Aran Shetterly, Chasing a Good Story

 

Aran Shetterly

SPEAKERS

Will Bachman, Aran Shetterly

 

Will Bachman  00:02

Hello and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host. Will Bachman, and I’m happy to be here today with Aran Shetterly, Aran, welcome to the show.

 

Aran Shetterly  00:16

Thanks. Will Great to be here with you.

 

Will Bachman  00:18

So Aran, talk to me about your journey since graduating from Harvard. Well,

 

Aran Shetterly  00:24

I feel like something of a late bloomer, and I had to bump around a lot coming out of Harvard to sort of find my path, or lots of different paths, I guess when I first graduated from Harvard. Now I am class of 92 I started class of 92 but I actually graduated 93 I took a year off in the middle that was very important to my development as a person and as a Harvard student. I got something called an Echoing Green fellowship. It was a social entrepreneurship fellowship, and I went to Costa Rica to set up a nonprofit that would link volunteers to environmental organizations there. And interestingly, I mean, I think this is something that could have worked much better if I’d done it about five years later, when the internet was really functioning, but recruiting people was a real task, but I did have a class, two classes of volunteers that came from different colleges around the United States and not even some were professionals who came down and were embedded for a couple of months in environmental organizations in Costa Rica, and it was a real my first sort of big project, all on my own, and I felt like I made a million mistakes and learned a lot, but also kind of got hooked on the idea of big projects and and figuring out how to do them with very little background and and in how to do them, or even the place.

 

Will Bachman  02:10

Okay, so that

 

Aran Shetterly  02:12

was, that was the first then I came back and I got this idea that I would go and be an academic. And I, I’m from Maine. I grew up in rural Maine, and I thought, well, maybe I’ll go back and get a master’s in American and New England studies from the University of Southern Maine. And then after that, I thought, well, then I’ll go to a sort of a prestigious program to finish up a PhD or and so I did this masters. And during that time, realized that I really wasn’t quite cut up for academia, that I needed to sort of bump around in the world in a different way. And I answered a want ad in the New York Times that a publisher in New York was looking for an editorial assistant. And you know, this is one of these examples. Is I feel like throughout time, I kind of avoided the Harvard network, and this is a great example of that, right? I answered a, a I want to add, took the bus down from Maine to New York, interviewed and ended up getting the job, and I moved to New York. And just at that moment, uh, Evan Cohen, in our class, had a room open in his apartment on Barrow Street in the West Village, and he invited me to move in with him, which was a wonderful thing to do. And I did that job for almost a year, but it paid very little, and I was working a lot, and was a little bored. And at that moment, Jamie Rosen, another member of our class, invited me to go work for an internet startup that he had going, and I was, I think I don’t know the ninth or 10th person to go work for him, at something that sort of got really big for a little while, and then wasn’t what was that after that. It was called comet systems. And so Jamie, who’s this brilliant, creative person who figures prominently in the in my life in a lot of ways, and is connected to so many important moments in my life, had this idea that, why is the cursor The only piece of real estate on a website that you can’t put an image into? And so he created this piece of software that you would download that then allow third parties to broadcast into that image. So it could be fun or it could be advertising, and it was called comet systems and the comet cursor, and it raised a tremendous amount of VC funding, and we had a real blast for a few years running around New York like Masters of the Universe.

 

Will Bachman  04:58

Okay, that’s it, you guys. With a cursor. Well,

 

Aran Shetterly  05:05

I was there, helping out any way I could, but, yeah, it was, it was a lot of fun for a little while, okay? And I remember this one moment though, I was on my way to try to set up a partnership with Yahoo, and I was flying across the country, and I sat down in the plane and opened the Wall Street Journal, and there was this big column about calling the comic cursor spyware. And so this was the absolute worst thing that could be happening on the plane on the way to meet with Yahoo and CBS market watch, and I can’t remember who else I was meeting with. So I got to the meeting at Yahoo, and the whole plan had been to talk about partnership, and what I got was a 45 minute lecture on internet ethics. And as you can imagine, that partnership went nowhere at that point. So bad timing.

 

Will Bachman  06:02

Um, proving the point that it is not necessarily true that, you know, all publicity is good publicity, or whatever,

 

Aran Shetterly  06:10

exactly. I mean, I think the things that we were collecting and and weren’t collecting at that time are nothing compared to what’s collected now. But the whole idea right at that time, that all of a sudden this information could be collected about individual internet

 

Will Bachman  06:27

users. Was Little did they know? Okay, so this cursor comment, comment, so cursor company, and then what? It wasn’t long

 

Aran Shetterly  06:35

after that that I took a trip to Cuba. I was interested in Cuban art, actually, and my father’s a painter and and I invited my father and and his partner, his wife, to come on this trip with me to look at Cuban art. And it was a sponsored trip. It was a wonderful trip, very intense. And one of the things, apart from visiting artist studios and galleries and museums, was we were also brought into Cuban hospitals and to talk to Cuban officials about how Cuba worked. And so there was a bit of a propaganda element to the trip, and we were in the this meeting in the middle of the country, tiny, little city called Santa Clara and I had, in college, read about and studied a little bit about the Abraham Lincoln brigades that went to Spain, the internationals who went to Spain to fight against fascism there during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s basically the beginning of World War Two, in a way. And so I asked this question. I said, Well, in this fight against Batista, the sort of you know, Fidel Castro’s rebellion, and fight against Batista in the late 50s, were there internationals that came to support that cause? And the man said, No, but there was this one guy, what was his name? And his secretary said, William Morgan, and it was like the hair on the back of my neck stood up. And I came back from that trip and started googling. And I thought, well, the only way I’m going to get any information is to send a Freedom of Information Act request to the CIA. And so I did, and I got back this, two inches of documents, about two thirds of which were redacted, and I was hooked. And so that was basically the end of my time in New York at comet systems. I thought, I need to know who this person was and what happened to him. And that’s what launched me to write my first book and to do something in a way I’d been avoiding, which was, I knew I wanted to write, but I hadn’t had the guts, in some ways, or the inspiration, or the sense of experience, or whatever it was, to go off and do it, and that suddenly, that motivating moment was enough to launch me into something that has become a career and become extremely satisfying and exciting for me to do. Okay, let’s

 

Will Bachman  09:24

properly promote this first book. What is the title of it? I mean, let’s, let’s

 

Aran Shetterly  09:29

call the americano fighting with Castro for Cuba’s freedom. And it tells the story of this young man from Toledo, Ohio, who ended up joining a rebel army. What I learned was there were more than one. Castro wasn’t the only one with a rebel army in Cuba, fighting against Batista and becoming a hero in Cuba. And so when the war, when the revolution, was won at the beginning of 19. 59 he was actually a more prominent hero of the revolution than Che Guevara at that point, and he actually helped save the revolution in its first months. They a sort of scheme that included members of the mob, representatives of the Dominican Republic and our FBI were trying to topple Castro in the first six, eight months of the 1959 and William Morgan played the role of double agent, and ended up uncovering this plot so that Castro could thwart it. He then turned against the revolution as it became it moved clear that it was turning communist. Was arrested and executed just before the Bay of Pigs, because Castro realized that he was the last sort of charismatic leader who could mount a successful counter revolution in Cuba, and got rid of them. Well, yeah, it’s a hell of a story. Okay, so,

 

Will Bachman  11:04

I mean, let’s dive in and it’s just a little bit more. Tell us about, you know, where you went and sort of sources to research this book. This guy had died, you know, 35 years earlier. So did you go to Cuba to research it? Or I spent

 

Aran Shetterly  11:23

six months in Cuba, whoa? And actually, I went. It was sort of a funny situation. I went with this two projects. I went with a project that the Cubans loved, which was to set up an exchange of artists between Maine and Cuba. They love that. And then I went with this other I was very open about it research project. And I don’t think they thought I was going to work as hard as I did at it. And at one point, I was up in this little town in the mountains, in the middle of the country, and all of a sudden this official from the interior ministry showed up and he said, I think you should get on the next bus down to the major city there. And I said, Oh, I’m fine to do that, but I’ve got a few more interviews to do. I’ll get on it tomorrow. And he said, No, you don’t understand me. You’re getting on the next bus. And I went down, and there was this historian who’d been helping me in this town of City of San fuegos in Cuba, and he just yelled at me. He said, You don’t realize you are almost in jail, he said. And and my phone was tapped in Cuba. I was followed everywhere I went after that. And that was a pretty interesting experience. The experience in Miami, I ended up spending a lot of having to spend a lot of time in Miami doing research too, was interesting. Also when you know there would be Miami Cubans who found out that I was writing about these people who had been revolutionaries but then excluded from Castro’s government and everything that came after, and they would turn around and walk away from me saying I was writing about communists, which I wasn’t actually. So it was intense, but one of the biggest archive Boon was in the National Archives and Records Administration, the Kennedy assassination archives. And what was fascinating about was all the amount of material that got sucked into the assassination investigation by basically association. So if someone knew X knew y and y knew Z and Z knew a right, all of a sudden you would pull those documents to see if there was any pattern or connection. And so William Morgan had met at one point Jack Ruby, who, you know, assassinated Oswald, and that was enough, and probably a few other mob connections to get him his the bulk of his, what the FBI and CIA and military intelligence knew about him sucked into the Kennedy assassination archive.

 

Will Bachman  14:10

Wow. Okay, so, and during this period, were you working as a barista at Starbucks to, like, make a little bit of money,

 

Aran Shetterly  14:20

yes, stuff like that bartender, you know, at one point, I went and lived with a, you know, got a friend offered me a room in New York, and I was working on the book, and I was, I got a job as a dog runner. So this was, like, instead of a dog walker, these was people who wanted their dogs to get a really good exercise. And so I would take these fit dogs out for like, three or four mile runs. I was in great shape at that point. And then I also worked as the personal assistant to this wonderful and fascinating man named Gil Shiva in who worked lived in the Dakota. And I would go. Up to some little room at the top of the Dakota and organize his calendar and write his, you know, regrets to events he wasn’t going to attend. He was, he was from Tel Aviv, and had was the person who took Alvin Ailey national and international at one point. He was a fascinating person. I

 

Will Bachman  15:22

hope you got some tickets from that. So

 

Aran Shetterly  15:26

I got lots of stories. Wow.

 

Will Bachman  15:29

Now this is like a little unusual to I haven’t, I don’t think I’ve interviewed other classmates that have just up and decided, outside of a graduate program or something, not being an academic. Hey, you know, I’m just going to write this non fiction book because I’m just curious about this topic. Tell me what you must have been really, what got you so curious about William Morgan, and what were you thinking in terms of, like, long term career? It’s, it’s, it’s unusual to say, Okay, I’m just gonna work, like, temp job so I can write a non fiction book and just tell me about what was going on your life. What were you

 

Aran Shetterly  16:15

well, you and my mom both. I mean, come on, my and my mom’s a writer, but she said, Come on, you haven’t you’ve never written anything on this scale. You know, write some poems, write a few articles. Come on, don’t. What are you doing? Trying to write a book first. But I’ll tell you one thing that that helped me. I mean, there were a bunch of things that sort of buoyed me along the way, but, and I’ll get back to that, but I wrote a book proposal. And, you know, as you often do with these non fiction projects, and I showed it to a guy from class of 91 Peter Blake, who’s a, you know, wrote for house and has done a lot of TV and movie work. And he passed it along to a friend of his, David Benioff, who did Game of Thrones and and David Benioff and Kimberly Pierce optioned my book proposal before I’d even sold the book, and this was, as you can imagine, it wasn’t money, but it was encouragement that I was A good story, and so that helped a lot. But I think, you know, I known, I knew I wanted to, didn’t want to do this internet business anymore, really, and I knew I wanted to write and this person, I think I’m always drawn to people who are take moral and physical risk and their stories and and also, what I found since is I’m really drawn to these sort of revolutionary moments, and understanding the nuance of them and sort of the different sides. And, you know, a lot of these stories get told in black and white terms. You’re either on one side or the other side and and that leaves out this huge middle of life and experience that, in a sense, better defined what was going on at that time, it seems to me, and this guy, William Morgan, led me into that great middle that I always find interesting.

 

Will Bachman  18:23

Okay, so I love this. I mean, a lot of people would be, maybe be a journalist and reporting, and then they do a non fiction book, sort of on the side, or they’re an academic, and that’s kind of their job is to go to research. So this was a bold move. So you just write a book and tell us then what happens after the book gets published. Tell us about the reception, what led, what happened next.

 

Aran Shetterly  18:50

This is a this is a lesson in what not to do, in a way, right, not in what to do. And I’m, as my now, you know, here, many years later, my next book is coming out. I’m doing it very differently. So as I was finishing that book, I was also getting married, okay, to my wife, Margo, and we met, and this goes back to Jamie Rosen, because she came to work at comet systems right after I’d left. But I these were still great friends. We had the camaraderie of a startup, and I would go back and met her, and we fell in love very quickly, and got married, and I so Margot had worked on Wall Street. She’d done a bunch of internet stuff, and I had a friend in Mexico who said, you know, I’m working at this little English language paper in Mexico, but I think it could be done so much better. And so I went down and poked around, and I told Margot about this idea, and we sort of looked at the number of English speakers living in Mexico, which was over a million at that time. And they were expecting it to grow rapidly, and we thought, maybe there’s an opportunity here. And so when my book finally came out, I was with Margo in Mexico, launching an English language periodical and website called inside Mexico, and had no time whatsoever to dedicate to promoting my book and and so we were, we were there, you know, putting out a magazine, okay, in 2005 this was 2005 we, we bought a Honda Element, loaded it up with everything that we thought we would need, and drove from Maine to Mexico City, where we stayed with Jamie Rosen and his Mexican wife, Mariana for 10 days, and then left Mexico City and drove down to Oaxaca in The South, where we thought we would start this magazine. And shortly after we arrived, a social revolution happened around us. And, you know, revolutionaries took over the city. They wouldn’t let people in and out of the city only on certain days. And so eventually we packed up the element again. And on one of these days, when they opened the roads and allowed the gas stations to function. We drove out, went to Mexico City and started the magazine there.

 

Will Bachman  21:27

We we almost overlapped. I spent the first four months of 2004 in day FA in Oh, wow, yeah, doing the last semester of my MBA at IPA. They so neat. So you guys enjoy it. It was awesome. Oh, it’s great. I did the Spanish program there, and we got to Oaxaca. We every weekend we would go explore. So we saw, yeah, you know, 32 states out of the 40 or something. And it was amazing. So yeah, we drove from New York. It was great having a car there. Oh

 

Aran Shetterly  22:01

so great. You, you know, the story,

 

Will Bachman  22:05

little sketchy some places, but, you know, stick to the main roads. So, yeah, you learn where not to go, yeah. So, so you started this magazine inside Mexico, in Mexico City, a decent figure out and tell us what happened. Then, after 2005

 

Aran Shetterly  22:24

it was such a heady, exciting four years that we did this. I mean, it was, it was interesting. It was hard convincing. It ended up being hard convincing. Mexican advertisers that we were big enough, or the community we were reaching was big enough to really be worth advertising to which made it tough. And the other part that made it tough was that so much of the Mexican economy relied on the government, and when the government would pay was hard to predict. And I think that sort of relates to the end of the story of the magazine itself. But, but we, for this period of time, had this wonderful operation. We had these young, you know, journalists who were excited to work for peanuts to, you know, get this experience and tell stories they wouldn’t get to tell in other ways. We also had, a lot of the major papers still have bureaus there, and a lot of the newspapers weren’t interested in topics other than migration and drugs and politics. And so you had these great writers and talented people who are willing to sell us stories very cheaply about other things they were interested in, you know, if they were interested in tequila or theater or a movie or, you know, a town that, you know wasn’t going to get published in the New York Times or Washington Post, but they would place with us. So it was pretty neat for a while. That’s

 

Will Bachman  24:09

an interesting arbitrage. So the reporters from the New York Times, they were allowed to kind of freelance. If the New York Times didn’t want their piece, they could write stuff for other publications, didn’t know that it worked that way,

 

Aran Shetterly  24:25

then for us, yeah, okay,

 

Will Bachman  24:27

so that’s interesting, arbitrage. So you said that’s led to how it ended? What? What? What did? The government does not pay some bills, and you guys didn’t have any cash or whatever. Well,

 

Aran Shetterly  24:37

we were running on fumes. We were very excited to find a Mexican partner, and he seemed like this neat guy who had a little sort of tourist guidebook that was, you know, extremely basic, and was impressed with our more substantial magazine, and thought we could combine these efforts. And so we worked out the term. Terms. What we didn’t realize was that the terms of this deal depended on him getting this huge contract with the government and them paying, oh and and so this went on and on, and eventually we got the assets back, but at that time, it was over, really. And so we moved from Mexico City out to Valle de Bravo, this little town couple hours west of Mexico City. It’s sort of like, a little bit like what the Hamptons are to New York it is to Mexico City. It’s this sort of on a reservoir. It’s beautiful in the mountains, a lot of paragliding and mountain biking and horse riding and things like that. And people go out there on the weekends. And again, Jamie Rosen was living out there and starting this company to sort of try to support real estate sales to expats. And so we went and worked with him for a little while, and then started another thing ourselves, helping the Mexican Tourism Board promote Mexico for meetings and conferences and congresses. And did that for a little while. And all in all, we were in Mexico for over 10 years.

 

Will Bachman  26:17

Wow. Okay, so 10 years, so you get back to the US sometime around what 2015 or so, 2016 2016 Okay, and then play it forward from there.

 

Aran Shetterly  26:27

Well, what really brought us back was this lightning strike of good fortune, which was Margo, my wife, was writing a book, and her unlike my story, where my book proposal was optioned and never turned into a movie or a TV show or anything, her a book proposal was optioned and the movie was coming out right after the book was coming out, and this was going to be 2016 so she wrote a book called Hidden Figures and and the movie Hidden Figures was the book came out in September and the movie came out in December. So we, in a sense, were had to come back to ride that Hidden Figures wave, which lasted a couple of years. It was pretty, pretty amazing to ride, be her wingman on that

 

Will Bachman  27:19

that is fantastic, great movie. And family is a big fan of it, the heroes to my, you know, to my daughters, the characters in there. So that’s amazing. So you guys came back to help promote and be around that and push that, when that got optioned, and okay, and then what happened then?

 

Aran Shetterly  27:43

So during that time, I was like, Well, what am I going to do now? And I so I’ll sort of loop back in 2015 so my father has this who was actually, he was class of 69 so I had to bear the burden of hearing. Well, that’s a little strong. But, you know, hear his stories about what Harvard was like in 1969 which didn’t quite resemble what Harvard was like for us in the late 80s and early 90s. You know, students strike for so no classes the whole spring semester of 1969 intense in a different way, but so he is a painter, and he started this project called Americans who tell the truth, in which he started painting portraits of Americans who’ve spoken truth to power throughout American history, basically as a teaching tool for schools, colleges, communities, to begin conversations about what it means to be a citizen in the United States and what what our responsibilities are to, you know, our communities and ourselves and our country and the common good. And so he had a show of paintings in Greensboro, North Carolina in 2015 at the International Civil Rights Center and Museum there, which is at the site of the Woolworths where the sit in movements began in 1960 and we were there, and we met this couple, Reverend Nelson Johnson and his wife, Joyce Johnson, and they told this story about something that is called the Greensboro massacre. And they were civil rights activists, Black Power, Pan africanists And then communists in the 1970s trying to organize the textile mills in the Piedmont and of North Carolina. So Greensboro, that area, which was still the some of the biggest textile mills in the world, is before all of that had been offshore, really, yeah, and they were having trouble organizing across the. Race, and so they had a march to educate workers about how divisive the Ku Klux Klan was, but who had served that it didn’t serve the workers to divide black and white workers who, if they could come together, could make stronger demands on mill management, and they were setting up for this march in a caravan of Neo Nazis and Klansmen drove up and started shooting and killed five and injured 10 of them. And so this story made front pages across the country the next day, but that next day, the hostages were taken at the US Embassy in Tehran. And so all of a sudden, this story that was us versus us got pushed off for a story that was easier for us to process of us versus them, and it kind of disappeared from our national consciousness. And so I was so impressed with this couple and their resilience and the fact that they were still activists and that they still kept trying to find sort of ideological and philosophical keys to unlock deeper equality and equity in our culture, that a couple years later, when I was home, I thought, You know, I want to go learn from them and and write this story. So that’s what I’ve been doing, and that’s what the new book is about. It’s about, yeah,

 

Will Bachman  31:29

what’s the what’s the title? Let’s give it a proper

 

Aran Shetterly  31:33

Morningside, the 1979 Greensboro massacre and the struggle for an American City’s soul,

 

Will Bachman  31:43

wonderful. And what is the timeline? Is it about to be published? Or what’s the it’s coming

 

Aran Shetterly  31:47

out, October 15. Okay? And I have a bunch of events up and down the East Coast, and would love to see classmates at them, if they are so moved, that would be fun.

 

Will Bachman  32:02

So send, send me the schedule, and we’ll make sure that we include that in the weekly email for the 92 report what your upcoming event schedule is. That’s awesome, and I want to, I’d love to hear, sort of as a on the side, what, what’s been going on with Margo since Hidden Figures came out? See, yeah,

 

Aran Shetterly  32:25

Margot is in the sort of editing process right now of a book about Baltimore, and what she thinks of it as, in a way, as sort of the prequel to the wire that this is the Baltimore black Baltimore between like the 20s and the late 60s, and the hopes and dreams of black professionals in Baltimore as they fight against segregation and and then achieve legally. Anyway, you know, the end of segregation in Baltimore and the I mean, part of the US story.

 

Will Bachman  33:09

And how did Margo come across, the story that turned into Hidden Figures. So

 

Aran Shetterly  33:16

Margo is from Hampton, Virginia, and the NASA center there was actually the first NASA center in the country, and her father worked for 40 years as a NASA scientist at that NASA center. And so she grew up Katherine Johnson, the protagonist of Hidden Figures. Was Margot’s Girl Scout troop leader. So she grew up, you know, with these women as community figures around her, not having any sense of their really, real sense of the their professional impact and their stories beyond that, beyond church and Girl Scouts and you know, yeah, wow, that

 

Will Bachman  34:07

what? That’s so cool. Thank you for sharing that. So, where have I, maybe told me, where have you two settled down now, where, where are you? Where are you based,

 

Aran Shetterly  34:18

Charlottesville, Virginia, about two and a half hours from her folks and down in Hampton, and Margot went to college here at University of Virginia, and we didn’t really feel like living in a big city again when we came back from Mexico, and this seemed like this a really great place with a lot going on and A big university and access to great trails for hiking and riding. And it’s, it’s, it’s a beautiful place to live.

 

Will Bachman  34:48

I want to ask turn back the clock to Harvard. Are there any courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you in some way

 

Aran Shetterly  34:58

very much? Um, you know, but I’ll also say, and maybe loop back, is, I feel like I learned as much from my classmates and friends at Harvard as I did in my classes, but, um, but really, three standout, um, Stephen J Gould, you know, I took the core course and was sort of amazed at his artistry. You know that here was this guy who would present these perfect lectures, but also, more importantly, and this is the theme, I think, with all three people I’m going to name he. He was a baseball fan, he read literature, he read poetry, he listened to music, he sang, and all of this came into his scientific work that it was it ended up making the work interdisciplinary, and that appealed to my sensibility, in my mind, that I liked making these connections between things that seem to be discrete disciplines. And so that was exciting to me. And then two others that did similar things but were closer to what I ended up doing were Philip Fisher in the English Department. I particularly remember a course I took with him called Shakespeare and a concept of the passions in which we read philosophy and Shakespeare and looked at art and history to some degree, and the idea that you could combine those things, to me, was very exciting. And then Bradley Epps, who was in the romance language department, and I in the Spanish literature and art, and I took two courses with him that were really transformative, and began to find my way as a writer, a little bit actually, in those courses, and because he again allowed me to write about art and literature and history in a way that made sense to the way my mind worked, and seemed to Get it and encourage it. And so that was, those were, those were probably the three that made the biggest impact on me.

 

Will Bachman  37:08

We’ve got a minute, and I want to turn back to your latest book that’s coming out Morningside. Tell us about, I mean, you’ve kind of told us what it’s about, but can you tell us a little bit about some of the major stories that you’re telling in there, some of the characters in the book.

 

Aran Shetterly  37:23

Yeah, you know, I got some amazing access, like the the the FBI agent who led the investigation into the shooting is in his mid 80s, and he was extremely forthcoming with me. And I spent hours and hours and hours interviewing this man named Cecil Moses, and he gave me great insight into his perspective and the perspective of an institution, the FBI, that, you know, I might not agree with, but I was often but I was able to represent in his words, their point of view and his point of view, and I try to do that in the book. It’s it’s a I want every character that I write about to feel like a real person, whether they’re the a Klansman or the I Asian or a police officer or one of these activists who really are at the heart of the book, and whose story, narrative story I follow. But there are a couple things like from a historical point of view. One thing that really interested me was no one tells the story of the FBI after the church committee report comes out in 1976 you know, into the early 80s, like everyone gets that church committee report where all these documents were released, and they look backwards, and they tell all the stories about COINTELPRO, you know, the counterintelligence operations in the United States, and what the FBI was doing. But there’s this hole in the history. And through this project, and through my access to this guy, Cecil Moses, I began to be able to fill in that gap and to also understand how important this Greensboro investigation was in the FBI mind to their ability to, in a sense, recapture some of their the esteem that they believe they deserved in American society. I mean, they’ve been the most popular American institution for years under Hoover, and it had collapsed, and there was a huge morale problem. And they use this investigation in part, to reclaim some status and that so getting to tell that story was very interesting to me. Another piece that comes into this, where it ends up is, you know, this is something we think about now, is the idea of truth and reconciliation process. Cities and committees, but Greensboro was the first place in the United States to bring the South African model and try to work out what had happened around this shooting through a truth and reconciliation process. And so it was actually that report that came out of that was critical to my research, it pointed me to where sources were and people to talk to, and angles on the story that I wouldn’t have been able to necessarily come up with on my own.

 

Will Bachman  40:33

What surprised you, or what is one or two things that surprised you in researching the book? I I,

 

Aran Shetterly  40:44

you know, I thought I would go to Greensboro and find, once I started talking to people and digging around, that there was just sort of a bit of a misunderstanding, you know about this history that still keeps people in Greensboro divided, and that if they just knew the facts that once I knew them, that some of those gaps and tensions that still exist would close. And what I didn’t realize, and this was a real education, was the degree to which the narratives that are set about who’s to blame for the shooting. You know, there’s a whole narrative that blames the activists for the shooting. There were three trials. There were two criminal trials. No one was ever held criminally accountable for these murders. All white juries in the south in the 80s, and they couldn’t get a conviction. And I found the degree to which these narratives are attached to a social community, and the degree to which access to your own sort of tribe depends on you adhering to a certain narrative. And that was that was extremely informative. It showed me how difficult some of these divides that we’re dealing with, how entrenched they are, because it relates so much to some of the things that we’re dealing with today. I mean, when publishers got interested in this project, it was right after Charlottesville happened in 2017 you know, which was suddenly this replay. And as someone in Greensboro said, Now, Greensboro is prolog. You know, this 1979 event is Prolog to what just happened in Charlottesville. And I think that just so much work needs to be done to work out those, those, in a sense, hermetic narratives that keep people sort of on different sides of some of these sort of important historical moments.

 

Will Bachman  42:54

So Aaron, for listeners that want to learn more about either of your books or about what else you have going on? Where would you point them? Online?

 

Aran Shetterly  43:04

AranLee, com. People can reach me there. They can read about my events and find out where to find these books if they’re interested. Alright,

 

Will Bachman  43:15

fantastic. I we will include that link in the show notes, and I’m going to go there myself to sign up. I hope you have a mailing list there where I can sign up. All right, perfect. Aaron, what a amazing journey that you’ve had. We were talking before we got crazy. You’re talking before we start recording about like, winding paths that some of us have. And, yeah, what an amazing journey. Thank you so much for joining today. No

 

Aran Shetterly  43:44

Thanks Will this was fun. I.