Little Rock Nine Member Ernest Green on Creating an Atmosphere of Change

On today’s podcast Ryan talks to Ernest Green about his experience as one of the first African-American students to integrate at Little Rock Central High School in 1957, why we should strive to disprove backwards thinking, how we must change as a country, and more. Ernest Green is one of the Little Rock Nine, a group of African-American students who, in 1957, were the first black students ever to attend classes at Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Green was the first African-American to graduate from the school in 1958. In 1999, he and the other members of the Little Rock Nine were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by President Bill Clinton. AppSumo is the best way to automate all of the busywork that comes with running a business, so you can boost your productivity, scale beyond your skillset, and focus on what matters most to you. AppSumo is the leading digital marketplace for entrepreneurs. Now with awesome tools for authors too. Just go to https://social.appsumo.com/ryan-holiday PLUS: Use code ryanholiday at checkout for $20 free credits (limit first 500, new accounts). Ladder makes the process of getting life insurance quick and easy. To apply, you only need a phone or laptop and a few minutes of time. Ladder’s algorithms work quickly and you’ll find out almost immediately if you’re approved. Go to ladderlife.com /stoic to see if you’re instantly approved today. DECKED truck bed tool boxes and cargo van storage systems revolutionize organization with a heavy-duty in-vehicle storage system featuring slide out toolboxes. DECKED makes organizing, accessing, protecting, and securing everything you need so much easier. Get your DECKED Drawer System at Decked.com/STOIC and get free shipping. LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, everyone. It's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Several months ago, I got this delightful email from a woman named Mackenzie Green. She said, "Hi, Ryan. I wanted to thank you. I took your Stoicism 101 course and I even got to ask you a question. Prior to getting into Stoicism, I thought it was just something for white dudes in tech." This is what she's saying. She said she listened to various interviews we had with women, where we talked about a women's role in the Old West, for instance. Then we talked about parallels between Epictetus and Frederick Douglass. And she said, "I started to see the Stoicism of Jackie Robinson, Harriet Tubman, Oprah, and others." And then she said, "And I saw it in my father, a member of the Little Rock Nine. And I started to see the Stoic principles in practice

• 1:37Ryan Holiday?

  besides white dudes in Silicon Valley." I was so grateful to get this email because Stoicism is not just for white dudes in tech, as you know, and as I deeply believe. But I was just so surprised and excited to get an email from the daughter of someone who was in the Little Rock Nine. The Little Rock Nine being the nine young black men and women who integrated Little Rock Central High School in the mid to late 1950s as part of the response to the ruling of Brown v. Board of Education, the first, one of the first major integrations of American--

• 2:16Ryan Holiday?

  Education, breaking down the longstanding and evil reign of Jim Crow segregation. We talked, Mackenzie and I, and I said, hey, would your father ever like to come on the podcast? And she said, she'd think about it, that when she was traveling this summer, she might connect and talk to him. Anyways, this all happened in May, and here we are now in August recording, and I got on the line with the one and only Ernest Green, a real American hero, who in 1957 was one of the first Black students to ever attend classes in Arkansas. And more than just, he's actually, as we talk about, the oldest of the students.

• 2:57Ryan Holiday?

  He's a senior, most of them are much younger. He's also an Eagle Scout, as we talk about. And then he goes on afterwards to attend Michigan State University, and then serve in the Carter administration, work at Lehman Brothers, and has a whole interesting, inspiring career. But, but is best known for this moment of courage and bravery in 1957, where he challenges not only segregation, but, but faces bayonets and guns as, as the governor of Arkansas sends out the National Guard to, to attempt to stop them. So it's a fascinating story, and it's funny, you know, I was, I was just reading this biography of Ralph Ellison for the book

• 3:41Ryan Holiday?

  series that I'm working on now. And it's really funny, there's a passage here, I thought I'd read it to you. This is on page 421, where Ellison is in a discussion with Hannah Arendt, the, the, the sort of scholar on the banality of evil, a well-known philosopher on, on Nazism and, and the, the horrible injustices of the 20th century. She actually talks about how she was disturbed, even mortified, that, that families were sending their kids to these schools, essentially.

• 4:16Ryan Holiday?

  Potentially sacrificing them to advance this, a cause that she agreed with, but she was worried about their safety. And she's talking to Ellison about this. I thought this was really great. Strenuously, strenuously objecting to Arendt, Ralph pointed out that behind the parents' actions, although some students had volunteered for the tasks, and specifically Ernest Green volunteered. So I think that's another inspiring note to his favor. He says, "This was neither negligence nor pushiness, but a nobility of ideals, but a nobility of ideals involving self-confidence, self-consciousness, self-mastery, insight, and compassion."

• 4:58Ryan Holiday?

  The parents, he said, "recognized the overtones of a right of initiation in their children's suffering, and they expected a son to face the terror and contain his fear and anger precisely because he is a Negro American." And then, in the discussion, Arendt concedes privately to Ralph that, "You are entirely right. It is precisely this ideal of sacrifice that I didn't understand." I would say that there's not a better description of Stoicism than that, than that series of phrases there. Self-confidence, self-consciousness, self-mastery, insight, and compassion. Facing terror and containing your fear and anger precisely because of who you are.

• 5:43Ryan Holiday?

  I love that so much. So I'm very excited to bring you this interview with Ernest Green, civil rights activist, American hero, I would say, and all-around wonderful person, father and grandfather, as we talked about. I hope you enjoy this interview. And I think, on that note, a final spot to end is a reminder that my new book, Courage is Calling, is available for preorder now. You can sign up at dailystoic.com/preorder. I actually talk quite a bit about the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King is a hero of the book. Ernest Green talks about, in the interview here, that Martin Luther King actually attended his high school graduation, and they got to know each other over the years.

• 6:25Ryan Holiday?

  I talk about Martin Luther King, I talk about John Lewis, I talk about Ralph Abernathy, and a number of other civil rights heroes, because there is no real activism or justice without courage. And we talked about a whole, I talked about a whole number of other courageous people, men and women like Ernest Green, who stood up. Or sat down, who did the right thing despite an enormous amount of pressure and fear and danger to the contrary. And those are precisely the people that we need to study, that we need to emulate more in our own life, personally, professionally, politically. And anyways, I hope you check out the new book. It's out September 28th and you can

• 7:05Ryan Holiday?

  get a whole bunch of awesome preorder bonuses if you sign up at dailystoic.com/preorder. Pick up a copy anywhere books are sold. You send in an email for the bonuses and you can check out the book and I hope you like it.

• 7:25Ryan Holiday?

  So walk me through, I think some people are familiar with the big day as they've seen it on television so many times or heard about it so many times. But walk, walk me through the run up to finding yourself at this historical moment.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Well, I think you have to, you have to walk back to the Supreme Court decision of Brown versus the Board of Education, which outlawed segregation in public, public schools. And as I say, sometimes it seemed like a non-event, not an event, that Little Rock School Board was attempting to comply with the Brown decision that the Supreme Court handed down.

• 8:23Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  And I'm like in a 15, 16 year old that I didn't pay a lot of attention to it. It didn't, you know, historic moments are not something you go outside your comfort zone to, to be involved in. But the spring of 1957, the Little Rock School Board was attempting to comply with the Supreme Court decision. At least that's what they said. And they asked for students who lived in the school district, who were interested in volunteering to sign a sheet of paper.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  And I complied with that and signed the sheet of paper and didn't pay any attention to it. And as the summer of fifty seven rolled along, I had a summer job. I was the houseman at a country club in Little Rock. And, you know, I got, I got a hamburger and a soft drink and made whatever the minimum wage was at that time. And I was a happy camper. Well, as the summer developed, it turned out that the governor of Arkansas said he was going to

• 9:55Speaker 01

  call out the, the National Guard to keep us from going to Central High School. And so you created this, this, this constitutional conflict. Again, you know, I'm like any other teenager. It doesn't check out as the most important thing for my summer. But it also meant that I had to pay a lot more attention to this event. Because I was the only one in the 12th grade that's the paper and was the only one that at the end of the day, the Little Rock School Board

• 10:42Speaker 01

  decided to invite us to become the Little Rock Nine.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  My, my, my interests did get heightened though, when all of this activity around our going to Central High School developed. In fact, my shorthand said to me that if all this attention is being paid to this, going to the school, this has got to be some sort of big deal.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  The, uh, summer of fifty-seven, uh, the governor, uh, who was Oral Flubus, announced that he was going to, uh, the night before we were to, to, uh, go to Central, that he was going to use the National Guard to bar us from entrance. And I thought, from that point on, uh, this must be something of importance. It was important, I guess, if I look at two events that, that, uh, sort of, uh, centered me.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  One was the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in which involved, uh, Dr. King and Rosa Parks and a number of other people. And then the, uh, the second event was the murder of, uh, um, Emmett Till. Emmett Till. Emmett Till. Emmett Till. Yeah. Emmett Till. Emmett Till's murder was in the spring of, uh, fifty-seven. The Montgomery Bus Boycott began, uh, that winter.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  And, and you spend some time, you know, looking at, uh, uh, events around civil rights. I, I didn't, uh, see myself as a, um, as one of the shock troopers. Um, but I thought that, uh, if this was going to change the way black people were perceived, uh, the way that they had an opportunity to, uh, uh, interact, elimination of Jim Crow, all of these things leading up.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  To a change that I thought was great for me. I believe that uh uh non-events were something that we shouldn't pay attention to. And then thirdly, I saw all of this as helping to improve the atmosphere around Little Rock for myself.

• 13:46Ryan Holiday?

  So the the other students were all much younger than you. So you you in effect volunteered as opposed to your parents sort of signing you up for it. So you must have had some some your your parents were activists as well, right?

• 14:03Speaker 01

  My my mother was a school teacher. My aunt was a a teacher. My grandfather was a a letter a postal carrier. Uh, and he had tried at some point to vote in the Democratic primary. And he was pushed away uh with the uh use of a gun, a rifle. Um, my mother was also, and my aunt, um, involved in a court case for equal pay between black and white teachers.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  And the teacher who brought the suit, uh, the moment she brought the suit, she was fired from Little Rock School School District. And she, uh, my mother and a number of other teachers pooled money together to provide income for her during the course of that year as she was a plaintiff. Anyway, the the lawyer that handled that case for the the black school teachers was Thurgood Marshall. So, yeah, we were we were activists without uh spending a lot of time

• 15:29Speaker 01

  uh knowing that uh this was going to be the beginning of a revolution.

• 15:35Ryan Holiday?

  And you were also an Eagle Scout, right?

• 15:39Speaker 01

  I was an Eagle Scout. I had uh uh become an Eagle Scout the uh that spring. So before I was at Central High School, uh I said I always use my merit badges to figure out what I wanted to do next and uh that helped me uh uh that that helped me get through the idea.

• 16:07Ryan Holiday?

  Was it must have been perplexing, right? You you you come from a a family of people who are contributing to the community. You're an Eagle Scout. You have a summer job. You are a good student. How did it feel as a kid to have this sort of intensity of hatred and disagreement and objection to a person who is effectively doing everything right? That must have been strange to wrap your head around at such a young age.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, that's that's one of the inconsistencies of of segregation and and Jim Crow at that period of time that

• 16:52Speaker 01

  the people that I knew, I knew the we had a a doctor, you had a pharmacist, had a a lawyer, Daisy Bates, who was a publisher of the uh weekly newspaper. All these people were making a contribution and yet if you listen to the uh to the segregationists, they would say that the black community doesn't contribute anything, that they are obviously not making any impact,

• 17:29Speaker 01

  positive impact, and that we've got to figure a way to keep them uh keep them segregated and keep them away from from the majority of community.

• 17:43Ryan Holiday?

  So so the day comes and you're you're there for your first day of school. I imagine this is the scariest moment of your life?

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Well, to have somebody with bayonets and rifles pointed that they're keeping me away, they're letting these other students go to class. Yeah, it's a difficult issue to get your head wrapped around. But you also knew that being a black person at that point in time, that if they were working that hard to keep you out, it had to be something going on that was worth pursuing.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  And that this represented, to me, an opportunity to change the atmosphere, change the matrix of how we were considered worthless. And that it made me feel that I had, I should be there. I mean, it was my opportunity to say that you got the wrong person. I'm obviously important and I want to be inside that school.

• 19:15Ryan Holiday?

  I love that. That's such an interesting way of thinking about it. Yeah, the reason they were trying to keep you out is that it was very, very valuable and they were trying to keep it for themselves. Even though it was dressed up in racism and hatred, it was really about self-interest.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you came to the conclusion that you were making a real contribution to the community, much more so than they were willing to admit. And that segregation and Jim Crow and...

• 19:54Speaker 01

  All of the rationale that they threw up to keep you out didn't make sense. I should be there and I'm gonna, I'm gonna stay there at that front gate until you let me in.

• 20:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I interviewed George Ravling a few years ago. He's one of the pioneering basketball coaches. He, he was there on the steps of the, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Monument when, when King gave the I have a dream speech. And actually Martin Luther King gave him the speech as he walked down the stairs. And George was telling me that his grandmother would, every time she saw him, she would say, you know, George, why did the slave owners keep their money in books? Why did they hide their money in, in the books on, on the plantation? And he said, I don't know. And she said, because she thought the slaves would never look there. And his, what he took from that was, go ahead.

• 20:55Ryan Holiday?

  Sorry, he, he was, he was saying that because they, they knew books were valuable, but were trying to deceive him from thinking they were valuable. And that's precisely why he has spent so much of his life reading. The things, precisely the things that they're trying to keep away from you are the things you deserve and should be seeking out.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Well, I, I appreciate that because I was at the March as well. And had an opportunity

• 21:30Speaker 01

  to hear Dr. King speak. Well, and, and I, I don't know whether you're aware that he came to my graduation, my high school graduation.

• 21:42Ryan Holiday?

  I didn't know that.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was, he was giving a speech in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, which is maybe 20, 30 miles from Little Rock.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  And he decided that he wanted to witness my graduation. He came up, sat with the woman who I mentioned, Daisy Bates, and my family. And so I always said that I'm one of the few people in the world that had Dr. Martin Luther King at their high school graduation. But over the years, I had an opportunity to see him. And, and as I said, I was at the march for, for Jobs and Freedom. That Dr. King was there. A. Philip Randolph was there.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Marlon Brando was there. And it was, it was an event to, to be.

• 22:48Ryan Holiday?

  I bet.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm.

• 22:50Ryan Holiday?

  So, so when you walk into that school for the, the first time, what, once you sort of get past the barriers and once you're inside, what was it like to, to be showing up to, to your senior year of high school, which is difficult and strange and weird, even under normal circumstances? How did you, how did you navigate that year and get your education while so many people were, you know, probably rooting for and trying to make you fail?

• 23:22Speaker 01

  To have you fail. Well, I, I think that because they worked hard at trying to make me fail, made me also stronger in, in terms of trying to succeed. I paid a lot of attention to.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  The fact that I needed to study, in fact, I had a couple of tutors that were working with me. I had a course in physics that was really very difficult for me. But the reason I got through it is I had a, my tutor was a physics professor from the University of Arkansas Medical School. He was white. And every Saturday for the entire school year, he and I had tutoring sessions that helped me get through that. So there were people who were trying to see that I would, could succeed.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  But most of them, most of the students were really afraid being led by, by their families or their community that somehow they should feel, they shouldn't help us.

• 24:52Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  They shouldn't reach out. And I think that it's a sad state when I look back at what could have happened, that didn't happen. But I was committed that I was going to go through that year. I was going to succeed and that it was going to be a year in which I would pass my courses and hopefully get on to college.

• 25:27Ryan Holiday?

  It, it must have been strange, as you said, some, some people were rooting for you. Some people were rooting against you. At first, the governor sends the National Guard to keep you out. And then Eisenhower sends in the airborne to let you in. It must have been strange that you have, you, you're seeing the absolute worst and the best of people at the same time.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Well, it was, and the fact that President Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne, which are, you know, elite troops to help us get into school, was another indication that this was, this was a big deal. I needed to make certain that I succeed at it, and that there were people around the country who cared, not just those in Little Rock, Arkansas, who wanted to see me fail.

• 26:35Ryan Holiday?

  Is it, is it hard for you to, how do you go through the world knowing that some of the people are really good, and some of the people are really bad, or that some people have, you know, Martin Luther King talked about how we all have a north and a south in our soul, and that there's a battle, which side are you going to be on? How do you, how do you navigate seeing up close the sort of the two paths that individuals could take? That seems like it would be hard to unsee. Once you've been screamed at by horrible racists, once people have thrown rocks at you, once people have threatened your family, how do you unsee that?

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Well, you, you knew, growing up in Little Rock, that this was an attitude that a number of people had, and that I was taught by my family and by my friends and my community that I had value. I was worth something. I was, I was important to me, and that, as you mentioned, the, the coach who said that they hid their, their money in books, because they didn't feel that, one, black people could read, two, that they were going to

• 28:01Speaker 01

  look in a book. And I think that at each point, I had an opportunity, along with my friends, to disprove that they had the wrong view about who I was and what I could do. And, and that way, I could always read.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  And they wouldn't know that I had I had a idea where the money was.

• 28:32Ryan Holiday?

  So I I think particularly growing up, I felt this way. This feels like it was all a very long time ago. But I was just reading to my son. There's a children's book. My son's four and Ruby Bridges wrote a children's book. And I'm reading the back of it. And she's only 66 years old. And you're 79, 80. It's not, it wasn't that long ago that this happened.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, this was, this was recent. In fact, we were a year before Ruby, when she went to school in New Orleans. That Little Rock was the 57, I think. She was 58, 59. When she went to school in New Orleans. But no, this, this is less than 100 years. And we're still fighting ideas that culminate in racist views about what people can and can't do. And that's why I think it's important for you to read to your son, that we're ready to take on these challenges.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  We're ready to disprove backwards thinking that people have about other people. And that we're ready to show the world. And that this is a changed atmosphere. That this is a place that we're able to show that we can.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  We can grow. We as a country have to grow. Uh, we we go the world in which uh people, as Dr. King said, hopefully judged by the content of that character. Uh, not who they are. So.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  Race, uh, justice, uh, an opportunity to show that uh we all can make a contribution is where we are at this moment.

• 30:48Ryan Holiday?

  I, as I was uh thinking about all this, I I um I reached out to my family because my grandmother uh and her side of the family is all from Bearville, Arkansas. And and so I I asked, I said, you know, uh, did my grandmother was was the high school she went to segregated? Um, and they said, uh, actually, um, I guess the senior year of her high school, uh, her, the Bearville High School was destroyed by a tornado. And so she went to Little Rock High School. She they they sent her to Little Rock High School. I think this is forty five, forty six. Uh, the last year of her high school, she went to the same high school that you did.

• 31:26Ryan Holiday?

  And it was interesting to me to think, one, again, this is not that long ago. I spent a lot of time with this woman when I was growing up. Uh, that my own grandmother pre went went to high school ten years before you did, and it was segregated. But the thing that struck me about it was it was never once talked about. Like, you know, we talk about privilege or we talk about advantages. It never once came up that my grandmother got to go to a high school that kept out a significant percentage of the population who still had to pay taxes, who still had an equal right to go there. It's it's interesting to me. We talk about sort of how advantages gets passed down.

• 32:07Ryan Holiday?

  Like, it's never been thought about in my family that we, you know, I think people go, oh, we're not racist. But we still don't think about how the that racist system benefited us at the expense of another group.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  And I will add that my dad went to Europe and fought in World War I.

• 32:33Ryan Holiday?

  Wow.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Now, he went, he went to France to help.

• 32:38Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  French. And when he came back, little like he couldn't vote.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  And it's a, it's a series of positions that when you stand on your head, it doesn't make sense. They can't justify it. They, they, they can't logically explain it. It doesn't, doesn't translate. And that's why I think as soon as we can get as many of these old vestiges of Jim Crow and segregation, whether they are statues, or, or behavior, or, or availability of opportunity, all of it doesn't.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  We have an opportunity, our generation, your generation, your, your, your children, to correct that and make certain that we don't have to live in, in the past like we've done in the, before.

• 33:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and you, you mentioned Emmett Till earlier. I was, I was reading an article, Wright Thompson wrote an article in the Atlantic about Emmett Till in the barn where he was killed. And the most stunning part of that piece, that really, that really brings home how recent some of this was, is that the woman that Emmett Till supposedly whistled at, although she, it, it, it sounds like she actually made it up. But the woman at the center of all of that is still alive.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes, absolutely. And, and if you ask her what happened, she'll probably tell you she doesn't remember now.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  So that we are a nation that I think our strength is our diversity.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  And yet, we fight hard not to recognize that. So that seems to me what we need to do, especially with generation of your kids, is make sure that all these blind alleys that we've been going up and down, that we get away from it and get on with recognizing who we are, why we can't be a better country than we are, and what our strengths are. I mean, it's, it is, it is mind-boggling that we still fight,

• 35:25Speaker 01

  that we're still fighting the civil war and that we can't give it up

• 35:34Speaker 01

  for a better future that's right in front of us.

• 35:37Ryan Holiday?

  I'm really glad you brought that up because, you know, the irony of, and maybe sometimes it's easier to see it in, when you look at another country, right? The irony of Nazi Germany is that the Second World War is ultimately won in large part through the work of Jewish scientists who are driven out of Germany by the Nazis who come to America and Britain and do all sorts of important work for the Allied cause. And I think that's one part of segregation and racism and Jim Crow that we don't think about. It's not just that it was morally wrong.

• 36:18Ryan Holiday?

  It was also economically stupid in a profound way because I think about the illustrious career that you've gone on to have and the work that that many of the the other members of the the Little Rock Nine have gone on to do, just being ordinary parents, raising good families, having good jobs. And to think that systematically the laws of this country prevented that from happening. If you had been born one year earlier, or one year later, actually, you might not have been able to have the career that you've had or made the make the contributions that you've made because we would have been shooting ourselves in the foot by holding

• 37:03Ryan Holiday?

  you and people like you down. That's diversity is a strength and yet, as you said, we seem to fight it at every step of the way.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think that in a, in a world that seems to become coming more diverse, that if we're going to recognize our strengths as a country, we've got to recognize our assets and it seems to me that fact that we are not a, we are a multicultural

• 37:44Speaker 01

  country with people from all over the world.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  We need to get on with with proving why that's important. And not see it as a hindrance.

• 37:59Ryan Holiday?

  So, so you experienced this, you saw sort of raw, unadulterated, unadulterated violent racism upfront, right? You saw the crowds screaming at you, you saw like literal

• 38:14Ryan Holiday?

  troops having to hold it back. That doesn't just disappear, right? It seems very distant now. But, but that didn't just disappear. Where does that? Where does that energy go, you think? All these people who are

• 38:30Speaker 01

  And probably

• 38:33Ryan Holiday?

  Go ahead.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Where does the energy go? Well, that's a, that's a great question. It ought to go towards an improvement of opportunity for everybody in this country.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  And I think the sooner we figure that out, you know, hopefully leadership

• 38:55Speaker 01

  is going to spend some time trying to work on that. I, I think

• 39:02Speaker 01

  the president administration, obviously, a very important accomplishment to have a vice president of the country that is, is not a white male. Sure. Uh, that, uh, in fact, that probably does greater opportunity for, for young women to see Vice President Harris than it does to see her as, as, uh, as a person of color. I, I, I think that, you know, you're

• 39:44Speaker 01

  interviewing.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  You're recognizing that

• 39:52Speaker 01

  we are different place.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  That when you talk to your son and, and ask him,

• 40:03Speaker 01

  what does he see, you know, the, the, the opportunities in America? He, he would probably tell you he sees Martians, which wouldn't be bad because we're spending all this time trying to get to Mars. And if anybody's up there, we're going to be shocked out of our, our pants.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  But we are at a point we have an opportunity to look at the future as something different than our history. And

• 40:43Speaker 01

  I feel great about that. I see it in my family. I see it with my children who are all adults and grown up and families that they have.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Can America be different for the future than what we've seen it become in the past? And I'm an optimist. I believe that that's possible. And that's why I wanted to go to that school. And that's why I believe, you know, change is, change is good.

• 41:20Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and that was sort of my question. I, I think, I think maybe we've told ourselves a story that as soon as the schools were desegregated, or as soon as, you know, the Voting Rights Act was passed, that this all went away. And I guess what I'm saying is, you, you saw these people up close, you saw, you met their children, or, or maybe you went to class with them. They didn't magically get transformed just because Ernest Green sat next to them in history class or physics class. So how have you seen that evolution in, in people? Like, I, I, I guess what I'm saying is, it feels like we're having this reckoning now in the United States because we realize that just because we made a few changes, doesn't

• 42:03Ryan Holiday?

  mean that, that everyone's soul was transformed, that we suddenly, that we suddenly grew out of this many century-long tradition of thinking about things the wrong way.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  But, but you're answering the question. Because it's more than just reckoning and sitting next to me in a physics class. It's a long history. And, but, the but is that it can change. There are enough people who are willing to spend time trying to make it permanent, not just window dressing.

• 42:47Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  And if anybody thinks that simply because we did one act, we made one, one change here, or that-

• 42:59Ryan Holiday?

  Or that we had a black president, or a black vice president.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  All of that.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  It's not that it doesn't mean anything. It's just that we have been so long at trying to prove that people don't have qualities of change, that we don't know when change comes. And I'm a witness that change is possible, but it is awfully difficult. It is awfully difficult. And that what we got to do is get people committed to stay with it and not give up. Because we got some knuckleheads who want to resist change. I mean, I don't know where they're gonna go.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  You know, they go to Iceland or someplace. They go to Mars, I guess. But they've got to be willing to accept the fact that we're all human beings and we've got something to contribute to the plus side of this country.

• 44:09Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I love that you said that you're an optimist because I think people said that they use that as an excuse, but it's not enough to be. You weren't just, hey, I think the future's going to be better or I think things will work out. Your optimism was also connected with the actions that you took. Right? So I think people sometimes think progress just happens. Of course, it does. But progress happens because individuals and groups come together and make progress together.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  And they, and they continue to demand change. I think it's, as I said, my dad fought in World War I. And, and yet he was working on this abstract idea of equality.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  And when he came home, there were a whole ton of people who were resisting. He considered himself equal to me. Who does he think he is?

• 45:17Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  And I'm here to say that you and I and your kids and mine and my family and other members of the nine, a big world out there. But we're not going to give in to the knuckleheads that say change can't occur and that I've got to live in the past. Uh, I'm going to want more. Uh, I'm willing to fight for more. And I think we have an opportunity to make the change stick.

• 45:57Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I'm so glad you brought that up because it is fascinating. Uh, that you talked about how we stand on our head. We can't make it work. I just looked, I just looked up, uh, uh, Orville Fabius, the governor of, uh, of Arkansas, who worked so hard to prevent you from going to school. He was in the US Army from 1942 to 46. He was a major in the infantry, uh, participated in D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge. So he, he goes overseas to fight fascism, to, to, to fight for freedom and democracy. And then comes home and is an active participant in the suppression of those very ideas at home.

• 46:37Ryan Holiday?

  It's, it's, it's so baffling, uh, that, uh, I can't, I don't know how you make sense of it.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  Well, I, I, and I agree with you. I don't know how he makes sense with it either. Part of it was that we thought that Little Rock and Arkansas were a bit more, more progressive than some other communities in the South. Uh, that's why I thought that my first day at school, I would have an opportunity to meet some students, um, who were interested in what I thought of the world. And, and I had an opportunity to figure out what they thought of the world. Mostly what I met the first week.

• 47:30Speaker 01

  Were students who were afraid to have any contact with me. Um, that they were going to be ostracized. They were going to, uh, uh, be told by their friends and neighbors that they couldn't have a relationship with me because I was gonna turn them around. I don't know, I don't know what the outcome was supposed to be. But here we are in a new century. Uh, ideas that your grandmother,

• 48:13Speaker 01

  who went to Central High, same that I did, uh, didn't become the flaming communist of Arkansas, right?

• 48:25Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  She was, she was a person that you still admired. And what I think is that

• 48:35Speaker 01

  your grandmother and other people who went to Central when I was there, we need to hear from them, that the place didn't fall apart. Uh, that, uh, Little Rock Central has had a number of students who have succeeded, done well. Uh, it was considered one of the jewels of, of the mid-south in terms of the building. And that I wanted to go there because I knew that it was a ticket to a better life. And that's what education has been centuries. So that, uh, uh, let's get on with it.

• 49:21Ryan Holiday?

  Otherwise.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Make it.

• 49:23Ryan Holiday?

  I think it's worth pointing out because, again, we can tell ourselves a story about these things retroactively that sort of absolves us of responsibility. I'm talking about everyone but you in this case. But, you know, it seems like in retrospect, obviously, the governor of Arkansas was wrong, obvious that segregation was wrong, and that this was a sort of a really small minority that had hijacked things. But I'm, as I was saying, I just looked him up. According to Gallup's Most Admired Man and Woman Poll of 1958, Orville Fabius was one of the 10 most admired Americans at that time. And so it's, I think it's really important that we look at history and remind ourselves that oftentimes, the

• 50:08Ryan Holiday?

  right thing, the proper thing, what in the future will seem like a clear-cut case of right and wrong, you know, we can, society can get completely incorrect, and that just how many people were on the wrong side of this issue as it was happening, probably including my own family. Again, it's the fact that we don't talk about it probably makes me think that we were on the wrong side of it. But, but I think it's important, you know, as issues happen today, that you don't just default to what all your friends and neighbors are thinking, because as we see with Jim Crow and segregation, these things that were unfortunately very popular at the time, we can be way off base.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Well, and I think recognizing that, that you can be on the right side of history, but it's probably takes a lot, but, and that the likelihood is that your neighbors are not going to applaud you.

• 51:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  I think we've, we've relegated.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Dr. King to godlike status. Now, there were many times when his efforts were being regarded as wrongheaded and going in the wrong direction.

• 51:33Ryan Holiday?

  I, I, yeah, I imagine he wasn't giving, given a standing ovation at your high school graduation.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Well, they didn't, they didn't know who he was. And luckily, I, I think that the Little Rock Police Force didn't have any idea who Martin Luther King was, so that they couldn't point him out. But to, to his credit, he wanted to see my graduation and I'm honored that he was there taking part of my graduation.

• 52:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, he probably risked his life to be there in, in, in some sense or another.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 52:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and, and in the end, he did give his life, right? It's not like he was so popular that we made him a saint, you know, in his own time. I mean, he was assassinated.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  That's part of the history and it's important to, to remember that. And that people who go against the grain are not necessarily the ones that we cheer on.

• 52:49Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  But let's recognize the fact that they make an enormous contribution to make this country what it is today.

• 52:59Ryan Holiday?

  So how did you come to talk about all this with your own children? I, I imagine you wanted them to have a normal life, but you probably also, and you probably also worried about their safety. And how did you talk to them about not just racism and its history in America, but how did you talk to them about, you know, activism and being of service and, and, and, and values? How, how did you talk to them in your own family?

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Well, it ranged from my attempting not to bury them in the history, in my history, having them to discover it, both on their own and with some help from me. My McKenzie probably will tell you that she discovered it on her own, that one day in a history class, the teacher brought out a picture of the nine, and she looked and

• 54:15Speaker 01

  saw that Terrence Roberts, who was with me, was one of the nines, and she had a perplexed look on her face. And I think that those of us who have been fortunate enough to be part of history, to show up in a history book. You want your kids to appreciate what you've done, and that's where we really were. All of them, I've spoken at their classes.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  I said, "Adam is my son, who is a history professor. I've been at every level of scholarship that he's been." So that I've tried to make myself available to be the outside lecturer, and hopefully not to bury them in my history, but to recognize that we've tried to make a contribution to the country.

• 55:33Ryan Holiday?

  And you went on, you served in the Carter administration, right?

• 55:38Speaker 01

  I was Assistant Secretary in the Carter Administration for Job Training, Employment and Training.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  I spent four years there.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  And then went from there to

• 55:57Speaker 01

  spend time on a Wall Street firm, Lehman Brothers. And

• 56:04Speaker 01

  and now my wife is trying to get me to retire. I'm semi-retired. Every now and then I do a lecture like this. But

• 56:19Speaker 01

  I'm proud of my kids.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  The work that they're doing. And

• 56:28Speaker 01

  you know, we continue to push on. I got a birthday coming up

• 56:33Speaker 01

  in September.

• 56:34Ryan Holiday?

  Eighty?

• 56:36Speaker 01

  That'll be the big eight oh.

• 56:38Ryan Holiday?

  Wow. Could you have, could you have imagined as a senior at that first day of school at Central High School that this would be the trajectory of your life, that you'd, you'd serve in a presidential administration, that a Democratic, you know, governor from the South, no less? Could you have imagined that?

• 57:03Speaker 01

  No, the, the opportunity to serve for President Carter was great. I've known a number of presidents. Obviously, Bill Clinton is someone that have a personal relationship with President Obama. Went to his inauguration.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  So, you know, it's, it's, it's a

• 57:35Speaker 01

  It's a moment that I cherish, but I always thought that if you gave me a shot, that this is the way it would turn out.

• 57:48Ryan Holiday?

  I love that. And that, I think, again, to go to this self-interested argument, I think, and I read this once about Anne Frank. You know, you read Anne Frank's diary and you see this precocious, you know, beautiful young girl who's struck down in her prime, that she's really a stand-in for a generation of other talented young people that we would have never heard of. And I think, when I think about your story, I think Americans should see both a triumph, but it's also a reminder, you're a symbol of all the other talented, ambitious, confident, young men and women who could have served in so many

• 58:30Ryan Holiday?

  different capacities that were wrongly deprived of that opportunity. And people who remain deprived of opportunities for various reasons.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, and I hope that people see the upside of it, that it's the opportunity that we've closed out a lot of folks. I'm sure my dad couldn't imagine, you know, things that have happened, but I believe that, you know, the future could be even brighter than what we've experienced. And there's no reason why we ought to cut off the lights and turn

• 59:19Speaker 01

  the lock on the door and not look for the future, or how are we going to get more talent and get more plus out of it?

• 59:32Ryan Holiday?

  Do you have grandchildren?

• 59:34Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, I have a granddaughter.

• 59:38Ryan Holiday?

  That must help contribute to your optimism about the future.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  It does. It makes me believe that that my optimism is not misplaced.

• 59:58Ryan Holiday?

  Um, you can, you can get that. It's, it's fine. Um, as, as we, as we wrap up, I'm just curious.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Mr. Secretary, I gotta call you back. All right. All right. Thank you.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  That was a person I'm very proud of, who like, like me, participated in

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  government, Rodney Slater, who's Secretary of Transportation and grew up

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  uh, working for Bill Clinton.

• 1:00:39Ryan Holiday?

  Wow.

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  Uh, he is now a big time lawyer in town. But again, a guy who came from humble roots and has been able to take advantage of education uh, and make it work for him.

• 1:01:01Ryan Holiday?

  I love that. Well, as we wrap up, as, as, as America in the last year and a half has sort of begun to wrestle more publicly with some of these racial issues, something we should have done a long time ago, of course. How do you, how are you thinking about and what advice do you have to the next generation of Americans, period, black or white, about how we keep the flame going, how we keep moving forward where we can and need to make progress? What advice do you have?

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Well, I, I, I think that my story, other stories prove the point that we, we don't look under all the right places to find talent. And my hope is that we've become a lot more inquisitive about where we search and seek out people to make a contribution to this country. And as I said, when we started this discussion, I'm an optimist about the future, but we

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  gotta work at it and we gotta believe that we can improve considerably where we're looking for talent and contribution and people who can make a difference. So I, I want to continue to look for that difference and I believe we can make it, we can make it work.

• 1:02:43Ryan Holiday?

  How, how do you think we can do a better job of that? Is it, is it education? Is it, how, how can people do a better job looking for talent that, that as you said, is not being given an equal shot?

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  Well, I, I think you, you've got to be willing to, to look at lots of different corners and underneath cans and not just the usual. Let's not look at everybody who graduated from the Ivy schools. Let's see if we can't find some other places that, that people congregate and have, you know, maybe homeless shelters.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  We aren't, we aren't looking at, for talent in all the right places, as the song says. And my hope is that the last two or three years prove that we've got to be more creative about where we look and how we support them.

• 1:04:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, not just looking, looking for them, but also thinking about the ways that our systems and our institutions are making it harder for people than it needs to be, and thus preventing them from thriving and succeeding.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  I would agree with you wholeheartedly.

• 1:04:20Ryan Holiday?

  Well, Ernest, this was truly an honor for me. I'm so glad that McKinsey connected us, and your story is very inspiring, and I'm honored to be able to tell people about it. And glad to see you're doing well, that you've written out this insane pandemic, and you're still with us. And I hope you're with us for a lot longer.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. And I look forward to getting this book written, getting my story told. But my family, my wife, my children, my sister, and extended family have been the rock of my support. And I believe we can, one, we can do better. Two, we've got to do better. And three, that better is out there waiting for us to find them and touch them and bring them in.

• 1:05:26Ryan Holiday?

  I love that. Well, writing books is one thing I do know a little bit about. So if I can help in any way, you just have McKinsey reach out, and I'm happy to do whatever I can.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. And I enjoyed our time together. And let me know what kind of response we get.

• 1:05:45Ryan Holiday?

  I will indeed. Thank you so much. This was great. I'll let you go. And I hope you have a wonderful Monday.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  All right. Thank you. And same to you.

• 1:05:54Ryan Holiday?

  Bye, sir.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  All right. Goodbye.

• 1:05:59Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could leave a review for the podcast, we'd really appreciate it. The reviews make a difference. And of course, every nice review from a nice person helps balance out the crazy people who get triggered and angry anytime we say something they disagree with. So if you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.