YouSaid · the spoken record

Michele Norris

lines on the record

74

first

2020-02-10

most recent

2020-02-10

sittings or episodes

1

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podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

1. “Use a boxed pancake mix, and this was built around Quaker Oats owned and the Angelimine brand. It was one of the largest advertisers in all of America, and it turns out that my grandmother was part of an army of women. Who knew? Who knew that there was an army of women who went out into the world to do these pancake demonstrations at rotarian breakfasts and county fairs and places where people gathered. And my grandmother had a region that included Minnesota, the Dakotas, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Michigan. And she would travel to these places. And again, the trope of the model minority emerges because she dressed up as Angemima. And this blew my mind because my grandmother was extremely well dressed all the time and also was a seamstress and always presented in the world in, you know, in”

   2020-02-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 367 — Michele Norris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Promote convenience cooking was new at that moment, brand new. We weren't cooking out of boxes. We didn't have refrigerators fill of hot pockets and things like that. And so she went out into the world trying to convince a generation of women to”

   2020-02-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 367 — Michele Norris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Burden and underneath that is a thick layer of calcified anger that is sort of glossed over with a veneer of perfection. And that's one of the ways that they, and it relates to, you know, the story you asked about my grandmother. One of the things that I learned from my mother, her secret that she never shared, was that her mother, my grandmother, Ione Brown,”

   2020-02-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 367 — Michele Norris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Know my parents were postal workers. We were working class family, but we had like beautiful curtains. Perfect all the time. And we didn't have a lot of money, but we looked fantastic every time we left the house. And that's wonderful if that is really, if your only reason you're doing it is to represent, but it is a tremendous...”

   2020-02-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 367 — Michele Norris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “I remember only people I have mixed feelings about that. I know I benefited in some way from that, but that's a burden. It is a necessary burden. I mean, my father loved his rose garden. You referenced his, and it was a thing. People in the neighborhood would come every year and look at the variety of roses that he grew in the backyard. And my mother was a big gardener too. And we had.”

   2020-02-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 367 — Michele Norris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Michelle Obama in her book, Becoming, says It's hard to hate up close. They hated the idea of a black family moving in, but when we moved in and they saw the way that we took care of our home, they saw the way that we comported ourselves, they saw, you know, everyday upstanding citizens and realized they're not that different than us, and something changed in them. They had given into this idea that Negroes didn't know how to take care of their property. They were not as strong or upstanding or as intelligent as perhaps they were, and they needed to meet someone up close to see that that just was not true.”

   2020-02-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 367 — Michele Norris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “White family. The gossips moved in next door, and May Gossett was like an aunt to me. She and her husband became very close to my mother and father. But what's interesting, David, is it shows... The elasticity of America, because by the time I was old enough to have friends and play kickball in the neighborhood and ride my banana seat bike up and down the street, the neighborhood had integrated. And many of the people who became friends of my parents and whose children became very close friends of mine were opposed to this Negro family moving in. To the neighborhood. But once they met them, it's like.”

   2020-02-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 367 — Michele Norris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “And my mother has, her name is Betty, and she has a great sense of humor. And so when people would go and look at the house next door, she could sort of time it and she knew they'd walk through the front of the house and the houses are all kind of the same in the way they're built. And they'd get through the living room and the dining room and they'd go in the kitchen. And usually when they go in the kitchen, there's a beautiful, all the houses had deep lots and beautiful backyards. So she would time it so she knew that someone was going through the house. backyard to play. So they knew when they got to that beautiful kitchen window that they would see two brown girls in the backyard. And my mother would say, Showtime, and she'd send the kids out, or either she'd go out herself. And she was pregnant with me. And so that they would see that, you know, a third brown child was on the way. And they never were able to sell that house. And so the second black family moved into that house because they couldn't sell it to a”

   2020-02-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 367 — Michele Norris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “It really created a lot of tumult, social tumult in that community. But by the time I came along that had changed. I mean, my mother tells this great story that when the houses weren't up for sale, there was the neighbors unfortunately next to us, directly next to us, didn't move fast enough. And so they couldn't sell their house. And it was hard because people would literally put a sign up on the for sale sign. Negroes live next door.”

   2020-02-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 367 — Michele Norris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Your property values would plummet. A single black family moving into the neighborhood would mean that your FHA rating would drop. And that was part of the impetus behind redlining in communities was just racial animus. But part of it also was a reaction to government policy. And so when they moved in the neighborhood.”

    2020-02-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 367 — Michele Norris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Yeah, they were the first black family to move south of what, you know, the line kept shifting further and further and further south. And they moved south of 48th Street and we were the first black family on the block. And as I write in the book, when we moved into the neighborhood, every family whose property line touched ours immediately put their house up for sale. And you know, as we lean into that and understand that, it's really interesting the role here at the Institute of Politics, the role the government played in that. So even if you supported integration in the abstract or as an idea. The fact is that a single black family moving into your neighborhood”

    2020-02-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 367 — Michele Norris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Pre lo Before the Supreme Court loving decision. So Minneapolis actually had a large community of people who moved there for their...”

    2020-02-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 367 — Michele Norris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Well, another secret. My father moved to Minneapolis. My uncle Jimmy lived here in Chicago and was friendly with most of the Norris boys, Norris men, and particularly close to my father and my uncle Woodrow. And they went to Minneapolis because that's where my uncle Jimmy was from. He'd moved here to Chicago. When they got to Minneapolis, they loved it. Minneapolis has long been known as a place of tolerance. They could move freely about the city in a way that they couldn't in Chicago. And my father met Jimmy's sister, Betty, my mother. And that was it. And my uncle also met someone and my uncle's wife, his eventual wife is a white woman, Audrey. And Minneapolis was attractive for them because at that time it was illegal to live as husband and wife in a mixed marriage. And I think it was 17. 18 states where it was still illegal.”

    2020-02-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 367 — Michele Norris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “And they didn't. That's another aspect of that greatest generation, that they, part of it was survival. They just decided not to look backwards on that pain. But I think part of it was a collective swell of hope. Like we want to give them something better. And in order to give them something better, they have to feel a certain anticipation and an optimism, you know, about a world and a world that they only could imagine because they We don't talk perhaps enough about utopian ideas and giving the next generation optimism at a moment at a sort of dark and difficult moment in America. Yes.”

    2020-02-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 367 — Michele Norris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Them the respect that they deserved. And that's why I use the word grace in the title of the book because that's something that's hard to imagine in today's moment. And my family is not unique in this. That happened to people who face persecution overseas, that happened to people who were in internment camps. There's something that happens where a family will go through some sort of collective amnesia to give their next generation the gift of hope. And that is an incredible, incredibly graceful act that at times I wonder if I'm capable of, you know, because I think our DNA is ordered a little bit differently in the age of social media where we complain about so many things. We live in a culture of complexity.”

    2020-02-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 367 — Michele Norris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “It and they just didn't talk about it and they didn't tell the younger generation, and I think in answer to your question, David, is that they didn't want to burden us. In order for us, they had such high hopes for us, and in order for us to move forward we They didn't want to, and this is what just blows my mind. They didn't want us burdened, but it's almost like they didn't want us to be angry at a country that never...”

    2020-02-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 367 — Michele Norris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “That was a central part of my journey, my journey in writing the book is trying to figure out why they never talked about it, because I didn't know my father had been shot. You know, he had a scar on his leg. He walked with an affect that was really, really, really gentle. And to me, in all my uncles kind of had a little bit of a stroll on their walk. They called it having English in their walk and the way that men of color often do. And I thought that that was just a little bit more of his style of gliding through the world. But he never told me, he never told my mother. You know, imagine that. In all the years of marriage, intimacies of marriage, he never told her. And yet once I started picking up the phone and calling my cousins and calling my second cousins and calling people in Alabama and calling the diaspora people who would wound up here in Chicago, some of them are in Indiana. A few of them are in Detroit. It turns out that there was an older generation. They all knew about it. They knew about it.”

    2020-02-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 367 — Michele Norris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “And how soldiers were central to the get out the vote effort in the 1940s. And we often don't really talk about that. That's something that's not well known. And I'm ashamed to say I didn't know a lot about the central role of soldiers in the right to vote. And what I had learned that day is that my uncle told me that my father had been shot while trying to enter a building in Birmingham, Alabama, just days after he would return from his military service in 1946. And you know when you say something to someone and you immediately regret it, you could see that he wanted to roll back the tape and take the words back.”

    2020-02-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 367 — Michele Norris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Why would you have to be convinced? You know, when people literally fought, died were met with violence for the simple act of trying to register, to vote. And this is something that you referenced the 50s and the 60s. This was, I mean, the story I learned that day reaches back to the 40s. Yeah.”

    2020-02-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 367 — Michele Norris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Canada Barack Obama, you know, another son of Chicago. And he was so mad because he was having to work so hard to try to get young people to register to vote. And we're sitting at this restaurant and I'm eating something. Isn't that little?”

    2020-02-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 367 — Michele Norris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Back in 2006, 2007. And yet, everywhere I was going, I was encountering people having really animated and interesting conversations about race. So my idea was to go out in the world and chronicle that, get out of studio 2A at NPR, and go and listen to people have these conversations. And what happened is when I would meet with the older members of my family. These stories were starting to bubble to the surface. And that conversation that you referenced with my uncle happened here in Chicago at a restaurant called the Agg and I, downtown. And we were talking, he was in such a bad mood that day because he had been doing work on the south side trying to register people to vote. You know, one of the people who was so charged up by the”

    2020-02-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 367 — Michele Norris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Yeah, yeah. I mean, you got it right, David. I wanted to write a book about how Americans were talking and thinking about race because we were talking about America entering this post-racial moment. You remember that conversation?”

    2020-02-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 367 — Michele Norris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Yeah, and they used to take fabulous pictures and send them back to their family at Brown Studio, which is also not far from here, which is where the people of migration would go and take pictures even if they worked with their hands or wore uniforms for the day. They would get dressed up and send those pictures back. And I'm thankful that I have them. And one of his brothers moved north to Minneapolis, where they both met women that they married. And I was raised in Minneapolis, but I would come to Chicago all the time because I had four uncles that still lived here.”

    2020-02-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 367 — Michele Norris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Well, it's interesting that you ask me that question here in Chicago. Because my father is originally from Birmingham. And as so many people did, he migrated north to Chicago with all five of his brothers, in fact, all six of them lived just off Midway Plissons.”

    2020-02-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 367 — Michele Norris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source