Reed Peggram

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[SPEAKER_01]: This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention.

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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm your host, Kelly Theresa Pollock.

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[SPEAKER_01]: I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Reed Edwin Pagrum was born on July 26, 1914 in Boston, Massachusetts.

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[SPEAKER_01]: He and his parents, Mary and Harvey lived with Mary's mother, Laura, who had become an important

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[SPEAKER_01]: Harvey, a graduate of the Hampton Institute, traveled the East Coast, reciting poetry, and performing in plays.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Even staging his own short play at an African Methodist Episcopal Church in Pennsylvania in May 1917.

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[SPEAKER_01]: In November of 1917, Harvey was inducted into the U.S. Army.

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[SPEAKER_01]: serving in France during World War I in the veterinary corps.

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[SPEAKER_01]: He was discharged in 1919 as 100% disabled, likely referring to his mental health.

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[SPEAKER_01]: By January 1920, Harvey was admitted to an asylum in Virginia.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And Mary was granted a divorce and full custody of Reed in 1921.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Mary, remarried and had two more sons with her new husband.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Unfortunately, Reed, to dock it along with his stepfather.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And after two years, he chose to live instead with his grandmother.

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[SPEAKER_01]: In 1929, Laura became Reed's legal guardian.

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[SPEAKER_01]: One of the few African Americans to be admitted, Boston Latin School is the oldest public school in the United States, and its alumni include Benjamin Franklin and Ralph Waldo Emerson, read Thrive to the school, and upon graduation he attended Harvard University

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[SPEAKER_01]: where he was again in an extreme minority as an African-American man.

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[SPEAKER_01]: In 1935, Reed, who was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, graduated Magnicum Laude from Harvard with a degree in romance languages and literature.

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[SPEAKER_01]: He completed an honors thesis in French literature.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Reed was the first in his family to earn a bachelor's degree, but that wasn't enough for him.

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[SPEAKER_01]: He had applied for a road scholarship, but when that didn't come through, he stated Harvard to begin graduate school, earning his master's degree in comparative literature in 1936.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Despite his achievements, Reed was not admitted into the doctoral program at Harvard.

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[SPEAKER_01]: So he left Boston and his grandmother, and headed to New York to study English and comparative literature at Columbia University.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Although he wanted to be back at Harvard, read did enjoy living in New York City, and he made the most of it, attending plays, sing Marion Anderson sing, and making friends.

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[SPEAKER_01]: After a year at Columbia,

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[SPEAKER_01]: Reed returned to Harvard in 1937.

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[SPEAKER_01]: There, he fell in love with Leonard Bernstein, then an undergraduate at Harvard.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Reed wrote a letter and poem to Bernstein.

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[SPEAKER_01]: including the lines quote just to see you has been enough and to touch your hand is consummation whether in a room without the music or in the open surrounded by satters whether in a room without all this or with all this and it is still enough and vote.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Read again, set his sights on Europe, and he received funding from the John Harvard Fellowship, and the Julius Rosenwald Fund, which had developed a fellowship program to support African-American scholars and artists.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Read plan to study at the Swerbon, and to conduct research at the Bibliotek National.

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[SPEAKER_01]: In August 1938, Reed set sail for a Paris that was quickly headed toward war.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Although other Americans were preparing to leave, and the American embassy told him to, Reed wrote to his grandmother, quote,

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[SPEAKER_01]: While in Paris, Reed published two articles in modern language review, but he was unsuccessful in his many attempts to publish his fiction and poetry.

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[SPEAKER_01]: In the spring of 1939, a mutual friend introduced Reed to Arna Hoffman, a Danish artist

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[SPEAKER_01]: Although Reed had a job waiting for him at West Virginia State College in autumn 1939, and the Rosenwald Fund declined to extend his funding.

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[SPEAKER_01]: We chose to stay in Europe.

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[SPEAKER_01]: He left his belongings in Paris and headed to Copenhagen in August of 1939 to be with Arna.

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[SPEAKER_01]: as war was spreading throughout Europe, read and Arna made plans to flee Denmark before it was invaded.

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[SPEAKER_01]: They headed to Italy, hoping they would be able to find a way to get a visa for Arna to travel to the US with read.

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[SPEAKER_01]: There were many opportunities for read to travel back to the US, but he refused to leave without Arna.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And Italy, things went from bad to worse as the country entered the war on the side of Germany.

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[SPEAKER_01]: As foreigners, Reed and Arna were unable to work and they lived in utter poverty, the relationship viewed with suspicion.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Eventually the Italian police separated them, forcing them to live in different towns.

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[SPEAKER_01]: After Germans had taken charge of the section of Italy where Reed and Arna lived, Reed was interned in an Italian concentration camp.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Arna was sent to a different camp, but eventually they were reunited, though still incarcerated.

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[SPEAKER_01]: In the summer of 1944, Reed and Arna escaped with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.

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[SPEAKER_01]: hiking to avoid detection and surviving and whatever food they could find.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Finally, in December 1944, they were found and rescued.

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[SPEAKER_01]: By an advanced patrol of the all African-American 370th Regiment of the 90 Second Division.

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[SPEAKER_01]: In August 1945, seven years after he left,

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[SPEAKER_01]: Like his father, he was hospitalized, for what was described as a mental disorder.

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[SPEAKER_01]: After four years of treatment and possibly a lobotomy, Reed returned to Boston to live with his mother.

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[SPEAKER_01]: He's saying in the church choir and worked intermittently as a translator.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Sadly, Reed never saw Arna again.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Reed Pagram died at age 67, on April 20, 1982 in Boston.

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[SPEAKER_01]: He's buried with his mother and forest hill cemetery.

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[SPEAKER_01]: With a grave stone bearing the name of his stepfather, with whom he never got along.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Joining me in this episode is Dr. Ethelene Whitmire, Professor of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and to author of the remarkable life of Reed Pagrum, the man who stared down World War II in the name of love.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Hi, Emily, and thanks so much for joining me today.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for having me.

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[SPEAKER_01]: I am excited to talk more about this book that you've written.

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[SPEAKER_01]: I'd love to hear a little bit about what got you started on this topic on researching this incredible man.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, this whole project started on a win.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I was working on my first biography when I decided to go to Denmark for two months, just on a writing retreat and I started hearing stories about African Americans in Denmark, both in general, but also while in the country and I decided to write about African Americans in Denmark.

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[SPEAKER_02]: but then I had to figure out who was there, and so I used the variety of ways to figure out who actually was in Denmark in the 20th century, and one of them was to look at the thankfully digitized African-American newspapers, and I was able to search, you know, of Denmark, Copenhagen, I knew some people went to Elsonor, and I found incredible stories, but the most

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[SPEAKER_02]: I had never heard about him.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I was surprised to know that he was working on a PhD at Harvard during World War II, when World War II began and they had been captured by the Nazis and escaped and the ran into African American troops who actually recorded this story.

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[SPEAKER_02]: with their embedded reporters in the black newspapers and the headlines were just so fascinating and I wanted to know more about this person.

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[SPEAKER_02]: So even though I'm writing about a lot of people, he was the most fascinating to me.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And I wanted to know who was he, how did he get into Harvard in the 1930s, for his bachelor's as bachelor's in PhD?

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[SPEAKER_02]: Well, what's he doing in Paris?

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[SPEAKER_02]: And I took off from there.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And the story that you're able to tell would not have been possibly used in the form, it is without some assistance from his family, and especially the letters that you were able to use.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Could you talk about how you were able to really dig into some things that otherwise wouldn't be known about him?

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[SPEAKER_02]: We'll just find out about the letters was incredible and was just a big coincidence.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I was doing research in Berlin and I ran into an African American woman who was kind of a gatherer of people.

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[SPEAKER_02]: She has parties and especially of people of color and then she moved to Austria and then I went back to the United States and in Austria she met another African American

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[SPEAKER_02]: will maintain you who was studying, and then she knew that both of us would be in Copenhagen in the fall of 2016 and that we should get together.

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[SPEAKER_02]: So I met Kaju.

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[SPEAKER_02]: She was interested in African-American history.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I invited her to this seminar about African-Americans in Denmark.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I was one of the keynotes, and I talked about all of the people in my study including

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[SPEAKER_02]: of the talk when we had the Q&A, she raised her hand, and then she said, that's my great uncle.

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[SPEAKER_02]: She was too young to know him, but she recognized him from photos in the house.

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[SPEAKER_02]: She said they can't come from a very small family.

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[SPEAKER_02]: There's only about 15 of them in the whole world.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so it was just incredible that we were both in Copenhagen at the same time.

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[SPEAKER_02]: She came to my office at the University of Copenhagen where I had a full bright during the fall

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[SPEAKER_02]: great-grandmother and her grandmother kept letters from read and I assumed that they would just be a few letters.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I had no idea there would be 200 letters of covering his time in Paris, in Copenhagen, in Florence, also for one brief year he went to Columbia University so in New York and

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[SPEAKER_02]: And I just found it to be a treasure trove.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I was a little alarmed to find out that they were all in a binder.

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[SPEAKER_02]: They were by the front door in case of a fire.

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[SPEAKER_02]: But they were well preserved.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And his niece, who lives in the home where he actually died in a door to a section of Austin, she would take photos of them on her phone and send them to me when she had a chance.

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[SPEAKER_02]: took a few months to accumulate all of them, but it was just fascinating to read these letters of him talking about his adventures and all of these European cities, what he did, who he saw.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I was always looking up people to try to figure out who they were.

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[SPEAKER_02]: It was just a treasure trove and just for a historian.

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[SPEAKER_02]: It was, you know, I kind of asked for more.

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[SPEAKER_01]: There is so much about Reed's story that is improbable, that is amazing, but just to start with the idea that he comes from this working class background and is able to right away go to the Latin school in Boston and Harvard, as you mentioned, can you explain a little bit about how that journey was possible for him?

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[SPEAKER_02]: I dedicate the book to his grandmother, Laura Reed.

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[SPEAKER_02]: She also came from very humble beginning.

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[SPEAKER_02]: She married and was widowed young.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And she had a child at the time.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And she moved on her own up north to Boston from Virginia, which was incredible.

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[SPEAKER_02]: This even preceded the Great Migration, with some people placed at 1915.

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[SPEAKER_02]: She went in the late 1800s.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And even though she had a third grade education, she worked as a cleaning lady and a janitor.

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[SPEAKER_02]: She had ambitions and she poured all of that into not just her daughter, but also especially in to read.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And I think because she gained houses for some very prestigious people, she had access or knowledge about the Boston Public Latin School and also about Harvard.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And what I like about this story is, again, even though she's from a bowl of beginnings, African-American

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[SPEAKER_02]: He seemed to live his life as if he had the right to go to all of these spaces and places.

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[SPEAKER_02]: He never seemed to have any doubt about his self-esteem, which I liked.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm sure he got that from his grandmother.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Like, why not?

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[SPEAKER_02]: Why can't we go to these prestigious institutions?

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so he just went and applied in and he prospered in

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[SPEAKER_01]: As you mentioned, he ends up going to Europe.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And this is maybe not surprising for someone who is both African-American and gay maybe doesn't feel completely accepted.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Almost certainly doesn't feel completely accepted in Boston or that in New York when he's at Columbia.

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[SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, what's the mechanism he uses to get to Europe and, you know, he says right off the bat like, oh, I'm supposed to come back in year.

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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm probably not coming back in year, which of course proves to be true.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, so he applied for fellowships to go abroad.

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[SPEAKER_02]: He applied at the end of his undergraduate degree at Harvard.

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[SPEAKER_02]: But unfortunately, he was signed me by a very lovely letter of recommendation.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And then Reed actually thanked him for that letter in his Harvard files.

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[SPEAKER_02]: But then the Dean wrote a second letter where he said, you should know that this man is a Dean Brille or African-American.

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[SPEAKER_02]: You can't tell by his name.

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[SPEAKER_02]: the organization in England said it wanted to be a problem.

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[SPEAKER_02]: He didn't get that fellowship.

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[SPEAKER_02]: So he decided to continue his masters degree at Harvard and then went to Columbia for a year and a doctoral program before returning to Harvard.

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[SPEAKER_02]: But he decided to try again by for a fellowship through Harvard to travel and also through the Rosenwald Foundation, which funded African Americans to go abroad.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so he applied to go to France.

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[SPEAKER_02]: He always wanted to go to Paris.

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[SPEAKER_02]: he loved French music and literature.

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[SPEAKER_02]: So he was able to get that.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Even though it was 1938 and by the time he arrived at Paris, the US State Department was already telling Americans, you should return there to be an unpending war.

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[SPEAKER_02]: But read

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[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think he was naive, but he was just so excited to be in Paris.

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[SPEAKER_02]: He said, I'm just going to stay here until the first bomb start falling.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I'll figure things out from there.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so he was just thrilled to get to Europe.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And not only just the Paris, but when he got there, he traveled to many other countries to before school started.

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[SPEAKER_01]: I said, one of those sources that you tap in writing this and I saw that you've written more about this as well is his library file from Shakespeare and company, I would love to hear more about not just what he was reading, but about for you with the process of looking at those books is like what it means, I know you had concerns about the ethics of that, even.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I'm on professional library here.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I have a master's degree and I worked at Yale as a reference librarian and American Library Code of Ethics says not to reveal, you know, the records in because sometimes the US government asking for the records, they destroy a lot of records, which is sad for library history.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I discovered when I was trying to find archives for reading, he doesn't actually have an archive.

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[SPEAKER_02]: So I was accumulating things from different sources that I didn't even know.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I knew about the Shakespeare company bookstore had been there before, but I didn't know they also were a library.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And that the records were digitized.

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[SPEAKER_02]: They're at Princeton University.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And I could see every book he took out from the library which I thought was incredible for that whole year.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And I actually thought about reading every single one of them.

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[SPEAKER_02]: until I realized that's ridiculous.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I started with a few Christopher Isherwood books, but I decided to use my library degree to analyze the books that he checked out.

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[SPEAKER_02]: The subject matters.

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[SPEAKER_02]: We're a lot of them are about young men on adventures.

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[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of the authors we now know are gay, but

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[SPEAKER_02]: Somehow, I feel that Reed knew this too.

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[SPEAKER_02]: He didn't read only read one woman.

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[SPEAKER_02]: They were all men.

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[SPEAKER_02]: None of them were African-American.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Even though the collection did have African-American books.

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[SPEAKER_02]: But I'm assuming, because of the education that he had, he probably wasn't exposed to African-American literature, Columbia, or at Harvard.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And so he really liked, as I mentioned before, Christopher Isherwood, Steven Spender, Red Poetry,

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[SPEAKER_02]: reading material.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I actually laughed where we took out one book that was almost 800 pages and then after that he took out short stories with school started.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I'm sure he said, I don't have time to read all of these, but it was fascinating to just follow this where whole year to see the kinds of things that he was interested in reading.

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[SPEAKER_01]: In addition to reading a lot and studying, he also had this amazing ability to make friends.

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[SPEAKER_01]: to get people who just wanted to like help him, yes, who are some of these friends that he's he's collecting, and some who are very wealthy and high-class kind of people.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, he seemed to be very charismatic.

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[SPEAKER_02]: People seem drawn to him.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Some of the people, I mean, you knew Leonard Bernstein fell in love with him.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Unfortunately, he was unrequited when he was at Harvard.

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[SPEAKER_02]: That was one of the most famous people he met in the very beginning.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And then while he was in New York, he met people, some people who who are now kind of famous, even though they've been deaf for decades, like Jan Gay inspired a national book award winning book by Justin Torres that came out a few years ago.

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[SPEAKER_02]: She gave him letters of introduction to people like Steven Spinder early in his career.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Spinder apparently liked him enough when he met

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[SPEAKER_02]: read met this artist Tom is hand-worth when I looked him up.

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[SPEAKER_02]: He won a good and high malwar for his work and he drew this beautiful portrait that's also included in the book of read who else did he meet?

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[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, when it's honestly got to Paris he went to Warsaw Poland to hang out with his friend called the Count who really was a Count in the Tonies of Ansky and lived a very luxurious

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[SPEAKER_02]: light there in Worcester.

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[SPEAKER_02]: He said he was sorry to leave, which I said I understood that.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And he just encountered lots of interesting people throughout his life.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And again, people seem to remember hand or drawn to him, wanted to help him, wanted to introduce him to other people.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I just wish that I could find more sources from how people perceived him.

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[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of this is from his his perspective.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And then when I was trying to figure out how come I

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[SPEAKER_02]: can't find people to interview or resources from other people.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I realize a lot of his friends were gay and didn't marry at a time when you couldn't marry, they didn't have relationships, didn't have children, and so a lot of this is kind of lost to history.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And he had one friend that he traveled with a new and Arnold who was straight, but he did not have children.

23:22.857 --> 23:23.458
[SPEAKER_02]: And so a little.

23:23.939 --> 23:25.020
[SPEAKER_02]: So some of that was lost.

23:25.140 --> 23:28.185
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot is, again, is from

23:28.165 --> 23:31.412
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, he would sometimes acknowledge he's a little cocky and air again.

23:32.154 --> 23:36.143
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think he's being very truthful when he talks about how people use him.

23:37.346 --> 23:46.647
[SPEAKER_01]: You mentioned that as he's going toward Europe, Europe is going toward war, or of course breaks out and instead of,

23:46.981 --> 23:47.502
[SPEAKER_01]: going home.

23:47.782 --> 23:52.169
[SPEAKER_01]: Like most Americans did at the time read decides to stay.

23:52.230 --> 23:56.256
[SPEAKER_01]: Could you take us through some of what appears to have been going on?

23:56.316 --> 23:58.720
[SPEAKER_01]: Why he didn't want to return?

23:58.800 --> 24:04.129
[SPEAKER_01]: Why he was willing to

24:04.362 --> 24:13.158
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, at the end of his time and Paris are new to end of his time and Paris, he actually met a Danish artist on a Hoffman and they fell on love.

24:13.799 --> 24:18.768
[SPEAKER_02]: They didn't seem to have spent a lot of time together in Paris, but the time they spent was very intense.

24:19.209 --> 24:24.919
[SPEAKER_02]: They spent a lot of time together and then Hoffman went back to Denmark and then read followed him.

24:24.899 --> 24:35.128
[SPEAKER_02]: And he read, arrived at the end of August the 39 and then the war broke out about two weeks later in Europe, not necessarily in Denmark, but Denmark was on edge.

24:35.949 --> 24:37.250
[SPEAKER_02]: But we refused to leave.

24:37.510 --> 24:38.651
[SPEAKER_02]: He was in love.

24:38.932 --> 24:40.913
[SPEAKER_02]: He didn't want to leave without Hoffman.

24:41.474 --> 24:48.901
[SPEAKER_02]: I think he was very unrealistic in terms of thinking about Hoffman's ability or a lot of people's ability to go to the United States.

24:48.921 --> 24:54.906
[SPEAKER_02]: You couldn't just get out on a ship and leave if you weren't a citizen.

24:54.886 --> 25:17.400
[SPEAKER_02]: At first, you know, when you do these projects, you don't have a lot of information all at the same time or in a chronological order, but eventually I found out how much people really went out of the way to try to bring him back to the United States and how he utterly refused, particularly the Rosenwald Foundation.

25:17.380 --> 25:36.908
[SPEAKER_02]: their frustration 80 or 80 years later, you know, seeing you through the letters where other people will contact them to and say, have you heard of this young scholar he may tell and they said the number of letters we received or an imaginable or one time they had a off the record conversation was did not help me as a historian.

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[SPEAKER_02]: But his family was frustrated.

25:39.651 --> 25:41.113
[SPEAKER_02]: Harvard was confused.

25:41.173 --> 25:42.835
[SPEAKER_02]: They offered also to help him.

25:43.236 --> 25:49.083
[SPEAKER_02]: But he would not leave until he thought or not half of him could return.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And it turned into a years long Odyssey.

25:53.188 --> 25:55.951
[SPEAKER_02]: They actually eventually left Denmark and went to Italy.

25:56.091 --> 25:57.873
[SPEAKER_02]: And they ended up being there for five years.

25:58.294 --> 26:02.659
[SPEAKER_02]: Read was literally in Europe for almost the entire World War II.

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[SPEAKER_01]: You mentioned how frustrated the Rosenwald Foundation was, but in addition to that, of course, his grandmother and his mother were fritic and, you know, as a mother myself, like, you know, a non-gen. What that must have been like, what do you learn from their letters to him about how they're feeling knowing that he is there and is really stuck there?

26:27.074 --> 26:40.667
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, you just tell the very frustrated, most of the letters are primarily to his grandmother who raised him after his mother married and remarried and felt like she was more of a mother to hand than his own mother.

26:40.707 --> 26:53.740
[SPEAKER_02]: And at some point, we started communicating with his mother because his grandmother was so angry or upset with him for not returning to the United States when he had the

26:53.720 --> 27:09.214
[SPEAKER_02]: they even reached out to the stage apartment and asked if they could intervene and help bring read home, read grandmother talk to the Rosenwald Foundation, but read letters were frustratingly repetitive in terms of talking about his love.

27:09.474 --> 27:21.685
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, he didn't want to say he was in love with her in a halkman, but that Arnold Halkman was his good friend and he could not betray a friend, though it's clear that his parents as mother and grandmother knew that.

27:21.665 --> 27:27.592
[SPEAKER_02]: he was gay and that there was more to that relationship and just friendship that every talked about.

27:28.413 --> 27:38.644
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's perhaps a counterfactual, but thinking through wood people have responded differently if he had been with a woman partner.

27:38.824 --> 27:51.098
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, if he had been married to a woman, maybe it wouldn't have changed the ability of you for her to get a visa or something, but that people would have at least been more sympathetic to his desire to stay with his partner.

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[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, because that wasn't the case.

27:53.932 --> 28:07.956
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't explore in depth, but I believe that if you are married, that that would help in terms of being able to get someone to go to a United States, because you could say you were supporting that on our Hoffman had to rely on the one.

28:07.936 --> 28:31.935
[SPEAKER_02]: Uncle that he had in the United States, but I also write about all of the paperwork How difficult it was almost impossible for anyone to complete the steps that were required for people to go to the United States But yes, if they were married, I believe it would have been much more easier for his partner to come with read But again, read just refused to leave without him

28:33.417 --> 28:50.616
[SPEAKER_01]: So, of course, once they are imprisoned in a concentration or in separate concentration camps in Italy, there's somewhat less in the way of documentation, and especially then once they escape and are wondering around Italy,

28:50.596 --> 29:13.926
[SPEAKER_01]: It seems like there's perhaps multiple stories about what happened, and I think I at least could see earlier in history, maybe he's not always telling exactly the truth, maybe he's elaborating a little bit on some details that especially seems to be the case or at least potentially could be the case with their escape and rescue.

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[SPEAKER_01]: How do you as a historian sort of tease through

29:18.912 --> 29:24.721
[SPEAKER_01]: people are telling about themselves versus stories that are being told about them and what's what's truth.

29:26.443 --> 29:31.270
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's very hard and you want to have all the facts there and things that are clear.

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[SPEAKER_02]: You look for consistency or inconsistencies and other stories that you know better.

29:36.859 --> 29:44.430
[SPEAKER_02]: Don't have as high stakes as escaping from a concentration can't know how consistent

29:44.410 --> 29:57.716
[SPEAKER_02]: And also looked at another account of an African-American who was captured by the Nazis and I don't know if it's trauma that make people not talk about everything that happened at first in initial conversations and then later more detail.

29:58.338 --> 30:01.103
[SPEAKER_02]: I also got records from the Italian government.

30:01.083 --> 30:02.644
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I just went with logic.

30:03.145 --> 30:09.331
[SPEAKER_02]: It seemed like Reed's story was more logical than what the Italian government was saying happened.

30:09.851 --> 30:16.117
[SPEAKER_02]: And of course, everything's not even in chronological order, it's a mess and I have to use Google Translate to translate to Italian.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I actually feel like I know a lot of Italian now.

30:19.199 --> 30:21.942
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm just looking at the records and a lot of Danish too.

30:22.523 --> 30:25.425
[SPEAKER_02]: But again, I just look for inconsistencies.

30:25.445 --> 30:29.689
[SPEAKER_02]: I look at other stories of other people who talked about their experiences.

30:29.669 --> 30:42.160
[SPEAKER_02]: escaping from Italian concentration camps or being in the camps and how consistent were they with what we talked about and and conclusions from that kind of information using multiple sources.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Read, of course, wanted to be a writer, did publish some academic works.

30:49.400 --> 31:00.034
[SPEAKER_01]: And at one point, I think you wrote to his mom something like, well, if I get through all of this, I'll just be able to write novels about my life, and but then he never does.

31:00.094 --> 31:12.130
[SPEAKER_01]: He put so much sort of time and attention into being a writer and to becoming a writer, of course, some of the writings that he and Arna

31:12.667 --> 31:15.874
[SPEAKER_01]: Why do you think he didn't pick that up?

31:16.214 --> 31:27.317
[SPEAKER_01]: Once he did return to the U.S., was living as somewhat more comfortable life, and had the time to sit down and write these stories.

31:28.394 --> 31:35.646
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, when Reed returned to the United States in 1945, he was hospitalized in a mental institution for four years.

31:36.087 --> 31:42.377
[SPEAKER_02]: He underwent a lecture with, they called a lecture shock therapy in the past and possibly a lobotomy.

31:42.417 --> 31:44.901
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that those things,

31:45.472 --> 31:48.757
[SPEAKER_02]: really affected his mental ability to go further.

31:48.817 --> 31:58.330
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I document some of his fellow students as the Harvard Alumni Reports come out and you can see them living a very conventional life.

31:58.810 --> 32:02.996
[SPEAKER_02]: These are heterosexual men, Mary have children, they go on to great things.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And Reed's story is very sad.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I actually saw Alumni Report from 25th anniversary

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[SPEAKER_02]: in the very beginning of my research and I wanted to know what happened to this man who's life started so brightly.

32:18.279 --> 32:30.379
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, I think he just didn't have the mental ability, he could have been depression, it could have been effects of electric shock therapy, but mentally he just wasn't able to grow it again.

32:30.359 --> 32:33.869
[SPEAKER_02]: Even though he did write, even during the war, he continued writing.

32:33.949 --> 32:46.123
[SPEAKER_02]: He took his typewriter everywhere, like we take our computer, everywhere, even when he went to Denmark, he was only supposed to be there for a short time, but he took his typewriter urgently.

32:46.103 --> 33:04.500
[SPEAKER_02]: And he continued typing throughout, even in Italy during World War II, sometimes, some things were handwritten when he had to get a sidebrider fixed, but yeah, he was a prolific letterwriter, a prolific writer, but sadly, all we have left are some of his academic writing.

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[SPEAKER_02]: But I think he would be thrilled that there's a book about him.

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[SPEAKER_02]: He thought his story was important, and he wanted to write his own story, so I think he would be excited, or of course he would prefer his name to be on the book, but I think he would be thrilled to actually know that that people are getting to know his story.

33:24.038 --> 33:38.605
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you reflect a little bit about what other stories like is we just don't know either don't know yet or because things like letter tropes of letters weren't kept that that we might not be able to recover.

33:39.749 --> 33:41.751
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I love doing recovery work.

33:41.831 --> 33:45.215
[SPEAKER_02]: My first book was about an obscure her Le Menason's librarian.

33:45.295 --> 33:50.721
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to hear about people that I haven't heard about before people doing interesting, exciting things.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I think that the newspapers, the African-American newspapers are so essential to covering a lot of these stories for my other work on African-Americans in Denmark, I rely on those papers a lot.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I think that,

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[SPEAKER_02]: stories like Reeze are important because he's like me a first generation college student who whose parents didn't go to school at all, but yet he was able to get into this elite institutions and continue.

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[SPEAKER_02]: I think it's a motivating, these are stories that can motivate other people, hopefully, younger people, to go into these spaces and not to get discouraged.

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[SPEAKER_02]: And as a professor, my student seemed to create these stories that they haven't heard before, or even stories about people that they know about, but don't see different sides, too.

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[SPEAKER_02]: For example, I plan to start my African-Americans in Denmark, Brooklyn, Bukerti, Washington.

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[SPEAKER_02]: He wrote a hilarious travel narrative about going to Denmark.

34:47.192 --> 34:54.981
[SPEAKER_02]: You don't think of him as being funny, but he met the king of England, and he wrote about that in a very humorous way.

34:54.961 --> 35:13.408
[SPEAKER_02]: I, so I like to, you know, just offer stories about people that you haven't heard about or something about them that you didn't know about people that you've heard about for a long time, I think there's so much hidden history that's out there like your podcast.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I often think that really Hollywood producers should just listen to unsung history and I'll get lots of ideas for stories that haven't been told on film.

35:23.381 --> 35:25.684
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, so many people keep saying this sounds like a movie.

35:25.824 --> 35:30.331
[SPEAKER_02]: I was talking to some documentary filmmakers and like is this a real story or a fake story?

35:30.351 --> 35:31.753
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm like this is a true story.

35:31.773 --> 35:43.750
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of people say it sounds like a movie, you know, people running from Paris to Copenhagen to Italy, so I do have a film agent and so fingers crossed that maybe something will come on this in the future.

35:44.641 --> 36:01.907
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so tragically, of course, after Reed and Arna went to so much trouble to stay together and read, turned down a million opportunities to leave and to escape some of the horror that he went through, of course, they didn't end up together in the end.

36:01.887 --> 36:13.041
[SPEAKER_01]: read went back to the US and aren't a went back to Denmark and then curiously aren't a Mary's a woman and you trace a little bit about what happens there.

36:13.101 --> 36:15.829
[SPEAKER_01]: Do we know much more about his story?

36:17.041 --> 36:21.186
[SPEAKER_02]: Very little, so he did marry briefly, it did not work out.

36:21.467 --> 36:24.731
[SPEAKER_02]: He actually divorced wife was pregnant with their second son.

36:25.432 --> 36:30.678
[SPEAKER_02]: And I got to beat the second son last year in Copenhagen, of Denmark.

36:31.419 --> 36:40.030
[SPEAKER_02]: And the story is just that his mother and Mary twice, and she did not want her sons to maintain too much contact with Arna.

36:40.411 --> 36:46.018
[SPEAKER_02]: And so the son that I met, he's only met him a few times and the last time

36:45.998 --> 36:53.390
[SPEAKER_02]: decades ago, and he knew very little about his father's life, though he didn't know he was in a camp during the war.

36:53.771 --> 36:59.320
[SPEAKER_02]: What was sad to me was that he was not aware of Reed at all, or that part of the story.

36:59.340 --> 37:05.610
[SPEAKER_02]: Reed's family, they know that Arna Arna actually wrote some letters to Reed's mother and grandmother.

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[SPEAKER_02]: But that's a whole side of the story was lost in Denmark.

37:11.118 --> 37:21.473
[SPEAKER_02]: And Arna seemed to leave a sad like, I don't think he ever remarried or had any kind of family, and he is buried in a grave of the unknowns.

37:22.275 --> 37:31.067
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and so again, they never, ever got together after that and never saw each other, which is sad and surprising.

37:32.730 --> 37:32.830
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

37:33.417 --> 37:33.879
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.

37:33.899 --> 37:34.220
[SPEAKER_01]: I know.

37:34.762 --> 37:39.740
[SPEAKER_01]: There is so much more in this story, this incredible details.

37:40.081 --> 37:44.136
[SPEAKER_01]: Could you please tell listeners how they can get a copy of this book?

37:44.875 --> 37:55.190
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, this book, the remarkable life of repayground, the man who stared down what we're doing, the name of love is coming out on February 3rd and you can get it wherever books are sold.

37:55.230 --> 38:11.693
[SPEAKER_02]: I won't name specific places, but it is by liking paying a random house and so they distribute it throughout the nation and there's a wonderful ebook and also audio books for people who are

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[SPEAKER_01]: Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talk about?

38:15.706 --> 38:45.291
[SPEAKER_02]: I just think his story is important because two of the institutions that he went to like the Boston Public Latin School and Harvard, they were both part of lawsuits about affirmative action, even in the 21st century, Boston Latin School had very few African American students and there was a lawsuit about that, and Harvard was a lawsuit about affirmative action, not that there were many black Americans who were there, but apparently too much for some people

38:45.271 --> 38:51.308
[SPEAKER_02]: There's still a lot of pushback and I think, you know, Reed was at both of these institutions before from a vaccine.

38:51.368 --> 38:55.841
[SPEAKER_02]: He was given an opportunity to attend and he thrived at these institutions.

38:56.442 --> 39:00.293
[SPEAKER_02]: And I just hope that more people can can take.

39:00.273 --> 39:04.277
[SPEAKER_02]: something from a story, takes something from a story that he knew he was unusual in a way.

39:04.717 --> 39:20.091
[SPEAKER_02]: He liked to pursue things that weren't serial typically African-American and yet he decided to just go ahead and explore his love for the arts in a way that he wanted to and go to these spaces and feel like he'd felt like he belonged.

39:20.231 --> 39:27.417
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I don't know, I think the message is just people should just go for it and pursue whatever things that you're interested in.

39:27.677 --> 39:29.419
[SPEAKER_02]: You have the right

39:30.226 --> 39:33.120
[SPEAKER_01]: That's all, and thank you so much for speaking with me today.

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[SPEAKER_01]: I loved reading this book, and I'm really glad you've had the chance to speak with you.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for having me.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening to Unsung History.

40:04.556 --> 40:08.080
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40:14.667 --> 40:20.734
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40:35.933 --> 40:39.912
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[SPEAKER_00]: Bye!