Robert Samuels, Toluse Olorunnipa, Kerri K. Greenidge & Ellis Cose: A Conversation

Ellis Cose is the author of a dozen books on issues of national and international concern, including the bestselling The Rage of a Privileged Class. He has served as a columnist and contributing editor of Newsweek, editor page chief for the New York Daily News, and contributor and columnist for numerous major publications, including USA Today and Time. He has received fellowships at the National Research Council/National Academy of Science, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University, among others. In Race and Reckoning: From Founding Fathers to Today’s Disruptors (Amistad), Cose addresses chattel slavery and the New Deal to the COVID pandemic, exploring how pivotal decisions have established and perpetuated discriminatory practices. Meanwhile, the rise of disinformation and other modern advertising techniques has plunged democracy into an ever-deepening crisis. American politicians have waxed eloquently and endlessly about bettering the nation. But improving it for whom? asks Cose. This is a story grounded in history, one that demolishes the myths that ultimately allowed one of the most ill-prepared, unethical, vindictive, and truth-challenged politicians in the country’s history to present himself as a savior by tapping into America’s darkest tendencies.

Kerri K. Greenidge is a historian at Tufts University and the author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, winner of the 2020 Mark Lynton History Prize, among other honors. Sarah and Angelina Grimke – the Grimke sisters – are revered figures in American history, famous for rejecting their privileged lives on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand activists in the North. Their antislavery pamphlets, among the most influential of the antebellum era, are still read today. Yet retellings of their story have long obscured their Black relatives. Sarah and Angelina’s older brother, Henry, was notoriously violent and sadistic, and one of the women he owned, Nancy Weston, bore him three sons: Archibald, Francis, and John. Greenidge follows their exploits in the North, but her narrative centers on the Black women of the family, including Francis’ wife, the brilliant intellectual and reformer Charlotte Forten, and Archibald’s daughter, poet and playwright Angelina Weld Grimke. The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family (Liveright) offers a corrective – shifting the focus from the white abolitionist sisters to the Black Grimkes – and deepening our understanding of the long struggle for racial and gender equality.

Robert Samuels is a national political enterprise reporter for The Washington Post, focusing on the intersection of politics, policy, and people. He joined the Post in 2011 after spending nearly five years working at the Miami Herald. In His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Viking), Samuels and co-author Toluse Olorunnipa examine the tragically familiar events of May 25, 2020, when George Floyd was added to the list of Black Americans killed by police when he was murdered outside a Minneapolis convenience store by a white officer. The video recording of his death awakened millions to the pervasiveness of racial injustice. But long before his name became synonymous with civil rights, Floyd was a father, partner, athlete, and friend striving for a better life. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews, Olorunnipa and Samuels examine Floyd’s family roots in slavery and sharecropping, the segregation of his schools, the over-policing of his community, and the callous disregard toward his struggle with addiction. His Name Is George Floyd places its subject’s narrative within the context of the country’s legacy of institutional racism.

Toluse Olorunnipa is the White House bureau chief for The Washington Post, which he joined in 2019 and where has covered three presidencies. He previously worked at Bloomberg reporting on politics and policy from Washington and Florida. In His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Viking), Olorunnipa and co-author Robert Samuels examine the tragically familiar events of May 25, 2020, when George Floyd was added to the list of Black Americans killed by police when he was murdered outside a Minneapolis convenience store by a white officer. The video recording of his death awakened millions to the pervasiveness of racial injustice. But long before his name became synonymous with civil rights, Floyd was a father, partner, athlete, and friend striving for a better life. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews, Olorunnipa and Samuels examine Floyd’s family roots in slavery and sharecropping, the segregation of his schools, the over-policing of his community, and the callous disregard toward his struggle with addiction. His Name Is George Floyd places its subject’s narrative within the context of the country’s legacy of institutional racism.