welcome to education in our community this show is about lifelong learning teaching and mentoring an ongoing process for every human being multi generational lee and maybe one generation at a time but the more the merrier and family education is very much needed we have an expert with us today her name is mrs frankie j j holtz davis mrs holt  davis will tell us about her background she has a bachelor's and a master's degree and so shorts are octaves and tell us the other information on my background is social work practice  i have a long career and social work practice i also am a domestic violence specialists i am also a facilitator and domestic violence groups i have a forensics certification number three from the national association of forensic counselors and what is for its forensic counselors so is the level of counseling that includes domestic violence substance etc and so in order to be certified you have to have a background in so short practice generally speaking and you can also have one in psychology but the preferred want is so short practice and the certification comes through the organization it's a national organization and it's been involved in it since one nine hundred ninety nine and in terms of social work practice i hundred seventy in san francisco at the department of human services and i have worked in northern and southern california i am also considered a sexual assault expert through the county of o southern california i've had a very comprehensive skill based career and i retired six years ago from my regular career but i've not stopped because i went to northern  vegas nevada and i became certified as a domestic violence supervisor and facilitator and so the last career during that career rather in nineteen two thousand and seven i guess is when i started and i continued up until i returned to northern california and i did write the service protocol for the city and county of san francisco through the green book initiative which was an issue if a federal initiative actually and that protocol is the one that i consider one of my better works and i did it in conjunction with the current attorney who was illegally on that document and i also wrote a piece called for the forensic psychology department called sayer a study in multiple personality disorder and that's also part of the sexual assault victim was ation project that i did with sarah center in southern california and the latest career as i said was in nevada after i retired however i am no longer and about i have returned to the bay area and i finished my current work prior to this book i did a book called irani read that was my first book and i believe i was on the show for that yes and so that's primarily what i've done and this is my last project and did you bring murali read with you i did yeah because i think that we would love to make it known that you have a website where i do these books can be obtained yes me it's called mariah me read the journey and it's autobiographical and it's about six years old so if you like to just turn so the camera sees the color that's beautiful that's a hair color beautiful color i think i can imagine that they wanted people to pay attention i think so and this book is called the men folk absolutely and i hope that people will realize that you have both the hardcover and the paperback i do and i bought mine from the website and i had the privilege this coming to your book signing over at the city college i believe bill you know that's the south east campus the south east campus of city college of san francisco absolutely you know i'm so glad i hope they don't close that city college down i heard from a good source that it's not going to happen not going to happen and i'm glad to hear it because i kept thinking city college had one of the most comprehensive curricula lairs heard about in any community college system in years and it's where a lot of the communities have a lot of the students from other countries who need the  what did you could you just tell us a teeny bit about this book and what it's about it's autobiographical actually and it's basically my story my life story and some of the life changing events that happened to me as both as a child and as an adult and that as you told us so the camera sees the color and that's really what this is about this is my story it started out just for my children i didn't write it for publication i started out i wanted to write this book for my children and my grandchildren i wanted them and know where i came from who i am who i was and who i was becoming that was the idea except when i went to a writing institute they insist that i put it out in the public domain and that's how it ended up happening it was not my intent originally to have it publicly because there's some very personal stuff in here  but nevertheless i allowed them to encourage me to put it out there and i did it and i'm really happy that i did because it's really a universal story it's not just it's about an african american woman it's about  child growing up to adulthood and haven't life experiences both as a child and as an adult all crammed into this one book but it started out with i thought of a more comprehensive story about me but when the editors finished with it it ended up being the best part so i think we're on the floor at cutting four but nevertheless i'm pretty pleased with the outcome of this book and it really is a i think a pretty poignant story yes it is and everybody has a story to tell but i was brave enough to put my story out there so that's how that evolved one of the things i really i was fascinated with was when you worked in the restaurant where you a teenager at the time  es i was that particular situation do you mind sharing what that was about well i was working on a restaurant on galveston island because that's where i lived most of my life in texas in texas on galveston  texas and it was a restaurant there was a greek greek owners of it but it was during the time of segregation and i remember going to work one day and the owner was saying to me that i could be a waitress i started out as a bus girl and he said because the other women had walked out something in a purpose in a personal stuff happening and so i said fine so i knew how to do waitressing if i knew how to dish a certain i knew how to do a waitress job so i took on the job of doing waitress and i worked and worked and then we had a break in in the service where the flow of customers kind of lesson and so it was my time to have lunch dinner or whatever and so when the woman made the meal for me the greek woman said i needed to go in the back to eat and i was incensed i was upset i thought well if i can serve these people surely out to be able to eat in this front part of the store with this insist and i said no i lost my appetite got up walked out of the restaurant i quit because in my mind if i'm good enough to serve these people and take all these insults from them  able they're not in the store but the woman's position was it's really not us it's where we are on the island and they don't allow us to sit in the front of the restaurant not even the help so rather than tolerate that kind of treatment i walked out i quit and i went home and i felt very good about that decision and you got hired back to new i got hired not only they tried to hire me back for that job but getting a job was never a problem for me i was always in demand because i felt like i was a very good worker and so your reputation can get around even if your kid if you're a good worker so but i the issue for me was the segregation part of it and being able to wait tables probably one of the first african americans to wait tables on that island that was a problem for me and i was young and but i had some values that i wasn't willing to relinquish not even for a job well i've admired tall kid but i started to work at fourteen years and the other thing in the book that is so outstanding there's a lot in there your grandfather and your grandmother they were just what you would want to see in terms of  image for a young person to see someone that knows what they're doing and how to do things and they do it so well that they wound up being so valuable to everybody absolutely and the whole community comes to i remember  the funeral scene absolutely when your grandmother passed to see all the people that showed up she taught for about how many years my grandmother taught school fifty five years and never missed a day fifty five fifty five years that was her claim to fame she started out in a one room school house where they had several grades and then of course the school a little bigger she was a principal and she did it all but she did teach for fifty and she never missed a day in that whole time and so when when my grandmother passed away her feeling of was like something that the county never seen because white and black people all gave to miss ball when that was her name so people stood on the road side of the road hat's off in respect of this woman who was really a giant in her time and my grandfather was a magnificent farmer they had like one hundred sixty acres of land and that land he farm but he was a real scientist in terms of and and so he was just a very stand up kind of man a very proud man who really didn't fear anybody even though it was very turbulent times because we're still talking about the forty's and fifty's jim crow era but he was a very proud man and he had thirteen brothers so i think that was helpful to him because he would stand up to anybody and say anything to anybody didn't matter so all the brothers would do this the thirteen brothers all of them i think they had a history of being very stand up kind of people if you get thirteen men very few people are going to tackle that yeah man yeah but my grandfather was really remarkable in that he just was a very honest person he was a very confronting person he was a very nurturing person as far as his grandchildren i was one of them and i loved my grandfather because he was such a remarkable man he was a teacher no he wasn't actually my grandfather was illiterate illiterate but he was a magnificent farmer that was his claim of amos that he was a great farmer he never lost a crop and he farm the land because he did it in a scientific way well that's what i got from the book that he actually was a teacher because he knew how to do so many things and he would share that knowledge well that part yes he was a informally a teacher but not formally so right and he was willing to share the wisdom that he had acquired from his own learning and he knew how to mentor others you know see something about him that was so unique and to see that in a man and it kind of helps me to go to the other book call the menfolk absolutely now a lot of the men that are pictured in this on the picture are related to you yes as a matter of fact all of the men with the exception of one are related to me my four sons my grandsons all three of my grandsons are there and then there is a friend of my son who is a reverend his he is a friend and the gentleman sitting down is my son's father my ex husband  so you have several ministers in your family i have one and i was a minister's wife for seventeen years oh wow yeah well i was just looking at the information about the work that you do when you mention domestic violence and then i think you said something about sexual assault yes a specialist in that area as well i am yes i was certified in our county and i ninet y six because i was hired to do the sexual assault assessment on the assault cases and because i was good at what i did i learned of course in san francisco before i left i was trained by the seventeen weeks and san jose and the agency department of human services trained me and at one time i was the only person doing sexual assault cases but then it became so burdensome and the more people know about the  problem the broader it reaches and then you have to hire other people but in our county when people were still in the eighty's denying that sexual assault happened because i was stationed in south region which was a very fluid is a very fluid community and naturally people were into not denying that that happened in their community but it did and so in abbottabad that was the job they hired me to do and i became certified by the court as a sexual  assault so tell us what this book is about please this book is about african american men soley about african american men it's their life story what i did was i developed a questionnaire and i asked different men if they would answer this question and they said yes contrary to what my colleagues thought in the writing group they said african american men don't talk about themselves from a cycle social point of view and i didn't believe that but i went ahead with the project anyway and every person that i asked read the questionnaire and said yes so this is a compilation of stories about african american men actually there are about sixty six stories in this book and they are all african american men and they range in age from eighteen to ninety seven the oldest man and ninety seven the youngest man was eighteen when idea then all the ages in between and this is their life story and they tell it in very poignant they tell it in very candid and amazing ways all of them answer the questions differently but they all have their story and it just was a real laborious project but it was worth it when i read through there of his one about a buffalo soldier i believe absolutely there yeah there is a little bit about the buffalo soldier the buffalo soldier is a mr strong who lived in las vegas nevada since the early sixty's and he is the head of the group the buffalo soldiers but aside from that duty he is a millionaire he's a quiet millionaire in las vegas i didn't know this but one of the other buffalo soldiers told me about it and part of the way this story got around is mr armstrong was introduced to me through a woman who knew him she said i think you should write his story here is a fascinating story he then introduced me to other men most of whom were buffalo soldiers the oldest man in in this book was a sold also and the buffalo soldiers how did they come up with that name i've heard it before what happen is that during the spanish american war african american men fought in that war and all wars that have been fought on american soil excuse me and because they were so ferocious and they were such good soldiers the indians the indians started calling them buffalo soldiers because of the color of their skin and the ferocity with which  or just out of slavery yes so they were excellent fighters and so they were so ferocious that the indians the cherokees or whomever we happen to men warring with at the time called them the buffalo soldiers that's how they got the name that was in the eight hundred yeah that is amazing because i know there are there's a group in houston that they have a association of we have buffalo soldiers and it sounds like they are very progressive they are indeed they have them all over the united states i think and i think once every three years they all get together all of the buffalo soldiers chapters in the united states and they have this big meeting so they do real good work in the community do it sounds like there's a fellowship there as well there is very much so why did you choose this particular topic the  thought that i had not read a book that was specifically about men folk i've read a lot of books and i've never read one where african american men were asked to tell their story and given the fact that i have four sons i had only one brother and i've been married a couple times i didn't think that i knew a lot about men as such except my grandfather please excuse me and so i thought given what's going on historically the first african american president and at the time he had not been elected it was on the verge of that and i thought this is timely because this is a historical moment and i need to capitalize on that moment for these men because african american men rarely are given credit for what they do in united states of america i mean if we do something if somebody in the community does something that is negative that's how we are depicted but what those people who are quietly going about their lives contributing to this country ever since slavery contributed to this country helping build this country they don't get the recognition and so and knowing that and deciding ok i'm going to tell the story i didn't plan to have this many people in the sample but it turned out that it just kept growing and growing and at some point i had to stop so just to give homage to and to honor these men but in doing so honoring all african american men that was the idea of the story how did you choose these men that participate well i  started out i knew i could probably get my sons to do it but i wanted it to be open beyond my family members and so i started asking men just  people that i know would answer these questions would you participate in this and they would say yes and i was always amazed and then one day one of the guys in this we were in a restaurant my son and i he said mother there's a gentleman who was very friendly so why don't you ask him so i thought no i'm not going to ask him because i'm really a shy person so my son asked and he gladly agree so it was not as if i just ran picked up this kind of random sampling of random they selected and then word of mouth like the buffalo soldiers transmitted the word that this woman is writing this story about men so let's participate so that's how some of them became part of the story of the thing about the song i heard it through the grapevine there was a positive yes and yes and really what specifically do you as the author feel is significant about the answers in this sampling of participants male participants one of the things that was amazing to me was the fact that there was there are there were and these stories core values no matter if a man was eighteen or eighty they had very similar core values and i didn't expect that because they're from all different parts of the country i thought they would be some difference in the way people for an example who grew up in on the east coast their values system but their core values of these men were basically the same and do you have any idea why that was the case i'm not sure i think it must be because no matter where and african american grows up there are some things after the dot asper that we were taught that we held onto and luckily those men that i randomly for the most part selected they held on to those core values and it was the same thing over and over and i was really amazed the other thing that i noticed about writing about men was that at a certain stage in their lives when we talk about life cycles these men's life cycle particularly between sixty and eighty five or whatever they seem to have very similar values about that but they didn't change in the way that i expected that they would for  example women at a certain age we reach a certain life cycles our values our norms in the way we see the world is generally different but that's not true with men it didn't seem to bear out with the men folk no matter how old they were there were certain core values that they held on to i think over time women with women that i have experience our values change when we do life cycle changes but that wasn't the case with these men so does that seem to be a positive finding well i don't know that i could put a value judgment on it one way or the other i didn't think it was negative i just thought it was unique just the core values so could you kind of share what those of those might be for an example of discipline for children and and what you thought about women's rights or children's rights that was one thing most of the men valued women they had a value for women some of them when it came to children they believe that children didn't have rights unless their parents gave them to them that was different for me because i think every human being has a right but some of these men didn't feel that way and i think it's more or less a matriarchal way of looking at it you know if you're a man i mean a patriarchal way excuse me if you're a man the head of the household i kind of thing the other unique factor that came up was that most of the men between the ages of thirty and forty when i had asked them when did you feel that you were fully grown most of them if their fathers were living or they had other men in their lives did not feel that they were grown man until they were in their mid thirty's or mid thirty's and their mid thirty's and one of them said to me emphatically i never felt like i was an adult until i was thirty two and if my father came around visited me i felt like i was a boy again and that was that was pretty universal you know they talked about it and i thought that's interesting because i know that women mature faster than men and girls do but i didn't know that men if their father was in the picture or a surrogate father they didn't feel grown up until they were in their mid thirty's even though they had families of their own  you're if you don't feel like you're a grown until you're in your mid thirty's you know you have children then yeah your father has a great influence well i see that we're getting toward the end of the the show so i would just like to find out of there's anything else you'd like to say like how persons can get a copy of the book and the other book oh sure i would prefer that people would contact me directly for what because i have these books rather than well i'm not sure but that's my email and i'll get an awful lot of graphical purpose i like to autograph books you know we're wrapping up so i'm hoping that the website because i found a lot of information on the website and that's