Forthcoming Memoir
Now Is
The Time
"We protect people, and we build things that cannot be burned."
"We protect people, and we build things that cannot be burned."
It begins with a three-year-old on a curb on Smith Street, watching a house burn. The house belonged to a civil rights leader and businessman — the man who raised his mother. The Klan burned it. No sirens came. No explanation was given. No adult said a word. That silence — and what a child does with it — is where Now Is the Time starts.
Noah Carmichael's memoir traces a journey that spans Jim Crow South Carolina, displacement to Arizona, the loss of his closest friend, the United States Navy, and the collapse of everything he built in his thirties — through Valley Fever, divorce, and a $10 million loss — to the ownership ecosystem he is building now. It is a book about what it means to protect people when the systems around you are designed to burn what you build.
At its center is a grandmother — Miss Carrie — who built a house as a widow in the Jim Crow South. Her lessons thread through every chapter: discernment, protection, the difference between a fight that is yours and one that is not. She is the book's moral engine. Her presence is felt in Diego Garcia, in the Apollo Group, in the Beverly Hills rental office, and in every platform Noah has built since.
From Miss Carrie teaching discernment to Brad Thrush standing at the bottom of the stairs until the porch light came on — every chapter returns to the same question: what does it mean to protect the people around you when the systems designed to help you are built to fail you?
The Klan burned the house on Smith Street. It belonged to a civil rights leader — the man who raised his mother. From a widow building a house in the Jim Crow South, to a veteran building an ownership ecosystem — the drive to construct things that outlast what destroyed the ones before them.
Miss Carrie's core teaching: know the difference between a fight that is yours and one that is not. The lesson threads through the Navy, the Apollo Group, the divorce, and every investment decision since.
Utter, LaVetter, Maxey, Buchholz, Fat Lever, Chris — coaches who each gave something that stayed. The lessons compounded. They still do.
Valley Fever. Divorce. A $10 million loss. Near-suicidal ideation. This story goes to the bottom — and stays there long enough for it to matter — before the woman in the rental car office changes everything.
Grady Carmichael organizing voter registration from a barbershop six weeks before Brown v. Board. Miss Carrie's house. The archival record that confirms the family legend. A story that begins long before Noah was born.
Thirteen chapters. From a curb on Smith Street to the world being built now. A preview of what's inside.
A three-year-old on a curb on Smith Street. The house burning belonged to a civil rights leader and businessman — the man who raised his mother. The Klan burned it. No sirens. No explanation. No adult saying a word. The silence that starts everything — and the archival record that makes it undeniable.
Mr. Phillips in the barber's chair. Miss Carrie and the lawn-mowing business. The family's property strategy. The South Carolina roots that explain everything that follows.
Germantown, Philadelphia. The doll collection. The Amtrak ride home. The first lesson that success leaves a visible trail — if you know how to read it.
Tucson. Gang colors. The scorpion. The knife in the wall. Boys Chorus. Brad Thrush. And Terrence — the most important friendship of Noah's childhood, and the loss that runs through every chapter that follows.
The coaching lineage: Utter, LaVetter, Maxey, Buchholz. The Fat Lever dinner. The ankle. Turning down the University of Arizona. What winning actually requires — and why that understanding never leaves.
The Music City Miracle at his grandmother's funeral. The descent into what came after. And then Chris — the words that become the turn: that a man from where Noah came from could go all the way to the top.
The Navy recruiter's office — visited twice. Boot camp. A-School. Corpus Christi. Diego Garcia. The Seagull Control near-miss. What the military teaches about leadership that no business school ever does.
Ron Russ. Ross Woodruff's warning. The Apollo Group years. Prudential. Beverly Hills. Valley Fever and the bed too high to climb out of. The divorce. The $10 million loss. The woman in the rental car office.
Where the journey lands. What the boy on Smith Street became. What was built, what was lost, and what was built again — and why now is the time.
The photographs that make this story real. The Navy card, the family polaroids, the grandmother, the dorm room — the life that became the book.
Noah Carmichael is an American executive, investor, publisher, and best-selling author. He is Managing Partner of Carmichael & Russ Capital and Publisher & Editor-in-Chief of The Black Executive Journal™.
Most memoirs ask you to take the author's word for it. This one brings the documents. The Carmichael family history is not legend — it is in the archive.
Signed by John H. McCray, Chairman. The State Executive Committee organizing delegates to contest the National Democratic Convention — six weeks before the political landscape of the South would shift irrevocably. The Carmichael family was in that room.
A handwritten letter from Grady Carmichael to A.C. Redd — Modjeska Simkins papers. Written from 217 Smith Street, the same address where a three-year-old watched the Klan burn a civil rights leader's house to the ground. The man who wrote this letter raised the author's mother. The history was already being written long before the fire.
The complete Report and Appeal — delegates, alternates, the funding appeal, the motion to remain even if they lose the contest. A document that proves what the book asserts: that the Carmichael family was not a bystander to history. It was organizing it.
Now Is The Time is in active development. Join the waitlist to be notified when the book launches — along with early access, excerpts, and updates directly from Noah.
