This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, including yours.

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Up next, Pastor and author James E. Ward, Jr. came to national prominence after Jacob

Blake Jr. was shot during an incident involving the Kenosha, Wisconsin Police.

What made his response so unique was his call to prayer, peace, healing, and forgiveness.

In his book Zero Victim Overcoming Injustice with a New Attitude, James Ward tells his story

as a Zero Victim Black American. Here's James Ward talking about two other African-Americans

in U.S. history who inspired his zero-victim mentality.

I like researching historical figures to see if there were any other zero-victim thinkers in history, especially in the African-American community.

And one of the great zero-victim thinkers in American history is

Booker T. Washington, who of course became the first president of Tuskegee University. And I like

his writings. For example, you know, up from slavery is a well-known, you know, writing of Booker T. Washington.

And as early as 1901, he was communicating what I call a zero-victim message.

Speaking to blacks in the South who had experienced tremendous victimization, you're still talking about the era of blacks not being

considered full human beings. You're still talking about blacks being subject to, you know,

Jim Crow laws and the effects of slavery and racism that were very, very pervasive in the South and was overt.

You know, these things were, it was a way of life.

And yet during that time, Booker T. Washington was encouraging blacks in the South to not be

victims, to not see themselves as victims, that despite the injustice that they were dealing with on a daily

basis and historically, in my words, he was encouraging them to overcome injustice with a new

attitude. And he began to explain, for example, to blacks in the South who were working in the

cotton fields, who were working on the sugar

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