This is an IHeart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories.

And we tell stories about everything here on this show, including yours. Send them to Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show, including yours. Send them

to Our American Stories.com. There's some of our favorites. 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 plantations, who were working the tobacco

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