Discussion, Q &A and book signing with Ben Jealous former NAACP President, University of Pennsylvania Professor of Practice and Author of "Never Forget Our People Were Always Free"

“One of the nation’s most prominent civil rights leaders” (Washington Post), Ben Jealous draws from a life lived on America’s racial fault line to deliver a series of gripping and lively parables that call on each of us to reconcile, heal, and work fearlessly to make America one nation.

#1 Release is African American biographies "Never Forget Our People Were Always Free," has a setting in Virginia

In the process of writing his book, Jealous discovered another unlikely but felicitous partnership. His grandmother’s Black grandfather, Edward David Bland, a former slave, co-led a multiracial, majority-Black populist party alongside a Confederate general turned railroad magnate to save free public schools in Virginia. Calling themselves the Readjusters, they expanded Virginia Tech, created Virginia State as the first public Black College south of the Mason Dixon, and abolished the whipping post and poll tax in the process.

Never Forget Our People Were Always Free illuminates for each of us how the path to healing America’s broken heart starts with each of us having the courage to heal our own.

These are the stories that helped to unravel the great riddle for Jealous, and the mantra after which his book is titled is a reminder to us all, in the same spirit as that of the pirate woman from Madagascar aiming to make her children understand. “Freedom was our people’s history, and so freedom must be [our] people’s destiny.”

That includes freedom from the chains of race as a concept. Jealous believes they can be broken.

“It’s important that we decide to have faith that we can pull America together, open up our hearts to the possibility that we are more connected to more Americans, different walks of life and different viewpoints than we realize, dig into our own family history, understand where precisely we come from,” offered Jealous.

“There’s a good chance that a lot of that has been obscured just by the existence of race and how we treat in this society.”

“Never Forget, Our People Were Always Free” is available at Amazon.