Welcome to Karen Hunter is awesome. I am Karen Hunter and it is Black History Month, and that means it's time to learn. Okay, so in this episode, you're going to be introduced to a man. I hope you've heard of them before, but if you haven't, we're going to do a deep dive into Robert Church, Senior.

And I brought my favorite professor, actually America's professor, the professor of the largest Africana Studies classroom in the world narrative, Dr. Gray Carr, to have a conversation about it.

Smartest man I know, by the way. Up next, my discussion with Dr. Carr on Robert Church,

Sr. Dr. Carr, let me first thank you for indulging me. I was reading this book. I was reading

this book by Shamari Wills. It's called Black Fortune. And it's six black. That's a book that I have not read.

I have it over here. So teach the people and teach me about their books. So I can pull it up for

myself. All right. I'm not going to give them a give away too much. But what inspired me was,

you know, he took, he told the stories of six black millionaires, like, who came out of bondage,

who became millionaires during slavery, during, while slavery was in existence. So the inspiration

is there's no, there's no obstacle that we can't overcome. In this book is Annie Turnbull. That's

where I first learned about, not first learned about, I knew about Annie Malone, but he really went into the story of Andy Turnbow, which makes this self-made such an

abomination when you think about it. And Poro, you broke that down, you know, not really

broke it down. We're going to get into that another time. But I really got to see how she

learned the craft and where her heart was.

But I also discovered this guy that I never heard of before, Robert Church.

And I have been talking about Black Wall Street, and I've been talking about this.

There's no Black Wall Street without Robert Church.

And you, and Ida B. Wells, checked and challenged him.

He writes about this.

Robert Church was such a powerful person. So I was like, Dr. Carr, do you know about Robert Church? And you were like, yes. I said, so today we're going to talk about Robert Church. So thank you for indulging. No, no, no. Thank you. In fact, you know, I'm from Nashville and we know Robert Reed Church, even though he was Robert Reed Church, senior, because he had Robert Church, Jr.

That's fascinating story. You know, he's born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, which, of course,

is out of B. Wells hometown. He's going in 1839, as you say, well before the Civil War was over.

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