Catherine Read, Author at Read. Think. Act.

A Question of Freedom – Wm G Thomas III

(Oct 2021) This book landed on my radar because it’s written by historian William G. Thomas III, brother of my husband’s law partner Sandy Thomas, who is the global managing partner for Reed Smith LLP.

It’s a tremendous work of scholarship. It is also a story well told with plenty of plot twists. The meticulous recounting of court cases, depositions, legal records, and oral histories is skillfully woven into the riveting stories of people, families, and history that have not previously been explored in such depth.

Willam Thomas discovers in researching the subject of Georgetown University’s sale of their slaves to fund their college back in the 1830s that his family also owned slaves in the same area of Prince George’s County, Maryland. His journey of discovery unfolds as he meets descendants of the families he writes about who sued for their freedom in the late 18th century to the mid-1800s.

It was emotional for me to read about the very real trauma, injustice, and cruelty suffered by families who were enslaved. That injustice was perpetrated by white families like the author’s and my own who accepted the institution of slavery as both a legal right, an economic necessity, and part of the natural order of life.

The book delves into the plantation system, the economy of tobacco and cotton, the vast holdings of Jesuit priests, banking instruments that allowed the mortgaging of human beings as property, the recessions and market collapses that fueled the expansion of slavery in the south. These concepts are brought to life through the stories of individuals with names, extended family histories, and accurate details captured by legal cases and property inventories that included enslaved people as assets.

The legal wins in the early freedom suits set up some branches of a particular family for generations of success as they flourished in Maryland and northern states. The failures of the legal system to see enslaved people as people with fundamental rights relegated others in those same families to a life in the deep south with generations of poverty and struggle. The Jesuit priests who bartered the souls of 292 people have much to answer for.

William Thomas has written an important book that is so fundamental to understanding the trajectory of our country’s history around slavery and the intractable racism that impacts all of us in our daily lives. He has also uplifted the stories of courageous people that history rendered invisible up to this point. The Queens, Mahoneys, Bells, Duckets and so many others deserve their place in our country’s founding story.

This is one of those books that I wish was on everyone’s reading list. It’s part of a journey of understanding, acknowledgment and healing. And our country desperately needs to be healed.

by Catherine Read

Violins of Hope – Richmond Exhibit 2021

(July 2021) Dr. James A. Grymes, a professor of Music History at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, has brought forth such a well researched and well told story of violins that survived the Holocaust, even when many of their owners did not. It is fascinating and horrifying, an emotional retelling of what happened to violinists – famous and not – during a period in history where Jews were savagely exterminated all over Europe. In some instances, these violins saved their owner’s life and that of their families.

I read this book in preparation for interviewing Dr. Grymes for a show I host called Inside Scoop. The upcoming collaborative exhibition called Violins of Hope is taking place in Richmond, Virginia, from August 4th to October 24th. The violins in this exhibit were played by Jewish musicians in camps and ghettos during the Holocaust and ended up in the hands of Amnon Weinstein of Tel Aviv, a second generation craftsman who repairs violins. The stories of the instruments, their owners and how they came to be in Amnon Weinstein’s shop makes for riveting reading.

There is so much I was not aware of regarding the role that music played during the Holocaust. There were camp orchestras at many concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, where work details left in the morning to the music of the orchestra and returned in the evening greeted by the same music. Providing music for soldiers spared the lives of some musicians who were given extra food or lighter work assignments. Dr. Grymes has focused his book on telling detailed stories of musicians from Germany to Romania, the Ukraine to Norway. There is a great deal of significant history woven into the telling of these very personal accounts. I learned so much.

Bronislaw Huberman, Ernst Glaser and his wife Kari, the boy partisan Motele Schlein, Feivel Wininger and his baby daughter Helen. Their lives mattered and Dr. Grymes has sought out their stories as a way of preserving their memories the way their musical instruments have been lovingly preserved.

Amnon Weinstein lost over 400 members of his family. His parents refused to speak about the loss of their parents, siblings and extended family during the Holocaust. Yet Amnon, who learned violin repair from his father Moshe [who was taught by violin maker Yaakov Zimmerman] finds hope in restoring and sharing these violins. He observed that while Nazis did not survive beyond WWII, these violins have. “These instruments are a testimony from another world.”

Although Nazis did not survive beyond the defeat of Germany, fascism lives on all over the world and is on the rise. For the 15th consecutive year, there has been a decline in global freedom. Teaching history – fully and truthfully – is important in helping each new generation understand we are not immune to the basest, darkest and cruelest instincts of human beings. Evil is never truly eliminated, it is kept at bay, and only the greatest vigilance prevents another Holocaust in a different iteration from happening again.

I highly recommend reading this book and then making plans to visit the Violins of Hope in Richmond Aug. 4th thru Oct. 24th at the Virginia Holocaust Museum, The Virginia Museum of History & Culture and the Black History Museum & Cultural Center of Virginia. There will also be a series of concerts in collaboration with the Richmond Symphony Orchestra where these violins will again bring comfort and joy to those fortunate enough to hear them. More information can be found at www.ViolinsofHopeRVA.com

by Catherine Read

The Three Mothers – Anna Malaika Tubbs

(Feb. 2021) What a wonderful book! Anna Malaika Tubbs has chosen to profile three incredibly important women and she has done it well. Researching women who did not leave behind nearly the body of work, personal history and accomplishments of their three famous sons was a challenge. It was as challenge well met, and stories well told. This book is a good read. And so enlightening.

Tubbs profiles three Black women most of us know little about: Alberta Williams King, mother of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther, Jr.; Louise Little, mother of Malcolm X; and Emma Berdis Baldwin, mother of writer James Baldwin.

Louise, Berdis, and Alberta were all born within six years of each other, and their famous sons were all born within five years of each other, which presents beautiful intersections in their lives. Because they were all born around the same time and gave birth to their famous sons around the same time, and two of them passed away around the same time, I reflect on Black womanhood in the early 1900s, Black motherhood in the 1920s, and their influence on the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Each of these women truly deserves to be known in their own right. They were strong women who all three valued education and were educated themselves. Tubbs connects their lives with sociological and historical factors of the time that impacted the trajectory of their lives and those of their children. There is so much here that deserves to be pondered, discussed and centered in our discussions of how to create communities – and a country – where Black families thrive.

One of the greatest shocks of this book was learning that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s mother Alberta was assassinated while playing the organ at a Sunday service on June 30, 1974. She was gunned down in Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta in front of a packed congregation, her husband, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr., her sole remaining child Dr. Christine King Farris, and several of her grandchildren – one of whom tackled the 23 year old gunman. The assailant was captured, tried and sentenced to death. “This was later reduced to life in prison, in part at the insistence of King family members who opposed the death penalty. He died in prison of a stroke in 1995.”

The fact that I did not know this speaks volumes about the erasure of Black women in American history. More importantly than how Alberta King died, however, is how she lived. All of these mothers deserve to have their stories told. Their legacy was how they navigated a life where the odds were stacked against them and raised children who had an impact on this country and in this world.

Anna Malaika Tubbs has done us all a great service in doggedly pursuing this project. Time has already started to erase the scant evidence of their lives and left the author to piece together their narrative from what little was left behind for her to find. Sadly, the women themselves were not interviewed in person while they still lived. Tubbs makes the case for why Black women’s stories need to be captured and written down. Not just for the sake of posterity, but so their families know where they came from and what shaped the women who brought them into this world.

I’m so grateful this book was written so that I could read it.

by Catherine Read

Railroaded – Dale Brumfield

(Sept. 2020) This book is an excellent work of research, scholarship and storytelling. Dale Brumfield, a native Virginian, historian, author and cultural archaeologist continues to write about the untold history of this Commonwealth that we never learned in school.

Railroaded is a window into the history and culture of the Commonwealth of Virginia through a very specific lens of capital punishment. To understand how so many young black men were put to death, we must first acknowledge that Virginia is ground zero of the slave trading of captured Africans that began in 1619. Those sales of Black Africans to White landowners established human beings as property, not people, and slavery as an important economic engine of Southern prosperity.

While this book is dedicated to telling the stories of the first 100 people put to death in the newly introduced electric chair from 1908 to 1920, the subtext of these stories is one of white rage, resentment and institutional racism in Virginia that is present to this very day.

There are so many layers to this book. The first that struck me was that the names of the victims and the names of the accused look so very similar. They are the same old Virginia family names that used to fill pages of local phonebooks. I recognize these family names because I have lived in Virginia all of my life and these are the names of my schoolmates, neighbors and leading citizens of the communities where I have lived from Southwest Virginia to Northern Virginia.

That is a reminder that many Black Virginians bear the surnames of the people who owned their ancestors. They do not have a family history of their own with an ancestry separate from those who enslaved them. Their identity was stolen when they were abducted from their own communities on another continent and sold as property to White people who chose what they would be called and whose mark was left on their children, and their children’s children for all of their days.

Reducing Black people to less than human is the foundation upon which this country’s culture and our system of justice and punishment has been built. Virginia’s legislature and our law enforcement created a two-tiered system that was both codified and legitimized in the law.

For many years a Black person was not allowed by law to testify against a White criminal defendant, so crimes such as the rape of a Black woman by a White man were rarely prosecuted, and never resulted in a death sentence since the victim could not testify against her attacker.

As a carryover effect, there was not one White-on-Black capital crime punished by execution – and unbelievably, Virginia did not execute a White for killing a Black person until 1997, when Thomas Beavers was executed for the murder of Marguerite Lowery.

Another startling layer to this book is the long and detailed history of violence against women. Rape and assault, along with husbands killing wives, and men stalking and killing the objects of their obsession. Women have not fared well here in the Commonwealth. It took until 2020 for legislation to pass in our current legislature that allows the Courts, through due process, to issue Risk Orders removing guns from the hands of people who are a risk to themselves or others. It’s hard to imagine how many women could have been spared murder while fleeing domestic violence if only we had the political will to protect them.

This book is an important part of Virginia’s history. I think it’s difficult for many people to understand how unarmed Black people can be killed with impunity and no one held accountable. It has ever been thus. It is hardwired into our culture and carried forward generation after generation. The history of law enforcement, the judicial process, mass incarceration and capital punishment present the blueprint to how we got here in 2020. More books like Railroaded need to be researched, written and widely read so that the next generation perhaps makes the intentional choice not to carry these terrible precedents forward.

Listen to my interview with author Dale Brumfield here: https://youtu.be/z0c36–BJWA

by Catherine Read

His Other Life – Melanie McCabe

(March 2020) This book was captivating. A real page turner. I love the writing and following Melanie McCabe through her journey as a novice researcher. I’m delighted to know that she is a local English teacher in Arlington, Virginia, and that a writer of such talent teaches creative writing in a public high school. How fortunate her students are to learn the craft from someone so accomplished.

The premise of the book is intriguing. It certainly makes me consider how little we know about who our parents were before they were our parents. In this instance, Melanie’s father Terrence McCabe, had an interesting connection to the playwright Tennessee Williams. The elusive Hazel Kramer, loved by both men, passed away young and tragically. I can appreciate how invested the author came to be in giving her a voice and a presence that is now capture for posterity along with a fuller portrait of the father she lost at such a young age.

It’s a wonderful book and I highly recommend it.

by Catherine Read

The Art of Gathering – Priya Parker

Art of Gathering (Jan 2020) This book is a must read. For everyone. From dinner parties and staff meetings to holiday gatherings and funerals, we all spend so much time at “gatherings” that are organized by someone.

Priya Parker points out that surprisingly little thought is given to the structure of gatherings. Because of that, many of us spend inordinate amounts of time in boring time wasters that are often tedious and quite forgettable.

This book changes how to think about the purpose of gatherings – absolutely all gatherings. With each chapter I had “aha moments” that made we wonder why I had not thought about this before.

I will also say that this book should be added to every reading list for leadership development programs, courses and seminars. Same for corporate retreats and strategy sessions. Constructing a meaningful gathering with purpose *is* a core leadership skill. Parker’s examples of the gatherings she has facilitated in her career are fascinating. It also makes the book more of a “show” than a “tell.” Once she tells the story of a particular gathering, she breaks down how and why it worked so well.

I think we all need to incorporate the format of 15 Toasts regularly into our dinner gatherings. Of all the concepts she introduced, I really loved this one. While “communication” takes place at gatherings, it does not always lead to meaningful connection among people. And why would you pursue the first if not for the purpose of the latter? I highly recommend this book. It will change the way you think about how we spend our time with one another and how with the smallest amount of effort it could be so much more meaningful.