We turn now to our next guest, the Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson, who's widely considered the foremost chronicler of the African-American experience.

His latest work, Boss The Black Experience in Business, looks at the challenges faced by African-American business owners from the Civil War to the present day.

And he sat down with our Walter Isaacson to discuss what drives his work, his production company, Firelight Media, and his upcoming film on jazz musician Miles Davis.

Which is set to release this summer.

Stanley Nelson, thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

I was blown away by watching, boss.

And we've all known the problem that African-Americans have had since the Civil War in doing wealth creation.

But what you show is how systematically the problem of wealth creation was even starting right after the war with the 40 acres and a mule not being a fulfilled promise.

Tell me why you got on to that and what you were trying to show.

Well, I mean, I think the story of African-American businesses is just such a poignant one and that it's a story that we don't know and the resiliency of African-Americans in fighting through that and starting banks and hair care companies and insurance companies.

And in the tech industry now.

And I thought it was I mean, I thought if I didn't make the film, who's going to make it?

And that it's not something that people like, oh, yeah, that's a great idea for a film.

But that it could be made as a film.

And that's what we tried to do.

And it seemed to break a lot of stereotypes and also disrupt sort of this theme of America that we all have equal opportunity Yeah.

I mean, I think it's very clear that that so many times and there's so many different stories in the film where African-Americans start businesses or towns even, and they are destroyed like systematically.

But I think that that's you know, just to be clear, that's not the focus of the film.

The focus really is on the starting of the business and then making the business succeed.

You talk about towns being destroyed because freed slaves and African-Americans went out west to places like Oklahoma and started their own self-contained enclaves.

We have a clip here at the Port of Tulsa called Greenwood and is one of my favorite parts of the movie.

Let's show it on May 30th.

1921, the mob came to Greenwood This white woman is in an elevator and this black teenager allegedly whistles at her.

Talk to her.

She is taken to jail.

A mob gathers of whites and blacks and blacks in Tulsa are armed They take their Second Amendment rights seriously and they come with guns.

And this is a threat.

Someone fires into the crowd and the riot is born.

This was not about the whistling boy in the elevator.

This was about blacks becoming too economically powerful and showing that wealth in a way that anyone would buy.

Creating buildings and constructing churches and having property There was a whistle that blew.

And then the mass invasion and the destruction of Greenwood began when the smoke cleared in the early morning of June.

First 1921 black Wall Street lay in ruins This is by far the largest single incident of racial violence in all of American history.

Yeah.

I mean, I think one of the most amazing things about that clip is the footage, you know, is that we were able to tell this story because of this newly discovered footage of Greenwood.

And you actually see the the people in their homes.

And, and right before what we saw, as you see them kind of building the town, you know, you see them planting their gardens.

You see black people on horseback herding cattle because they're in Oklahoma and all of those things.

And then you see the destruction of that.

And it's just it's very moving to me, you know, partially because you can really see it.

You can visualize what the town was.

One of the things I learned was that the first real businesses were sort of services, whether it be barbershops or beauty and other things.

How did that help pave the way for a building of wealth?

One of the things that happened in the South was, you know, after the time of enslavement, as African-Americans became free, many times they at black people took up the jobs that they kind of already were doing.

So, you know, if I was a barber, you know, or if I would, you know, that was one of my duties.

And I became I had my own barber shop.

If I worked in the field then I became a farmer, you know.

So a lot of those things led to the first businesses that African-Americans had and led to a certain amount of economic freedom.

What were the obstacles to world wealth accumulation?

Well, I mean, I think there were so many you know, I mean, at first and for a long time, as we show in the film, African-Americans really only sold to African-Americans.

You know, you could have a store that sold to black folks.

But what people really sometimes do understand is that in most of this country, if you were even a black grocer, it was very hard to have a black grocery store that whites would frequent.

So basically, for a lot of the history of the United States, after the Civil War, black people were having businesses that sold to black people.

And so, you know, that in some ways is limiting you can't borrow capital.

You could not go to a bank and borrow money.

That was somehow in some ways alleviated when black people started having their own banks.

But you know, you in so many places and because you could walk into a bank, but if you could, you couldn't get a loan.

One of the obstacles seems to be the big corporations You have a wonderful sequence of Ursula Burns, who moves from being the executive assistant to the CEO of Xerox to being the CEO herself.

But she's a very unusual case.

Why is it that it's hard for African-Americans to become the boss?

Well, I think, you know, there's this ceiling above you and it's not a glass ceiling.

It's it's a real ceiling.

One of the things that Ursula says in the section we have on Ursula is she says it was hard for me because what this what business looks at as excellence are white men.

You know, that's what they that's what she says.

That's what it looks like.

That's what it sounds like.

You know, that's the model and it's very hard for a black person and especially for a black woman to, you know, fit into that model.

How do you how do you fit in if that's your standard of excellence, how do you how do you break in?

People do it.

But you have to be extraordinary.

One of the entrepreneurs you've done a documentary on before and then as part of this one is Madam c.J.

Walker.

Tell me about who she was and how she created the business.

Yeah.

So, Madam c.J.

Walker was a woman who, you know, pretty much started out with nothing in the south.

She started working for a woman named Annie Malone, who had a company called Pearl Products, a black beauty company in Chicago.

Out of Chicago.

And Madam Walker said to herself, You know, I could do this, and I could do it better.

And so Madam Celia Walker, you know, moved to Indianapolis, started her own company, and just raised it from nothing until she had a whole series.

I think it was 19 or 20 different products that that that she had in.

And again, is kind of in the Guinness Book of Records as the first woman to star with nothing and earn $1,000,000.

All of your documentaries almost deal with race from different angles.

How does the arc of your career?

How do you put those together to say, here's the story I'm trying to tell?

I feel that people should tell their own stories, that stories are richer and deeper and more meaningful and more heartfelt if they're told by the people who live them.

So I try to tell stories that I live you know, that that I think are important.

But I also think in very general terms, I'm really interested in in institutions and and movements and things that are bigger than just, you know, the great man or woman of history.

Now, the film that's coming out soon which I just loved, what I got to see of it is on Miles Davis.

And that seems a bit of a departure.

I mean, you're doing somebody who is an artist and it just wakes up every morning with his music.

In fact, let's do a clip about the importance of music to him.

Sure.

Music has always been like, of course, with me.

I've always felt driven to play it.

It's the first thing in my life.

Go to bed thinking about it and wake up thinking about it.

It's always there.

It comes before everything Yeah.

I mean, that's just a beautiful clip.

I mean, I think for for me, you know, I'm I'm a real music lover.

I listen to music from the time I go to bed at time I wake up and I go to bed.

It's just something that I've always wanted to do, like a pure music film.

And you know, who who's better than Miles, you know, because one Miles's music is so great and so important and I believe will last forever.

But two Miles was a really complicated individual.

You know, he's really complicated.

And it makes it makes for a much richer film.

He was complicated, too, in his feelings about race.

Right.

Because he gets beaten up once by a white deputy here in New York City, and it sort of scars him for the rest of his life.

There's an anger there that's in his music sometimes.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that, again, you know, Miles, there's so many facets to Miles to to understand and try to unpack.

And I always say that that I think before you try to unpack any anybody or anything, you have to first say that, you know, different people react to different stimuli and in different ways.

So you might have lived or I might have lived the same thing and reacted differently But Miles grew up his father was a dentist.

And Miles grew up in East St Louis.

And they were for that standard for African-Americans at that time.

They were rich they had a farm outside of the city.

Miles had a horse, you know, very ride.

I mean, you know, Miles grew up rich, but he also grew up black.

In segregated America, you know, in East St Louis.

So he had all that to pack on top of it.

Also, Miles was very, very Dark-skinned and Miles was beautiful, you know, so we had that going on.

Let let us show something about the blackness.

That blackness is an amazing part of the movie.

I think the darkness of Miles Davis, the skin, instead of seeing it as a liability, he saw that as an asset it was very different from anything that was projected on television or in movies at that time.

Miles turned that into something called something desirable.

Cool.

And that's what it's like the birth of cool.

We you call this like because that's what he does with his music.

Is the birth of Cool.

Yeah.

Miles and Miles with us, we're making the film.

We're like, Okay, so Miles is just the coolest guy that ever lived.

I mean, he just is, you know, I mean, you know, what somebody says in the film, you know, Miles had big cars or fast cars, the snappy clothes, you know, the Miles had his clothes.

Taylor he had beautiful women.

One of the musicians says, you know, we not only wanted to play with Miles, we wanted to be Miles.

That's that's what we wanted to be.

So Miles is this, you know, has all these things going for him, but he also has this chip on his shoulder, you know.

And, you know, that part of that was his reaction to the racism that he was exposed to.

He was born in 1926, the racism that he's exposed to in that America.

And, you know, he is that person and he was always innovating in a way.

I mean, this creativity is like, don't stand still.

Let me try a whole new form of music.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that that that's who Miles was, you know, to, to our great benefit and sometimes to his own detriment, you know, I mean, you know, he breaks up groups just because he wants to do something else.

You know, there's a great scene in the film where he asks Ron Carter, you know, he has the what's one of the greatest group groups ever?

And he asks Ron Carter to play electric bass and Ron's.

No, but I was like, okay.

Well, then by you know, I mean, that's kind of how it was with Miles.

You know, it was he had this thing where he constantly had to change.

He constantly had to create.

And, you know, I think, again, for us listening to it, it's great because he made great music in some in so many different ways.

But for him, sometimes personally with hard, your next big project, I think, is on the Atlantic slave trade.

And you're going to try to treat it as a business, right?

Yeah, we're working on on a four part series for PBS on the Atlantic slave trade.

We're just starting now.

And I think that, you know, one of the things we wanted to try to do is say, you know, look, this was the first global business.

This was a business that that set so many things in motion.

You know, shipping banking, insurance, all of these things came out of of the slave trade.

And, you know, we it's something we never look at.

So this is a four part series on the trade.

It's not on slavery.

It's on the trade, which was a business that that was, you know, Europe, Africa North America, South America, the Caribbean were all involved in the slave trade.

So it's the first real global business in the world.

One of the small things you did that I find very interesting as I looked at it was a training video you did for the Starbucks company of what it's like to be in public and be black, especially being a teen of color.

They assume that you're doing something bad.

I feel like I'm disturbing people by just being there.

Like people feel uncomfortable when I walk in.

Explain why you did that and what you conveyed there.

Well, Starbucks came came to to me after they had the incident where the four the two guys were arrested in Starbucks in Philly, and they decided that they were going to close their stores down and kind of have a training session for the for their employees.

And they wanted to do a video.

And so what we came up with was an idea of of of African-Americans and others just talking to the camera about how we feel in public spaces and that, you know, so many times we don't feel entirely welcomed, you know, and that it has its roots in the civil rights movement, which part a large part of civil rights movement was to say everybody is equal in public spaces.

Right.

So you could go to a public library, you can go to a park, you can go to a swimming pool.

But we still as African-Americans, don't feel welcomed so many times when we walk into stores and other places.

Did you have any reservations about working with Starbucks and to try to help smooth the situation over?

I mean, you know, for a second when they called me, you know, I wanted to meet with them.

But then when I met with them, I mean, they were they were totally honest about it, you know, I mean, they had they closed down their stores.

They didn't have to do that.

I think Starbucks in some ways, they were really shaken by this and they really wanted to try to make it right.

And so I felt very comfortable in trying to help.

Did we move on too quickly?

Yes.

I think so.

I mean, I think I think there's a lot more discussion to be had.

I think it's really and it's an important, important discussion.

And, you know, I learned so much from doing the film because, you know, I didn't know that there were things that I didn't talk about.

You know, I didn't ever think about the fact that, you know, I am not comfortable going into a lot of places or it's not even uncomfortable.

It's that just little you know, you put your hand on the door, you're like, okay, you know, I don't know what what's going to happen.

And what I what might happen.

And I think that's important to talk about.

Then move you company is Firelight Media, and it's important for Firelight to be training a next generation, especially of African-Americans who can own the story and tell the story.

Yeah, well, we have we have a documentary lab where where we train filmmakers of color of all races.

So black, Latino, Asian, you know, all races.

And we have between ten and 15 filmmakers who are who we mentor in the lab.

At the same time, there have been, I think, over 80 filmmakers who have graduated the lab.

We've, you know, and these are filmmakers who are making full length films.

They've been on all different networks.

We've been had multiple films at Sundance.

One of our films has won an award at Sundance this year Emmys, Peabodys, DuPont.

So all those things that our films have won.

And where do you see it going over the next ten, 15 years?

Our next step that we're really pushing to do more, raising money to do is to have it have a move for the filmmakers to make their second film.

Because what we're finding is, you know, people who have been to the lab, you know, they went to DuPont, they won a Peabody, they won an Emmy, and it's still hard for them to get their foot in the door for that second film.

So what we want to try to do is be able to give filmmakers seed money, mentorship to get that second film made.

Because when I made my second film, when I made $2 and a Dream, you know, William Greaves, who was kind of my mentor, said to me, Well, Stanley you've done it twice.

They can't say it's an accident.

You're on your way.

Stanley Nelson, thank you so much for being with us.