would have been so nice to have women to talk to, to have as a mentor. So I've made it a real point ever since I got out of college to be a mentor and to help with other women who are coming up the technology route and hope I can help them make decisions or give them advice on the way. Larry: Great advice, wow. Spread the wealth. Lee: Yeah. Lucy: Well, thank you for that too. And thanks for spending your time with us. You know, it was past due that we interviewed you, so this was really fun. Larry: It was fun turning the table. I love that part. Lee: Yeah. Larry: Well, this is Larry Nelson with w3Ww3.com, here at NCWIT, that's the National Center for... Lucy: The National Center for Women and Information Technology. Larry: Exactly right. Lucy: You can just say NCWIT, and that's just fine. Larry: NCWIT.org. Lee: And you can find these podcasts at www.NCWIT.org and www.w3w3.com. Larry: That's right. And download it as a podcast and you can also post on the blog if you'd like. Lee: There you go! Larry: Thank you, guys. [music] Transcription by CastingWords Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Lee KennedyInterview Summary: Lee's got some great advice for getting kids interested in IT and entrepreneurship. In fact, you might want your kids to listen to this interview. Release Date: September 17, 2008Interview Subject: Lee KennedyInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry NelsonDuration: 14:19

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Jeanette Symons Founder and CEO, Industrious Kid Date: October 19, 2007 NCWIT Interview with Jeanette Symons BIO: Jeanette Symons was the founder, Chief Executive Officer of Industrious Kid, and mother of two. Prior to founding Industrious Kid, Ms. Symons co-founded Zhone Technologies, a telecommunications company that builds "last mile" access solutions, where she served as the company's Chief Technology Officer and Vice President, Engineering. Prior to Zhone, Ms. Symons was Chief Technical Officer and Executive Vice President of Ascend Communications, Inc, which Ms. Symons co-founded, from January 1989 until June 1999 when the company was purchased by Lucent Technologies. In addition, Ms. Symons was a software engineer at Hayes Microcomputer, a modem manufacturer, where she developed and managed its ISDN program. Ms. Symons holds a B.S. in Systems Engineering from the University of California at Los Angeles. We are deeply saddened by Jeanette's tragic death in a small plane crash on Friday, February 1, 2008. She was a true technology pioneer and we hope her life will continue to inspire others. Lee Kennedy: Hi, this is Lee Kennedy, a board member for the National Center for Women and Information Technology or NCWIT. This is part of a series of interviews that we are having with fabulous entrepreneurs, women who have started IT companies in a variety of sectors and all of whom have just great stories to tell us about being entrepreneurs. With me I have Larry Nelson from w3w3.com. Hi, Larry. Larry Nelson: Hi. Boy, it's really great to be here today. Lee: So tell us a little bit about w3w3.com. Larry: Well, we are a web‑based Internet radio show. We really started in '96 with full time in '98. This has been probably the most exciting series that we have had, so many neat entrepreneurs going through all different types of things. I have a feeling that Jeanette is going to have a great story today, too. Lee: Great. And we also have with us Lucy Sanders who is the CEO for NCWIT. Hi, Lucy. Lucy Sanders: Hello. How are you? Lee: Great. So, why don't we go ahead and just get right to it. Today we are interviewing Jeanette Symons. Jeanette is the Co‑founder and CEO of Industrious Kid. Hi, Jeanette. Jeanette Symons: Hi. Thanks for having me today. Lee: Sure. So, Jeanette, why don't you start off and tell us a little bit about Industrious Kid? Jeanette: Industrious Kid was actually started to develop web sites for kids. What happened was a couple of years ago my daughter, who is seven, actually came home and said, "Mom, I want to make a MySpace profile." Needless to say, I panicked and ended up setting up a server where they had my kids and the neighbors had their own social network in my closet, literally. We went from there to actually creating a social network for kids where they could have the same safety on the Internet that we actually provided in the closet at the time. Lucy: Wow. I'd say that's one special kid that gets to come home and tell mom what kind of company to start next. Jeanette: It's gone to their heads a little bit. Lucy: That's pretty special. Lee: And also imbee.com; that's your social networking site? Jeanette: That's correct. The social networking site itself is imbee.com, and Industrious Kid is the name of the company. Lee: OK. And I see imbee.com won a Web 2.0 award this year. Jeanette: Absolutely. It's exciting. We are really making these strides and have kids interact with each other and learn to use the Internet in a positive way. We are really enjoying it. This is a company that we started because we wanted to, because it was fun and it's really been exciting all the way along. Lee: Great. Lucy: Well, so now maybe you all think I'm a kid and sometimes I am a kid at heart, but I went over to imbee.com, started playing around, making a baseball card, doing the things that I wanted to do. As a technologist I had to wonder about the technology that you are employing on that site. It is very sophisticated. Jeanette: Well, thanks. It is interesting. I have been building the infrastructure for the Internet for over 20 years now and really hadn't done anything in the way of card sense since the very early days. It's fun. We actually built on open source. We built on Drupal which you can actually go to, download and have a social networking site up in a matter of days. From there we've just added more and more kid centered features to it. It's fun and it's very incremental and dynamic. Lucy: It is a lot of fun. On that note and getting to the first question around technology, as a technologist what technologies do you see on the horizon as being particularly important? Jeanette: I think the biggest thing that's driven us for at least for about 20 years if not longer and then I think will for at least the next 20 years if not longer ‑ it's all about communication. It's what's changing the most and what's driving the most. We talk about the simple evolutions of the telephone and the way we are using them, but what's so amazing to me when I watch is how differently the next generation communicates than we do, even electronically. As adults, we tend to communicate via electronic mail, via personal or group communications that are relatively structured. When I look at the next generation, they're not patient enough for email; they look at me like I'm crazy to waste my time sending them an email message they may not look at till tonight. They want a text message or an instant message. If they want to say something to a group of friends, that just post it on their profile. So the way in which we communicate is changing over time and changing generation to generation. And that's what's really neat. I don't know where it'll be another five or 10 years from now, but it is fun to watch. Lucy: That's really interesting when you think about it, because it's just a cross‑generational difference in the way people are communicating. Larry: That's right. One of the things that we're also curious about ‑ we have a number of young people that are listening to the shows, sometimes their parents tell them about it, because it's so interesting hearing how people like you, an entrepreneur, does what you do. But we kind of wanted to know: why did you become an entrepreneur, and what is it about entrepreneurship that makes you tick? Jeanette: Well, I think the why is because, a long time ago, when I was relatively young, I thought I could do it better. I didn't want to work for someone else. I thought I could do it better. My ideas were better. I could do something better. I think, after a lot of hard work and a lot of years as an entrepreneur, I realize that it's not that easy to do a better job. I really learned how hard it is to do better than average. But it's really fun trying. What do I really love, and why do I keep doing it ‑ this is my third company, and I doubt it's my last ‑ is because there's no greater feeling than creating something from nothing. And that's the products you create. It's watching the people grow. It's creating value within the company. You're really, as an entrepreneur, making something from nothing in so many different ways, and I think that's what makes it really exciting. Lucy: So, Jeanette, that kind of brings us to the next question. When you think about getting into technology and the career path you took, who influenced you, or who were your role models or mentors? Jeanette: I think I got started in technology, really, because I got offered a job writing software that paid $1,000 a month, which was more than I could get with anything else as a student. I had no idea how to do it. I didn't try to get into technology. It was just a lot of money for me at the time. Lucy: That's great. Jeanette: It wasn't a big plan. I always loved math. I always loved science. I had no idea about computers and technology at that point in time. So I really got into it then. And I think it's no different than the excitement of starting a company. As an engineer, it's that sense of creating. It's that sense that you made something that you can put your name on that you can be proud of. And it really is one project at a time ‑ one company, one project, one thing at a time ‑ where you really get to create something. And I think that's what really hooked me, once I got started. Lucy: Were there any role models or mentors along the way? Jeanette: I think one of the most frustrating things, for me, is that I kept looking for a role model and looking for a mentor and looking for someone, especially as I started to become more successful, and I really struggled with it. I was younger than many of the other people starting companies at the time. There were very few women involved in starting companies at the time and having had been successful at it. And I really spent a long time being really frustrated that there weren't people that I thought I could go and emulate. It took me, actually, quite a while to kind of accept that, "Hey, it doesn't matter. You're not going to copy anybody. Get on with life and do what's fun." But it took me a long time to accept that I had to do what I wanted to do and not worry about copying somebody or emulating somebody. Lucy: I think that's a great answer. And I want to also kind of link it back to something you said a minute ago around that it's often very hard to do something better, to have that great entrepreneurial idea and push it across the finish line, and along the way, there are challenges to overcome. And so we'd really like to know the toughest thing that you've ever done in your career, and why it was so hard. Jeanette: I think, unfortunately, that's the easiest answer...The hardest thing to ever do in building a company, in any way, is to lay people off. As with grown companies, even really successful companies, there's a time you've got to lay people off because of the business cycle or whatever. And no matter what the circumstances is, that, I think, is one of the hardest things to do. The second hardest thing: while I started three companies, one of them, I'd say, I walked away from before I was done. The company still was in a growing and struggling phase, and I felt it was time to move on and walk away from the company. And I think that was probably, emotionally, one of the hardest things I've ever done. Larry: I must say, that's probably one of the most common mistakes that many founding people do is they keep on long after they should have left. That's really a strength on your part. Jeanette: Well, thank you. It didn't feel like it at the time. Larry: I bet not. Lucy: That is a hard judgment, though. When is it time to leave? Larry: Mmhmm. It is. Jeanette: Exactly. And we always want to be the one. It's so tempting, especially when you start something, to feel like you need to be the one to finish it, that you need to almost be the hero that makes it successful. Accepting that you're not is just so tough. It's one of those very lonely decisions. Larry: I think you're wonderful. I'm proud you. Now, speaking of that type of thing, if you were, right now, sitting down with a young potential entrepreneur, what kind of advice would you give them about entrepreneurship? Jeanette: I think the real answer ‑ and it's easy to say, it's harder to do. And that is that you've really got to follow what you believe. You can learn from others. You can listen to others. You're going to get a lot of advice, a lot of suggestions, people telling you to do things, how you're doing them, telling you to do differently. But at the end of the day, you've got to do exactly what you believe in. And you won't succeed in creating something great and something that you're really proud of unless you stick to what you know are your core values. And there are so many people that want to push you in different directions, want to change the company, change the product, and change the financing. You've got to really stick with what you know and you believe. Lucy: That's really good advice. Larry: Yeah. Lucy: Sort of along that note, earlier in the interview, you said that you thought you could do things better and you liked creating and building things. So, when you think about getting through all the tough times, what personal characteristics do you think have given you the advantages as an entrepreneur? Jeanette: I think one of the most important things to really get to success is that you've got to have a willingness to fail. You've got to accept that, you know what? Everything you do isn't going to be perfect. You're going to make mistakes. You've got to be able to say, "Oops, I made a mistake" and move forward. You've got to be willing to let little things fail, big things fail, and all sorts of things, in the big picture, to get to success. If you're not willing to take the risk that you're willing to fall through on, you're not going to ever get the big win. So you've got to really be willing to kind of accept that this time might not be it, but there will be a time that will be. Lucy: And do you have examples that happened in your career when there was failure that happened and you guys learned a ton, maybe one of those moments; that was a big turning point in the company? Jeanette: Now, there's so many that it's hard to pick one out. But I think one of the things that we've done a couple of times is we've built the product, we've stood behind it, we've been proud of it, and then realized that, oops, it's not the way people want it. And being willing to do that, and then stop and say, "You know what? We're going to do the right thing going forward." We've lost investors in those decisions a couple of times. They used to say they've regretted it each time... Lucy: I love that. Larry: Yeah. Jeanette: I mean, I remember, 20 years ago, when we changed our company from being a digital telephony company to deciding to build infrastructure for this weird thing called the Internet, we fought tooth and nail. Nobody, none of our investors wanted to back it. They thought it was silly. How would this Internet thing work? There was so much more revenue if you stuck to traditional things. We lost supporters along the way. We're pleased to say those supporters are eating their words. The Internet grew. We had to take a big risk ‑ that now, of course, seems obvious, in hindsight, but at the time, didn't‑‑to say, "We're going to drop what we're doing. We'll see the growth. We're going to take a risk and build something new and different." Larry: Yeah. I'm sitting here kind of groaning because, internally, Pat and I, we had a terrestrial radio show, "Business Talk, " and I made, in 1996, the prediction that the Internet was a fad and would go away soon. So I wish I had known you. Jeanette: You were right. You just have to wait about another 100 years. You have to be patient, Larry. Larry: Yeah. Lucy: Your timing was wrong. Larry: Yeah, timing... Lee: You're still right. Lucy: Yeah, you're still right. Larry: Now, you're a mother of two. You fly in your own Lear jet, from time to time, to conferences and so on. And then, of course, the other thing is that, between your children, your family, and your growing business, how do you bring about kind of the balance to all of this? Jeanette: The answer to that is kids take care of it for me. Larry: Whoa! Jeanette: I was told before I had kids that I was not at all good at balance and I was workaholic that didn't do enough different things. I don't think that's true, but my friends all think it's true. It's just so great and so much fun to do things with my kids, that they keep me home on the weekends. They keep me doing things and being outside and being active. So for me, my kids are my solution, and it's just a lot of fun. Lucy: Well, we've got a nice little airport here by Boulder. You could come see us. Jeanette: I could. I do have that advantage. People go, "Oh, so you just love to fly." And I've got to say, I do. It's one of the most just relaxing things there are. But what it really is ‑ and people make fun of me - is if you go into my airplane, it looks a lot more like a minivan, stacked with stickers and snacks and books and activities and such in the back. The beauty of flying a plane is that it gives me and my family incredible freedom. So I can be in any city in the country in a meeting on Friday morning and home playing with my kids Friday night. Lucy: It's an important thing to balance. Larry: You got it. Wow. Jeanette: We got it. So everybody needs a plane. Lucy: I believe that you're our first pilot that we have interviewed. Well, you have started three companies. You've said that you doubt this one is your last. So, why don't you tell us what you see in the future? What's next for you? Give us some top‑secret stuff. Jeanette: Oh, gosh. You know what? I don't know. I will tell you that, for a very long time, I worried so much about, "OK, now that I'm successful, what am I supposed to do?" Almost like there has to be a road map: "Build successful company, go do blank." And I worried so much that I was doing the right thing next. It's amazing how stressful that became. There has to be an answer. Where do I find the answer? And I finally got it licked. I do what I enjoy. I love building the company I'm building. I love where I'm at today. I have no idea what's next. I have no idea whether we'll be building this company for another five years, another 10 years, another 20 years. I don't know what's next. But I know it'll be interesting, it'll be fun, and if not, then it won't last long and we'll move on. Lucy: That's a great answer. Larry: Yeah, I'll say. Hat's off to Imbee and Lear jets. Lucy: Well, thank you very much, Jeanette. We really appreciated talking to you. Lee: Thanks so much. Jeanette: Thank you. Larry: Thank you. This was great. And by the way, you listeners out there, make sure you pass this interview along, because they can listen to it 24/7, download it as a podcast, and what else could we ask? Lucy: Well, we should remind everybody what site to go to for the podcast. You can get them at w3w3.com or at ncwit.org. Larry: There you go. Thanks, Jeanette. Lucy: Thank you, Jeanette. Jeanette: Thank you. Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Jeanette SymonsInterview Summary: NOTE: We are deeply saddened by Jeanette's tragic death in a small plane crash on Friday, February 1, 2008. She was a true technology pioneer and we hope her life will continue to inspire others. For Jeanette Symons, motherhood proved to be good for business. Her kids helped her come up with the idea for her award-winning social networking site, imbee.com. Release Date: October 19, 2007Interview Subject: Jeanette SymonsInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry Nelson, Lee KennedyDuration: 17:16