Dallas College Civil Rights Tour and Speaker Series

[Music]

[Mark Green] Hello, friends. I am Mark Green, and I serve as a Professor of US History at the Mountain View campus. Today I have the honor and privilege of introducing Mr. Dale H. Long to kick off our 20-21 Dallas College Civil Rights Tour Speaking Series. At the height of the Industrial Revolution, Birmingham, Alabama became known as the Magic City because of its rapid growth and dominance in iron and steel production.

To African-Americans like Mr. Long who grew up in Birmingham during the Civil Rights Movement, the city was known as Bombingham for the more than 50 bombings that occurred in the city between 1947 and 1965.

Initially, the bombings were used to intimidate families of color who were attempting to purchase homes in predominantly white residential areas. Later, they were used against anyone working towards racial desegregation in the city. The neighborhood that noted political activist and academic Angela Davis grew up in experienced so many bombings that it developed the nickname Dynamite Hill.

On Sunday, September 15, 1963, the city lived up to its infamous moniker in the most horrific way. Local Ku Klux Klansmen bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four young girls. Then 11-year-old Dale Long survived the bombing. Almost 58 years later, he is here to share with us what it was like to grow up in Bombingham and bear witness to one of our nation's most shocking tragedies.

Mr.Long, thank you for taking the time to be with us today.

[Dale Long]: Good morning. And thank you, Mr. Mark Greene, for that introduction and for inviting me to participate in this educational experience.

You know, it was tough on my parents as they brought up my brother and I in Birmingham in the '50s and '60s.

Birmingham was the most thoroughly segregated city in this country because of Jim Crow laws that came about basically back in 1896 when a Supreme Court ruling that said it was all right to segregate facilities, as long as they were equal. It's known as Plessy versus Ferguson. And that created a roadmap for Birmingham to keep facilities separate but, in most cases, unequal.

That was known as the Jim Crow laws in Birmingham. As been mentioned, there were bombings all over Birmingham. Every one of them went unsolved. It was felt that the City of Birmingham Police Department all knew who were responsible for the bombings.

It was well-known that, in many cases, the police and the Ku Klux Klan were the same people or at least they talked to each other about making sure that African-American people stayed in their place. And the main way to intimidate was through bombings. Several homes bombed, churches bombed, businesses bombed. And, again, every one of them went unsolved.

You know, there was no counseling for black boys and girls because we would hear those bombings from time to time and, obviously, it was quite terrifying for us as young people. As my brother Kenneth and I grew a bit older, we would have questions that we would ask our questions about this issue of segregation and of the things we experienced that just didn't quite make sense.

For instance, when we turned on the television, there were images of a family's, white families, Leave it to Beaver, Make Room for Daddy. We would always see those TV shows but none featuring black people. Even as we watch the television and we'll see images of any city, USA, for some reason, you would never see black people doing simple things like walking down the street or coming out of a department store.

As we started to do things in Birmingham, we would pass by an amusement park that was a city run park but it was on the grounds of the State Fair of Alabama. It was called Kiddie Land Park. And my dad and mom tried their best to avoid passing by this, especially during the summer in the evening where we can see the lights and hear the music and smell the popcorn.

We would always ask, Well, why can't we stop and enjoy the park? And my mom said, because we're African-American, we were prohibited from doing so. That only created even more difficult questions that Ken and I had about what was wrong with us? We have been told that the sky's the limit. All we have to do is apply ourselves, study hard, and we could achieve and be whatever we wanted to be.

But there seemed to be a difference in what we started to realize. We could not participate in in Birmingham. If we went to a department store, we would see water fountains for black people and water fountains for white people. Usually, the white water fountains were filthy -- I mean the black water fountains, excuse me, were filthy and very difficult to access. That was segregation in Birmingham.

You could not try on clothes in a department store, a pair of pants or shirt. You dare not touch a hat and put it on because, if you did, your parents were forced into buying it. In order for my mom to buy shoes for us, she would have to trace our bare feet on a piece of paper and present that to the salesperson in order to buy shoes. If they didn't quit -- didn't quite fit, too bad. We would have to trade them with friends who might fit the shoes and have some sort of bartering system like that because we couldn't bring them back, had our feet then placed inside of those shoes.

Neighborhoods were thoroughly segregated. Schools were segregated. You couldn't go to a burger joint, couldn't go to one of the restaurants downtown or any of the hamburger joints or fast foods around town because black people weren't welcomed. They had a place called Jack's Hamburgers in Birmingham. And you -- they would wait on you, but you would have to go to a window at the very back to be waited on. You know, we weren't too particular about those burgers, anyway, because my parent's burgers tasted better anyway.

Buses were thoroughly segregated, the city owned bus system. And we all know the story about Rosa Parks, who attempted to ride the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, the state capitol, about 100 miles from Birmingham. This particular day, she had a long day at work. And the law said that, as white people began to enter the bus, black people would have to move further to the back. And then when the bus filled up with white people, black people had no other choice other than to stand up.

Didn't matter how old they were or if the woman was pregnant or somebody was crippled, you had to stand up to allow white people, even a kid, to take your seat. In order for black people to board the bus, they would have to enter the bus from the front, place their money into the container, exit the bus and then come back in through a rear door -- a door in order to access the bus. Many cases as you paid your money and attempted to access the rear door, the bus driver would just drive off just for the fun of it. And most of the occupants who were white got a big laugh out of it. That was segregation in Birmingham.

So as my brother and I had all of these questions about why were African-American people treated so bad, they would try their very best to explain to us why that exists. And we were so confused about it. But always my mother would send us to her mother, our maternal grandmother, Nanee. That's what we called her. And she lived next door. And she would explain to us how she went to school at Clark Atlanta University and how they made their way to Birmingham.

And then when she ran out and then she looked at our confused faces, she would always end her discussion with a mantra. Boys, if you want to overcome this segregation issue, you need to pray, have faith, walk upright and get yourselves a good education. Again, she would say pray, have faith, walk upright and get an education, a good education.

In 1963, one of the ministers in Birmingham, Fred Shuttlesworth, attempted to enroll his daughter into some of the white schools, Phillips High School, I think it was. And he tried several times. And as he attempted to do so, he would -- he was met by mobs of Ku Klux Klansmen who would beat him unmerciful.

Now, they didn't bother the girl, but they beat dad really bad. And many times his attack was on TV, and we were able to see what happened to him. That meant don't try it again or the rest of the black people in Birmingham don't dare try to do it.

Reverend Shuttlesworth was persistent, and he tried several times to enroll his daughter into Philips High School. Well, see, because by that time in 1954, we had Brown versus Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruling that took place in Kansas. And it basically said that even though Plessy versus Ferguson allowed for separate but equal facilities, the facilities in the Birmingham schools indeed were not equal.

So that meant that Fred Shuttlesworth wanted to enroll his daughter into predominantly white schools. You've got to understand that that was ten years after Brown versus Board of Education.

After these attempts, Dr. -- Mr. Fred Shuttlesworth decided to reach out to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. By this time, he had become known all over the country, all over the South. And he had successful boycotts and bus boycotts in the state of Georgia. And so he asked Dr. King to come to Birmingham and help things out. And that started the Freedom Movement of 1963.

Now, Dr. King would have the rallies with people from Birmingham at 16th Street Baptist Church, which was one of the largest churches in Birmingham. It was situated not too far from downtown Birmingham and a few blocks away from City Hall and the county courthouse. It was directly across the street from Kelly Ingram Park, which is where the demonstrations usually started and stopped.

Typically, demonstrate the next morning with his brilliant oratory, with his intellectual depth. And I would see him on television, but we never went down to hear him talking. I wanted to go so bad.

You see, Dr. King had a brother that pastored a church in Birmingham, in Ensley suburb. And his sons Al and Derek King, where my brother and I best friends. And so we hear about the Civil Rights Movement directly from our two buddies.

You know, every now and then we would -- we would be over to their home, perhaps on the weekend having a good time. And I recall their mother telling us he is to lower our voices because Dr. King was in the room trying to get some rest. You know, and I asked her, I said, you know, are you telling me that Dr. King's on the other side of that door? She said, Yes. And you don't know how bad I wanted to just go in and see him because I'd seen him on TV several times.

I'd seen him in magazines and jet magazine and everything. I've seen him in the newspaper in Birmingham, but I'd never seen him in person. And I wanted to see him so bad. I didn't know but a few bit -- a few months later, I would get that chance to see him in person.

Dr. King would have a rally at the 16th Street Church, and that rallies would be attended by adults. And the next morning, the adults would show up at the church, and they were taught nonviolent resistance. That mean no weapons. If the police hit you, you couldn't hit back. If you had a knife or a gun or anything that can be considered a weapon, even a fingernail file, you had to leave them in a box because Dr. King was nonviolent.

Typically, the people would leave 16th Street Church, cross the street, go over to the park area; and they would be met by police with cattle prods, billy clubs, fire hoses, attack dogs; and many of them would be taken to jail. Now, that posed a problem for the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham and Dr. King because, as the parents were being locked up, there were no body at home to take care of the kids.

The other part of it was, when the adults were locked up, incarcerated for a couple of days, obviously not showing up to work, the employer would figure out that they were locked up because of the Civil Rights Movement. And whenever they did get out of jail and try to return to work, they would find that they had no jobs.

So Dr. King decided to, rather use adults, ask the kids of Birmingham to participate. Thus became the Kids Campaign of 1963. So kids were invited to come to 16th Street Church, and I wanted to go so bad. And I had several discussions with my mom and dad because I wanted to go.

I understood that even as a 10- or 11-year-old kid the significance of being a part of a movement that would hopefully change things for people of color in Birmingham. But my parents didn't want us to do it, and so that was a measure of protecting us.

Now, it wasn't such that our parents were against the movement. But they were fearful of what would happen to us, inevitably, when we got arrested. And so I wouldn't dare defy them, but it was a struggle for me.

And so when I was seeing the movement on television because, again, Dr. King had a very smart way of dealing with the media. He would plan the demonstrations in time for all of the media who was in Birmingham from around the world to record what was going on and then give them time to get their film back to New York or wherever they were coming from because the essence of using the media was that the whole world saw what was going on in Birmingham, at the 5 or 6 o'clock evening news.

It was important for people to know how black people were treated in Birmingham, and I think Dr. King used that media brilliantly because back then, again, no internet. But it was very brilliant of him to use that to let the world know, here's what's happening to people of Birmingham, simply trying to do things that weren't normal for people to be able to do, to go to school, to go to a department store and try on clothes, to have a decent water fountain, to go to the doctor and sit in a waiting room and not have to go to what was known as the colored waiting room, to be able to ride the bus, to be able to get jobs working in a department store or doing something as simple as being a bus driver. All of those jobs were out of reach for people who looked like me.

At some point, the kids were locked up in droves. When the jails were filled, they were sent out to the State Fairgrounds, and they were locked up behind cages standing cages. Imagine that.

I have several friends who went to the demonstrations. And, again, I was hearing about the movement from Al and Derek King and struggle with wanting to go. And, again, as I had these discussions with my mom and dad, they will send us to grandmother next door. And our grandmother would tell us after she struggled to try and explain things to us. Her mantra that she always used. Boys, if you want to overcome this issue of segregation, you need to pray, have faith, walk upright and get yourselves a good education.

At one point, Dr. King was locked up himself. And as a means of intimidating him, they locked him up in solitary confinement. He was all by himself. And while he was locked up, some of the ministers, white ministers in Birmingham, they bought a full age -- a full-page ad in the Birmingham News. And they wrote an editorial, and they were asking Dr. King to back off of the demonstrations, to wait a little while, to put off the demonstrations to give the city fathers' time to work things out.

But Dr. King knew that if you ask people -- white people in Birmingham to wait, that always meant never. And so in response to these preachers who put the ad in the paper, Dr. King used scraps of paper, anything he could find to pen what is now known as a Letter from a Birmingham Jail. And I would ask as you study the Civil Rights Movement that you would make an effort to go and read that famous essay, that brilliant essay because Dr. King responded to those ministers and, really, it led to his first book, Why We Can't Wait.

Dr. King was finally released from jail. He was -- his release was made possible by an attorney that lived up the street around the corner from, me on Dynamite Hill, Arthur Shores. And about the same time, there was the A.G. Gaston Motel, which was down the street from the church, 16th Street Church. And my dad was a manager there.

And one morning we woke up Sunday morning. We should have been getting ready to go to church, and we knew that there were many people in our house. And normally we wouldn't see white people in our home. But we knew there were white people in the house, and my brother and I were terrified when my mother finally came to my room and explained to us who these people were, she explained that the A.G. Gaston Motel had been bombed the night before as well as Dr. King's brothers home, Al and Derek King's home.

And we were really terrified by that because we wanted to know, was our dad all right? And we asked my mom, Well, who are all these people in the house? And she said they were the FBI and the police and media questioning our dad. We asked her to stop his interviewing and have him to come into our room so we can see for ourselves that he was okay. And then we spent time on the phone trying to call Al and Derek to make sure they were fine as well.

A few weeks later, of course, Medgar Evers over in Mississippi, worked with the NAACP, was tragically assassinated in his front yard in front of his wife and family. And I even remembered my mom and dad discussing joining the NAACP because, at that point, I think the NAACP had become outlawed in Birmingham. And the officials there wanted the list of its members, and my parents were really afraid to be a part of that group because of what might happen to us. They didn't want us victimized in one of the bombings or anything else.

It was difficult for my mom and dad to raise two boys in Birmingham. But again, not having any access to mental health or counseling for African-American boys, after hearing these bombings and seeing it on the news every day, there was our grandmother Nanee who said, Boys, you need to pray, have faith and walk upright and get a good education.

It was September 15, 1963. 16th Street Church was again the rallying point for the Civil Rights Movement and what became known as The Children's Movement. That was right downtown Birmingham. The reason why Birmingham -- the 16th Street Church was targeted because we had received quite a bit of threats, telephone threats, threats by mail over the course of a few months, but nothing ever happened to 16th Street Church.

That morning, my mother, who was a school teacher, dropped my brother and I off at church for Sunday school. Normally she would be there as well, but she had to return home to finish a report that was due the next day relative to her school teaching job. But there were many school teachers that went to 16th Street Church. And, ironically, many of them did the same thing. They dropped their kids off and went back home to finish their report.

My brother Kenneth went to his Sunday school class. And I went to mine, which was located in the library of the church. After Sunday school class -- and I recalled it being Youth Day, where the youth of the church took over the entire service that was to take place at the 11 o'clock hour up in the sanctuary. The library and the kids' classes were in the basement of the church.

At about 10:23, right after our class was over, the library, the whole building began to shake. I remember the lights going off and dust and smoke and total darkness because, again, even though it was 10:20 in the morning, we were in the basement of the church. There was dust. There was smoke. I don't really recall there, hearing the sound of the explosion. But I remember the room shaking. I remember books falling off of the shelves. And probably the thing that frightened me the most, there was a huge bookcase that was -- the front part was glass, and it was reeling back and forth. And had it tilted over on some of us -- because there were about eight boys in that library -- it would have killed some of us.

We had no idea what was going on. And we sort of looked at each other and ran out of the library into the lower auditorium part that had folding chairs. Now, again, we couldn't see because of the dust and because of the darkness. And I remember running into the chairs and getting my shins hit and we were so determined to get out of there, not really knowing what was going on. That adrenaline alone allowed us to continue to run, despite the fact that we were bumping into these chairs that were really quite painful for 11- and 12-year-old kids.

As I attempted to run up the stairwell, that I knew that side of the basement of the church was open, I was met by a police officer. He had both sides of the stairwell blocked. He was holding on to the rails. And I tried to run past him under his arms. And he looked at me and said, Get back down in there, nigger. Now, you know, response time today is about 7 to 8 minutes with fast cars and computers. But explain to me why the police were there within seconds of the bombing. I ran right past him some sort of way. I don't remember even touching him, I was moving so fast. And I got on the outside of the church, wondering what was happening.

Then it dawned on me, that I started to smell the pungent odor of dynamite, gunpowder. And I guess you asked yourself the question, well, what do you know about dynamite and gunpowder? Cap pistols and fireworks. And, again, our neighborhood had been -- homes in our neighborhood had been bombed several times before, so we knew the smell of that gunpowder and dynamite.

I started to see people come down out of the main auditorium, down this huge stairwell. Many of them were being helped down the steps, and many were hysterical and crying. I noticed that that was blood all over their foreheads and other parts of the body, and some of my friends -- and I was terrified by that.

People were running around looking for their loved ones, looking for their siblings, looking for their parents. And then it dawned on me I had not seen my brother Kenneth. I looked around on the outside as I saw people began to gather but didn't see him. And so I went back into the basement looking for my brother. I went to the classroom where he should have been. And I called his name, looked under the tables and yelled for him but there was no one in the room.

I came back out the second time and I remembered to grab my clarinet because I played in the church. I missed it the first time. But I saw it on the table near that same stairwell, and I grabbed it and I walked out. And I looked around and I looked around and I ran all over the area. And, finally, I saw my brother who was with his Sunday school teacher, my grandmother's best friend, Miss Esther McCall.

And looked like she was holding on to nine little kids. My brother was about nine years old. And she looked like she was holding on to them all at the same time. And I was so happy to see my brother. And I told her, I said, Miss McCall, I'll take him right now because our dad was right up the street at the A.G. Gaston Motel, and I knew he'd be there pretty quickly. And she questioned me, but her hands was full with taking care of the other kids. So I grabbed Kenneth by the hand and made sure he was okay. And we stood there on the corner, waiting for my father to come down the street.

Probably within a minute, I could see him running. I had never seen my dad run like that. But he ran down the street, and by this time the police had blocked off the street and they stopped him from exiting, from crossing the street. My dad defied the police, similar to what I did when I was trying to get out of the church. He said, Those are my boys, and I have to go see about my kids right now. Without even waiting on a response, he crossed the street and he hugged us like he never done before, all the time asking us were we okay.

He looked at us head to toe, just making sure that we were okay. And I saw the terrifying look in his face because, see, you remember he, too, had experienced the bomb just two or three months earlier when the A.G. Gaston Motel was bombed. He walked us that block down the street to his office at the motel that had been repaired by then, obviously, and he attempted to call home to tell our mom that he had found us and we were okay, but the line was busy.

My dad even tried to call next door to my grandmother and aunt, Nanee's house. And her line was busy, too, and he was so frustrated. And I remember seeing news reporters in the small lobby of the A.G. Gaston motel, and they were trying to gain access to these pay phones because they were trying to report their stories back to wherever they had come from.

See, reporters, white reporters even, weren't welcomed at the hotels in Birmingham, the Holiday Inns, the [inaudible] and the other hotels because they knew that they were there to report what was going on in the Civil Rights Movement, and they didn't want that information to leave Birmingham because it would affect the city economically. So reporters weren't welcome.

Pretty soon my dad finally got through to my mom, and what should have taken about 7 to 8, 9 minutes for her to drive from my home to the church took about 45 minutes. She finally pulled under the breezeway of the A.G. Gaston Motel, and it looked like she jumped out of that car before she put it into park. Tears were in her eyes as she jumped out and hugged us and again went through the process of making sure that we were okay.

Oh, we were okay physically. But, mentally, we were a mess. She loaded us into the car and took us home. And we started to see people gathering all over downtown Birmingham and demonstrations were taking place and people were singing the Freedom Songs, We Shall Overcome. We ain't going to let nobody turn us around. People were visibly angry.

We got back to our home and my grandmother and aunt met us in the front yard. They examined us themselves and asked us to tell them what we had experienced then. We told them as much as we could. And by this time we were in tears and shaking. Again, no counseling for black boys and girls. But there was Nanee, grandmother. And she told us, Boys, you need to pray, have faith, walk upright and get a good education.

Later that day, around 5 or 6, we learned that 27 people had been taken to the hospital. Again, 27 of our friends. And then we learned the tragic news that four girls, four precious little girls, Denise, Addie, Carol, and Cynthia were found basically on top of each other as they were in the ladies room, putting on their choir robes preparing for the 11 o'clock service. Again, it was Youth Day. And the theme for that Youth Day celebration was the love that forgives.

Monday morning came about, and after school we spent time visiting homes of the bereaved. We went to the Wesley home. We went to the Robertson home. We went to the McNair's and went to the Collins' home. We took groceries to some and made sure that they had food to eat. And we sat and cried with grieving parents and siblings because their four little girls were tragically killed. Neither one of these girls have participated in the movement. Nobody went to jail. But they were victimized by the bombing.

Now, meanwhile, you know, everybody in Birmingham and especially the police knew the guys who were doing this, but none of them were arrested immediately. Carole, Carole Robertson's funeral was Tuesday at St. John Baptist Church, which was right around the corner from 16th Street Church. And as I recall, there was a mass funeral with Cynthia, Denise and Carol -- Cynthia, Denise and Addie, their funeral was at Sixth Avenue Baptist Church on the other side of town in the place of where the University of Alabama Birmingham is right now.

I don't remember how I made my way from school to Sixth Avenue Church, but I remember standing on the outside of the church listening to Dr. King who delivered the eulogy because they had a PA system where you could hear his eulogy on the outside because they wouldn't allow any more people to enter because there were too many people already inside.

I stood there and watched them bring out four coffins, four little coffins with my friends inside. The pallbearers loaded them into the waiting hearse, and then the ministers followed the pallbearers out. And that was Dr. King and Reverend Shuttlesworth and Reverend Abernathy and Reverend Cross, the minister at my church. They were all in their robes.

And as the coffins were being loaded, I saw Dr. King about ten feet away from me. He seemed to have this strange look on his face. Every time I looked at him, looked like he was looking directly at me. It was so powerful a moment for me, I really didn't know how to handle it. And I attempted to look away. But when my eyes went back on him, looked like he was looking right at me. I called it my epiphany experience.

See, because Dr. King was blamed for the loss of those girls' lives because it was he that came to Birmingham and created the movement that enraged the clan that caused that to happen.

Pretty soon the entire world knew about that bombing, and the bombing of the church proved to be the pivotal moment in our history that created the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Federal Housing Act of 1968. And of course, you know, the history. Dr. King was assassinated in 1968.

14 years after the bombing, Bob Chambliss, one of the people who were accused of the bombing, was convicted. I think it was, what, 1977. And then, later, 40 years later, Frank Cherry, Thomas Blanton and Robert Chambliss finally were tried and convicted and sent to prison for life. I went to Birmingham to the Blanton trial because I wanted to see closure. So I drove from Dallas back to Birmingham to sit and witness the trial because I wanted to see the perpetrators punished for what they had done and for the lives of my friends that were taken away.

So how does the story end? You know, when my grandmother talked to us about the bombing of the church and counseled us, again, she referred to her mantra, Boys, pray, have faith, walk upright and get a good education.

But after the bombing and after we learned about the death of those four girls, she added something to it. She said, Boys, God spared you for a reason. Could have been four little boys versus four little girls. Do something for somebody else. Make something of yourselves. God has a plan for you.

Now, I had no idea what that was. But years later when I left Birmingham and I went to college, I ended up here in Texas and went to Texas Southern University down in Houston. And it was there that I learned at a fraternity meeting about what became my way of giving back in a significant way.

I learned about the mentoring through Big Brothers, Big Sisters and became a part of that program that almost a week that I finished school and went to work. I was working at NASA on the Space Shuttle program and found out from one of the African-American employees about Big Brothers, Big Sisters, and I've been a volunteer ever since, now almost for 50 years.

When my little brother that I have now who's a teenager calls me and talks about the police shootings and about Trayvon Martin and about the things that he sees on the news and he wants to know, could he be victimized by the police and police brutality, and I explained to him about his appearance and wearing hoodies, to making sure he's -- his parents know exactly where he is and hanging out with his friends and don't be out too late.

But when I run out of things to talk to him that was designed to protect him, always went back to my grandmother's mantra. Pray, have faith, walk upright, and get a good education. And you will be able to overcome the issues that you see in your experience right now with the many things that shouldn't be happening to people of color, maybe one of these days that will all end.

Let's hope so. I pray that it does.

Thank you.

[ Music ]

Hi, everyone, my name is Roy Vu, and I teach History at Dallas College North Lake Campus. Today I'll be presenting a paper on Family, Food and Freedom: African Diasporic Family Ties Via Emancipatory Foodways.

My presentation will encompass all three.

And as far as my personal interest in Civil Rights Movement and Black History Month, it stems from the fact that I'm a son of Vietnamese refugee parents.

And in regards to the Vietnam War, I was -- I found Martin Luther King's statements on the Vietnam War profound.

For instance, during the civil rights era, he remarked that unfortunate a disproportionate number of black men, poor black men, as well as poor whites from the south, were being shipped overseas to fight the war in Vietnam, and as a result, they endured unfortunately the highest number of casualties.

Another historic focal point that intersects my own personal history with black history and the civil rights era is the fact that in regards to Vietnamese refugees, and there were so many in the United States, thanks to civil rights legislation, like Immigration Act 1965, and a little bit later on, civil rights movement, the Refugee Act 1980 those acts would grant political asylum to thousands of Vietnamese refugees, who are fleeing from communist Vietnam, and be able to resettle in countries like the United States.

So those are just the two of many historical intersections that allow me to pique my interest or allow me to pique my interest in terms of learning more about black history and the Civil Rights Movement.

And of course, history is personal, right? Everyone has their own history.

So in fact, I like to always say to my students, history never ends until every story is told.

And in regards to today's story, again, as I mentioned, a moment ago, I'll be covering African American diasporic foodways, tying in with emancipatory foodways.

So without further ado, let me go ahead and begin with a quote from civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer.

"Down where we are, food is used as a political weapon.

But if you have a pig in your backyard, if you have some vegetables in your garden, you can feed yourself and your family and nobody can push you around.

If we have something like some pigs and some gardens and a few things like that, even if we have no jobs, we can eat it, and we can look after our families." End of quote.

This is from Fannie Lou Hamer. She was a civil rights activist and founder, Freedom Farm Cooperative.

Family members, quote, encapsulates the ties that bind family, food, and freedom.

And also, the topic of my presentation and this is presentation goes along with a solace theme for 2021 on the black family.

And so, it's important that we celebrate black foodways and how such black foodways help emancipate African Americans, not just during the civil rights era, but even before back in the days of slavery, and of course, to new African American foodways that are going on today in the 21st century.

So let me move on to -- ooops. Let's move on to Michael W. Twitty, a culinary historian and recipient of the 2018 James Beard Award.

He made -- in his book, "The Cooking Gene", he made numerous references to food and race.

So in the history of African Americans and the certificates of food and preserving and protecting and expanding black culture, Twitty poignantly analyzes that, "The food is, is in many cases, all we have, all we can go to in order to feed," I'm sorry, "all we can go to in order to feel our way into the past.

For others, we are on interesting note on pages of a very different conversation.

For African Americans and our allies, food is the gateway into larger conversations about individual and group survival.

It is a lie that food is just fuel. It has always had layers of meaning." And he admits, "for the most part, despite meaningless food."

He further assesses on the points of protecting, preserving and promoting African cuisines that have been Southernized in the United States.

"Through history is not in the food, it's in the people.

We'll work against the loss of our cultural memory against the consequences of institutional oppression, against indiscriminate flagrant appropriation and against courts of public opinion that question our authenticity, maturity, and motives of the revolutionary act of clarifying and owning our past.

It is my belief that the very reason we are here in space and time is deliberately connected to our journey with food.

The only question I ever wanted to ask for myself was, how is my destiny shaped by the history of Southern food?"

So here, Twitty poses a crucial and valuable question, to what extent in working against loss of cultural memory could African foodways be remembered and reinvigorated, survive, recapture, and expand, while overcoming the destructive, violent cultural genocide brought forth by the ongoing consequences of slavery, Jim Crowism, institutional racism, and cultural appropriation.

It is a question that must be recognized, addressed, and deliberated with meaningful action to combat and reverse the loss of cultural memory.

Moving on to African Diasporic Foodways from Slavery to Jim Crow Era, of which I don't have the time to delve deeply into the history of African diasporic foodways during slavery, but I'll just give you a snippet of what African slaves managed, or how African slaves managed to regain some food sovereignty, in other words, regain some control over what they consume.

OK. All right. So going far back into early American history.

Scholar Monica White argues that African slaves planted gardens and raised crops as a form of resistance.

She declares that, "The millions of men, women and children who were kidnapped from the homelands in Africa, and transported through the Middle Passage in the most extreme case of forced deportation in world history possessed knowledge in microclimates, and the particular kinds of crops that they could grow in places where they were as told as enslaved.

In addition to human cargo, slave ships carried African food staples, seeds, roots and vegetables that are produce, and livestock.

These staples would feed the crew and minimally the enslaved, but they're also incorporated into our culture of plantation economies, and became critical to the survival and wellbeing of both those living in slavery and their captors.

Researchers identify their African yams or root, bananas, hibiscus, millet, okra, pigeon peas, plantains, rice, sesame, sorghum, sweet potatoes, and on and on, to the Americas and the Caribbean throughout the Middle Passage."

So in the history of American slavery regarding the food distribution consumption of South, despite the plethora of food staples bought forth by African slaves, scholar Marcie Cohen Ferris says that slave owners often gave their slaves the less desirable parts of an animal, such as the fish head and backbone, or the hog's tail, brain, gizzard, and chitterlings.

These were typical on most southern plantations, unfortunately.

So Cohen writes, "Enslaved cooks improvised cooking methods that transform tougher cuts, as well as awful, the entrails and internal organs of a butchered animal into tasty dishes."

OK. So oftentimes, to nourish themselves for survival and improved health, African slaves would seek ways to regain some food security, reclaim the food heritage and reestablish the food sovereignty to have some control over their own food consumption and diet.

The foods given to African slaves by the slave owners were woefully short and inadequate of supplementing a balanced healthy diet.

African slaves resort, therefore, to their creative culinary skills and ingenuity to transform the leftovers into wholesome delicious meals with some nutritional value.

Consequently, African slaves and the cultivation food gardens would become another act of slave resistance.

So by cultivating herbs, vegetables and fruits, African slaves sought food resistance to meet their own health needs.

Scholars have identified the location of slave gardens or provision kitchen gardens -- kitchen grounds, excuse me on many former plantations, including the remnants of African seed, and root crops that eventually made their way to diets of contemporary Americans.

Most likely work on Saturday or Sunday, according to White, "Those who were enslaved grew crops such as various types of squash, yams, sweet potatoes, various kinds of peas, such as guinea peas from New Guinea and for soil fertility, it serverd more purposes cow and pigeon peas."

White goes on to argue that slave gardens are performances of resistance.

Well, gardening these crops are performance of slave resistance, arguing that, "Yet it seems likely that enslaved people decided what to grow, how to grow it, and what to do with the harvest in these gardens.

Thus, slave gardens represented independent production grounds, it can be understood as a strategy of resistance to corrupt system and an effort to create food security."

Food -- Therefore food provisioning can be seen as liberatory, enslaved people is using food production as a strategy of developing social relations and some autonomy.

For those who were enslaved, this practice of growing food, especially foods for the Motherland, and the social exchanges that went on in the marketplaces were also opportunities to enact freedom.

Using food production the slaves were able to practice the cultural and ceremonial uses of land that are brought with them as a way to celebrate their ancestors and the homeland they left behind.

Therefore, examples of black farming as resistance occurred during the transition from slavery to reconstruction, and well into the Jim Crow era."

So here, we talked about African foodways, as well as Afro-Caribbean foodways from the Middle Passage where millions of slaves were forced into bondage and transported in slave ships cross the Atlantic Ocean, making their way to the Americas.

So this journey would be known as the Middle Passage.

But along the way, slaves end up at places like Haiti and Cuba, throughout the Caribbean, and, of course, the United States, as well as South America.

They would carry with them Afro-Caribbean foodways or traditions that would help them live and survive and of course, would give them a more balanced diet.

And again, as I mentioned, slave gardens are perceived as an act of resistance.

So for slaves themselves, who cultivated these food variants, they are basically active agents of history where they would enact a form of resistance.

And in regards to black American farmers of the Jim Crow era, this is where I will talk about next.

And to give an example, since during my sabbatical, I did some research in Houston, my main area of interest was Vietnamese Americans and their home gardens, but along the way, I learned more -- also learned more about African American foodways in Houston, and the history of such foodways in Houston.

So Houston, Texas, there's a long tradition of black residents who cultivate their own vegetable gardens that remains today.

Historian Tyina Steptoe aptly explains the migration of blacks Southerns from Louisiana and East Texas,the migration to Houston at Jim Crow era, racial segregation violence toward African Americans.

She describes this as development in black settlement of its residential wards during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Steptoe profoundly analyzes, "The wards by Houston feel like a collection of small towns rather than one city."

Thelma Scott Bryant [assumed spelling], who was born in Third Ward in 1905, commented that her neighborhood felt very much like the country in the early 20th century.

Likewise, musician Arnett Cobb, who came of age in Fifth Ward described community of his youth as a country town.

Indeed, many of the people who moved to his neighborhood from the country continued the same customs and agricultural practices, they have brought forth -- that brought with them for the countryside, excuse me.

Most families raised chickens and grew okra, greens, corn, other subsistence crops in the backyards."

Here, African American migrants brought to Houston their own customs of raising their own vegetables, herbs, and farm animals when they lived in the countryside, but kept with them when we're selling and Houston, and thus preserving their cultural practices.

Historian, author and colleague Dr. Malcolm Fryer refers such aforementioned practices as cultural continuities, which are integral to cartel cultural appropriations, and marginalization of their food heritage.

So cultural continuities is just carrying farming customs from the rural to urban environment is one of many contributions blacks and the migrants have brought to Houston, enriching the city's polycultural world, despite under Jim Crowism.

That introduced the concept of urban farming in early 20th century long before the term itself became part of the American vernacular and trendy in the 21st century.

Furthermore, African Americans' cultural continuity via urban farming adds to the unique characteristics of Houston's urban development and growth, and the people who make the city.

Right. Now, going to transition to the civil rights era, Black Home Cooks, Chefs, Restaurateurs, and Farmers in the Civil Rights Era, in which no food no justice, no peace.

I will share a few stories. There's a lot more, but I'll just share three stories today just to make sure that I won't overextend my time.

So, transition to civil rights era. Let me share a few examples of black home cooks, farmers, chefs and restaurateurs who fed, housed and protected civil rights activists, starting off with Georgia Teresa Gilmore and her Club from Nowhere.

Scholar Marcie Cohen Ferris, "The attention of the nation turned to Montgomery Alabama December 1, 1955, where Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old black seamstress and civil rights activist refused to give up her seat in the back of a crowded city bus to a white man and was arrested.

That day marked a historic turning point in the evolving civil rights movement as Montgomery's black community with well known leaders such as Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr., to little known figures such as Georgia Teresa Gilmore, a local cook organized mass meetings and bake sale fundraisers to protest the city segregation laws."

So first, sheds greater light on the role of lesser known civil rights activists, like Georgia Gilmore.

She explains that, "Georgia Gilmore walked to and from the National Lunch Company where she worked every day during the boycott, until she was fired after testifying in court in Montgomery.

Undeterred, she cooked from her own home and organized the Club from Nowhere, a name chosen to ensure the anonymity and safety of its members.

The working class black woman from nowhere raised funds to support the carpools by selling homemade pies and cakes at local beauty parlors, Laundromats, and gas stations.

Each week Gilmore reported club success to the standing ovations of volunteers, gathered the mass meetings led by Reverend King.

The pie and cake money brought station wagons used in the boycott carpools. I'm sorry. The pie and cake money bought station wagons used in the boycott carpools.

Gilmore eventually turned part of her home into a public dining area thanks to encouragement and startup funds from King and the Montgomery Improvement Association, which coordinated the boycott.

She created a backdoor restaurant where black and white customers, attorneys, activists, barbers, doctors, preachers and politicians alike could enjoy her fried chicken, pork chops, stuffed bell peppers, macaroni and cheese, and chitterlings.

In November 1956, US Supreme Court declared segregation of public houses to be unconstitutional, and the boycott ended.

Georgia Gilmore continued to feed the civil rights movement 10 years after the Montgomery bus boycott.

She prepared food for participants in historic Selma to Montgomery march."

Food scholar John T. Edge would add to that quote, "Threatened whites recognize," I'm sorry, "threatened whites recognized that Georgia Gilmore's house on the Deracote Street [assumed spelling]served as clubhouse for progressive black Montgomery, so did King.

In fact Gilmore's house restaurant which started the divide between dining hall and private club defined a welcome table ideal that would emerge as a primary metaphor in the civil rights movement.

After she stepped away for her job at National Lunch to claim her own business underground black economy, her success hit too of the moves come during the Black Power stage of the Civil Rights Movement, when instead of angling for the integration whitespaces, African Americans created black spaces at a moment when they had seemingly low leverage cooking for the brave black women intimate and essential power."

Moving on to Fannie Lou Hamer and the Freedom Farm Cooperative.

Fannie Lou Hamer founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative in 1967.

Scholar Monica White explains, "The Freedom Farm Cooperative was an antipoverty strategy to meet the needs of impoverished residents of Louisville, Mississippi, in Sunflower County.

Freedom Farm was a community based rural and economic development project.

Its members were unemployed farmers who have been dispossessed of access to land and displaced by mechanization."

White goes on to analyze that Freedom Farm represents opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based on building alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort.

Fannie Lou Hamer, White praises her political accumen and intellectual fortitude to connect food security with voting rights.

"In her work with SNCC and with the Mississippi freedom Democratic Party, she connected starvation of people in Sunflower County, not only to pressure to migrate but also to the pressure not to register to vote."

From Fannie Lou Hamer, "Nobody told us we have to move from Mississippi. Nobody tells us we're not wanted, but when you're starving, you know."

So in creating Freedom Farm as a means to develop a stable black community on the foundation of agriculture, Hamer illuminated, the relationship between economic self-sufficiency and political power and translated the theory into action.

In an effort to increase access to healthy food, FFC's members worked collaboratively in planting, maintaining, and harvesting the crops in the community gardens.

And the community spaces, 30 in the first 40 acres were dedicated to subsistence crops and community garden where co-op members planted greens, kale, turnips, corn, sweet potatoes, okra, tomatoes, butter beans, and more.

In 1972, these subsistence crops are more than 1,600 families.

 At least 10% of the community garden harvest was donated to needy families whose members were unable to work the fields.

Cooperative families share the remainder, and if there was more than they needed, FFC shipped the surplus to feed needy families as far away as Chicago."

White goes on to say that the Freedom Farm Cooperative would also help families who were displaced by the automobile industry and its families in urban areas who struggled to gain access to healthy food, and adequate and healthy, I'm sorry, adequate affordable housing, clean water, and quality education, and healthcare deployment as well.

White argues that "FFC developed a model community resilience and collective agency as a foundation for political action that speaks to those who live in food insecure communities, such as Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago and New Orleans.

It offers a new way for those who historically -- who have historically been excluded to build sustainable communities."

So between 1969 and Hamers's death in 1976, the Freedom Farm Cooperative increased from originally from 40 acres to several 1,000 acres, and it was used for food production.

It was also used for cash crops of corn and soybeans, and provide housing entrepreneur activities.

Food scholar John T. Edge argues that Hamer's intrepid commitment to black food production in 1960s to 1970s set precedents "for current dialogues about food sovereignty."

One more example, we like to talk about the Black Panther Party and the Free Breakfast for School Children Program, which started 1969, ended in 1980.

The Black Panther Party advocate for food justice, fighting against food security that plagued black neighborhoods.

Edge asserts that, "Bobby Seale helped found the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense 1966, focused his attentions on food too.

Inspired by the rhetoric of Malcolm X, and anti-colonialism in Africa, Seale, like other Panthers, argued that power will allow blacks to gain land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace."

Sociologist Alison Hope Alkon views that "The West Oakland farmers market has roots in the Black Panther Party, which emphasized community self-determination and self-sufficiency.

The Black Panthers Party, Free Breakfast for School Children Program tie their political approach to issues of food and hunger.

As recipients of free food, the school children could have characterize -- could be characterized as victims in need of charity.

However, Black Panther Party leaders and volunteers used rhetoric to envision the children are subjects rather than subjugated objects, by referring them as little brothers, little sisters, and the only assurance we have of a new indifferent tomorrow, the Black Panther Party posited children as entitled to rather than merely in need of free food."

Alkon 41 further elucidates that the -- end of quote, sorry. Alkon further elucidates that, Free Breakfast for School Children and others of our programs were tailored not only to sustain the black community, but to introduce them to the party's ideals, which included a right to food."

Noble chef and author Brian Terry states that, "In the late 1960s, the Black Panthers had this brilliant analysis around the intersection of poverty, malnutrition, and institutional racism.

They wanted to liberate black communities, and they know that providing food for young people was key."

Now, there are many other examples as well, including Chef Leah Chase, who passed away back in 2019 at the age 96.

She fed several US presidents at her creole restaurant, Dooky Chase, a famed restaurant in the New Orleans' Treme neighborhood.

So her beloved Creole restaurant in New Orleans' Treme neighborhood had long been important being an eating place for civil rights leaders in the city, go all the way back to the 1960's Freedom Riders, for instance.

And there are many other examples as well.

So these are just a few examples that provided today.

Moving on to a few photos.

This one is of Georgia Gilmore as she adjusts her hat for photographers during the bus boycott, Montgomery bus boycott trial of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery, Alabama.

Yeah, Fannie Lou Hamer, a fierce advocate of civil rights and food justice.

Again, she was the founder of the Freedom Farm Cooperative.

And, again, tying in or connecting the issues of civil rights with food justice, Hamar and others advocated the right of African Americans to gain food sovereignty.

And then you have the Black Panther Party, one of the cofounders, Bobby Seale here checking the food bags provided for school children.

As we all know, 2020, 2021 unfortunately, we've seen many videos and images of long lines of food banks and school children today not having access to school breakfast and lunch programs.

And so, this issue remains unfortunately prevalent today among US school children.

And going back to the Black Panther Party, they're one of the early advocates, if not the first, to establish a free breakfast program for schoolchildren.

Another photo here, Black Panther serving children free breakfast at Sacred Heart Church in San Francisco, California.

We're going to move on to Black Food Geographies, African American Urban Farms and Gardens Today.

I met you at the West Oakland Farmers Market which was inspired by the Black Panther Party.

I'm not going to delve too much into the West Oakland Farmers Market for -- you know, to save some time.

So for West Oakland Farmers Market, you have the influence of Black Panther Party that would lead to farmers and food gardeners in Oakland to establish a farmers market of their own in West Oakland.

And so, not only would you have an opportunity for black farmers gardeners to sell their produce and earn some income, but also these farmers, gardeners at such farmers markets, like the West Oakland Farmers Market would provide African Americans, in particular West Oakland, access to healthier food options, OK, particularly in areas that has food deserts, lacking in healthy food options.

OK. Moving on to the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, and the D-Town Farm.

I want to spend more time on this.

Scholar Monica White contends that, "Across generations, black Detroiters are using our culture as a way to convert vacant lots with overgrown grass into community gardens that serve as social spaces.

These spaces now function as community centers where people learn about healthy eating, increased access to healthy food, and receive health services.

They're a place where intergenerational relationships are nurtured and maintained, and where residents have a safe space for exercise.

For many in Detroit, the new relationships they forge between land, food and freedom are response to the housing foreclosure crisis, the closing public schools, the water shutoff crisis, and issues of policing."

Monica White would further add that for members of the DBCFSN, "They oversee the work of D-Town Farm, which is about two acres, as critical to their survival that became involved in community farming for many reasons, including neighborhood beautification, insuring Detroit residents access to clean healthy food, and become stewards of the environment.

They engage in farming to reallocate land within the city for green purposes for meeting the needs of the local community.

They also engage in farming as community based business strategy oriented toward political change.

They hope that participating in the farm will plant seeds in farm workers' minds, demonstrating the critical nature of community based control of collective resources.

D-Town activist recognized farming as a strategy of resistance and sustainable community building.

As Fannie Lou Hamer did before them, D-Town farmers have built new institutions on their own, and saw an opportunity to work toward food security and food sovereignty, and to gain greater control of the food system that affects their daily lives.

Farming food security became steps towards self-determination and self-reliance.

The community builds and controls its own social institutions, restoring the earth or transforming the food system become possible.

D-Town farmers' resistance strategy focuses on their use of land to create community spaces to teach about healthy eating and to create a new vision of Detroit.

By the 2016 growing season, D-Town farm was producing more than 30 different crops, including acorn, squash, zucchini," I'm sorry, "acorn squash, zucchini, kale, collard greens, tomatoes, basil, green beans, watermelon, beets, turnips, and so on.

An unusually broad spectrum by the way for a city farm.

In addition to the fruit and vegetable herb crops, D-Town farmers maintain a mushroom growing operation and an apiary that produce honey.

D-Town also had hoop houses for year round food production and runs large scale composting operation."

Moving on to the Gardens of Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans.

Changa Muenda [assumed spelling], born and raised in Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood New Orleans, that was the worst hit community by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, deliberates over the points of home gardening, culture continuity, and food sovereignty for African Americans when rebuilding her neighborhood in the post-Katrina era.

Muenda asserts that, "The gardens are our community centers. It's really about the people first.

The space needs to serve the people.

What I'm focused on is increasing the capacity of these gardens to serve our people and be effective community building tools.

We're building community and replace your old cultural traditions of our neighborhood.

There was a time when everyone here had their own backyard gardens, which is something that they did, sharing produce and helping one another, harvesting from fruit trees that grew around the neighborhood.

This has to be a space that is safe for people who have felt disenfranchised and overlooked.

So that as community, we know these gardens, the projects are not about other folks coming here and deciding what should happen, that this is ours."

I'm spending a little more time on Urban Harvest and Plant It Forward Farms.

This is more my area of research.

In regards to Urban Harvest, here's the food writer David Leftwich, provides some great details about one of the oldest community gardens in Texas, community that was confronted food desert issues, yet at the same time was expanding food sovereignty for African Americans.

Leftwich argues that, "Urban Harvest has community gardens set up in food deserts with the aim toward, for one, the oldest raised bed community garden along the Gulf Coast, and that's the Alabama community garden and Third Ward.

And they are associated with Urban Harvest, but mostly they're running it on their own."

Leftwich elaborates more on Alabama community garden and its mission to serve food desert communities.

"So it's a pretty big community garden, it's primarily African American, like there's a couple of schools that gardens there.

There's certainly a true community garden.

Urban Harvest does a lot of work with the community gardens.

There's this kind of overarching to teach classes, provide logistic support and more.

So to confront, sorry, so to confront food justice and sovereignty challenges, marginalized populations often collaborate with local farmer organizations, such as Urban Harvest, as well as Plant It Forward Farms.

Thus, community home gardens also play a pivotal role in producing enough healthy greens for their family, neighbors, and community.

Such community home gardens give them opportunities to seek food justice and redeem themselves and their food heritage, regain their food sovereignty, particularly in working class food desert neighborhoods, and as a result root and cultivate a part of their culinary citizenship to belong to this land.

I'll explain more about culinary citizenship in a minute.

Now, in regards to Plant It Forward Farms, they are a nonprofit organization that assists new refugee and immigrant groups in Houston to resettle their lives in the city and become urban farmers.

Hundreds of thousands of Congolese refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of Congo have recently experienced the traumas and difficulties of war, displacement, refugee camp life, resettlement and marginalization.

For the more fortunate, some Congolese refugees were eventually granted asylum to resettle in cities like Houston.

In their brief resettlement history, they work tirelessly to earn a decent living wage while residing in working class neighborhoods of Southwest Houston as they adjust to living in a new country.

Nevertheless, despite the overwhelming challenges and odds, the Congolese diaspora in Houston continue to persevere -- continues to persevere and demonstrate resilience in agency, as they develop their own community and retain their food heritage.

[Inaudible] turned to urban farming and home gardening.

Plant It Forward Farms, again, nonprofit organization in Houston, assists Congolese refugee farmers, establishing only sustainable, small scale urban farms that sell fresh locally grown produce.

But the organization also provides farmers opportunity to earn a modest living.

The personal stories of farmers such as Toto Alimasi in Harriet, in Gangwal, are just a few significant stories out of thousands that allow us to critically contextualize and storicize African refugees and immigrants in the United States who attempt to cultivate sustainable small scale urban farms toward achieving emancipatory foodways.

For farmer Toto Alimasi, he raises herbs, vegetables, fruits like amaranth, African eggplant, sweet potatoes, and sugar cane to remind him of his homeland.

Regarding the aforementioned produce, Alimasi asserts, "When we eat this, we feel like home," end of quote.

At a small farm, he walks and guides me to his banana trees and points out several bunches of small bananas with each bunch carrying a dozen or more.

He proudly and joyfully declares, "I grow these banana trees here.

When we eat bananas, we remember Africa."

So that ends our discussion on black food geographies.

Again, there are many more examples, but these are a few examples I wish to share today.

I also want to share just a few photos of Plant It Forward Farms.

Here's -- Here are actually three small Plant It Forward Farms at the Westbury community farm site in Southwest Houston.

It's a beautiful farm site as you can see, right, you know, in the city limits of Houston, Texas.

This is farmer Toto Alimasi, back when I had shorter hair, the pre-COVID-19 days back in October 2019.

It was a pleasure to talk to.

Henriette in Gangwal. She's been a Plant It Forward Farmer since 2018.

Again, these gardens are beautiful, and green, and lush, and again, they're providing healthy food options, right, in neighborhoods, communities that lack such options.

In addition to that, these refugees are earning a decent living by urban farming.

All right. So moving on to Critical Food Studies, Theoretical Frameworks in Emancipatory Foodways.

I won't go into great detail over these theoretical frameworks.

But just to start off real quickly on food sovereignty, actually I have a graph that I want to show you.

Food sovereignty is about having control over some healthy food sources.

If space and resources are available no matter how limited, African diasporans typically cultivate produce to gain access to fresh and affordable food, which leads to better overall diet, health and food security.

When cultivating crops familiar to the African diaspora culture, then African Americans are preserving their food heritage.

By preserving the food heritage, they demonstrate food resistance to unhealthy food options.

They're often ubiquitous in black working class neighborhoods.

To overcome marginalization of their food heritage, they would be agents of food justice, using herbs, fruits, and vegetables from their own farms and gardens to make culinary dishes that remind them of home.

OK. That's the concept -- basic concept food sovereignty.

Moving on to culinary citizenship.

Culinary citizenship expresses the need and control by the oppressed to compensate the suffering and misfortune by cultivating traditional food ways of creating, raising, procuring, consuming, and sharing the food to neighbors and strangers, to friends and foes alike.

Culinary citizenship is a close cousin of agrarian citizenship, but with an emphasis on the urban, suburban, and exotic places, not just the rural locales.

Not unlike agrarian citizenship, however, culinary citizenship also permits the oppressed to remember, recover, redeem, and expand their traditional foodways.

It is the network of systemic practices to grow food to live a dignified life to a freedom from despair, hopelessness, poverty and statelessness.

Moving on to food and culinary justice.

I do have another quote from Michael Twitty.

Quote, "We are surrounded by culinary injustice where some southerners take credit for things that enslaved Africans and their descendants played key roles in innovating."

In other words, Twitty is addressing the issue of cultural appropriation of black food, and the failure to -- our failure to recognize the innovations and ingenuity of black chefs, home cooks, farmers and gardeners.

And one example that we use would be barbecue, right?

The popular biggest fare in the south and the rest of the country as well.

And so, barbecue like he mentioned, "Might go the way of the banjo, an African instrument that most people now associate with bluegrass music played by whites."

For anthropologists Ashante Reese, she argues that, "Food justice is fundamentally about racial justice, because in the United States, racism not only structure everyday practices, I'm sorry, everyday experiences, but also influenced the underdevelopment of neighborhoods and the implementation policies that disproportionately disenfranchise black communities.

Documented in these inequities and eradicating them is essential as we work toward a more just food system.

Self-reliance is neither simply cultural nor simply spatial.

Residents understanding of self-reliance was grounded in historical and spatial context, addressing structural inequalities, while building community using the garden as a central site, which to work.

In this context, feeding the community took on greater meetings that providing fruits and vegetables.

Feeding meant youth development, visions for entrepreneurship, and potentials for strengthening relationships with parents and caregivers."

Going back to Michael Twitty, who calls for culinary justice, Twitty demands culinary justice and defines it definitively as, "The idea that people should be recognized for their gastronomic contributions and have a right to their inherent value including the opportunity to derive empowerment from them.

Today, this widens the lens of food justice, which centers around increasing access to healthy food and helps amplify how culture, food and power interplay and amplifies the agents leading the revolution."

So with the concept of culinary justice, Twitty has certainly advanced our philosophy on food, the production, procurement, preparation, sharing and consumption and remnants of food.

And finally, liberatory agriculture. This comes from scholar Monica White, whom I quoted before.

She argues that, "Liberatory agriculture ignited the imagination of former activists and African American farmer cooperatives during the mid-19th century.

In the 21st century, self-determined agriculture, alongside lessons learned from decades of successes and failures, had the real potential to offer similar opportunity for urban growers who are responding to the harsh conditions of deindustrialization and economic downturn."

Here's an image of culinary historian Michael Twitty, again, the 2018 James Beard Award recipient, and author of "The Cooking Gene."

So to conclude, black food matters.

And I'll start with a quote from Chef Kwame Onwuachi, the author of "Notes from a Young Black Chef", which by the way is North Lakes 2020-2021 Common Book Read, so kudos to our great common book committee. "

My ancestors are those who like Auntie Mi, ground cassava flour for hours, soaked stockfish, and hit kola trees until the nuts fell down.

My ancestors are steeped in the curries and jerk of Jamaica, and found in the stews and roux, gumbos and jambalayas of Louisiana.

It was something I couldn't deny any longer."

So this goes -- this ties in with all the previous concepts we talked about in emancipatory foodways, right.

So farm to freedom delves into how African Americans utilizing foodways will experience greater liberation from the traumas of enslavement, racism, inequity, injustice, poverty, land loss, and food insecurity.

Also allows them to embrace Afro-Caribbean food heritage and roots through farming, cooking, and gardening.

And furthermore, just as Twitty stated, it addresses culinary injustices, right, to right the wrongs.

In addition, for black chefs, home cooks, farmers, gardeners, there's more to black food than just soul food, OK.

So going beyond soul food, black food is diverse, it's complex, it's healthy.

Think about the different regions when you look at Afro-Caribbean cuisine, right, stretching from Africa to various parts of the Caribbean, to the Americas, right?

In addition, not only that, you have in terms of soul food, the diversity of soul food itself.

Today, you have vegan soul food and chefs creating -- or staff should begin soul food restaurants in creating vegan dishes, right?

So in other words, you know, black food matters and black food is diverse, complex and healthy.

In regards to 21st century African diaspora foodways, it's about the perseverance, right, and the preservation, as well as expansion and celebration of black food.

And just to complete our presentation for today, here's a photo of Chef Kwame Onwuachi, author of "Notes for Young Black Chef".

And also, I want to show you photograph of Chef Mashama Bailey, 2019 change James Beard Award recipient.

And Mashama Bailey, a black chef in Savannah, Georgia established restaurant called the Grey Restaurant.

Her work reclaims segregated spaces for integrated dining.

And it was, by design, it was with a purpose, right?

Chef Bailey was, as mentioned, the 2019 James Beard Award recipient.

She transformed what was a generation ago a segregated Greyhound bus terminal into an award winning restaurant called the Grey, now serving as an integrated dining space.

OK. All right. So that concludes my presentation for today.

I do have a list of books should you wish to read more about African American, I'm sorry, African diasporic foodways, as well as emancipatory foodways.

I recommend all these books, particularly again, Kwame Onwuachi's "Notes for Young Black Chef", as well as Michael Twitty's "Cooking Gene." Monica White's "Freedom Farmers" is a marvelous piece of work as well, and many others.

So my question is for students and the rest of the audience, what does black food mean to you?

How can we preserve and expand black foodways from Africa to the Caribbean to the United States and around the world?

In what ways could we honor and celebrate black chefs, home cooks, farmers, gardeners, and restaurateurs?

What steps are necessary to improve racial and gender inequalities in the culinary world?

And I'll end with another quote from Chef Onwuachi, "I want to see the world in which not only the food from the African diaspora but the food from Africa is given the respect it deserves.

When I push open the kitchen doors, I want to see dining room full of diners, but especially brown and black diners who look at their plates, feel seen, celebrated, and recognized.

And when I look in the mirror, I want to see a young black chef who made that world a reality."

This is just a wonderful illustration by an artist.

And that's Fannie Lou Hamer. Well, not the artist, I'm sorry, this is an illustration of Fannie Lou Hamer and her influence on African diasporic foodways.

Thank you.

[ Music ]

[Rachelle Powell]:  Hello. Welcome to the Civil Rights Speaker Series.

I am Professor Rachelle Powell, Sociology Instructor at North Lake Campus.

[Rolanda Randle]:  And I am Dr. Rolanda Randle, Government Faculty at Richland Campus.

[Rachelle Powell]:  This presentation, "The Story Behind the Headlines, the Fight for Social Justice in Education during the Civil Rights Movement," will focus on some of the headlines that you've heard and seen throughout the Civil Rights period, but we're also going to talk a little bit about some of the lesser-known stories behind the headlines.

So, again, welcome to this series, and we hope that it provides you with a better outlook of some of the issues related to education during the Civil Rights Movement. Thank you.

[Rolanda Randle]:  And as we move through the presentation, we've established a timeline for you to follow.

And as we talk about the different cases and the different events that occurred, we are going to spend a lot of time talking about the families' involvement because with the stories, you've heard the headlines, but we don't always know how it affected the family, so that is one of the focuses.

And as you see the timeline here, look for it throughout the presentation. We'll start in the 1800s to talk about how education for African Americans began and then lead through what's happening today. Next slide.

And for this particular slide, we're using "Separate but equal," and we'll talk about what that term actually means. I want to start out with the history of the Freedmen's Bureau.

It was established after the Civil War during Reconstruction to help integrate the newly-freed slaves into society and also to help those White families who lost land or were left without a home because of the Civil War, and one of the major functions of the Freedmen's Bureau was to help establish an education system for African Americans and to protect the teachers who were part of that school system.

So, it was established in 1865. It was temporary through the federal government, and it ended in 1972.

Through the Freedmen's Bureau, there were over 1000 schools established for Blacks and loans made to some of the historically Black colleges and universities that exist today to help them get up and running.

And so, after the Freedmen's Bureau and after African Americans were freed from slavery, we move into Plessy v. Ferguson. It's a seminal case in our history.

And in that case, the Supreme Court at the time basically upheld the constitutionality of separating the races, and they established the doctrine "Separate but equal," stating that if African Americans and Caucasians were separate, as long as the facilities were equal, then that was constitutional. Next slide.

[ Music and Singing ]

[Video audio, woman speaking]:  It sort of -- it was the -- the bubbling up that was coming to the early '60s and the events that led up to Rosa Parks sitting on the bus, you know, to the March on Washington.

[Video audio, man speaking]:  We were proud to do what we know we needed to do.

[Video audio, man speaking]:  They were a direct forerunner of trying to move the nation into a different direction.

[Video audio, man speaking]:  The history of the walkout at Adkin High School in Kinston is a marvelous and very encouraging story. And to be honest, I'd never heard about it.

[ Music and Singing ]

[Rachelle Powell]:  Now, in that brief -- this brief video clip you heard about Adkin High School and the walkout from 1951. So, I'm going to go into a little bit more detail.

And the fight -- fighting for equal education was well underway when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education, but one of the lesser known fights that happened was with the Adkin High School walkout in 1951, and Adkin High School is located in Kinston, North Carolina.

One day in 1951, an announcement was made over the loudspeaker, and the announcement was, "Carolyn Coefield has lost a red pocketbook."

Those words were the signal that triggered the walkout of 720 Black students. The students, not wanting to cause troubles for their parents or teachers, told no one about their plan, which was executed perfectly.

Prior to the walkout, five students spoke with the school board, demanding better facilities and materials similar to what the White students had at their high school.

The school board did not waiver and chose not to make any improvements to the building or supplies at the Black-only school.

That prompted the students to devise and implement their walkout plan. They marched with signs that read, "Freedom, Equal Rights, and Education."

This walkout illustrates how aware Black students were of the fact that their education was not the same as their White counterparts.

The walkout received widespread attention with the media wanting to see if the students had actually done that.

Within one year of the walkout, although still segregated, the Adkin High School received a new swimming pool, a new gym, new classroom, and new vocational building.

And this was all done before the Brown v. Board of Education's lawsuit. And so, this just shows you that the fight for civil rights, it did not begin with Brown v. Board of Education.

Most often when we talk about civil rights in education, we always focus on Brown v. Board of Education. And although that was a pivotal point in civil rights regarding education, we just want to stress that the fight for equal education and racial justice within education was a fight long held before the Brown v. Board of Education decision came through.

We've provided more information about this in our resource section of this presentation, so I encourage you to look at that when you have an opportunity. Thank you. Next slide.

[Rolanda Randle]:  Now, as Professor Powell mentioned, Brown v. Board of Education is another seminal case in social justice in education. So, when we talked about Plessy v. Ferguson and "Separate but equal," that doctrine lasted for 58 years. Brown v. Board of Education was the case that finally overturned that.

And by applying the Equal Protection Clause from the Fourteenth Amendment to African Americans and in public facilities and in this case specifically in public education, stating that there's no such thing basically as "Separate but equal," and one of the cases that tested the ruling from Brown was the Little Rock Nine.

After Brown, there was a call from the federal government to integrate schools, public education, and one of the first cases that gained a lot of notoriety was the Little Rock Nine.

With the Little Rock Nine, there was a group of nine African American students who were going to integrate the high school in Little Rock, and it was a major media event because the National Guard had to be called in to walk with those students to class because there was so much protest about integrating the schools and everything that happened in Arkansas, eventually with the schools being -- all schools being closed down.

Governors started to take the same action and close down schools all across the United States.

The clip that is -- that accompanies this particular story is just the story of one of the students who was from the Little Rock Nine talking about how she felt after that first year of trying to integrate the school and also with having security with her almost 24/7, but she speaks of -- they couldn't be with them everywhere because she was a female.

[Video audio, woman speaking]:  By the time school had ended, I had sort of settled into myself, and I could have gone on for the next five years. It didn't matter anymore. I was past feeling.

I was -- I was into just that kind of numb pain where you say, "Hey, I can make it. Do whatever you'd like," and it just doesn't matter anymore.

But I came home, and by myself, I walked to the backyard, and I burned my books. I burned everything that I could burn.

And I just stood there crying, looking into the fire, and wondering whether I would go back, but not wanting to go back.

[Video audio, man speaking]:  Melba Pattillo didn't have to face that decision. The next year, Governor Faubus closed down all of Little Rock's high schools to halt integration.

[Video audio, woman speaking]:  The troops were wonderful. You know, there was some fear that they were dating the girls in high school, and I don't care what they were doing.

They were wonderful. But they couldn't be with us everywhere. They couldn't be with us, for example, in the ladies bathroom.

They couldn't be with us in gym. You'd be walking out to the volleyball court, and someone would break a bottle and trip you on the ball. I have scars on my right knee from that.

[ Music ]

[Rachelle Powell]:  Okay. In this brief video clip, you're going to hear about the Prince Edward County School and their response to the Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

[Video audio, woman speaking]:  I missed the whole four years out of school. And I think I lost a lot of education because now some of the things we have in school, I have missed it, and I have a hard, you know, time trying to get there.

[Video audio, man speaking]:  I knew that the whole thing was wrong. The most important thing was, "Why was it wrong?" There was nothing else I could say but, "It was wrong, it was wrong, it was wrong."

[Video audio, woman speaking]:  After I got old enough, they closed school. And well, I guess I was more hurt than anything else because -- well, I had to leave home, and I've always loved it here, and I just felt bitter.

I don't know why. It was just because I guess that's -- well, they just closed the schools and shut the door.

[Music; Video audio, man speaking]:  Prince Edward County, Virginia, the only county in America that closed its public schools rather than integrate them. Where Negro and White fought over the interpretation of the Constitution for 10 bitter years.

Where every resident had to decide for himself where the law lay. In court decrees? Or in his own personal attitudes and beliefs?

[Video audio, male minister speaking]:  These children are members of a lost generation. I'm Reverend Griffin, minister of their church, and I know.

Sometimes, I look at them, and I wonder if the whole struggle was worth it because in a sense, what we did to them is undeniable. We sacrificed them to prove they were equal.

[ Changing Radio Stations ]

[Video audio, woman speaking]:  Well, I'm not about to sacrifice my children. I mean, I want them to get a good education, but I really believe they can't get a good education in an integrated school at least not in the South. It just won't work in the South.

[Rachelle Powell]:  Now with this brief video clip, you heard about the Prince Edward County school closure. So, I'm going to go into a little bit more detail about that.

Now, this was, of course, after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, so you would think that since the Supreme Court had ruled that segregation was unconstitutional with regard to schools and they were required to integrate, that that would be -- would have been the end of the story.

But, in fact, it was not. And so, while there have been many cases and many instances where integration improved the lives of African American students, there are cases that shows where it did not help Black students during that period.

And one such case is with the Prince Edward County schools. And in this school district, the county chose to close the school district, the entire school district, rather than integrate, although that was the law of the land.

And you might be thinking, "Well, if they close the schools that would impact the White students, as well as the Black students." Well, it did.

And the county had an answer for that. They understood and they created a plan to address the issue.

What they decided to do was to open up private academies for White -- for the White students in the county, so they were still able to receive an education while all the schools that were supposed to integrate were closed to the Black students.

The state also, recognizing that these private schools charge tuition, the state offered scholarships and grants to cover tuition.

But of course, the tuition -- the grants and the scholarships were only available to the White students in the county. So, Black students were not allowed to attend any of those private schools.

Now, some Black families may have sent their children to live in other counties and other cities and perhaps even in other states to receive an education in an integrated school, but many families could not do that for a variety of reasons.

Some churches decided to hold classes in their basements. But again, that was limited in terms of what they could offer the students.

And what it ended up doing was most of the Black children in Prince Edward County simply did not attend school.

So, there were lawsuits back and forth through the courts for a period of 10 years or so where they were determining whether it was constitutional for, number one, the school district to close entirely, but also with opening the private schools and with providing tuition and grant and scholarships for the students.

The cases were finally settled. And in 1964, the school district finally reopened, and the students were allowed to go back to school.

But when you look at that video, you've heard about the students who say that they lost four or five years of education that they were never able to get back because the schools were closing.

So, again, I encourage you to watch the video clip in its entirety, and there's more information about this school closure in the resource page of this presentation.

[Rolanda Randle]:  Okay. So, I'm sure most of you have seen the depiction of Ruby Bridges.

On the original, it's showing her being escorted by federal officers from the school building. And then, Norman Rockwell did a picture in 1964 depicting this particular event because it moved him so much.

But Ruby Bridges -- when we're talking about how it affected the family, the reason that Ruby Bridges was -- caught media attention, first, it was because she was only six years old, but she was the first Black student to integrate an elementary school in the South.

And so, to talk about what happened with her family, she and her mother had to be escorted every day by four officers to the school and back home every day, and it had a really negative effect on her family.

Her father lost his job. The local grocery store stopped selling groceries to her mother.

And her grandparents, who were sharecroppers, they were evicted from the farm that they'd lived on for a quarter of a century, just because the parents chose to allow Ruby to integrate the schools.

So, in 1974, there was a major ruling that stated that Boston had still refused to integrate its schools. And so, there was a ruling that stated that the Boston schools needed to integrate, and it ended up being a lot like the Little Rock Nine in that the National Guard had to be called in to ensure that schools were being integrated.

And the clip that you will see from this will be of a mother who is upset that her child was bussed to the school that was in the White neighborhood, primarily an Irish Catholic neighborhood, and they did not bring her back.

So, she was over there alone in a neighborhood where there was extreme violence going on because the neighborhood and the citizens that lived in South Boston were angry about integration.

On the first day, they attacked the school buses with eggs and bricks because they were so angry. But the clip just depicts how a family was affected by her child being bussed to a location and being left.

[Video audio, mother speaking]:  They are not going until they get some Black cops and some Black drivers. They did not pick my kid up at school. He left her over there.

[Video audio, woman speaking]:  He left her in South Boston?

[Video audio, mother speaking]:  He left her in South Boston. No, they left her over there.

All those -- All those people out there are Irish. They left her out there. And they refused to go get her.

[Rolanda Randle]:  As we move into 1970 -- the 1970s and 1980s, we start talking about the concept of affirmative action.

The term was first used by President Kennedy when he issued an executive order that required federal government to take affirmative action to employ African Americans who had been systemically excluded from government contracts.

That term was then expanded to other areas such as education. So, one of the major cases that happened related to affirmative action was Regents of California v. Bakke.

Allan Bakke, who was a White male in his 30s, applied to 12 medical schools. UC Davis, he applied to twice.

He did not get in either of those, and he eventually sued UC Davis, saying that he did not get in because of their affirmative action program and because they had let in a Black student who he knew or he thought he knew that his grades were better.

The video that's depicted actually shows the student, the Black student, who was let in at that time because of affirmative action, and she will talk about how she had graduated from an Ivy League in three years versus four and how her scores, MCAT scores and her GPA, were much higher than many of the White students -- excuse me, many of the White students who had applied to medical school.

And so, she talks about her experience, not knowing that she was an affirmative action admission, but finding out after the fact that she was and knowing that her grades were far superior to other students who had been admitted.

So, it's a very interesting case and it set the standard because the court in this case stated that an education system could not use quotas, meaning that they couldn't set aside seats for African Americans or other minorities, that that was unconstitutional.

But in subsequent cases and in this one, they said that race could be a factor to be considered.

[Video audio, man speaking]:  Black progress was facing a challenge. Allan Bakke was an engineer in his 30s when he decided to become a doctor.

He was turned down by 12 medical schools, twice by the one at the University of California at Davis. Bakke sued Davis.

He alleged its affirmative action program unfairly limited his chances of admission.

But Toni Johnson was admitted to Davis Medical School, the first in her family to attend college.

She had gone to Stanford University on an academic scholarship and graduated in three years.

[Video audio, Toni Johnson-Chavis]:  When I was selected for UC Davis and went into Davis, it was not until well into my first year that I had any idea that I had been selected through affirmative action.

Certainly, I had met all the criteria for regular entrance. Certainly, there were other students, White students, who did not even meet the same criteria.

Their GPA was far less than mine. Their MCAT scores were far less than mine. So, I had no idea that I had even come in through affirmative action.

I heard about Allan Bakke the very first year I was in medical school, but there was not much said, other than there was a guy who wanted to get into our class, and he was really angry that he didn't get into the class, so he was going to sue.

[Rolanda Randle]:  Magnet schools. So, we move into 1980 to 1990. So, we're trying to, in this discussion, trying to show how bussing and integration is still pretty much happening in the United States.

And Sheff v. O'Neill, the families -- several families sued because they said that in their particular school district, that the state and the local government, they were expending more funds in the White neighborhoods versus those neighborhoods that were primarily Black and primarily Hispanic.

And so, they sued. One of the remedies in the suit was to establish magnet schools.

There was a federal order that established magnet schools for the purpose of integrating and also for giving -- giving a way for African Americans and other students to improve their educational skills.

So, when this case happened, it was still not until 2020 where they had to go back to the courts and state that -- the court said that the magnet schools should be established and that African Americans should have access to it, and Hispanic students should have access to it, but it still had not happened.

So, they had to go back to court as soon as January of 2020 to enforce this particular order. Next.

[Rachelle Powell]:  All right. In this video, please pay close attention because it's closed captioned only.

[ Music ]

[Rachelle Powell]:  Now in the midst of the fight for racial equality in education, the focus was on public education, of course, and that was the whole premise behind the Brown v. Board of Education.

But unbeknownst to most people, there was a secondary level of inequality happening specifically within the deaf community.

And as you've seen in this -- saw in the video clip, this person talked about Black American Sign Language, and that was something that was actually new to me.

And of course, I've heard of American Sign Language, but I never knew about this other sign language that was used in the Black community.

And the reason that it was -- this Black American Sign Language came about was because, although the first deaf school opened in 1817, Black students were not allowed to enroll until 1952.

So, for over 135 years, people who were deaf in the Black community had no way of learning a language, had no way of communicating.

So, they had to come up with their own language. They had to come up with their own signs to communicate within their families and within their communities.

And this language is still being used today because oftentimes -- not in every case, of course -- but many times, the -- deaf runs through generations in various families.

And so, that language is passed down from generation to generation.

And so -- but this resulted in this sign language being used in communities and used by multiple generations, and this was something that wasn't addressed as part of Brown v. Board of Education, but segregation, of course, existed for people with disabilities and specifically for the deaf community.

But I encourage you to learn -- to go out and learn a little bit more about Black American Sign Language. It's really fascinating.

[Rolanda Randle]:  Okay. And as we come to modern day from 1990s and into the 2000s, we see an era of resegregation, and that has occurred primarily because of redistricting, the way lines are drawn, zoning, and because people tend to want to live in communities where they feel safe and they feel comfortable, so a lot of people move into communities with other people who look like them.

And so, you see bussing has ended for the most part. So, you see a lot of schools being resegregated, and this is a study from Harvard, and they were talking about, in this particular study, looking from 1990s to 2000, looking at the percentage of schools that are resegregated.

Again, meaning that schools are now primarily consisting of one particular race again. And from the numbers, you see that the numbers look the same from 1970 before bussing to 2000.

And also, when they say percentage of Black students in intensely segregated schools, it is even larger than it was in 1970.

So, we are seeing again of the whole issue coming up with state expenditures for schools and low-income neighborhoods or even middle-income neighborhoods because in Texas, for instance, paying for education is based on property taxes.

So, if you live in a single family home in a nice neighborhood, then you're probably going to pay more taxes, which means that the schools in your area will get more funding from the state.

If you live in an area where it is primarily multi-family housing, which are apartments, then that tax base will be less, and the amount of money that schools are getting will be less.

And therefore, you have an inequality of schools based on funding and location.

[Rachelle Powell]:  Now, as we close out of our presentation, we just wanted to direct your attention to some more recent headlines and to let you know that the fight for racial equality within schools still exists.

Take, for example, Noah Harris. He became the first Black man elected Student Body President at Harvard University in their 384-year history.

So, for 384 years, that school never had a Black person, male or female, that was Student Body President. And that happened in 2020.

And also, there's -- you know, we've heard of different stories, you know, where a valedictorian had to share the honor with a White student.

We have seen the story of, you know, students still having segregated proms because of laws and particularly in Southern states like Georgia.

[Rolanda Randle]:  And as we close out the presentation, again, just to reiterate that the fight for social justice in education continues the last video clip that you will see is of one woman who was arrested and actually served prison time because she used her father's address to enroll her son in the school in his neighborhood because that school was better, and she was eventually arrested and charged with larceny, and there's been several cases like that since 2011, 2015, in different areas, most of them in the Northeast, but they are using the address of someone else who lives in a better neighborhood so that their children can get a better education, and the response to them doing that has been severe.

And they've been arrested, they're being charged with felonies, and they're being asked to pay back hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And so, as we go out, just remember that the fight does still continue.

[Video audio, news anchor speaking]: Okay, we've telling you about Tanya McDowell. She's the single homeless mother who stands accused of stealing her son's public education.

[Video audio, woman speaking]:  Tanya McDowell is a Connecticut mother jailed for what authorities call, "stealing an education."

That is, for registering her son, A.J., at an address not in the school district where she last lived before becoming homeless.

In April of 2011, Connecticut police arrested McDowell and charged her with first-degree larceny for allegedly stealing an education for her son, A.J.

[Rachelle Powell]:  All right. Thank you guys for viewing our presentation.

And here are resources that are available to you for some of the stories you heard throughout this presentation, and we encourage you to take a look at these when you have an opportunity.

But we, again, wanted to let you know that the fight for racial equality in education, has been going on well before Brown v. Board of Education, and it still is going on today.

And so, your part in, you know, looking at the Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Tours, you know, sponsored by Dallas College, is a step that certainly you can take to become more aware of what's going on regarding civil rights in education.

And thank you for viewing our presentation.

[Rolanda Randle]:  Thank you.

[MUSIC]

[Narrator:] Hello and welcome to Intersectionality: Black Women and the Family. My name is Dr. Sherry Boyd and I am with Dallas College, North Lake Campus. And I am looking forward to really making this presentation to you today. And I hope that you'll learn something from it. Remember that if you have any questions, don't hesitate to send me an email at sboyd@dcccd.edu.

Today we're going to talk about intersectionality. This is the reality of race and gender bias. According to Kimberlé Crenshaw, intersectionality is about capturing the dynamics and converging patterns of advantage and disadvantage. And those will change from context to context. And when I say that, I mean, if I'm looking at ability and age, or ability and gender and sexuality.

In this presentation, we're going to be talking about the Black woman's experience with race and economic and family. And there are millions of ways that this can converge, but this is how I'm going to talk about it today.

I'd like to introduce you to my mother. This is my mother, Ruby Jean Simpson Randolph. And a lot of Black families depended on Black women's earnings. As of 2015, eight out of 10, that's 80.6%, Black mothers are the breadwinners and are the sole earners of at least 40 percent of their household. My mom and my dad lived together.

This is my mom. She was a teacher, a Girl Scout leader. She was a Get Out the Vote volunteer and a mother to all. And I want to give you a little history. And so, my father fought in the Korean conflict and he returned home and he and my mom both completed their bachelor's degree at Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas, which is a historically Black college.

After they moved from Austin, they've moved to Cisco, Texas and there were no schools for any of the Black children there, so my mother and my father started a school in Cisco, Texas for Black children. And they ran that school for three years. And they moved from Cisco to Odessa, Texas, which was offering better paying jobs for teachers at the time in the state of Texas. My mother was immediately hired and my father had to work three years as a cook before he was hired as a teacher.

My mom also grew up with a mother and father, but her father was not present. Again, we're talking historically because he had to travel in order to find a job. And this at the time of my mother's childhood was a traditional Black family in that the father had to travel to work and my grandmother worked her entire life as a maid.

My mother had eight brothers and sisters. And she and my aunt were the only two children who attended college out of her eight brothers and sisters. And out of my 21 cousins in that family, 15 of us earned degrees, bachelor's degrees, four of us earned master’s degrees, and two of us earned doctorate degrees.

Throughout history, Black women have taken care of blood family and found family. And this tradition reaches back to slavery. So, at this time, I would like to share with you a poem that was written by Kimberlé Crenshaw and she wrote it for Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues. And it's something that Eve Ensler does every year in order to talk about the experience of women all over the world. And this is called "Respect."

"Black vaginas are the hardest working vaginas in America. And still they get no respect. No vagina has done so much for this country and received so little. Really. Black vaginas built this country. It all started right here between blueberry black, chocolate cream, honey brown, praline pecan and French vanilla legs. It wasn't the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, or the Stars and Stripes that gave birth to America. It was the Black vagina that laid the golden egg, or rather, the chatteled slave. That's right–during America's formative years, the most valuable property produced, the property that the entire economy was based on, the property that was mortgaged to build America was property in slaves. $12 billion worth. One can't begin to fathom in today's dollars. And where does that come from? Whose vaginas passed this $12 billion mark? Whose vaginas were capitalized, colonized, amortized, all to give birth to America? Whose vaginas have been appropriated, syndicated, depreciated, and never, ever vindicated in the process of building this country?"

So this is a photo from the Library of Congress. And I want to talk about the slave owners' exploitation of the Black woman's sexuality. And this is one of the most significant factors differentiating the experience for slavery for males and slavery for females. The White man's claim to the slave body, male as well as female, was an inherent concept of the slave trade. And was tangibly realized, perhaps because, because there was no other place that that was realized but on the auction block. This is where captive Africans were stripped of their clothing, oiled down, poked, and prodded by potential buyers. And the erotic undertones of such scenes were particularly pronounced in the case of Black women.

Labor was segregated by sex and the frequency with which male slaves were sold meant that women were not only left to raise their own children alone, but they also had to rely on other friends and relatives above husbands. Because women were used to populate, to continue to populate the slave population, that segregation by sex meant that women were not only left to raise their children, but they raised other children that were brought to them who were sold from other plantations.

And so this, this I hypothesize, and other historians tend to agree with me, is, is looking at how the Black family was really started to break up and segment was because of what happened starting with slavery. And I could go into some, some deeper issues. I could talk about after slavery, post slavery, post-Civil War, Jim Crow laws. But really all, all it came down to was economics.

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued a controversial report on Black family life in America. He argued that poor Blacks were caught in this, this tangle of pathology because the Black family had been destroyed by slavery. Slavery, he said, had disrupted the mother-father pair and set in place the female household. And thus, today's children, today's Black children are deprived of their complete family life that would give them the psychological strength to make it in a hostile world. And I have to personally say that you learn to make it in a hostile world as a Black woman; you either do that or you don't survive.

And so it's whether you have two parents or not I think that there are parents that are always trying to help their Black children survive in this world. Now, the Moynihan Report, its fault doesn't lie in the fact that of looking at family stability. And it is desirable. We know that when children grow up in a two-parent home that's stable what privilege that gives them. But here is the insistence of the Moynihan Report is that the Black structure, the family structure, and the Black pathology is a primary driver of poverty and inequality. In effect, saying in his report that because of poverty and inequality, it was the Black families' fault of why they were not, why they were not surviving.

So this, this look at this inaccurate cultural narrative, it, it, it, it does imply that Black families, Black people are to blame for the effects of institutional racism, sexism, classism. And that really diverts the attention from the whole cause of inequality, which was economic inequality. And looking at economic inequality, I'm going to jump ahead to look at where we have been in the last five years.

So, pay gap by gender and race. And this is from a 2015 study. So Black women are paid less than White men and White women, on the average. Black women in the U.S. are paid 38% less than White men and 21% less than White women. If we look at that at an early age, when Black women start working at the age of 16, there is a 21% pay gap for between a Black woman and a White man at the ages of 16 to 24. From 24 to 54, that gap increases to 32% between a Black woman and a White man, and to 37% at 55 plus for a Black woman and a White man.

Why is this important? We'll talk about that. Even in the same job, Black women get paid less. Black women are ambitious. They're just as likely as White men and more likely than White women to say they want to become top executives. But even in the same job, Black women are paid less than White men. For example, Black women sales, Black women sales professionals earn 53% less than white men. If you look at the pay gap for nurses, it's a 19% gap between Black women and White men. If you look at the gap of cashiers, which is one of the lowest paying jobs one can get, It's the 18% gap. Between White women and Black women, It's a 6% gap. But if we look at computer scientists, analysts, and engineers, there's a 29% gap, 29% pay gap between a Black woman and a White man. And there is a 19% pay gap between a White woman and a Black woman.

Did you know that 53% of Americans are not aware between, of the pay gaps between Black and White women? We always look at male and female and we look at those pay gaps and we know that that pay gap exists. But when you break it down by race, the pay gap is even more incredulously different.

The reason why I bring up pay gap because over a lifetime there is a loss of $941,000. Black women are asking for more. They are asking for promotions and raises at about the same rate as White women and men. Yet, the broken rung, broken rung still holds them back at the first critical step for manager. For every 100 men promoted to manager, only 58 women, Black women are promoted.

The average Black woman, as you can see, loses out on almost a million dollars over the course of her life. And the importance of that is is if you are a single Black mom raising children, that has an impact on what you can do with your family. If you are a married Black woman, that still has an impact.

As an educator, what I have realized coming in early on in my career, coming into Dallas College, I came in as a visiting scholar. I was really excited about that. I'd wanted to teach. I came in as a visiting scholar at Brookhaven College. And I took a pay cut to come into that visiting scholar. But then I realized as I started doing my research about Dallas County Community College at the time, is that I came in with nine other people who did, who came in as visiting scholars. And what I saw is that men got brought in at a higher rate than women, even though we had the same degree. And some of the women had more experience than the when, the men. And that goes back very much to our patriarchal system of the man is going to be taking care of the family.

But we have forgotten, we have not watched our statistics as they grow, that there are more single Black females out there with children and single White females and single Hispanic females that are head of households. And when we look at head of households and who the breadwinners are, we see that 50% of White mothers are the breadwinners and 81% of Black mothers. So, if you're losing almost a million dollars because of what you're getting to the dollar that a White man is getting, that affects what you can do economically. More than four in five Black mothers are the breadwinners for their family, meaning that their household depends on their paycheck.

So, when Black moms are paid less, they have less money for the basic family necessities like rent and groceries and school supplies. And over time, this ability to invest in savings and higher education, or property is not within their reach because of how salaries are conducted with Black women. And when we look at this current coronavirus, this pandemic, this has exacerbated a deep and long-standing bias against Black women that are trying to build up their wealth. Black women are shouldering more responsibility at home with less financial security. And according to research from leanin.org, Black women are almost twice as likely as White men to say they've been laid off or furloughed or had their hours and pay reduced because of COVID-19.

And I'm hoping that in looking at these statistics that we see that it's not, it's not about that women are single. And I'm speaking of all women at this time that are taking care of their children. It could be a divorce. It could be, it could be having a baby and being unmarried. It could be widowhood. Currently, we've lost over 500,000 people to COVID-19. And that loss has impacted so many families.

So, as we, as we look at where we're going, we really have to start looking at pay equity because if women, as a whole, got paid the same as men for doing the same job, that would economically affect so many children. And the, the, the, the home, the supplies, the groceries, the rent, all of that could help children really move forward.

And we talk about so much how we want to help children. We help children by helping families. And I speak mainly of the Black family because it has been so broken by the system that has existed in the United States. Even if we don't go back as far as slavery, we can talk about eugenics and how Black women were sterilized, were given hysterectomies without permission so that they wouldn't have more children. Yet within that, you still found that women, women brought in other children into their lives.

And I really want to talk about four women who made a difference historically to the Black family, as women continue to make that impact on the Black family. So here are the four women that I want to talk about. I want to talk about Mary Ann Shadd. She was an American Canadian anti-slavery activist. She was a journalist, a publisher, a teacher, a lawyer. She was the first Black woman publisher in North America and the first publisher in Canada. In doing that, not only was she teaching people to read, she was also keeping them informed. This had a great impact on Black women.

And here's the thing, is we talk about Black women and the Black society as a whole in America being a matriarchal system. It's been made a matriarchal system because of how discrimination and inequality has been built into the United States system.

Clara Hale is next. She is known as Mother Hale. She is an American humanitarian, and she founded the Hale House Center. And it's a home for unwanted children and children who were addicted to drugs. She changed the lives of so many children in the neighborhood that she worked in. And this is something that while she was, was recognized for.

I can tell you, growing up in my family, I had cousins that stayed with me when their family couldn't take care of them. My parents raised two or three people that were in our family. My father being a police officer and my mother being a teacher, our house was never empty of other children being in our house that needed help.

So, while Hale, Clara Hale is famous for that, I am telling you that that is a typical thing that happens in our, in, in, in my family and I think in the Black families as a whole.

The next person I want to talk about is Mae Mallory. She was an activist in the civil rights movement, and she was founder and spokeswoman of the Harlem Nine. Now Harlem Nine was a group of African American mothers who protested the inferior and inadequate conditions in the segregated schools in New York City. And so they were looking at inexperienced teachers, overcrowded classrooms, dilapidated conditions. They were looking at gerrymandering that was promoting segregation in New York. And because of that nine, the Harlem Nine, they changed how their children went to school. They wanted and transferred their children to integrated schools that offered a higher quality of resources.

So, the last person that I want to talk about is Fannie Lou Hamer. She was a voting rights activist, she was a women's rights activists, a community organizer, and she was one of the leaders in the civil rights movement. In 1961, Hamer received a hysterectomy by a White doctor without her consent. In fact, for the longest time, it was dubbed the "Mississippi appendectomy."

And I think that if we really want to think, I'm just touching on this, how Black women, Black families tend to question medicine. This is one of the things that did that. I could talk about the Tuskegee experiment. But there are so many things that, that made Black women and Black men distrustful of a system that was supposed to support them. But because Fannie was unable to have children, she adopted two daughters.

And while she was very active in the civil rights movement, there was still that that, that wall of, "You're a woman, we're men. Let the men do their work here." And so in 1968, she decided that she was going to look at other problems that were happening with Black families.

So she started a pig bank. I found this fascinating. So, she started a pig bank and she provided free pigs for Black farmers to breed and to raise and slaughter. And the next year she started a freedom farm cooperative. And she bought up land that Blacks could own and farm collectively. And with the assistance of donors, she purchased 640 acres and launched a co-op store, a boutique, a sewing enterprise. And she single-handedly ensured that 200 family units of low-income housing was built in Ruleville, in Ruleville, Mississippi, and there's, it still exists today.

These are four women that we don't talk about that really built stairsteps for families that helped them change lives. So these are the ones that we know about, but there are so many that exist out there that help families take the next step. What I am hoping as we look at this, that we don't forget that it took women and men to build this country and not leave women out of, out of the picture. Because we still tend to do that. Yet, if we look at our schools, if we just look at K through 12 and we look at education, a majority of the people that are in that field are women. They're teaching our children. They're laying a path for our children. And we need to support that.

And I would like to end by reading part of a poem written by Maya Angelou called "Phenomenal Woman."

"Pretty women wonder where my secret lies. I am not cute, or built to suit a fashion model's size. But when I start to tell them, they think I'm telling lies. I say, it's in the reach of my arms, it's in the span of my hips. It's in the stride of my step. It's in the curl of my lips. I am a woman phenomenally. Phenomenal woman. That's me. Now you understand just why my head's not bowed. I don't shout or jump about or have to talk real loud. When you see me passing, it ought to make you proud. I say, it's in the click of my heels. "It's in the bend of my hair. It's in the palm of my hand. The need for my care, 'cause I am a woman phenomenally. Phenomenal woman. That's me."

[Piano music playing]

[Beth Nikopoulos]: My name is Dr. Beth Nikopoulos and I am Director of Student Life and Engagement at our North Lake Campus of Dallas College.

And I am really excited today to have some very prominent leaders of Dallas College as well as the Dallas community.

So I will begin by doing a brief introduction and then when I call your name, if you want to just kinda tell us a little bit about yourselves and maybe what, what inspired you to be with us today.

So I will start with our very own Chief Lauretta Hill, who is Chief of Police of Dallas College. Chief, would you go ahead?

[Lauretta Hill]: Hi. Good morning. I'm excited to be here and share this with this, this screen. Usually I'll say this stage.

But this screen with such wonderful women. I have been at Dallas College for a little over four and a half years now.

I have over 27 years in law enforcement. I started when I was 15.

Usually when I'm not when in front of people, people laugh. So I started very early in my career. (laughs)

So I'm excited to be here today.

I've served in Arlington, Texas Police Department for over 20 years; and I served in Miami Beach Police Department, Miami Beach, Florida Police Department for a couple of years before joining Dallas College.

So I'm excited about the opportunity to share a little bit about my story.

[Beth Nikopoulos]: Excellent. Thank you so much. We're glad to have ya.

We've had the opportunity to work together before, so it's good to see you.

Next, we have Dean Shani Suber, who I still want to say is from North Lake Campus, but I know that she was at Brookhaven and now you're just Dallas College, I think.

But you are in charge of Effectiveness and Enhancement for E-learning, which is of course, a very busy job these days.

So would you share a little about yourself?

[Shani Suber]: Yes, thank you very much.

I do, I have Dallas College family throughout what we used to call the district.

And so it's just been an amazing journey.

So off and on I've been in Dallas College about 20 years in education holistically, to date myself, but I previously did serve in the role of Dean of Online at Brookhaven and then I was also English faculty.

So I am probably along many, served in many roles as adjunct faculty and now administration.

So I am elated to be here and just connect with, you know, women in leadership.

And like we said, the people on our panel and just so many incredible women in Dallas College, so, and in our communities. So thank you for having me.

[Beth Nikopoulos]: Thank you so much. Good to see ya!

And I would also, next, like to introduce Minister Crystal Bates, who I know you work with Friendship-West.

I know you work with voter registration. You do a lot of wonderful things.

So please share with us some of the work that you do.

[Crystal Bates]: Oh, thank you so much. I'm so glad to be here.

Thank you for the invitation and thank you, Dr. Braden, for the invite.

Yes. I've been a member of Friendship- West for almost 20 years and I remember the date, like it was yesterday.

I dated them for a year and I joined on September the 9th of 2001, which was a couple of days before 9/11.

So I don't remember many dates, but I remember that date as if it was a birthday or something.

So I am a member and part of the ministers in training there.

I've been with them for quite some time, serving all over the creation with Dr. Pastor Frederick Douglass Haynes, the Third.

Um, a little bit of my background- In 2008, I got into radio. I was invited - with no experience - to co-host a radio show.

I had some experience in radio starting 2008; many of us shared on here that I am a graduate of Kilgore College.

I was a first generation graduate in my family.

And then I got a computer science degree there and then I went on to UT in Arlington, where I finished with an economics degree.

I was in ninth African-American female to complete that degree at UTA and also a business admin degree as well.

And then, currently, I was serving on the Public Policy Committee with Dallas, with the city of Dallas, but due to the pandemic, we've kinda halted things there.

But I also serve as an outreach coordinator for United States Christian Leadership organization.

I'm also the logistics chair for non-partisan Get Out the Vote, a non-partisan coalition here in Dallas in the midst of the pandemic.

Oh, let me back that. I'm also a proud Coppell Rotarian. I was inducted, I think in 2019 or 2018, I can't remember what year.

But also in the midst of the pandemic when so many crazy, crazy things like locusts, gnats and everything else was swarming the creation, God put me on this vision to activate a local NAACP branch in our area and...I'm still in awe.

Needless to say, I'm still in awe. I fought through the wolves and the forest and everything else, and I was able to collectively gather our community.

And we started - well now, Dallas can celebrate us having DFW metro NAACP because God gave little ol' me a vision.

And so we service the communities of Coppell, Carrollton, Lewisville and Flower Mound.

It's five cities- Coppell, Carrollton, Lewisville, Grapevine and Flower Mound. I think that's it.

And I'm the proud mother of a 25-year-old Mr. Christopher [inaudible], who is a YouTuber, he does some other amazing things.

Oh, I'm so proud of him so...that's enough.

Oh, and my ministry, see-based ministry. Okay. How could I forget that?

[Beth Nikopoulos]: Thank you so much for sharing. I'm the mother of three young adults, I should say.

I did not know it was so hard to live with college students until, until the pandemic. (laughs)

So I've learned the hard way.

So next and surely not least, I am very happy and proud to introduce Dr. April Braden, history faculty from the North Lake Campus.

And of course, she has also served as advisor to our feminist groups who have had various names.

There are some stories behind that. Dr. Braden, I'm really happy to see you.

Would you like to share a few comments?

[April Braden]: Sure. So I've been at Dallas College for three years now. I've been teaching for 10.

I got my BA and my MA from Loyola Chicago in history, and then my PhD in American culture studies and my public history certificate from Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

So yeah, I'm actually surprisingly new to female history. That is not my area.

My area is buildings. But for my master's, I wrote a sort of a feminist history of aerobics, focusing on Jane Fonda.

And I also taught a lot of women's studies classes at Bowling Green.

And through that, I've just sort of entered into it.

I have, I'm working on an article now talking about how feminism, historical feminism, is represented on television and popular culture.

So hopefully that'll be done eventually.

But yeah, I'm, I'm very excited to be here and yeah, looking forward to this discussion.

[Beth Nikopoulos]: Awesome. It's a lot I didn't know about you.

I'm gonna go get my leg warmers on so I'll be ready to read your...(laughs) I thought maybe I was the only one who would remember Jane Fonda in this whole room.

(laughing) Wonderful.

So I'm going to read a question and then any one of you can respond or all of you, of course.

So I'm just going to read it and please just, you know, let me know who wants who wants to start.

So we'll try to be as flexible as possible. So our first question is, what do you feel is our responsibility as women in leadership to help the next generation of women?

[Lauretta Hill]: Well, I'm not shy. I'll start. (laughs)

You can't be shy my profession. So there you go.

You have to go in, you have to command the facts, make a decision, and go to the next call.

So I think it's really important because in my field, in policing, there's not many women in executive levels.

There's not many women in policing period, but definitely not, few and far between in, in executive levels.

So I think it's really important for people to see somebody that looks like them.

Because then you can aspire to be in that position.

If you don't see people as -- women, as doctors or lawyers, or chiefs or presidents of colleges, chancellors, whatever that professional role -- a general in the military.

When you don't see people that represent who you are, you may not believe that there's an avenue for you.

And so I think it's very important to be representative, and that we have an obligation to open those doors and leave them open behind us, not shut 'em.

So we don't give out hate. We don't shut doors behind us, but we have an obligation to open those doors because somebody opened them before us, and leave those doors open and be informal mentors.

I'm not a big fan of formal mentors because you don't pair people with people that they don't have something in common with, it doesn't work.

But be informal mentors to people and allow yourself to be used and serve in that capacity because somebody opened that door for you.

And it is an obligation for us to continue to open that door and be, you know, be transparent with people and what it takes to get where we are.

Because it takes a lot to give where you are, it takes a lot for us women, especially African-American women and women of color, to stay where we are.

So you have to be realistic with people in it. So I think that's our obligation- to open that door, keep that door open, be informal mentors and, and reach one, teach one.

[April Braden]: You know, jumping off of that, when we talk about representation, I think sometimes it gets sort of like abbreviated down to just, like, physical appearances.

And one of the things that I wrote down was not hiding my background.

So a lot of students don't understand that many of their professors are also first-gen, like I am, first-generation.

They also don't, they maybe don't think that, well, gosh, I didn't know that Professor Braden also, when she was a child, she was a child of a single mom and they were on welfare for a bit of time.

And like just sort of sharing your own story and it doesn't have to be like, "Oh no, they were poor," whatever.

But just sharing that you too had, had stumbles and it's okay to have a stumble and it's okay to come back from that stumble.

And I think oftentimes once we get to these higher levels, we want to hide that from people, because we don't want to emphasize the flaw that we may have because then it's easier for people to pick away at us.

[Shani Suber]: And I would say, I think all women leaders can help the next generation, I would say through three areas.

The first would be awareness. And I think first and foremost by saying, it's our responsibility to empower women to know that they are leaders where they are currently, title or no title.

So in your home, in your community, in your church.

So the title is not necessarily required because you're leading, you know, it's it's kind of that in order to lead you have to serve.

And that's the place that you start with within yourself.

So we teach them, you know, that you truly teach people how to treat you.

First, starting with yourself and leading yourself.

And then I'll say mentorship, you know, in a, in a way that's well-rounded.

Because if you embrace who you are and be honest with where you are and allow yourself to be vulnerable, then, you can then learn what you need in order to grow.

But you have to be teachable, not intimidated, not, you know, my chapter, you know, 25 to your chapter 30.

There's a calibration that needs to happen. So just honoring and embracing the ownership of future women's leadership and their journey.

And I think recognizing that they're going to learn from multiple people.

So there's no such thing of, as Lauretta mentioned, as one mentor, one person, one, you know, it depends on what area of your life that you want to grow and people that you see that are in that direction that you want to go.

And third, I would say the empowerment piece, because we will seek opportunities to recognize, I think the strengths in women and around us, and then meet them with that genuine support to acknowledge their steps and what they're rooted in, and what they feel most connected and passionate about.

It doesn't necessarily have to be, like she mentioned, what I'm doing, but just be that voice.

And one of the quotes that I like is Muriel Strode says, "I will not follow where the path may lead, but I will go where the path -- there is no path and lead a trail."

So hopefully our women will continue to move forward and create that path and leave that trail and continue to grow in what they're passionate about.

[Crystal Bates]: For me, I mean, I echo everything that everyone else has mentioned.

Definitely being transparent, not allowing people to think life has been roses.

I mean, you wouldn't imagine what's behind this face and sometimes just being transparent to let people know my struggle may not be your struggle but we all have a struggle, and we have to keep on climbing.

And definitely we juggle so much as women.

You know, everybody's juggling a whole life, and especially as African-American women, we oftentimes are responsible, responsible not only for our household, but we have generational responsibilities, we have community responsibilities.

Also allowing people to see us say, "no," or allowing others to see us say when enough is enough.

Because so many of us find ourselves being consumed and overwhelmed to the point we're depleted and we're no earthly good for ourselves or anyone.

So showing people it's okay to respectfully say, "No, I just can't do it."

And then also, as Dean Shani mentioned, empowering other younger women and allow them their space to be individuals- their own individuality, their own character, personality, their creativity, allowing space for that because trust me, it's enough room for all of us to shine.

It is enough room for all of us to shine.

So allowing those young people to come -- and not just the younger.

Oftentimes, I know, all of us seem to be very young women.

Sometimes even older women need that mentorship and that encouragement, to strive for bigger and greater in their dreams, their visions, their goals.

And so just allow space by everybody and allowing every moment.

When, I talked about my ministry, see-based ministry and that's building attitudes to encourage success.

I love it, just building attitudes to encourage success, and that's the message that we can share with everyone.

And I feel that's definitely our responsibility for other women as well.

[Beth Nikopoulos]: Wonderfully said everyone, thank you so much and I am going to keep on moving.

Our next question is, name a person or people who inspired you along your journey and who helped you get where you are now.

[Shani Suber]: Well, I'll start. I would say for me over the course of my journey, both professionally and personally has, you know, they're a lot of people that have shaped where I'm at now.

And I have tremendous, tremendous honor and respect for so many people, but I would say one outstanding person is no longer here and she's my best friend of 24 years.

And her name was Courntey Chancer Brown.

And so she was actually a pillar of strength and she held steadfast in her faith, her determination to be -- she was actually a student at North Lake in the '90s, but it had its challenges.

And so, you know, we started our higher education, like really going to college, together in different schools but she was actually unable to finish.

So she had Lupus and basically attending classes physically was not ideal.

And as you can imagine, in the early '90s, online education was that dial up.

So it was 20 minutes to load a page and so it had its own challenges.

But I would say throughout her battle with Lupus she always encouraged me to continue- first to embrace my health, my life, and what our journeys were, we were trying to accomplish.

And so I think her encouragement of utilizing the gift of education and finishing school.

So since she's passed on, you know, that's my commitment.

And so when people see me in accessibility, and when you guys see me doing what I'm doing now with online education, it's to honor her and a lot of things that she's been through, and to continue in those years that she didn't have.

So when I look at our students and when I look at our colleagues and as the minister mentioned, you know, I never take those things for granted.

And so when we have an opportunity to be that voice, even though that may not be something that we live per se, to continue to strive in that, and to hold a light to that and bring that awareness is key.

So I commit my life to that. And so I would say not only Courtney, but there are a lot of other people.

All the women in Dallas College have inspired me.

It's just been incredible, no matter what positions they've held, you know, I've seen the strength, I've seen the commitment, and I've seen the heart.

And that is truly what kept me personally a lot of days.

So it was people's faith walk, how they treated people, how they responded in their highs and lows and then their impact.

So I would just say for me, again, it's not one person, it's my spiritual growth its my being a wife, being a mom, and, you know, friends and families and professional life.

So I'm just grateful for, you know, and honor every woman's journey no matter what that looks like.

[Lauretta Hill]: I would say the same thing with, that Dean Shani said, that it's so many people that have shaped it, but at the core is my mom.

She is a woman of faith. She prayed for me the day and I decided that I was going to be a cop because she had no idea why I would do that.

And she's been praying for me ever since -- it's because of my safety.

I'm her baby girl and back in 1993 when I started my journey as an officer, she and my dad were, have always been there for me.

And so I will say my foundation started with her.

So because it did, because she told me to keep these three things in order: God, family and work.

And now of course, I spend more time in some of those areas, depending on where I was in my career, when I'm working midnights it's really hard to go to early service at church.

It's really hard to get to a little league game when I'm working evening shift.

So I may spend more time, depending on where I was in my life, but I never mixed up those priorities, God, family and work.

And so with that foundation, as I started my journey throughout policing and where I am now, when I see other women and other people in my circle, some of them are starting that journey, and I'm a, I got young kids.

I know y'all, a lot of people said they got adults well I started late in life.

I have an eight-year-old and I have a 12-year-old. And so, and my eight-year-old has special needs.

So when you said, Minister Bates about saying no, I still don't know how to do that yet.

I really try hard, (laughs) but I just feel that I owe so many people because so many people have been there for me.

So it is so hard for me to say no and mean it, because I feel like I owe so many people for where I am today; but I do need to learn how to do that.

And I'm going to work harder to learn how to say no, but I just can't name all the people.

Dr. Theron Bowman, it's my old boss from Arlington. He not only professionally but personally, throughout my whole entire career has been there for me, and still is now.

So it's just so many people and you just can't do it by yourself.

It's just impossible to be in our, in this day and time and not have people around you that help you through that journey.

So it's my mom to the core that has been that rock for me.

[Crystal Bates]: I would like to say also, my mom. My mom is a recovered cancer patient.

So she dealt with cancer back, okay I'm 44, so probably over 40 years ago, 42 years ago.

So, the advancement that they have now, they only had radiation then.

And so she deals with a lot of complications as a result of that now.

And not only that, raising, having had a two-year old at the time she was diagnosed with cancer, raising me alone.

You know, she raised two children along with a lot of major health issues and on top of that, she had a sickly child.

I was diagnosed at 10-years old and I was very sickly.

We didn't have a lot of money, so little money we had. She was missing work.

And when I tell you even if 44 it's not a time that I'm hospitalized that my mother is not on that road from East Texas and by my side, like literally.

In 2016 I went in for a routine procedure. They accidentally perforated my intestines.

And like literally they thought I was just about to die because they couldn't find it.

Well, at two o'clock in the morning -- before two o'clock came, my mother had made it before they took me into the operating room to do emergency surgery.

So there has not been a time, literally even as an adult, that I've gotten sick and my mother not, my mother not been there.

And even my grandmother- because of my mother's health issues and my health issues, we stayed in a home with my grandmother for many, many years.

And even with my grandmother, she also displayed that strong black woman.

I remember one time I couldn't walk; and my legs were hurting and I couldn't walk.

My grandmother came over to my house, she said, "Well Christina, you need to put some copper on."

So ya'll, this lady had me taping copper pennies around my ankles, only to find out they long stopped making pennies out of copper.

So my grandmother, my mother, and then I have to mention --and there other people -- but Dr. Jean Jones, who I mentioned earlier.

I didn't even know this woman, like literally another minister in the church was like, "Reverend Jean Jones is looking for you. She wants to contact you."

And I was like, what does she want with me you know, because I was like, I didn't know her.

And literally, it has blown my mind. And at the time, I had just, I lost my hearing in 2008. And I mean, that was just tragic.

So in the midst of a very tragic situation, she reached out to me to co-host her radio show on her radio station.

And since then she's had several shows that she's invited me to be a part of, which allowed me space to evolve, to develop in public speaking and other things that I had already been doing, but she also --- anything she's ever did since we've met, she's always allowed me that platform.

We have a live show going now...The Word of God Heals All Wounds, I probably missed that up.

But, you know, she has really been very instrumental in my life, and then I can't forget my son.

Just raising him as a mother by myself, it was challenging.

He was such a wonderful kid and then he turned into a monster for a while and now God has brought my son back.

And he's just the most amazing son. And even as an adult, he challenges because --- and he teaches me.

Although I'm not a wife and I haven't been married, raising a son has allowed me to learn some things because one important thing I had to learn, and I'm going to share this because I don't know who may be listening to this.

Raising him, I raised in one way but then when he became 18, I realized I had to raise him differently.

Like I was a disciplinary and do this, do this when I say do it, you know all that.

That doesn't work with an adult male, and especially not a black male at that.

And so I've learned so much; he probably doesn't realize how much he sharpens me.

And he encourages me even now to continue to strive to do better.

And he's walking in my footsteps doing some amazing things.

So, so my mother, my grandmother, Reverend Jean, and of course my son, and so many others.

I hate to even heck, name names, because it's so many who have really been instrumental.

And like I said, at times in my life when things were very, very dark, those people, and just so many remain here now just to encourage me.

And the late, I'm just going to say the name, late Shawnda Rondos.
She was from Dallas, Texas. She was a Toastmasters contestant. She won locally, regionally, statewide and went on to compete internationally.

She dealt with lupus, and I didn't know her.

Somebody called me one day- this lady's in the hospital, she's dying and she wants to give up. And I raised up, like, "Give up?"

I didn't even know her. I went into the hospital for chemotherapy, I found out where she was and after my chemo treatment I rolled in the room and the rest was history.

But she encouraged me because when I met her, she was skin and bone.

She had just came out up a coma, but yet, and in the middle of competing for that Toastmasters, she had limbs, she had fingers and toes amputated, but still went on to compete and won internationally.

She was [inaudible] to some Lupus issues and passed just a couple of years ago.

But even though she's not here, she still encourages me. She does.

[Beth Nikopoulos]: I hardly even know how to follow, follow that up with any more words.

I really appreciate the candor and the struggles that you all have had, both health and personally.

And I think this next question you may, some of you may feel that you've answered already.

But really, this is just about the barriers. I mean, I know many of you have expressed being first or being not a lot, maybe one of the first few.

So talk to us a little bit about some of the barriers that you had to overcome.

And how did you, how did you overcome those barriers so that you can be here and be the leaders that you are?

[April Braden]: So when I was thinking about this, I'm like, "Man, I don't have a lot of barriers. Like, I just went out and did it."

But then, you know, I get to thinking and some of you guys may know that I grew up in a really, really small rural area in Northern Illinois. There's about 1000 people.

So if you can imagine, there weren't, there wasn't a lot of access to educational opportunities to begin with.

There were no advance classes, nothing.

I mean, when I was in high school, we had a newspaper come and do a story on our school because our ACT scores were so high and they were like, "We don't understand how it all you poor people have such high ACT scores."

And we're like, Oh, okay. So there wasn't a lot of educational opportunity.

It's not to say that people are uneducated because they are, they're not, farmers aren't dumb.

But there weren't, like, I didn't even know that you could be a professor until I went to college. Which sounds silly.

But like, professor just seemed like a job like you might have like on television, right?

Like, I don't know how you got there but you did it. Right? (laughs)

And so when I think about some of the barriers that I had to overcome, it wasn't just like geographical and economic because even though I grew up very poor, money was never an issue.

You do the thing that you wanna do, money will find its way, right?

Like money is like a checkmark that you have, right? You shouldn't let it stop you.

But it was just sort of like the lack of exposure. And so when I went from a really small town to Chicago, a giant city, like it was just...all of this stuff. (laughs)

And so it's sort of like trying to, to get on the, what is it --- to get my feet underneath me, right?

Like trying to start out at a run. And then dealing with like, ask for help, also, went through a lot.

And even, I didn't even, still didn't even think that I wanted this job until I was a senior in college.

And one of my friends told me like, "You should do this."

Like I was pre-law, I was going to law school. Glad I didn't.

I worked at a law firm. I hated it. It was the worst. Oh gosh, it was so awful.

That's a note for whomever is listening. Being a lawyer is not fun. It is not SVU. (laughs)

So at any rate, I think some of the biggest barriers for me weren't necessarily like someone else keeping me from doing something, but just not knowing the possibilities of what you could achieve.

[Beth Nikopoulos]: Thank you.

[Crystal Bates]: Um, for me, of course, I mentioned that I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease at age 10 and just was so sickly.

I would spend two to three months in the hospital. Then in East Texas, health care was at a minimal there.

And so just a lot of challenges with my health and like I said just spending so much time in a hospital.

I didn't even think I would live to see 18. And I definitely didn't think I would graduate and coming from a family who no--- there had not been college graduates.

I didn't have anybody in my ear encouraging me to go to college.

You know, again, I was just trying to finish high school and I didn't think I would manage through that because every year I was always [inaudible] behind due to being sick.

So [inaudible] just challenges- I've had threats of my legs being amputated, I lost my hearing in 2008, I've had --- the Crohn's disease had attacked my skin, my eyes.

It has been such a complicated disease for me. We didn't have much money.

I told you my mother's background. And on top of all that, I go out and get pregnant at 17.

So I was a teen who dealt with a teen pregnancy and having to raise my son, alone and be sick at the same time definitely head its challenges.

So we just had so many barriers there.

And then I knew I was being called to ministry early on, but, so just given that opportunity to minister and share in different spaces was definitely a challenge as a woman and being very young, because I knew early on at age 12 and 13 in the middle of being sick that I was being called.

But, you know, I was a minister of music at that time before accepted my calling to preach and teach.

But also during that time, I was introduced to Langston Hughes' poem Mother To Son.

I mean, it just, it talked about most of that. "Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.

It's had tacks in it, and splinters," and rooms boarded up, you know, and just so many things in that particular poem talked about barriers, and barriers as an African-American woman.

Barriers as a woman in general, a single mother raising a son, financial hardships and challenges.

I've had them all, you know. So yeah. I mean, we've talked about many of them but again, it's too many to name.

I'd have to come back as an author. (laughs)

[Beth Nikopoulos]: Sounds like you should do that.

And I should just say my, my father has suffered with Crohn's for as long as I can remember.

And it is a very, it's a very unusual disease, much like coronavirus in that everybody has a different response to it.

So I can only imagine how challenging that has been.

And I'd like to ask Dean Suber or Chief Hill if if you wanted to add at all?

[Lauretta Hill]: I'll share a little because my journey in policing, there are barriers everywhere for women in policing.

And, you know, in Arlington, Texas, I was the first African-American female sergeant, lieutenant, deputy chief, chief. I'm the second chief in black female chief, black female chief in the state of Texas.

And so so when you have firsts still happening, then you know, there had to be barriers there.

It's not because, like you were saying, Dr. Braden, it's not because we're not smart and not capable of doing it, is just the fact that you have to prove yourself every day, where a male in my profession...it's an automatic.

When they sit in the room with other police executives, oftentimes, if I'm not in uniform, oftentimes they wonder, if she's actually an executive or is she a civilian, and, you know, they don't know.

They, they may assume that she's probably a civilian because it's not that many chiefs around that are, that are female.

And so you're constantly dealing with the fact that it's a good ol' boys club in policing.

Not every department, but there is a there is a thread that runs throughout policing history.

You know, it doesn't have to be right in your face, but you can see by the numbers there are barriers there.

And then when you get into the room, you have to continue to prove yourself daily-on your knowledge, what you know, your interaction.

So I've always been the one, when I come in the room I make noise.

So I just don't -- just only invite me in the room because you need to fill that seat.

Because if you're uncomfortable with me, then that's your problem.

And so when you get in the room as a woman and you break some of those barriers, you're in that room for a reason, your voice matters. Your voice counts.

Don't just be thankful that you broke the glass ceiling.

You know, you have to be a voice because...are we going to keep still having firsts for this, firsts for that?

I still see them now, which is still amazing to me, in some police agencies.

Oh, this is the first female lieutenant. I was like, It is 2021.

How is it that you're just now getting your first?

But we just have to -- it's just so many barriers in my -- when I came to the district and I saw all those women presidents, I was like, Okay -- and then all these women deans, I was like, this is a totally different world for me, completely with all these beautiful, intelligent, strong women leading the district everywhere.

That's just not something I see, I have seen throughout my law enforcement career.

But I just think the barriers that are there, especially in my line of work is, you know, it's you just have to continue to prove yourself over and over; and, when you get there, it's just really hard to stay there, and we have other things going on in our lives.

You know, I'm a mother, I'm a wife. I'm a sister, I'm an aunt. I run a special needs ministry at my church, like I have time -- so I have to make time for that too.

I started the special needs ministry because my child needed a place to go.

He can't stand in the regular sanctuary because he has autism, he screams and flaps, the preacher would never get through a sermon with my child in the regular sanctuary.

So I started a special needs ministry at my church.

That's me not being able to say "no." So... (everyone laughs) I told you I have a problem with it.

But so it's just, you know, just those barriers of just having to -- that are constantly there.

You know they're there and you just have to continue, continue to prove yourself over and over.

But when you get in that room, you have to make noise and you have to let them know, you belong there.

So if they're uncomfortable, it's their problem not yours.

[Shani Suber]: That's true. I would say my barriers included many areas-moving states, several schools.

You can imagine sometimes a lack of confidence that came with that every time you're having to reset and readjust.

But I think that over time when I look back, that's probably why I can deal with change right now.

So I think it actually helped me in the long run, but, you know, that constant change was tough.

But when I was actually preparing for college, I didn't have any money for school.

So I had to basically learn how to ask questions, stand in as many lines as possible.

And, you know, it took a lot, but I had to be patient. And of course there wasn't online registration and learning then.

So everything was the paper book with all the classes and you would get to the front of the line and they would say that a class is full and you're frantically trying to find another class.

So, it taught me a lot of patience.

But I would say, you know, one of my challenges and barriers was I would go to school 8:00 to 12:00 and then I would work 1:00 to 9:00 at night.

And I remember at one point I just thought, I just want to work. This is too much.

I don't have a life. I wanted to quit.

I saw people pushing in their chairs at 5 o'clock and I was still working till 9:00, 10:00 at night.

But something wouldn't allow me to stop. And so I continued and basically knew, Okay, I have to take risks because I had other changes that were happening in my life, so... I didn't even really think I could get to college, let alone through college.

I'm from Louisiana so when I moved to Texas, that was a huge academic shift and I struggled.

So, I think that, you know, between that and then eventually I went back to school, when my oldest son was seven months old.

So I would have, you know, a backpack and then my [inaudible] and people would say, "Why do you have two backpacks?" (laughs)

And so, you know, it's just one of those things that -- you know, I taught by day, I worked 40-hours, I had you know, my family and my husband was a tremendous support with that.

But it was it was one of those things, it was now or never create that legacy.

So when I started as a teacher in K-12, I thought people were staring because I was new. And then I realized that my colleague and I were the first Black teachers at that school.

And so I think getting to a place that people are asking to see your credentials.

And it was a challenge because we were actually the most educated in school, we both had our Masters degree.

But we were certainly challenged in those.

Also in terms of, you know, we were qualified to do that job. And I remember I won't -- I won't say cities but someone said, "Well, that might be, you know, how they do in Dallas, but here..." and I lived here.

But at the time, because they knew I taught in Dallas, which I did the heart of my career -- it's like, you know, it's just interesting how people take your journey and things that you do and then apply it to that particular situation, but not always in a positive light.

So I think that you learn to listen and process before you speak, and you learn when it is appropriate to engage in certain conversations, and I think sometimes if it's, if it's worth that energy.

You know, moving into a professor role is like a dream come true.

And the people I've met, I think, again, it just speaks to particular barriers though.

You know, I started learning all these different things and everyone knows how much I love tech, and one thing led to another and it all came together, which led me into the place that I am now.

But I would just say, I learned what is constantly thought about and that you magnify in your life; and so I learned to reduce those distractions and that noise and lean into what I wanted to accomplish to create that legacy and make an impact.

So my family and friends know me well when they don't hear from me, I'm leaning in, I pull back and I focus and I do my thing.

So, you know, hopefully I have two boys, they're 14 and 18, they're encouraged by that and I've been encouraged in some of their leadership and when they have mentors, sometimes they choose those female and I think that's fantastic.

My son is connected to Marine ROTC and he got to choose his leader and that's who he chose and that made me very proud because he looked at who she was and what she was accomplishing and I thought that was fantastic.

So that was one of my proudest moments, you know, especially as a mom.

[Beth Nikopoulos]: Thank you so much for sharing. I was about to ask how your, your oldest son was doing. I think he's a senior, am I right?

[Shani Suber]: Um, no he's a freshman at --

[Beth Nikopoulos]: Oh, he is?

[Shani Suber]: Yeah, he's a freshman.

[Beth Nikopoulos]: Wonderful. So you understand ---

[Shani Suber]: In Florida so I miss him dearly. (laughs)

[Beth Nikopoulos]: Oh, that's hard, that's hard. And you know, I do want to just say that I'm so amazed.

I mean was a graduate student when I had children. But I, I'm amazed that our students, both men and women who make it through school with jobs and kids.

I mean I've met some students that have three to four children and kudos to them because it is truly a challenge to try to manage and compartmentalize your life and still not miss those important things that you need to have with your family.

So I appreciate you all sharing such wonderful insight.

[April Braden]: I just wanted to comment, I think all of us were showing examples of tenacity.

And I think a lot of females don't appreciate how innately tenacious we are.

You know, society teaches us that we're supposed to stay in certain roles.

We live in a patriarchal society. And subsequently we attribute all of these things like grit and tenacity and, like, strength to men.

And it's really not saying that men don't have that. But when I think back on the women that I see in my daily life and the women in my family, almost all of us have two full-time jobs.

You know, even if we don't have kids, were involved in something else that takes up all of our breadth and all of our focus.

And oftentimes I think women are not used to sort of complimenting themselves or congratulating themselves on those things.

I mean, one of the great things that's been coming out recently is to treat yourself or take care of yourself, or "me" time, right?

And then we like to say that, "Oh, me time is just like taking a nice bath or having a glass of wine."

But I think really we need to focus on me time being like, take a step back, say okay, look at all -- like list all the things that you have accomplished, even if it's just getting up that day and then move forward.

[Shani Suber]: And I want to speak to that too, because I think that one of the things we had mentioned was that balance of what it takes to move in leadership, like you mentioned, compartmentalizing but also transitioning back into your home space.

And so I think that for me I've had, I guess the benefit of all guys in my house and I grew up with two brothers, so I can kind of navigate with that level of strength, probably more than others, but I think it's kind of flowing between those two areas when you are moving between your workspace and then your home.

And like you mentioned, kind of going through those roles because it does typically take, you know, a lot, you know, when you're moving in leadership of strength and determination in order to compete and to maintain and to calibrate at that level, before moving back into the space which is total opposite when you get home.

So it's, it's an interesting dynamic.

[Beth Nikopoulos]: Well, once those kids get a little older too, I have found for myself personally, I'm less afraid to try new things than I would have done before.

And I won't tell you what my age is. But it's taken me all those years to feel like I shouldn't be afraid of things that really maybe simple to some folks, but for some reason may be a challenge to me.

So that's the benefit of being little older, is that you have that hindsight and it's really, it's pleasant, it's a nice change.

So as we move forward, I'm going to move on to our last question because I think this one is a very important one. And I know you all will have great input here.

And that is, give us an example of when you've had to display an act of courage.

[Shani Suber]: I know I'm the talker, again, I'm a Louisianan. (laughs)

Um, I would say, and Beth knows this well and I'm going to word this carefully because I want to be respectful in everybody's journey.

And there was only one thing that really stood out for me. And I would say that it would always rest in my heart.

Because when I sat alongside my students in an uncertain and tough moment, unsure what was to come and leaning on what we were taught and focused on their well-being, it was quite an experience and I'll never forget it.

And I appreciate all the people that, you know, were at our school and I treasure the opportunity to continue to learn and grow.

And one of the things, when I was thinking about this question is John Lewis -- I was reading his book and one of the quotes is just so profound, it talks about our problems initiate a struggle within us, our own souls that take us to the brink of our own experiences.

To find a way to overcome these obstacles, we are forced to break past any false trappings of identity and focus intense, intensely on what is real and what is truly important.

And I think that that experience taught me that it was truly the brink of my own personal experience, of anything I'd ever experienced or what I knew or what I need to do.

And so I think that, you know, that piece -- And for me it was certainly faith and prayer and calm and living in the minute -- that got us beyond that.

And so I think that as you go through different situations that you're like, Okay, am I going to take this leap of faith or am I going to be courageous in a situation, I think it's important to value every day, every minute.

Everyone knows me when I wake up and when I see you guys, I'm welcoming you to the beginning, middle, and end of the day.

And that's, that's really birth from that situation because you realize not everyone has the gift and the joy to see every minute of their day.

So, you know, I use that as a renewing of our day and when we're working and sometimes things get, you know, tense or you're trying to figure things out, or you're so busy, is just to renew that space.

And so I would just say that that particular experience truly just brought me to a point to make sure again, just to appreciate the people that were around me, to also treasure opportunities and to continue to embrace what we have the gift to do in education and our purpose of serving our students and our community.

So we can't ever lose sight of the ability to lead and to guide and to serve.

And that's what I hope any woman listening to this, any guy listening to this, that you just continue to remember, we're going to always reach a place that takes us to the brink of what we know.

And that's where that courage comes in, to move forward and to venture into that wisdom and to learn something new or to do something new.

So, you know, be courageous and do something great.

[Crystal Bates]: Um, for me, of course, my health, my health has presented unimaginable challenges.

And it was always a goal for me that no matter how hard, how I struggled with my health, I didn't want my son to be neglected in any shape, form, or fashion.

I remember one day taking him to school like, literally, the school was across the way here and I could scream and they could hear me, and I remember getting back home and literally within less than five minutes of taking him to school, I fell to the ground with appendicitis.

And it was just scary, living here and didn't have a lot of immediate family very close to me. And then to be hospitalized and my son is at school. I can't even think about trying to survive this.

I have a child at school that doesn't have anybody that's going to care for him. I remember going in for chemo treatments --they would treat the Crohn's disease with chemo -- or going in for some other routine procedure, and I'd get out of that, redress, or go straight to the football field, go straight to piano lessons, go straight to whatever my son had going on.

I never wanted him to suffer due to my suffering.

And then I made up my mind with Crohn's disease I don't have to be sick and dumb.

And so although I don't have the physical strength to do the things that I want, I do what I can.

And as I've gotten older, I've learned to sit down when I have to sit down. J

ust in the midst of everything that was going on last week, I had been really struggling.

Like I said, I hadn't even walk very well for the last couple of months.

It's been --because the Crohn's disease has been bothering my feet and they hurt. And I mean, just the pain.

People will look at me look like this and as Dr. Nikopoulos would probably have seen with her father, we don't look like what we've gone through and I said I don't smell like the smut and hell that I've gone through, or maybe going through.

And it has really, really, really been challenging and a lot of times we look like this. But it could be so much pain behind it.

I mean, I've crawled up stairs. I've crawled across my floors.

I remember when my son was just a couple of weeks old and I fell sick and we had rotary phones then.

I literally had the fall to the floor and it was that old carpet that had the little stuff sticking out and I pulled on that just to get to a phone to call somebody to bring him Pampers.

I remember even when I lost my hearing in 2008, I was trying to maneuver through the basement of UT Southwestern to get to another part of the hospital, and I could talk.

I kept asking people for directions and I was trying to read lips and one person I had asked, she came ten minutes later she saw me again, still trying to ask.

And she motioned to me, It's okay," and she motioned for me to follow her and I just cried because she knew I couldn't -- something was wrong.

And I told, I said, "I can't hear and I'm trying to read lips."

And I remember even during that time having, because the thing, I want to say this real quick, all of our struggles and barriers that we had in life and people are experiencing this with COVID, all my life I always said, "People will never understand what I go through."

I feel like the world going through this pandemic gives people a sense.

Because no matter what you go through, life doesn't go on hold.

You've still got bills, bills due, you've still got other people that depend -- nothing stops.

And so even in the midst of when I lost my hearing, I had bills I needed to call and negotiate because I had financial hardships.

And I remember somebody texted me and said, "Well, I'm gonna come pick you up, take you to get something to eat and take care of whatever you need taken care of."

And I had made a folder that day and I was intending to get in my car, and just go to some random place and write down on a piece of paper, say, "Please help me" to somebody.

And so my health has been quite a challenge. But I continue to push on and I just continue to push on with all the strength in me.

And like I said, just last week with everything that happened with the snowstorm, my iron had been so low.

I had been so scared that somebody's going to find me unconscious because my blood count was so low.

And in the middle of all that I ended up having to go into the hospital and get a blood transfusion.

So I think my greatest struggle is my health, but not looking like what I'm going through.

So oftentimes, when I'm crying out or when something's wrong, most people can't see it, and so therefore they don't understand it.

And so -- but I just keep pushing on because my faith, God has not failed me.

He has not forsaken me, even when I'm on my back.

I remember doing chemo treatments and it would be in the hospital doing work for school when I was working on my master's degree at Baylor.

Unfortunately, due to my health I wasn't able to finish. And that broke my heart because I really, really wanted to get that master's degree.

But my health just wouldn't let me, you know, it just would not let me. So my health has been a barrier, but it has shaped me.

It has made me strong and and I just keep pushing. And as long as I have breath in me.

When in 2016 when they accidentally perforated my intestine, somebody came to the hospital, they said, "Christina, I don't understand how you do it."

I said I think about Jesus on the cross. I think about how he sacrificed, I think about the blood that he shed.

I don't have a right to complain. He paid the price for us all. He didn't give up, he didn't give in, and so as long as I have breath than me, I won't give up and I won't give in.

[Beth Nikopoulos]: I had to take a breath, just for a moment. Thank you for sharing such struggles and accomplishments.

And before we end, Chief Hill, I wanted to make sure that you were back.

[Lauretta Hill]: Yes, I'm back and I just I can't follow that. So...but Crystal, I don't know you, but I do now.

And I am praying for you. And you are, you are the salt and the light that this world calls for.

So you keep being you and you will be forever in my prayers and I'm thankful just again, when you run into women, like, you know, the women that you run into throughout your life, you never know who's going to be put in your path and why they're there, and what you can gain from them or them from you and that's why you always have to be open to the possibility that this may be the person I sent to show you something or this may be the person to show you why not to go this way.

So you always have to be open to be ready for, to learn something new, that new adventure, that vulnerability.

And in policing, those two words usually don't go together very well -- vulnerability and policing -- but it's something about women leadership in policing.

I will say this because there's a whole bunch of people probably going to see this. If we had more women leading some of these law enforcement agencies, we wouldn't not be, personal opinion and professional opinion, in the situations that we are in policing.

How can black lives matter and blue lives matter? Easily. I live it everyday.

And both -- Black Lives Matter is real. I'm raising two boys, okay. I have to raise them different than my white male colleagues in policing.

And so it's just, it's so rich to see you on the screen and the women that I come in contact with daily at Dallas College, that we're doing tremendous things and that we have an opportunity to continue to learn forever and ever and ever and ever.

And I'm thankful that just this day, of course I knew Beth, but I didn't know anybody else that's here today.

And I've learned so much and I feel I can take pieces, pieces of what you said, and I will be using them.

I always use stuff, I repackage it. I'm a recycler when people tell me stuff.

I don't try to reinvent, I don't try to start certain things new. I just kind of recycle it because if it's good for you it's, it's probably good for me too.

[Beth Nikopoulos]: Thank you so much for words of wisdom. And I can only imagine Chief Hill what it's like to be a woman in police.

I appreciate you being a trailblazer there, and I do hope that more of our students will take that opportunity and will see it as a life's goal as well.

I just want to say thank you to all of you for sharing wonderful inspiration and insight, for taking that time to be with us today.

I sure would like to have lunch with you all because I feel like I have met some wonderful, wonderful folks and I'm privileged.

I got a chance to -- I knew several of you before today. Thank you so very, very much for spending time with us today.

I appreciate you all and I certainly hope to see you very soon for real, for real, in the community or back on a college campus.

Thank you all so much and we will see you soon.

[Shani Suber]: Thank you for having us. This was awesome. Thank you.

[All]: Thank you.

[Lauretta Hill]: Bye.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our third presentation of our Dallas College So Right Speaker Series.

Today we have the wonderful, amazing Professor Naomi Chapman, who is lending her time and expertise today to share us her presentation.

Professor Chapman is a new faculty member at Dallas College. She previously worked for four years A.

at Odessa College, and she earned an M. in history from Texas Tech University. So let's give her a nice warm welcome and a round of applause for presenting today. Awesome. I thought this was going to be a little bit like teaching, but I don't get clapped in when I teach usually, so that was really nice.

Thanks. Yeah, I'm really excited to present this material to you guys today because it's a little bit niche. It's a little like a lot of history research.

If you get a really, really specific and really niche and you don't often have a chance to like talk about what you spent so many, so many hours and weeks researching.

So when I heard that the kind of theme for Black History Month this year was having to do with the arts and music and everything, I was like, oh my gosh, I need to, you know, jump on this opportunity to present this because it doesn't come around all that often. And it's something that really, really interested me. So just a little background on this before I jump into it. When I was working on my master's degree, I wanted to study diplomacy, cultural diplomacy, and I wanted to specifically look at classical music because that's actually what my background, my educational background was in up to that point. So I was trying to find a way to like, you know, I wanted to look at classical musicians, I wanted to look at diplomacy, and I was trying to find where and when has that been used.

And I ended up looking at like the Cold War, specifically India, and I'll get into a little more detail about why that is in a second. But I wasn't setting out specifically to look for how Black artists were part of this program.

That wasn't like my main goal.

But the more and more that I researched, it became really clear that there was a very intentional kind of use of these artists.

And they're also like participation in these programs was also very intentional at a very critical time in US history, when the Cold War was going on, but also the Civil Rights Movement was really, really starting to ramp up around to the mid 1950s. And it just became kind of this unavoidable, obvious thing that specifically African American artists were being asked to go on these tours, that it's not a coincidence when they are being asked. And then kind of how they navigated that just became more and more and more interesting. So in my larger research, I ended up, you know, I did what I wanted to do with classical music in general. But then within that, I really had to separate out and talk specifically about how Black artists were used in that context, because it was so different. And anyway, you'll hopefully you'll see in the presentation, why they were so popular with the State Department as diplomats, and also why they chose to participate in these programs. So this is presentation is going to be kind of like one third, like a history conference presentation, which if you've ever, well, you probably haven't been to one, but if you ever go to like a history conference, it's a lot of people, they show pictures and they kind of read from their research. I have that a little bit. But also, I've been teaching for a while, and I'm used to improvising a bit, so I might stop and do that. But anyway, I'm gonna have some text and some pictures up here.

And we'll just jump right in. So in his coverage for Contralto Marian Anderson's tour of India for CBS, reporter Edward Murrow said, a French poet once wrote, if you wish to influence the Indians, rather than a thousand missionaries, send one saint.

The United States sent Miss Anderson.

She was the first foreign visitor to speak at the Gandhi Memorial. And in 1957, thousands of Indians lined to the streets of New Delhi and followed her as she approached the nation's memorial to its late hero. If you know anything about India, Gandhi is kind of a founding father figure in India, he's on all of the money. So this is a really kind of momentous place for her to be speaking and performing. And this local audience listened with rapt attention as she praised the Mahatma's moral leadership and peaceful resistance to injustice. Before a gathering, which included the American Ambassador Chester Bowles, who I think is this man, Anderson said, quote, knowing something of the life and the aspirations of Mahatma Gandhi, as a Negro, I was naturally very deeply moved and felt it absolutely imperative to come to this spot before returning to my own country. After these few words, Anderson sang the hymn, Lead Kindly Light, which is a favorite of both American congregations and actually Mahatma Gandhi. Martin Luther King Jr.

himself two years later would make a very famous tour of India. But already with Miss Anderson, we can see the crucial links between the people of India and African Americans.

The State Department, despite its own lack of diversity and personnel about which much has been written, acknowledged these links and sought to promote the image of the United States as the land of opportunity for all, despite the highly visible ongoing racial conflict within the United States. And remember, this is happening in 1957.

So really highly and well publicized events going on back home. So that's kind of our lead in. We'll get back to Miss Anderson and her extremely popular tour.

But I want to give you some background on what's going on in the 1950s from like a diplomatic standpoint.

So during the 1950s, while Cold War politics was raging on both sides of the Atlantic, and you have McCarthyism going on at home, and everybody is getting a lot of Cold War information through their television screens, through their radios, the State Department found itself tasked not just with influencing global opinions about the United States, but about democracy itself. Thanks to decolonization, they had to do so in more places than ever. This is a map of all the kind of territories and countries that are gaining their independence right around this time after World War II. If you ever look at it, there's a lot of countries in Asia and in Africa that have an independence date of like 1945, 1947, 1950, 1951, all throughout this area.

We're going to focus specifically on India.

But just to get across, the State Department in general is like, okay, we really have to fan out. And we're not just trying to make the United States look good, we're trying to make democracy and like Western culture look good. And so everybody I talk about, they don't just visit India, they also take tours of other parts of Asia or Africa. But I had to focus just on India, it was going to get too big if I didn't. So one of these places was newly independent India, which sought to govern one of the world's with a secular democratic government.

The Americans were accustomed to dealing with India through the British.

But the American mission sought India a critical opportunity to foster Western style democracy, thereby gaining a critical foothold against communism in Asia. Music constituted one of the ways in which the State Department sought to influence perceptions and in many cases alter pre-existing biases against the United States.

The first kind of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, he was kind of more of an anglophile, even though he had helped lead the resistance to British colonization.

He was very literate in British culture, he had studied in Britain, he had more of a respect for British culture. And like a British person would, they kind of look down at Americans as people who don't really have a high culture, they're all about popular music or popular things.

And so that's an attitude that was kind of generally held maybe among the elite classes in India, who looked more to like the British or the Europe for like high Western culture.

So there's three kind of questions here about specifically my research, why classical music, why India, and then why African American musicians, because that's what we're focusing on today.

As far as classical music, in 1954, the National Security Council drafted a policy that dealt specifically with South Asia and Africa. And that policy kind of led to more of an emphasis on doing diplomacy there, as well as other more secretive Cold War activities.

And so then the Department of State's International Educational Exchange Service, say that five times fast, distributed a list of guidelines for these agencies that were tasked with administering this new cultural program.

Just a side note about the cultural program, it didn't have like any funding, even though it was considered really important. A lot of the funding was not going towards maybe soft things like diplomacy or musical tours, a lot of that was going to like intelligence or the military. So most of the funding for this program actually came from the President Eisenhower's emergency fund. That's a whole side thing, but I thought that was really interesting. That's how they got this funded. That's also why they have to do it extremely cheaply as far as they can.

So but these new guidelines, they gave priority to professional and amateur presentations of dramatic productions, musical comedies, operas, ballet productions, concert groups, as well as individual performers. They also wanted to emphasize American writers and composers, which is a little bit tricky when it comes to classical music, because if you've looked at it, obviously, western classical music mostly comes out of Europe, although there's a lot of American composers.

The like standards still tend to come out of Europe.

There was a similar memo called, and I looked at this in the archive, which is interesting, types of American cultural representation needed abroad, and it acknowledged that there was kind of a lack of what they called natural cultural ties between the United States and the Near East, which they included India.

And it placed importance on intellectual gatherings and events, presumably to counter the perception among Indian intellectuals that Americans don't care about these things. So later on, we'll see that American diplomacy really leans more towards like popular music and sports. But at this point in the 1950s, they're really emphasizing what's considered maybe, you know, dismissively like high culture or intellectual pursuits.

As far as why India, I have personal reasons for choosing India, I just kind of have a personal affinity for India.

And so my gaze was kind of naturally drawn there.

But fortunately for me, India also makes a really interesting study at this time period, because as you might have studied in class, during the Cold War, countries were expected to kind of pick a side. Are you going to side with the West or with the United States, you can decide with democracy, with capitalism, or are you going to side more with the Soviet Union and with socialism? And there were a lot of countries that resisted this binary, and they didn't want to be shoehorned into anything. And India is a huge leader in that they did not want to be, you know, put in a box in that way.

The founders of India had an affinity for socialism, but they also wanted democracy, they wanted to be secular, but they also recognized most of their people are really religious.

And so they were like, we're not going to be told by these other people that have to focus so specifically on African Americans, is that they kept appearing in the list of artists that we want to engage in some of the most successful performances. So a lot has been written, or let's say more kind of prominent histories have been written about jazz diplomacy, which started in the late 1950s and kind of continued mostly through the 1960s and 70s.

And that's really, really, really interesting work. This is a cool picture here of Louis Armstrong playing his trumpet in front of the pyramids, in front of the Sphinx, I guess. And my argument and, you know, the evidence that we're about to see is that a lot of the same reasons that jazz diplomacy was so emphasized later on by the State Department were present when they were engaging classical musicians as well.

So the prevalence of African American classical musicians in the US Cold War cultural diplomacy undermines the idea that jazz musicians automatically made the best diplomats because they played a more popular style. At this point in the 1950s jazz was kind of more considered like more like pop music.

It wasn't considered as prestigious, which of course we know it takes enormous musical skill and training. And it definitely overlaps more now with what we might consider classical music. But in the 50s, partly for snobbish reasons, partly for racist reasons, it was considered like a people's art form and not a high art form. That changed obviously by the 60s. But what we see in the 1950s is that the bulk of funding went to classical musicians, and about half of those were classical musicians of color. So it doesn't make sense to argue that jazz music, due to its popular origins, automatically appealed to more common people than classical music.

The audiences who came to these performances in India were they liked the classical musicians a lot.

And one of the things that they would do before performances was kind of fan out and pass out information about what this music is and how you listen to it. They did that with classical music and they did that with jazz. So at least in the case of India, they're both really serving a very similar purpose diplomatically.

Now of course, just because the State Department has its agenda for why we want certain people to go abroad, the people who are choosing to participate also have their own ideas and their kind of political goals as well.

goals as well. African Americans are at the forefront of recognizing the critical role that race would play in the 20th century's foreign policy. And throughout the 1950s and 60s, they pushed for what they call the diplomacy of desegregation. It's not something that gets studied often, but the State Department was overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male in terms of all the people that are making these decisions. And so they were calling for a significant increase in the number of African American diplomats and more consideration of minority interests in the crafting of foreign policy. The State Department's agenda for black artists touring abroad often conflicted with their own personal and professional agenda, because of course they're there in part or in the State Department's mind to show look how culturally advanced the United States is, even in like a minority group that you might have been hearing a lot about, look at how successful they've been, how talented they are and that kind of thing. And of course that overlaps with the personal agenda of a lot of these performers, but they also don't want to serve necessarily fully the narrative that like everything's okay, right?

like everything's okay, right? It's all fine, you know, you might have heard bad things. They're going to resist supporting that kind of narrative. But this is also a really good opportunity to travel abroad and get in front of as many people as possible.

So what are the ingredients for a this is something that's true across the board. I found for white classical musicians, black classical musicians, and then I also argue like the jazz ones later on, is that they have to be accessible to the people. They go out of their way to perform in front of what you might call like common people, normal people.

Only in a few cases is it an audience almost entirely of like diplomats and notable people. They're going to be going to smaller cities, staying in some cases with people in their homes.

University groups do that a lot. They'll put the students up in people's homes.

They'll go out amongst people before or after a performance and get to know them and talk to them. So those, when they make themselves accessible like that, the tours tend to do very well.

Indian audiences also really, really love to see their culture get incorporated into the performance.

I was amazed to see how many of these tours would at some point play or sing the Indian national anthem.

And they always loved that. And so any connection you can make with the Indian local culture was extremely popular.

And at the end of the day, it helps that something is new. And this is another case where I would say the classical musicians do the exact same job later as the jazz musicians.

Because if you're a regular person living in India, western classical music is just as new and interesting to you as jazz music would be. They're both kind of equally unknown. And so it's new, it's exciting, it's something you don't often see. They don't have a lot of opportunity to hear this kind of music.

And audiences also tend to really like uniquely American music.

This is a big reason that later on, once they get over their snobbishness, the State Department does tend to go so much for jazz because jazz is one of those uniquely American art forms.

American art forms. But of course, you have that in the classical music too. But in the instance of jazz and the classical arena, those songs and those pieces that tend to be perceived as really authentically American are also African American. It's black music, it's black musicians. So this is not a picture from the 1950s, clearly, right?

So this is not a picture from the 1950s, clearly, right? From the 1870s.

I've always struggled to find a really good picture of this group from the 1950s. And so I ended up picking one from the 1870s, which is when they began their tours. But the first, so we're finally at a few artists, we're going to talk about them in particular, but the first African American group to tour India after all of these new kind of guidelines and things were published was a group of students from the historically black Fisk University.

They're the Fisk Jubilee Singers. They had formed in 1871 to help raise money for the school. And they had been touring the United States and Europe for decades. They were known as like a touring choral group and they're really, really popular, really successful.

And so they contract with the Jubilee Singers to come to South Asia. And they perform the same repertoire in Asia that they would in the United States and in Europe. One of the most interesting things I found in the research is kind of local reaction, at least in the English press to these performances.

So the times of India praised them enthusiastically.

And the evening edition of the news of India asserted that, quote, such superb and effortless coordination of thought, feeling and rhythm was never before experienced here.

And if you've heard Indian classical music, you'll know that's a huge compliment because Indian classical music is extremely rhythmic and kind of very note driven and lots of movement.

And so for them to say this is like something we've never heard before is pretty high praise.

The Bombay Sunday Standard called the recital a landmark in the development of music appreciation in India.

Remember, these are college students. They're highly skilled college students, but they're very young and they're they're touring around.

It's fascinating that the first group the United States would send after reorganizing its art program would be so identifiably African American. I mean, obviously, all of the singers are African American, but they're coming from an HBCU. And they're singing a lot of music that is exclusively and identifiably African American. That's probably not a coincidence. I wasn't I didn't see a lot of extremely explicit like we are only going to send this type of group language.

Of course, they didn't.

But right after all of this gets reorganized, it's not it's not as though they started out with a lot of white artists and then said, Oh, you know what, maybe we'll fold some other people in. It's like right out of the gate.

We're going to contract with a very identifiably like African American group.

And this is all happening immediately after events back home, like the Montgomery bus boycott and school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas. And you have to keep in mind, people around the world know about these things. And the Soviet Union is publicizing these things because it makes the United States look bad. And even though it's all true, they're not anyway.

So let's look at some more artists. We also have William Warfield and February of 1956, they managed to book Leontyne Price for a tour of Asia.

They crafted the tour around her performing in India, and they looked at this booking as a huge success. They're like, we did it. We snagged somebody really, really good land.

They tried to balance cheaper tours, like the college students with more expensive ones, like somebody as prominent as Leontyne Price. If you studied classical music, you might know her as one of the major vocalists of the 20th century. They persuaded her to make time in her performance schedule for a two week tour. She even had to cancel other performances to kind of make time for that. And they said that she did so because of our insistence on the importance of immediate appearances in India.

She performed in, well, not that it matters to you guys, but she performed across India, south, north, east, and west in different sized cities. And in addition to her live performance, a local radio station in India made the audience that much larger.

The American Consulate in Calcutta concluded that for those in the city who enjoyed Western classical music, Miss Price's appearance in the city was a rare and seldom equal treat.

And they noted that she received a rare standing ovation. The Hindustan Standard reported that she received rapturous applause after each piece, even from the quote, usually undemonstrative Calcutta audience. Bace Baritone, William Warfield, he combined several desirable qualities for the cultural program and both his repertoire and his persona. Warfield had actually gone on previous tours to the State Department in like the Caribbean.

And in 1952, he had reprised his role as Porgi and Porgi and Bess. And if you'd studied classical music, maybe that'd be something you'd be familiar with. It's a really, really famous Gershwin musical.

So he's very well known for this recent acclaimed performance in Porgi and Bess. His solo tour of India focused on actually the less saturated areas, smaller cities, which by Indian standards, it's still be really big cities, but by Indian standards are smaller.

And so his case is interesting because he was in a sense more typically classical in his singing style than some others were. And that actually made him a little less maybe popular or well liked than Miss Price or Marian Anderson that we'll see in a second, because audiences or critics said he sticks so close to how you're supposed to sing. And they were maybe more used to hearing something else. Consistently, like the most, the biggest hits were always spirituals.

They would sing stuff from the kind of classical repertoire, you know, German music, Italian music, French music, and then they would end with the spirituals, which people always commented were their favorites, and they liked the best. And of course, that's something that white artists aren't doing.

And that sets them apart. So undoubtedly, and we haven't talked about every single tour that went, but without doubt, the biggest, most successful, most prominent one was Marian Anderson. And like Lancing Price, she is a name in the classical music world. This is a huge, this is a huge win for the State Department. She's also famous by this point already for a controversial incident when she was prevented from singing in front of the Lincoln Memorial by the Daughters of the American Revolution in the 1940s.

And then Eleanor Roosevelt intervened and she did sing in front of the Lincoln Memorial. This is a huge, she's probably more famous for that than for this. But she's a well-known musician.

She's also a well-known kind of figure already in like civil rights circles.

And also her whole tour was filmed and televised by CBS. Edward Murrow, who is a really popular reporter from that time, they followed her around, not just India, but also Vietnam and filmed a lot of her performances, her interactions with locals and interviewed her. So we have a lot of really good, much, much more information about her tour than anybody else's. So I mentioned her at the beginning. She's the woman I said was kind of walking to the Gandhi Memorial and thousands of people were following her. And she got up there. She said some kind words. She sang a hymn.

And it was really, really well taken. She's the first foreigner actually to give a speech of that kind at this memorial, which I think on its own is really remarkable.

Of all the special programs tours in India, none caused as much of a stir and required more resources than that of Marian Anderson. Her tour took place over an extended period of 15 weeks, covering the entire arc of free Asia. Several factors made this tour more complex.

Anderson enjoyed worldwide fame among music lovers.

So making arrangements for her required a lot more. She's not going to be staying in people's homes, right, like the college students did, or even in kind of normal hotel accommodations. It's going to take a lot more. Her audience is also quite diverse.

She performed for government, military and civilian audiences.

And in addition to the five concerts that she gave every two weeks, which doesn't leave a lot of time for her voice to rest, she would meet with students and locals on her off days.

Unlike a lot of other performers, especially white ones, Anderson also had her own agenda for her tour. And she was actually in a position to make suggestions concerning her public appearances. She had that kind of clout that she could, you know, intervene and say, no, I'm not going to do like this, I'm going to do like that. A little bit more of her background there.

there. But so Anderson wore her accomplishments proudly, but privately, she was kind of unsure and self-conscious about her role in the civil rights movement. She tended toward quiet, dignified and opaque responses, which is, of course, why the State Department likes her, because she's not going to totally run from a question, but she's going to answer it in a way that's a little bit soft and vague. And she's not going to be, you know, while on a State Department tour, really coming down hard on the United States. In fact, in Vietnam, she was asked by some Vietnamese schoolgirls, you know, what are your favorite songs?

songs? And she was really emphasizing African-American spirituals and American history and her kind of connection to that. And she would do that more often than she would open up for any kind of criticism.

So the impact of Anderson's tour for the civil rights movement in the US was complex. That's another thing that sets her apart, is that where others like the Fisk Jubilee Singers or William Warfield, they tour, they come back, there's not a lot of information about that tour in the US. Because this was displayed on television, American audiences have also their own feelings and their own reaction to, how is she doing this? And why is she doing this? And some people loved it and thought it was great. And some people said, you know, this is, she's like covering basically for the United States. So that also gave her a lot of these contradictory kind of feelings. She's like, how do I navigate what I want to do with, with what people expect of me? And I think she wanted to be an artist first.

So each of Anderson's Indian performances enjoyed audiences of well over a thousand attendees.

The Calcutta concert was attended by an estimated 2,200.

And the English language press in India tended to be very complimentary of all of these tours.

That was something I noticed in the archive that kind of made me curious. Like, they're, they're always so nice about this.

They don't have any critiques of anybody's, you know, like musicality or what they chose to perform, but they tend to be very complimentary. Other places, not so much. And Japan, for example, they outright said, we don't like a lot of this music. And they said the same thing in Afghanistan.

But even for the very complimentary, very effusive English language press in India, when it came to Ms. Anderson, they were waxing poetic about, about her performance. Here's a quote, every now and then in the annals of music, we get a supreme artist who not only achieves the pinnacles of sheer artistry and greatness in his or her own field, but brings to the achievement that rare quality in a human being character.

Character is a big word. She is not only a great singer, but a great human being. So they went way above just, yes, it was a beautiful performance to say this is like a life changing interaction that we've had with Ms. Anderson. So many, many, you know, classical groups got to travel around Asia and particularly in India between 1955 and 1960.

And then the funding dried up, Eisenhower left office, they weren't able to access that emergency fund anymore.

There's a lull in these kinds of tours being sponsored and supplemented by the State Department until you get to the jazz diplomacy. But even at the end, jazz diplomacy was beginning right before the 1960s.

Like the Jack Teagarden's Sextet is traveling and more like folk music troops are traveling. So you can see that kind of gradual shift into jazz.

But my argument was that they didn't, that they basically this is a continuation of the success that they had with classical music. They saw that particularly African-American classical music and performers did really well. And that opened up the door for okay, maybe jazz will do really well. The State Department couldn't recognize that because the people at the State Department were tended to be older and male and wider and were not, you know, baby connoisseurs of jazz music, didn't fully appreciate it. As those attitudes kind of changed, then you get to those much more famous tours by like Louis Armstrong, that takes such more prominence when we think about cultural diplomacy.

But these musicians were traveling at a time that was critical for international relations and diplomacy, the Cold War, the non-alignment movement. They were going to a place that was firmly non-aligned, India.

And they're also traveling at a time when at home, the civil rights movement has never been more important.

And the kind of abuses that people experience in the South are extremely visible to people with the boycotts that are happening with the lynching of Emmett Till with the, you know, desegregation in schools and the Little Rock Nine and all of that's making global news. And so they're traveling at a very sensitive time in our history, and at least in India, doing a fantastic job of representing not just themselves, but also the United States, and really kind of towing that line.

And yeah, that's basically the, that's my presentation. We can open it up now, I guess, for questions, but thank you. We can sit for a second and see if any come up, if you come to mind.

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

I would say no. People were, she was welcomed very warmly. People were excited to see her.

And I mean, by this point, they knew she was coming. And so when I said thousands of people were following her to the Gandhi Memorial, they, that's literally true. She was kind of like a celebrity.

And that's kind of common, I'll say, in India, like if a famous person is showing up somewhere, a lot of people find out and they'll come and you can see it on Instagram. There's lots of people, how they had Instagram, I think it would have been similar situation.

So yeah, she was extremely popular, extremely well liked.

And I don't, I didn't see any controversy about her speaking there.

She had a lot of really kind things to say. She sang a hymn that Gandhi himself really liked and it went over really well.

really liked and it went over really well. Yeah. Did you have a question?

Did you have a question? Yeah. I think that, I mean, definitely Indians are already aware of it because it's not as though they were like totally cut off, you know, like educated people or people who paid a lot of attention to like Western music definitely had already heard it. I think it's actually probably the State Department's kind of blindness that they thought, oh, classical music is the only way to go. And classical music did do well because Indian audiences liked that too, but they probably were ready for jazz too. And it's just the State Department that was like, didn't see that as like, well, there's something I didn't really fully talk about, which was this idea of mediating prestige, which is something that I got from a different, from another historian, Daniel Fosler, Lucia, but she's studied classical music diplomacy in Europe and has said they were trying to really present prestige and they didn't perceive jazz music as prestigious. But once they finally clued in, yeah, those did super well in India too. And they also, people just really liked things that were new and different. And so classical music and jazz music were different for them. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know about specifically in India. I mean, like, it went really well.

But I can't say like in classical music in general, for sure. Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, you know, they all had significant influence where, this was a big question I had as I was writing this, like, where does the Negro spiritual fit? It's not really Western classical music.

It's not like it comes, you know, it's not like Mozart or Mahler or any of that.

But it's also not fully folk music. It's not treated fully like folk music. It kind of operates this middle ground where it kind of has been folded into classical music I studied that in college and choirs will sing it and opera singers will sing it. And it's a, it's always a part of the repertoire for Black classical musicians.

So I think her impact would be more like really solidifying that, that that's an art form that you can get done singing a Mozart aria and then go straight into like a spiritual, which is part hymn, part folk music, part classical and, and that's also what made these musicians, even though the ones by more like all just like, like white or mixed groups of people were also successful, the ability to sing the spiritual made these solo African-American performers like really popular with people.

They really like, those are always the ones that they sang when they got standing ovations or they would sing it twice or something like that.

So anyway, I think she had a hand in making that part of the classical repertoire for singers today, who if they will easily bridge between those two kind of song styles.

Yeah. Yeah, it's, it started around 1955 with, they were pulling from the emergency fund and then I think around 1959, the emergency fund ended because the Kennedy administration was coming in and they had been pulling Eisenhower himself and said, yes, you can use this presidential emergency fund for this.

Yeah, yeah, this is all about five years worth of much more intense kind of sending a lot of artists abroad and the budget was really tight. Like they had some funding from the State Department, but they also, some like provided their own or relied on ticket sales and that kind of, that was also always a question.

And these people come cheaper than like, than a lot of other artists would, they would mix it like a Marian Anderson tour is really expensive, but a tour by a university choir where you're not even paying the students is like really affordable. So they would, they would mix them in. Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, look how accomplished they are.

Yeah, exactly.

No, that's exactly true. And I don't think Eisenhower said, okay, this is important enough to me that you can use this money in 1955 because of how, what's going on in 1954, 1955, 1956.

Yeah, yeah, like, and, and the Soviet Union missed no opportunity to publicize those kinds of things. And India was also trying to be a world leader of like people of color.

And so they were paying even closer attention.

So I couldn't ever really get a, I could tell that the, the Indian audiences liked the performances, but you can't really ever tell or measure if it changed their opinion about the United States or if they just said, wow, that was a really great performance. You still have a lot of issues. You know, you don't get a lot of that like kind of feedback. But I did notice in India, they tended to be really, really positive. And I thought, well, maybe that's just how it was everywhere. But then I looked in like in Japan or in Kabul, they'd be like, we didn't like this one as much. So I don't know, I haven't gotten to the bottom of, and I also couldn't really look at non-English language press.

I do read Hindi and I was looking for that, but I just, I mean, I have to go to India and like dig around in archive and that wasn't available to me. So it could be that in the Hindi language or local languages that maybe they were not as effusive. Maybe the English language press was more, that's a whole other question, but the State Department thought it went well. Yeah, it's also too short a time period, just 1950, 1965, 1960.

This is where it kind of dovetails into the jazz diplomacy.

And maybe my argument really wasn't that this was better from jazz diplomacy or anything like that. It was more this an overlooked kind of prelude to jazz diplomacy and that it has the same issues, the same things that made it successful.

And so if, if the jazz diplomats, if they could, if you could argue like Penny Vanesh and historian did that they could move the needle on public opinion, then I don't see why the classical music ones couldn't do, at least in India, just where I looked.

Thank you. For sure.

Well, that's something you don't see, like you don't see State Department sponsored tours of like Erykah Badu or something to India, but like that could be cool. I don't, I mean, I'm not aware of anything like that. They do a lot of stuff with students and sports diplomacy, actually.

I mean, they did that, like they'd send really prominent, usually black athletes to countries in Asia and Africa. That all, that's a whole other kind of outside my expertise, but I think it's a similar thing.

And, and they'd get on the, you know, they get with kids and like play sports with them. And they're also like, why is baseball so popular in Japan and all that. Anyway, sports diplomacy is something else, but that has some overlap for sure.

And that came more, I guess, in 60s, 70s, 80s. Yeah.

Thanks. Those are really good questions. I mean, anybody has anything else I'd love to talk about it. I spent a lot of time on this recent, a few years ago.

Yeah. Good question. So my test did any, these class positions, like very interesting. Have any relations, connections with Paul Robeson? Yeah.

I kind of skipped that part a little bit. Paul Robeson, he, he got blacklisted for his political beliefs. And he was connected with William Warfield. They were touring around the same time, I think, in the Caribbean. And so that was something to overcome. But I think maybe Worley and Warfield looked better maybe in comparison to Robeson, who did get blacklisted because he didn't tow that line as well as Warfield or Price or Anderson did. They were very conscientious about who they chose. And I'm sure they did some background checks that maybe didn't show up in the archive into people's politics and to their beliefs and gauging kind of how safe they would be to send. And that's that tension between what the State Department wants to do, what the performers want to do. There's enough overlap there that it works out, but they're not, they're not wanting the same. For sure.

Yeah. They, Paul Robeson did come up and he was certainly not going to be asked to do any performances after, at least at this point. Thank you. Thanks so much.

Roy Vu: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for being here. We appreciate your attendance and your time and thank you for your patience. Special thanks to Alexander and his video crew. We appreciate you here helping us out in recording Dr. Howard's presentation, which we expect to be fantastic. Phenomenal. I have the pleasure and privilege and honor to introduce Dr. Howard. Dr. Howard has served as professor of philosophy and religion here at Dallas College for the past 16 years, he is also a teaching fellow at the University of Texas. In Denton  where he is also a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy and religion. getting your second PhD his research, interests include topics relating to social and political philosophy, as well as topics related to curriculum and instruction. In addition to his institutional service responsibilities here at Dallas College, he also serves as one of the original faculty advisors for our Civil Rights Tour since its inception in 2019. lets give a nice warm welcome and a round of applause to Dr.

Darryl Howard Dr.

Howard: Good Afternoon,  how’s everyone today? Good, good seeing a smiling faces today. It's a beautiful day.

It’s good to see all of you out and alert and attentive. And it is my hope that in the time that we have remaining together today, that you will learn much on today. And hopefully I have a time keeper to kind of cut me off probably about 45 minutes or so i guess. Okay. Excellent. Very good. the topic that I'm covering today and during Black History Month, I cover a number of topics. And so I'm really making this statement for my benefit as well so that, you know, I know exactly what it is I'm covering on today. My focus on today will be the American photographers who’ve made an impact. Who’ve made an influence in the civil rights movement. Through their work, the civil rights movement was able to advance rapidly because of the visuals that were provided by by these photographers whom we will affectionately refer to as activist photographers, activists, photographers. Okay. Because that's truly what they were when you listen to the stories of many of them. And hopefully as a result of having attended this presentation today, you would do some Some independent research and study on your own to learn about these different individuals, many of whom risked their very lives, many of whom suffered attacks from racist and violent members of the community in which they served. But nevertheless, because of the movement, because of the emphasis and because of the pursuit of truth and justice and recognizing the inherent dignity, value and worth that all human beings possess, you know, they they were willing to sacrifice their lives. And so with that being said, we're going to cover a number of highlights a number of topics. As I get started. I need to mention at the outset that simply there are just so many individuals who fall under this category of activist photographers. I will not be mentioning all of these individuals, should I say, I will not be highlighting each and every one of these individuals. But at the outset of my presentation, I definitely want to make mention of those men and women who have made significant contributions to the struggle of civil rights, a struggle which continues even to this day. So with that being said, I don't know how because someone may come after the presentation and say, Yeah, it was it was good, but you didn't mention this person. Okay, believe it or not, even names that are not on this list, those individuals who captured some of the most memorable photo, photographs associated with the civil rights movement, many of them may have done so as journalists with specific local newspapers, specific national publications such as Time magazine, Life magazine, a local newspapers, I'm thinking about local newspapers affiliated with Birmingham, Montgomery. You know, even African-American publications as well. Okay. All right. So when we talk about photography, check this out, everybody. As a matter of fact, everyone has a device to capture images. If you would just take a moment and raise your smartphone, if you own a smartphone, If you have a smartphone, yes, you are free to wave your smartphone, just don't do anything else with it Okay. All right. Cause I see some of you looking at me like Dr. Howard you’re recording. No, no, that's okay. Okay. Take a moment and I want you to wave your smartphone. You know what a matter of fact, we can real quickly lets just take it a step further. And right where you're sitting right now, go ahead and take a selfie of yourself right now on your smartphone that's allowed. Okay. Because I want you to understand. All right? Go take a selfie of yourself right now. All right. One, two,  three All right, All right. Okay. Excellent, very good. Okay. You said we old over there. Okay. So hopefully you've taken the selfie of yourself or you've attempted to take a selfie of yourself. Okay. But the reason why I had you to do that is because what we now take for granted, okay, actually started in the early 19th century, okay? What we now know and we carry on our person on a daily and regular basis. And, you know, we use it as much as we use our automobiles and our refrigerators and so on and so forth. Guess what did not began as the portable mobile device that we know it as today. Okay. And that's the camera the camera is important. It had an amazing and interesting beginning the camera. Okay. All right. And it was It was a significant form of technology because it was a means whereby individuals were able to capture an image and that image would be permanent in time. Okay. The camera is also important, especially in the civil rights movement, because once again, without the images that were captured, via camera or photography, guess what? The rest of the world and those who were not a part of those activities were probably considering the events just to be fairytales and wild, outrageous stories, if you would. But in order for us to understand the significance of photography, let us check out its early beginnings. In the 19th century. The camera did not. It actually started as an instrument known as a daguerreotype. Can everyone say daguerrotype? students who take my classes in person. They know we're always learning a brand new vocabulary in my class,  a vocabulary that originates from different languages in different parts of the world. Repeat after me. Daguerreotype named after its founder, Louis. Jacques Mande- Daguerre It was the invention of the daguerreotype advanced the possibility of preserving a period. The memory of a place or the faces of a family. If you would Okay, What I like to do now is I’d like to show us how this important piece of technology was utilized during this time, if you would. I think it's impossible for us today to imagine what a revelation the first photographs would have been to people. These mirrors with a memory to record things that looked just like what we saw. People's ideas of time changed completely. For the first time, you would know what your grandparents looked like, even if they died before you were born. To see this process make its place in the lives of ordinary people is to me, the most exciting thing about it. It changed everything in 1814, 1815. You have a man named Nicéphore Niepce, and what he discovered was that asphalt was sensitive to light. He paints the solution on a piece of glass and put an engraving on a piece of paper on top of that, and where the light shine through and exposed that asphalt, it hardened. If you put that piece of glass with the asphalt into a solvent, it will remove the areas that weren't hardened. The earliest photograph we know is on a piece of pewter made by Nicéphore Niepce It's a view from a window. It's from the 1820s. And this image made by asphalt still exists. So that's that's the invention of photography. Niepce knows that he's onto something and he takes Louis Daguerre on as a partner. Daguerre was well known in Paris in the 1820s, you know, well before the 1839 announcement of the daguerreotype. He was a showman. He ran this 75 foot diorama.

Daguerre  himself, wants to make images. He understands how a camera obscure works. Niepce didn't have the money. He didn't have the youth. He didn't have the health. He really kickstarted Daguerre.

When Niepce died Daguerre continued his experiments on his own. By 1839, Daguerre has a system that is fully realized. It's perfect. It's a piece of copper coated with silver. And you have to polish it very well to the point where you have a polish that when you turn the plate towards a darkened room, it looks black and it's fumed with iodine. And when you take it out of the box, it's yellow. That's silver iodide plate is then put into a camera obscure or we would say camera now, but a camera obscure given enough time, it's exposed. When you take it out of the camera in a darkened room, there's nothing to see on the plane. Completely invisible, same yellow coating. But when you put it in another box with a little container of mercury and heat, the mercury, the fumes of the mercury dance upon the plate. And when you withdraw that from the box, you have an image. You still have to fix the image. And fixing is a strange term basically means that you're preventing the plate from changing any more as light strikes the plate and you place it into a solution that fixes it. There's something that we now all call hypo. Daguerreotype is placed into a special case. It's designed to keep air away from the plane because air is what makes silver tarnish. Daguerre would give the process to the government. The government then would allow anyone in the world to do the daguerreotype except England. And so if you wanted to make daguerreotypes in England, you had to pay a fee. This is the easiest ruediger type camera would be the world's first commercially manufactured in cameras. It's the camera, but it's also the system that goes with it. So you need to process, sensitize and process the image. It's essentially an American phenomenon. It was the Americans that embraced it, that used it. It was Americans that were leaving home and striking out further and further west so that people could have something to think about and to reflect on and to remember people by. We are in the photography vault at George Eastman House. This is where all of our photo collections are stored. And here we have our wall of daguerreotypes. We have one of the largest collections  daguerreotypes in the world. Over 3500 daguerreotypes, including 1500 French daguerreotypes, which is the largest collection of French daguerreotypes outside of France. The daguerreotype is both a negative and a positive image at the same time. I think really to see a daguerreotype and get the full effect, you have to be holding it. It's an intimate thing.

It's an intimate thing. It's reflective. And sometimes you do see yourself and it's kind of makes you part of the object. With daguerreotypes, there's infinite detail. There's something just so compelling about daguerreotypes. They're not made with the negatives. So that daguerreotype plate was actually in the room with the person being photographed. So there's something of I read as a person's energy on the plate. It's a very, very permanent process, much more so than than all the processes we grew up with. I can take you to an antique shop that's 15 minutes from here and we can find a daguerreotype made in the 1850s. And guess what? They're still in perfect condition. so a little bit something about how photography started with the daguerreotype. Now, if you look at the camera, if you would that he's standing behind, you'll notice something about the early camera, if you would. Okay. It was just large. It was just bulky, was cumbersome. And believe it or not, in order to take photographs, you also had to have some money as well. So the photos, the photographic process, if you would, it was expensive and it was cumbersome as well. Right. So there was a challenge. Technology advanced rapidly even in the 19th century as it relates to photography, in which photography moved from the large daguerreotype to these smaller items, more portable items, items that number one could be produced in mass quantities. Number two was affordable. And number three, they were because they were easy to produce, they were affordable. They were also smaller. The first is what's known as the business card. And that's what that term in French means, if you would. The very first item that you're looking at is just basically a collection of three and not even 3x5, but more business card type of photography, if you would, that individuals would just hand to one another when they're greeting one another, if you would. The third type of form of photography, if you would, is what's known as the cabinet card. The cabinet card  is more of an index size card. About four, four and a half, by six inches, if you would. A little bit larger than a regular index card. And so we see the image of the cabinet card here up against a bunch of smaller photographs that would fall under the category of the next type of photography, if you would. Okay. Individuals would use these smaller, more affordable and portable forms of photography, if you would, to create personal and public photo albums. Okay. All right. Like this woman here Arabella Chapman from Albany, New York, who was an African-American music teacher who was posing for a portrait from her small this is a small business card type of photograph, if you would. And what they do is this. They would create they would create private photo albums. Does anyone still have photo albums in their home, in their household? I know my parents and grandparents always have photo albums. Well, that's where the concept of photo albums originated from if you would. Individuals would create personal photo albums. Okay, i.e. for the family. But then also they would create public photo albums as well. And with the public photo albums, they would distribute their photographs if you would. Like we distribute and hand out business cards today. Why is this important for African-Americans? Well, what we have to understand in African-American life during the 19th century, being able to take a portrait, if you would, that is let's be clear about the terminology here. These are not just individuals taking pictures. But what these pictures represent are portraits. And what these portraits represent is they were expressions of self empowerment. Okay. In a in a in a society that did not see human beings, did not see African-Americans as human beings. And so when we talk about the significance of photography for African Americans, black Americans from the 19th century use photography as a tool for self empowerment and for social change. We see this gentleman here. His image is in the daguerreotype portrait format. If you would.  To pose for a photograph, became an empowering act for African-Americans. It served as a way to counter act racist caricatures that distorted the facial features depicted African-Americans in subhuman contexts or stereotypical images, if you would, to be able to sit and pose for a portrait. Demonstrating the inherent dignity, value and worth that African-Americans possess possess in a culture that did not see them as inherently of dignity, value and worth if you would so you heard me make mention a moment ago about false and negative and stereo typical depictions of images of African-Americans. Such as what? Well, we have negative caricatures. Negative  caricatures serve the purpose of portraying African Americans as lazy, dishonest, irresponsible, sexual deviants. These were the negative images that were put upon African-Americans during slavery and then even post slavery as well. These are negative caricatures and were also depicted in racist cartoons. They were also depicted in kitchen products of many of the containers in which food came in. During this time period, depicted African-Americans as smiling, happy, submissive and docile, if you would. Okay. The purpose of these negative caricatures, the racist stereotypes, was to portray African-Americans as being subhuman and not equal to the white citizens of society. They serve the purpose or they were used, should I say, to portray African-Americans as enjoying their status as slaves and second class citizens. These are false and negative depictions of African-Americans. It was very common also for white performers to perform in what was called blackface. Okay. And I'm showing these images for a reason, because in today's culture, many of these images are seen as, “what's the problem”? okay. Well, you know, you may go on a university campus, for example, and there may be a fraternity or maybe even a sorority, for example. And one of the pranks that they may pull and this is still happening. You may have some white students who may choose to don the blackface just as a joke. Well, guess what? That's not a funny joke. Matter of fact, that's a cruel joke. Okay. And so that's another reason why I'm showing these images, because guess what? Some of you are not aware of these negative stereotypical images of African-Americans. And guess what? We here at the uni- at the college, we're here to educate you so that you know how to govern yourselves accordingly. Okay. And not be offensive in your conduct and behavior. These stereotypical images of African-Americans also portrayed in radio and in television, one example being the  Amos N’ Andy show once again where African-Americans were seen as sexual deviants, dishonest, untrustworthy, irresponsible, lazy, so on and so forth. Guess what?

Guess what? These images, they are false. They are false. And they are negative. If you understand, say I understand. Excellent, very good. So another reason why I showed you those images was to highlight the importance and the significance of photography for African-Americans. See what the photograph represents, it represents an opportunity for the African-American to change the narrative change the narrative to take grab control of the narrative, to change that narrative. And the photograph represented the opportunity, even to this day represents the opportunity for us to tell our own stories. Another instance in which that occurred was the the development was the the depiction of the African-Americans in communal life as well as in as well as in entrepreneurial ship as well. The development of black photography studios allowed communities greater control to style images that authentically depicted and demonstrated African-American life. One example was an individual, an entrepreneur by the name of Harvey C. Jackson, who established Detroit first Black owned Photography studio in 1915. He collaborated with communities to create cinematic scenes of important events. So in this image here, we see a collective of women in particular who are at a mortgage burning ceremony, and they are at a mortgage burning celebration. And the facility is what's known as the Phillis Wheatley House. And it's not the place where Phillis Wheatley was born and raised. No, it was a home that was started by Phillis Wheatley in Detroit, Michigan, for the purpose of helping homeless women and children, if you would. And the purpose of this photograph is to celebrate that they had paid off the building and they were burning the mortgage, if you would. Okay. So what the image depicts is the academic and the economic accomplishments of not only African-Americans, but of African American women in a society that was not supportive, if you would. The point i’m trying to make here is that in the 19th century, when this new form of technology known as photography started and rapidly developed into a more affordable and portable form of image capturing. Guess what? African-Americans used photography as a means of taking control of their personal narrative and telling the truth about who we are as a people. And so in this image here, I just want us to take a look at a number of the smaller business card type of photography and cabinet cards as well that I talked about a moment ago to show and depict African-Americans in their best light. All right.

Okay. Let me highlight an individual. And matter of fact, let me go on to the Next slide.

Next slide. In the interest of time. Let me highlight an individual who make full use of the this technology known as photography. And that was Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass was born a slave. Okay. Who escaped from slavery, was a very literate man individual, became an advisor to President Abraham Lincoln, was a great orator and an abolitionist. An abolitionist is someone who fights against slavery, if you would, and they are fighting to end and abolish slavery. And so the wonderful thing, many great things about Frederick Douglass, one in particular was that he was the most photographed American during the 19th century. Important to know think about that for a moment. The most photographed American in the 19th century. And he was willing to sit and pose for a portrait with anyone, male or female, black or white, because he believed in the in the unbiased, objective nature of the camera. The beautiful thing also about Frederick Douglass was that, as you'll notice in many of his images, the portraits he controlled, the narrative. Everybody say control the narrative. I think that's really important to understand today. He controlled the narrative, and you can tell that he controlled the narrative because of how he posed in his portraits. Oftentimes, he would look directly into the camera. He never smiled intentionally. He never smiled in any of his portraits. And the reason why he said, because the purpose of the portrait was to portray the African-American with a high sense of dignity, with a high sense of of work, if you would. And he said that portrayal was important in order to end slavery. And he said the fight to end slavery is not a smiling matter. It's not a laughing matter. He said it's a serious matter. And he said that the seriousness of ending slavery, the seriousness of ending the mistreatment of African-Americans, he said the gravity, the seriousness of that issue must be depicted in the portraits that we that he sat for, if you would, oftentimes he looked directly into the camera often rather than looking off in the gaze. If you would. But he presented this strong image, if you would. I mentioned a moment ago that Frederick Douglass was an orator meaning, he presented powerful speeches. And most recently, one of his speeches has become very popular. Especially since the Juneteenth has become a federal holiday here in the United States. More and more African-Americans, rather than celebrating the 4th of July, choose instead to celebrate Juneteenth. And as they're celebrating Juneteenth rather than the 4th of July during Juneteenth and even during the 4th of July. A lot of individuals in the African American community currently will listen to a speech that was given by Frederick Douglass titled What to the Slave Is The fourth is your 4th of July. “What to Slave is your 4th of July?” A very popular speech by Frederick Douglass. Its popularity has experienced a resurgence, if you would. And he says in the speech, he says, I answer a day that reveals to him that is to the slave, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim to him, your celebration is a sham. And I was surprised because this past summer I was somewhere, I was at a gathering. And lo and behold, the family members were like, “doc, you got here this.” You know  Doc “I know you've heard this.” I'm like, What is it? it's Frederick Douglass. “What to your slave is the 4th of July.” And I was just shocked that a speech that was presented during the 19th century has It’s really popular. Photography for Frederick Douglass was used as a form of social protest, as I mentioned, that when he looks into the camera, he is looking into the camera to confront the issue of racism and slavery, if you would, setting the narrative. It is important, setting the narrative. Okay. Today, we call it setting the narrative. Also today, we call it branding. See what branding is, is just essentially setting the narrative that you want to be communicated. And there's a message in that rather than allowing someone else to brand us, rather than allowing someone else to define who we are. It is important and imperative that we first and foremost understand who we are so that we can define who we are to the world and in the world that we live in. Do y’all agree with that?

Do y’all agree with that? It's important that we that we control our narrative if you would. Douglass dies at the end of the 19th century in 1895. Okay. And so we move into the 20th century. And at this point in my presentation, I want to highlight specific photographers who and I want to highlight specific events also during the 20th century, where photography played a significant role in advancing the cause of civil rights. Okay. Let me highlight an individual, for example, by the name of James Van Der Zee. James Van Der Zee. Let me tell you I just read a brand new book that came out last summer about James Van Der Zee. And if any of you are interested in photography, I strongly advise you to read up on the life of James Van der Zee, who was born and raised in Harlem. And although he was not an orator like Frederick Douglass, the idea of controlling one's narrative and control the idea of black people, controlling their narrative and controlling how they portray themselves to the world was important to James Van Der Zee.

because in his pictures and images, he reflected the beauty of African-American life. He he reflected the the inherent dignity and class that is that is resident within African American peoples, if you would. In this very first photograph here, he has a group of Pan-Africanist leaders. And for those of you who are aware of Pan-Africanism, the leader of Pan-Africanism is here on the right hand side, Marcus Garvey. Pan-Africanism teaches in the it teaches the the dignity and self-sufficiency of black people across the African diaspora, if you would. And so for more about Pan-Africanism, you can look up Marcus Garvey, just an amazing life, if you would, along with other of African leaders in you. He's showing this young lady looks like she's a bridesmaid, if you would. But these just reflect some of the images of James Van Der Zee. I'm thinking about a particular image of a man and his wife. And they're dressed head to toe in a fur mink coat, if you would. And they're sitting outside of of their luxury automobile, if you would, in the 1920s, in the 1930s. His photographs provided much pride to the African-American community. This is a photograph of a group of men from the A Phi A Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. Alpha Phi Alpha is. It is a black Greek fraternity, one known as one of the Divine nine, if you would. Okay. As a matter of fact, some years later, Martin Luther King Jr. Became a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha Greek fraternity. If you would. If you want to learn more about that, you can look up that information as well. Okay. So that was early in the 20th century, James Van Der Zee. Okay, alright? And he remained influential in the middle of the 20th century, was a major tragedy. 14 year old boy by the name of Emmett Till, who was living in Chicago, Illinois, with his mother. Mamie decides that he's going to travel to Mississippi for the summer to visit family and friends. His mother was hesitant and reluctant, but she decided to go back to go ahead and allow her son to visit his relatives in the south for the summer while he was in Mississippi. A white woman accused him of whistling at her, accused Emmett of of flirting with her as a result. Four days later, Emmett was kidnaped from his uncle's home in the middle of the night. He was beaten. He was tortured. He was mutilated. And he was dumped in the river. And so his mother flew from Chicago to Mississippi to view her son's body. She then had his body flown back to Chicago, and his mother insisted, talking about the power of photography. Make his mother insisted that the world see and I'm quoting her, what those two white men did to her son. Many of the major publications refused to print it. See, that's the power of controlling the narrative. Okay. And also in this lesson, there's a there's a lesson about the importance of owning your own business. When there was one black publication owned by an African-American man by the name of John H. Johnson. And for those of you who grew up in the 60s, 70s and eighties, you know about Ebony and Jet magazines, Ebony and Jet magazines, for those of us in the African-American community, they are the equivalent of TIME magazine, Newsweek magazine, U.S. News and World Reports. Okay. And thanks to Ebony and Jet magazines, that's probably where a number of us who have a sense of pride and dignity in our African heritage. That's where we got it from. Just seeing images of. Of Ebony and Jet magazine sitting around the house. Jet Magazine agreed to publish the pictures of her son who was mutilated, who was killed by these two white men. The world was shocked. This was 1955, a year before. Actually, probably six months before. Martin Luther King Jr arrives to Montgomery, Alabama. So this was the year before the Montgomery bus boycott. And so this is considered the photograph that changed America forever. And it's also consider the photograph that started or catalyze, if you would, the civil rights movement. Okay, alright. the following year, as I mentioned, was the Montgomery bus boycott. And for those of you who are not aware, the Montgomery bus boycott started when an African-American female by the name of Rosa Parks decided that she was not going to give up her seat to a white man. Okay. Important to note, however, is that before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, there, there was a young African-American girl by the name of Claudette Colvin, I believe her name was, who refused to give up her seat. Okay. But the leaders of the movement decided that Rosa Parks would be the better representative, if you would, in legal proceedings, because, you know, she was married and so on and so forth. And so important to make a long story short, after a 385, 381 day protest, African-Americans during a period of 381 days decided to not ride the busses in Montgomery, Alabama. This brought the city of Montgomery to its knees economically, and as a result, in December of 1956, public transportation in Montgomery, Alabama, became desegregated. Important to note. Right. talking about control of the narrative Well, the individual who covered many of the captured, many of the photographs and images related to the Montgomery bus boycott was a gentleman by the name of Donald Cravens, whose photographs are now part of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. In the interest of time, I'm just going to move rapidly through these photographers. Another photographer is a woman by the name of Jill Freedman. She is known for capturing the images through an article in Time excuse me, Life magazine about the Poor People's Campaign, which was in Washington, D.C. in 1968. Important to note is the poor. The Poor People's Campaign was the campaign that Dr. King, the last campaign that he was working on before he was assassinated, actually was working on that campaign simultaneously with the Memphis sanitation workers strike. And after his assassination, his wife carried on and followed through on the plans for the Poor People's Campaign. What made these images so significant What made these images so significant is the fact that they did they they showed poverty side by side e.

next to images of prosperity i. the White House or in this photograph over here, the National monument, or if you would. And you have these rolls of tents, shanty life beside a lovely landmark. That caption says, if you would. I'm going to move quickly here. Another important photographer who advance the cause of civil rights was James “Spider” Martin. Okay. You see him perched in a tree and he captured many of the images associated with Bloody Sunday. One of the major destinations that we’ll travel to on the civil Rights tour will be to Selma, Alabama. And we will cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Okay. Well, there were three attempts to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. And on the first attempt, the protesters, led by John Lewis, were savagely beaten by the Alabama state troopers. Well, it was “Spider” Martin who captured these images and photographs of of innocent, peaceful protesters such as John Lewis here who were savagely beaten by the Alabama state troopers. These images were captured and presented around the world. And after two more attempts, they successfully cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Another important photographer who would advance the cause of civil rights, a Dr. Dorris Derby, just recently passed. She started out making copies as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, and she said that she learned photography through her dad. Then she ended up becoming a major activist photographer, if you would, for the civil rights movement. And then she eventually became a professor at Georgia State University, where she taught on issues related to civil rights. Okay. Some of her images, many of her images cover cover ordinary African-American life. And many of her images also highlight  the role of women in society, the power and the impact of women in society as well. One of those women hails from a destination, the first stop on our civil rights tour, which is Jackson, Mississippi, a native of Jackson, Mississippi, is Fannie Lou Hamer. Fannie Lou Hamer was an advocate, a staunch advocate for voting rights. And here Dr. Darby was able to capture a photograph of her after she had finished speaking at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, in 1968. A major feat. Monetta Sleet Jr. You heard me a moment ago talk about Jet and Ebony magazine. I remember as a kid seeing those copies of Jet and Ebony magazine just sitting around our house. We would just get so excited whenever my dad would bring a new copy and they seem like they would come out every Friday. They were weekly publications. Well, I remember flipping through the pictures and photographs, and I would always as a kid and a teenager see the name Monetta Sleet Jr. Okay, well, Monetta Sleet Jr He was a major photographer for a number of publications, including Life and Time magazine. But then also he was a frequent contributor to the Ebony and Jet Enterprise. And he would this picture is important and significant because this is called the photograph that almost never happened. It almost never happened because when Mrs. King, the picture represents is Mrs.

King and her daughter, King, and their daughter at the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It is the photograph that almost never happened because as Mrs. King was making funeral preparations, and when she looked at the press roster, she noticed that there were no photographers from African American publications. She noticed that none of the photographers were African-Americans. And she said she said, find me African-American photographers representing African-American publications. She said, Well, we will have no photographers at all. Okay. As a result Monetta Sleet Jr, attended, he captured this image and won the Pulitzer Prize in journalism for this image, for this picture, if you would. He made history by doing so because I believe he was the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize. And I believe he was also the first individual to win it for journalism as well. Okay, Monetta Sleet Jr, just a phenomenal individual. Really phenomenal individual. We have local photographers. R.C Hickman from Dallas, Texas, if you would, who focused on education and social issues. His colleague from Fort Worth, Texas, Calvin Littlejohn, who was able to capture a photograph of Dr. King at Love Field in October of 1959. Okay. And then we have Ernest Wither, Ernest Wither is an interesting individual because he covered through his photography, he covered as many as 60 years. 60 years of archival footage was captured by Ernest Withers, and he walked very closely with Dr. King. He captured images from the Emmett Till trial, as a matter of fact, I believe was the only African-American photographer who was allowed to take images and pictures in the Emmett Till trial. Okay. He captured images from the Emmett Till trial, the Montgomery bus boycott, the March on Washington. All those incidents in Birmingham, as well as as well as, you know, Major League Baseball and the Memphis Blues scene. Okay. A little bit about him in a moment. But what I want to do is let me see. Okay. Yeah. So those are some images captured by Ernest Withers. Okay. First image is of Dr. King and his colleague Ralph Abernathy, as they are riding the desegregated busses in Montgomery after the court ordered decision. And then the second image is of the sanitation workers strike in Memphis, Tennessee. Okay. You see my sources before I take a turn it over to answers and questions. Here's what I would like to do. I mentioned something about Ernest Withers. Let me give you a little bit more information about Ernest Wither here  Photographer Ernest captured some of the most indelible images of the civil rights era. The photo of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr riding one of the first desegregated busses in Montgomery, Alabama. The iconic image of black sanitation workers carrying I am a man signs in Memphis and he was the only photojournalist to document the entire trial in the murder of Emmett Till. But Withers was also an FBI informant funneling information to the bureau about the civil rights movement and its leaders. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Wesley Lowery joins us now to talk about his new podcast called Unfinished Ernie Secret, which explores the government's efforts to infiltrate and disrupt the civil rights movement and the man who was caught in the middle. It's great to have you here. The podcast is phenomenal. Thank you so much. I'm glad you're enjoying it. So tell me more about Ernie Withers, who he was apart from his life as an FBI informant, because his biography in so many ways is a cross-section of Memphis history. It's a cross-section of American history. He's this World War two vet, the first one of the first black cops in Memphis, and then he becomes a freelance photographer. And Ernest Withers is fascinating. And he gets into photography in part while he's in the armed services. He would take photos and some of the other enlisted men and sell them to them so they could send them back to their wives and girlfriends. Or maybe both their wife and girlfriend, depending on the guy selling them, not giving. Correct. Right. Well, he was he was a smart, industrious guy. Right. And so he when he gets back to Memphis, there's a stint as a police officer, but then becomes essentially the black photographer in Memphis. And so he documented everything. Homecomings very passes, just everyday black life. He also was obsessed with Negro League baseball. And so he would travel and shoot photos of all of these black baseball players across the country and also Memphis has Stax Records at it. And so he photographed so many musicians, be it Elvis and Aretha Franklin and Tina and Ike and and so many folks. And so, in fact, when you go to Memphis, his old studio on Beale Street is now a museum where you can see this remarkable collection of photographs by Ernest. And how did he find his way into those moments where he was so close to Dr. King and so many other icons of the civil rights movement? Ernest with us is probably best known for his civil rights work. He photographed basically every major campaign across the South. He's present when James Meredith is integrating Ole Miss. He's in the room when two men are being charged with the murder of Emmett Till. He's there when King is riding the first desegregated bus. And part of it was that he was just kind of everywhere. He was someone you trusted. He was a piece of the furniture and he was someone who, especially the civil rights leaders knew and respected and believed would tell the story accurately that would document what was happening. And so people were happy to have Ernest around. You know, Andrew Young, one of King's chief lieutenants, told us, you know, that they always answered Ernest's call if he wanted information. They always gave it to him. And all the while, he was living this Second Life as an FBI informant during what is now this infamous period of American history where the FBI was involved in domestic surveillance, illegal domestic surveillance. Why would an Ernest Withers be valuable to a J. Edgar Hoover at the time? So we have to remember, the FBI at the time had no black agents right? They couldn't just show up at a civil rights meeting. In fact, this was a time when FBI agents were particularly being recruited by Hoover to be, you know, white guy Republicans from Omaha, right at a specific look in. And we love Omaha. Right. But you know what I mean, Right? They had a very specific clean cut look. That is not the best workforce. If the thing you're trying to do is infiltrate a black civil rights movement that's playing out primarily in urban centers across the country. Right. And so these human assets became vitally important for the FBI, people who could be in a room, who knew everyone's name, who would introduce themselves, who could ask for someone's address and it not be suspicious. And so what Ernest ends up being is a sponge of information. Now, he already was one, right? He was a local photographer. He knew everybody and and their mother and their cousin. He knew where they lived, you know, when their birthday was right. So he had a lot of that information. But now the FBI was able to kind of prime him for it and to ask for questions. You know, a lot of what Ernest did was he sold them photographs, photographs he would take otherwise and that he might otherwise sell to the Associated Press or to the black paper. He'd shoot a protest all day. He'd get all the caption information, and then he'd sell the roll of film to the FBI. And now, suddenly, at a time before the Internet, before a lot of the databases we now have in law enforcement now has they now have photographs and names and in some cases, addresses and phone numbers for people who they otherwise might not have known how to track. One of the primary threads that runs through the podcast is sort of the moral ambiguity of the day that in many ways Mr. Withers didn't have a choice, that when the federal government comes and says, you know, we want information that only you can provide. He didn't really have a choice. It's interesting, right, when you listen to Ernest Withers family and the one time he ever addressed this before he passed, Right. There's an insistence that he was not an informant in the worst sense of the word. Right. That he was someone who was selling photographs, that the FBI was a customer like anyone else, and that also, what was he supposed to do? He's a black man at a time when black men don't even have the right to vote. The federal government has come to him and said we need to stop the communist infiltration, because that was the pretense under which Hoover harassed the civil rights leaders, including King. And here you have this black man with six children to feed who's not particularly wealthy. And how do we gauge now, so many years later if he thought he had a real choice when he was asked to do these things or if he did it? As I was listening to the podcast, my ears perked up when I heard the voice of Ambassador Andrew Young. The reason I bring him up is because he told you that he wasn't surprised that there was someone spying on the work that they were doing, that there was an FBI informant in their midst. But he also suggested that he didn't care all that much, that in his mind he had nothing to hide. The SCLC at the time had nothing to hide. And as he saw it, it was good to be super trans parent, whether it was with the FBI or whomever, about the work that they were doing. That is what Andrew Young said. It's actually interesting cause I've gotten a lot of feedback on that particular quote from people that I know. I know modern day activists who are like, What's wrong with Andrew Young? Is he serious? Can you believe that effort from other people? I guess that makes sense. But those activists are pretty young. Yeah, so they are right? Yeah. And I, I think it cuts in a few different directions. The first is that a lot of the people from the time, people who knew Ernest in real time have been pretty forgiving of of this information that's come out. Part of it, I think is that so much time has passed. Right. A lot of this is in in the rearview mirror. There's also a reality where as frustrated and upset as people are about the FBI surveillance, the idea of holding Ernest personally accountable for what was clearly the sins of one of the most powerful institutions in American society is something I think a lot of the black activists are willing to, you know, kind of be kind about. But there are other activists who are furious with him who are really upset. Dick Gregory, when this news initially broke, called him a Judas. I do wonder if we could go back in time and interview an Andrew Young, 40 years younger, 50 years younger, if perhaps he might be less generous to Ernest Withers in real time as he is in retrospect. It's an interesting question. Wesley Lowery The podcast is a fascinating look at a really important part of American history. Congratulations. Thanks so much for having me. It's available everywhere, wherever you listen to your podcast. Wherever you listen to your podcast. Appreciate you. So I show that to highlight the importance of photography, the importance and the significance of photography in not only in African-American life, but even the importance of photography to the government in general. I'm trying to close this. okay. And so that's what I want us to understand is the importance and the significance of photography in the civil rights movement, but also the importance and the significance of photography for entrepreneurs, particularly for African-American entrepreneurs, but then also the importance of photography in a social, social and political context as well. Okay, Hopefully you've gained something out of this presentation. Okay. Are there any questions? Let me take a few questions in the bit of time that we have remaining. Questions, questions, questions, questions. Oh the George Eastman Museum? Yeah. Good question, because that's related to the Eastman Kodak Company. Okay. Okay. The question is, where's the Eastman George Eastman Museum? Where is it located? And you know what? Let me let me look that up and find out, okay? Yeah. Yeah. Good question. I was so busy focusing on. Okay, the narrative and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Other questions. Audience Member: Now, this Spider man Dr. Howard: James “Spider” Martin, Audience Member: I just thought that was a unique position that he took, that he was going to do whatever it took in order to show the world what was actually really happening. Dr. Howard: Yeah. Interesting thing about James “Spider” Martin as a photographer  people think he got his nickname Spider because he was a small, he was a short man. He was about five, five foot two in height. And he was a diminutive man as well. He only weighed about 120, 125 pounds. And so people called him Spider. They think that's how he got the nickname Spider, when in actuality he said that as a baby he had contracted  I think it was pneumonia. And as a result of his illness, you know, it affected his- And so when he was in school, bigger students would pick on him. And so he learned how to maneuver and get out of the way of the bullies who were picking on him. And I'm presuming based on that photograph of him sitting perched in a tree, I'm presuming he learned how to climb trees as a result of that, you know, And so that but but they said his resourcefulness, King said and he told Spider this and this was in spiders memoir. He said that after the I believe it was after the Bloody Sunday campaign, he told Spider he said, Spider, if it were not for you and the pictures that you're taking, he said people would not believe that this was happening, you know, And so he was really pleased with spiders work and he gave him a lot of the credit for helping to advance the cause of the civil rights movement. And King was also happy. And what he also noted, he said that were it not for the photographs and images captured by Spider Martin. He said that the passage of the voting rights bill, the signing of that bill by President Lyndon Baines Johnson into legislation, he said, it would have been probably years delayed. Audience Member: Last question.  Dr. Howard:  Yeah, go for it. Yes, ma'am. Audience Member: Why aren't those pictures shown in color? Why are they always shown in black or white when my understanding I got pictures of my parents and stuff during that time they were in color. Dr: Howard: Yeah. (Inaudible) Why are the pictures in black and white? you know, you know, that's a good question for when you visit the Eastman Kodak Company when we find out the location. Okay.

All right. Audience Member: you mentioned really about controlling the narrative.

 These photos, it's my guess to make these mostly more timeless. And in that way, it's historic. And in that way we'll always remember perpetuity about what's going on. Dr. Howard: That's that's a good point. I'm not so sure because there are some images, some photographs that are in color. For example, when we see images of Dr. King marching, whether he's marching with his wife, Coretta, you know, or whether he's marching with his colleagues, Ralph Abernathy, some of those photographs and images, they are in color and so, you know, it could have been an issue of cost, you know. Yeah. You know, and. Yeah, but that's a good question. Very good question.

Yeah. Yeah. Other questions. Other question. Good, good. I have a question. I have I would like for three of you, share with me, share with the audience three of you, one thing that you learned from this presentation today, three of you, three of you. One, two, hold your hands up high If you're if you're ready to do it. Okay. Yes, go ahead. Yes, ma'am. Ma'am? Yeah.

Yeah. Ladies first. Okay, speak loudly. Audience Member: One thing I learned was the importance of controlling a narrative. Dr. Howard: The importance of controlling a narrative. Okay, good. Excellent. Very good. How about you, sir? Audience Member: Photography started in 1940. Dr. Howard: Okay Yeah, photography started yeah, in 18. More like the 19th century. Yeah, 1840. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good. Excellent. Very good. Okay. Yes. Audience Member: How  Frederick Douglass never smiled in his photos. Dr. Howard: Yeah. Yeah. How he never smiled. And why is it that he never smiled in his photographs? Audience Member: Cause if he smiled, it would have seemed like he was okay and happy with everything. Dr. Howard: Yeah. Seemed like he. Yeah. Yeah. It would have appeared that he would have been happy. He did not want to present the image of being a happy, docile slave, if you would. And his goal was to abolish slavery. So. Yeah, very good. Excellent. Very good. All right, good, good, good. If this was a productive time, you know, give yourselves a round of applause. Give yourselves a round of applause. All right. Okay.

Good afternoon, everyone. Today, we have a pleasure to have Professor.

Rochelle Powell.

And Professor Sean Mixon to give a presentation. Dr. King's therefore Birmingham jail, a social life with the philosophical perspective and I have standing next to me the magnificent Professor Mixon, who is a graduate of Cedar Valley College with two associate degrees, one in Arts and another music composition here, and a B.A. in Philosophy from UTA in Arlington. Later, a master philosophy degree for the University of Dallas is a analytic philosopher and podcaster.

On the dart decoder was Sean Mixon. I'm going to check out your podcast. So that's very good. So let's give another one coming around for us for Professor Sean Mix, thank you for being like you, Dr. View, and thank you all for being here. We will take a brief survey into some of the results of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

We will look at a letter from Birmingham city jail. So just to give you a preview of where we're going, I want to kind of make some comments on the historical context which led to Dr. King's writing this letter. We would look at some definition of unjust laws that Dr. King gives. What does it mean for a law to be unjust?

We will move into Dr. King's argument. He's he's given reasons to support his conclusion. And finally, we want to look at some implications of Dr. King's letter for our society in our times today. So some historical context. On April the 10th, 1963, Judge W.A. Jenkins issues a temporary injunction ordering Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and respondents not to protest without a permit.

Specifically, they were not to parade or procession or other public demonstrations without a permit. The city denied Reverend Shuttlesworth a permit using a code named Section 1159, which required demonstrators who planned to demonstrate on streets or public ways to get a permit. King and Shuttlesworth was arrested on April the 10th, April 12, 1963. Reverend Shuttlesworth would go on to do four and a half months in jail, and King would post bail, leave jail, be convicted of contempt of court on April the 26th, 1963, and four years later, he and Ralph Abernathy would serve five days in Birmingham jail.

It's interesting to note that this conviction was later overturned by the Supreme Court, and they ruled that the conviction of Dr. King and Reverend Shuttlesworth was unconstitutional. Since we had a right to gather peacefully in protest. So what is Dr. King's definition of an unjust law? This is very important for his argument. So Dr. King says that an unjust law is a law that is not consistent with the moral law.

The moral law was this idea that there was a law that was common to all people by virtue of us being human beings, that there was a sense that some things were right and some things were wrong. We often call this conscience. And Dr. King says that any unjust law does not fit together with the moral law. Also, Dr. King said that a law that suggests that people do not have equal value is an unjust law.

He writes, All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregate a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Also, a just and unjust law was any statute which is binding on one citizen group but not another. He writes a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey, but does not make binding on itself.

So here's King's argument. King's first premise is bless you. If a law is binding on some citizens, but not others, and devalues the worth of one citizen group, then it it is unjust. The moral law applies to everyone by virtue of our human nature. And this means that everyone has moral worth and value. Why is it wrong for me to mistreat you is because you, as a human being, you have more intrinsic moral value.

So any any mistreatment I give to you are imposed on you devalues the moral worth that you actually have. So thus any law which privileges one group over and above another violates the moral worth of those who are oppressed. To. To think about this, you you must reflect on the fact that since the moral law reflects our moral worth, the unjust laws which are aligned to the moral law will also reflect our moral value.

And any law that diminishes the value and the significance that I have as a person, that law is unjust according to King. If a law is unjust, then it shouldn't be followed. This is another premise in Dr. King's argument. Since we have an obligation to preserve the moral worth of our neighbors, then any law which violates a person's moral significance should not be followed.

Now, King wants to argue that segregation statutes are binding to black people, but not to white people, and destroys the self worth of black black people. I want to read an excerpt from this from King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. To me, this this is this excerpt strongly demonstrates the premise in Dr. King's argument that secretary segregation laws and statutes diminished the value that we had as human human beings, he writes.

But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers a wheel and drown your sisters and brothers at William, when you have seen hate, feel, policeman, curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters. When you see the vast majority of your 20 million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society, when you suddenly find your tongue twisted in your speech, stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Fun Town is closed to colored children and the ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people. When you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading white and colored.

When your first name becomes nigger, your middle name becomes boy however old you are and your last name becomes John. And your wife and mother are never given the respect. The title of Ms.. When you are harried by day and hunted, hunted by night, by the fact that you are a Negro living constantly at tip toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are playing with inner fears and out of resentments when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of no badness, then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

In this excerpt, Cain addressing his critics who say that King, as a clergyman, should not be advocating for four for a demonstrators and protesters to break the law, to do sit ins to this letter is King's response to that. And in the excerpt, King is showing that the Jim Crow laws segregation statute acts were demeaning to African-Americans and to everyone else who experienced them.

That did destroyed the personality of black people and gave them low self-esteem, and that this effect of devaluing the human worth and the inhuman significance of of people, of black people specifically, so that these laws were unjust because they didn't lift up the human personality, they tore it down. So we can summarize King's argument as follows If a law is binding on some citizens, but not others, and devalues the worth of one citizen group, then it is unjust.

Premise one. Premise two If the law is unjust, then it shouldn't be followed. Premise three Segregation statutes are binding to black people, but not to white people and destroys the self worth of black people. Therefore, segregation statutes should not be obeyed. So I want to look at some implications of Dr. King's view. How might his letter instruct our thinking and our actions and today's society in times?

First, according to King, the moral law given by God offered a basis for just treatment of all people. Despite political, social or racial differences. There were white clergymen who thought that King should not break the law by doing sit ins and protesting. King was a black clergyman who thought that he should break the laws because those laws were unjust.

Yet. KING since he thought that human beings as a whole were united on the basis of our inherent and intrinsic more were worth which is given to us by God. All men are created equal and all men are made equal. Men and women. So since there was this foundation for our moral work, then that means we had a basis to treat each other with respect.

Even if we differ. This contrasts with modern society because and a lot of public conversations in the domain of ideas, we see a lot of hostility toward people who have different points of view. And many times we don't see the appreciation of one another as human beings. We identify people based off of their political views because of their race, their religion, etc., etc..

But Dr. King found in this law that is this moral, immoral significance that is given by God. He found a foundation whereby he could treat everyone equally. The same with respect.

The second implication is that just laws aligned to the moral code and are binding on all citizens. Unjust laws are not. So as time progresses, we we will find ourselves in situations to where we have new laws and we will always have the question, is this law a just law or is this law an unjust law? Dr. King gives us a test by which we can test these laws.

We can ask the question, does this law apply to all people or does this law only apply to some people? If the largest applies to some people, then by definition that law is unjust.

Finally, just laws can be misapplied. It was a just law. Section 1159, which the state of Alabama issued to to maintain order and keep demonstrators from just blocking the streets. That was a just law. And Dr. King says this in his letter to Birmingham jail. However, he said it was unjustly used. So adjust law can be misapplied because it was applied to them.

Although they walked on the sidewalks, they weren't in the streets, they weren't blocking roadways or anything, but they prevented them from getting a permit, which would have allowed them to protest by saying that what they their protest was unjust. So Dr. King emphasizes that although the law is just, you still can use it in an inappropriate way. So these are some implications.

Thank you for your time and thank you.

Well, I'm Professor Powell ratio. Powell and I am a sociology instructor. I've been with Dallas College for 15 years and interested. Interestingly enough, all of the 15 years have been here at North Lake. But this year I moved over to Field and so now I'm house over at East Feel and I'm super excited to be here to to share with you some information and give you a sociological perspective of Dr. King's letter from Birmingham Jail.

And so we're going to just kind of give you a little background. Our Dr. A professor mixing did a great job of share with you the historical perspective of the letter. And so I don't have to do too much of that. But we'll talk just a little bit about that. And then we're going to look at the sociological perspective that I believe applies to this letter.

And then we're going to look at Dr. King's own words. Just give a brief little conclusion and then I'll open it up for any questions that you may have. So, you know, there are many sociological perspective that are woven throughout this letter from from Dr. King. And let me take a moment to say, if you've not had an opportunity to read the letter, I encourage you to do so because it's very enlightening.

And I know while many of us have heard of Dr. King and we've heard different speeches from him, this this letter is, I think, a different offers a whole different insight to his mindset. You know, during that time in Birmingham when there was so much violence going on. So I definitely encourage you to read it if you have not had a chance to do so.

So we're looking at these sociological perspectives. Okay. So we think about a sociological perspective as this tool for analyzing social life. How do we behave? What do we do? How do we communicate? Right? So this these perspectives gives us a viewpoint, right? It's like glasses. The lenses that we're looking through. And so we want to use these perspective.

So three of the most popular in in sociology and also the important ones in sociology is structural, structural functionalism, conflict theory and symbolic in action. So we're going to talk about those and see how they relate to Dr. King's letter. And so when we're thinking about these three theories, we need to look at them and understand that some two of them are specifically structural functionalism and conflict theory are from this macro perspective.

So they're looking at society in this big, big view of success of society and the issues surrounding that. Right. So they they give this macro perspective. And then you have symbolic interaction, which takes a more intimate a micro perspective because it's about the individual and the meaning that the individual gifts, the things. And we're going to talk more about that.

So just understand we've got this big picture view, but we also have this this smaller view that's a little bit more intimate structural functionalism. So when we're thinking about this this what this theory does, it's actually in the name structural, functional, and it says it sees these is sometimes called functionalism, but it sees society as a structure with interrelated, interrelated parts designed to meet the needs of society.

What does that mean? So basically, we have these systems, these structures in our society that when they are doing what they're supposed to do, then they are functioning right in the name. They're functioning to help us to be a society. And so what are some of those systems? Well, we have our education system, we have health care, we have the criminal justice system.

We have our government, we have the economy, we have the environment. We have a lot of different systems going on. Right. And we are just the last few years, we all experience a huge breakdown of those systems. Right. The pandemic that we experience now, the pandemic was, you know, a different thing because that was when almost every system stopped.

Right? Schools weren't teaching. So our education system was broken down. Hospitals were refusing patients because they didn't have room. So that was not working. Government entities were not operating. So all those things were just going on. Right. But, you know, we can see that it doesn't normally happen that way. But often what will happen is that there will be something in one of those systems that will break.

Okay. And Dr. King does so very eloquently in his letter. He talks about these different systems and these different structures and the breakdown of them. And we're going to talk a little bit more about that. So how do we see functionalism? Sorry, I went too far. How do we see functionalism in his letter? Okay. Structural functionalism. Well, first we see it through this interconnectedness of society.

Right. Remember, we say that the functionalism are these parts of society that help us to function. So he talks about that, but he helps to make those those connections. He also talks about social order, right? When we're a society as a society, rather, we need social order, we need processes to be able to again, the goal is to function as a as a society.

So there has to be some sort of order. But he talks about that, the role of institutions. I named a few of them Education, health care, right. Politics, environment, economic system, all of those different things. He delves into that in this letter. And he is very straightforward in in his comments and his concerns about those structures, those institutions in our society we talk a little bit about or he also delves into what we call manifest functions and latent functions.

So manifest functions, these are the intended consequences. So the things that, you know, when we have a system, right, these these entities that I've mentioned, when they're doing what they're supposed to do, that's the manifest function, okay? But sometimes things happen as a result of that. And these are not necessarily bad things, but they're they they come about as not as a it wasn't intended, but it's an unintended consequence of of whatever the entity is.

And so but what Dr. King does in his letter, he takes a little bit further because he actually talks about the dysfunction that's going on. Right? So he talks about, yeah, this is how things should be, but let's talk about how they actually are. And so he's saying these systems that we have, the education system is is just broken and our criminal justice system is just broken.

And he goes on to explain that. So let's look in his own words. And these are know statements taken directly from his letter. Again, I encourage you to read it and kind of show you, from my point of view, how he is coming from the lens of structural functionalism, Right when he's talking about these things. So one of the things he says is I am cognizant of the interrelate relatedness of all communities and states.

So remember, he's in Birmingham right there protesting. We already heard a little bit earlier that he was denied the permit. He was denied They were denied permit, you know, to to to demonstrate their right. But as a result of them going ahead with the demonstration, the city officials released a torrent of violence toward those protesters. There were the police dogs attacked the the the protesters, the the fire department.

They unleashed the water hoses on the protesters. Right. They were beaten by the police. And unfortunately, it was involving women, children, you know, men, you know, elderly and the young, younger, like. Right. But he's saying, hey, this is this is connected. And what is going on here in Birmingham? It applies to me. Right. One of the things that when you read the letter, you understand that Dr. King wrote this letter as a response to some clergyman who was concerned about him being in Birmingham and about his the resulting violence of him being in there.

So he wrote a response to them. And and so he's saying, Hey, I understand what's going on in Birmingham. It applies to me, even though I live in Atlanta, because why do you where society okay. And it's all related. It's all connected. It's not this isolated thing, right? He says whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. So again, he's saying we're all connected.

So yeah, I may not live here and you may not want me here, but I have a role to play in what's going on. I have a vested interest in what's going on in Birmingham, and that's why I'm here because again, remember, he's responded to this letter or to the concerns of these clergymen who wrote to him. He says injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Again, he's saying, this is why I'm here. This is why we were protesting. Okay, He's acknowledging that. So again, this functionalism he's connecting, this is saying communities across the country are connected, even though what's happening right now is physically happening in specifically in Birmingham, Alabama, is related. Two things are happening in Mississippi, things that are happening in Tennessee, things that are happening in Georgia.

And he's making that connection for them. He also says any nonviolent campaign in any nonviolent campaign, there are four basic steps. The collection of facts to determine whether their injustice exists negotiation, self-gratification and direct direct action. So this is that the social order that he talked about, right, that that is seen in through functionalism. So he said, I understand there's a process.

We don't just use. So go out, you know, blazing and get try to create change. First you determine, yeah, there's something wrong. And then you decide you want to change. And then you go about it. He said, We tried negotiation, so that was in there. He met, you know, the civil rights movement. It had been going on. So they've been talking to leaders and trying to make change, but nothing happened.

So as an almost as a last resort, they said, hey, we have got the protest. You left us with no choice. Right. But he's acknowledged. He said, I understand order of society where we are following that order, but we're doing the things. It's the people in Birmingham that's not following that order. Right. Because you've met a peaceful protest with this unimaginable violence.

Right. He also goes on to say lukewarm acceptance is acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. Now, this is where he is really concerned specifically about these clergymen, because what he's saying is here in his letter, he mentions the the KKK, the Ku Klux Klan, I think he mentions at one time. Right. But he's not really concerned about the KKK in this letter because we all know what they stand for.

Right. They're not hiding. So what he's talking about, he said there's this lukewarm acceptance. These are the people who will blame the protester for the violence and not the police who set the dogs. You know, who set the dogs on the protests. Right. The words who are not you just sitting by and you're you know, you heard about these unjust laws that you're saying it's okay.

You know, so he was really concerned about that. And again, the mere fact that these clergymen questioned his presence there meant that they were, you know, part of this lukewarm acceptance. Right. So you saying I shouldn't even be here? You know what I'm telling you? We're here to fight for justice for everybody. But you saying we shouldn't be here, Right.

And so you're looking at that functionalism. So there are other examples as you read that that letter. But this is just a few that really for me hone in on the fact that, you know, I can see that functionalism that Martin Luther King is talking about society and and these systems and it's just broken. Right. And he's he's acknowledging that.

So now we look at conflict theory. This is that second sociological theory. So this perspective says is characterized by a power dynamic that creates conflict. Now, you're going to have conflict anywhere. Right? But remember, this is from that macro perspective. This is that big picture perspective. So this is not two people fighting, right? This is this system that's in place that is that there is this power dynamic, that it is so unequal.

Okay. It emphasizes the role of inequality. So that's a big element. That's a key element, in fact, of conflict theory is that there has to be some level of inequality. And we're talking about the civil rights movement, right? We're talking about injustice. We're talking about unjust laws. We're talking about racism and discrimination. There's that inequality. And so he taught, you know, Martin Luther King Junior talks about that in his letter.

This this unequal this inequality, rather, is about the distribution of resources. So it not it is not necessarily about limited resources. It's about the distribution of resources. Right. Because, well, what happens is the resources are not distributed equally, so everyone doesn't have access to all of the same things. Therein lies the conflict, right? Because it creates that level of inequality it talks about.

So access and control those with power, they want to keep control. Those without power said, hey, can I just at least have my share? Right? And so they're that's why they're protesting for the right to vote. So they're saying, can we at least have the right to vote? Okay, We you know, you're making laws just so unjust. The point is, African-Americans are not part of that process because we're not allowed to vote.

Right. So he's acknowledged that. And again, it is that power dynamic. So it's there. The class struggle. You know, he he talks in the letter about the lack of resources and economic opportunities, particularly for people in Alabama. And so he and he acknowledges that. So there's the issue of class. When you think about this, there's this the struggle for, you know, shaping that social order.

And again, he talked a little bit about a minute ago, but he's tried to to deal with that social order, but he's being confronted with these forces that are stopping him at every turn, like putting him in jail for charging him with for parading without a permit. Right. So he's here trying to, you know, take a stand for social justice and he's being jailed because he doesn't have a permit for a parade.

Okay. And then it talks about the different groups with competing interests. So, again, you have people in politics, you have people in business. So everybody has a has a different interest, you know, But it all fleshes out the same in that there's always some level of inequality. The people in business, particularly at this time, they were making, you know, doing things where they were preventing, you know, black people from visiting their establishments.

Right. That's why they had the sit ins at the lunch counters demand, you know, not necessarily to be served. They just wanted to have that have that access. Right. So people are looking to, you know, for that competing, you know, competing interests. So let's look and see how possible to for. So when we look at Martin Luther King's letter, how do we see conflict theory in that letter, that power imbalance?

I talked a little bit about that. But we're going to look at some actual, you know, his words that demonstrate. Yes, we're talking about this power imbalance, institutional racism. Again, he talks about that, the class struggle that's prominent in his letter and then that direct confrontation. He talks about that, that the protests are face, so in his own words, a conflict theory.

So these are some of the things, again, to quote taken directly from the letter that demonstrates his awareness of this conflict theory. Now, he may not have called it conflict theory, but, you know, that is what it is or what it was. It is unfortunate that the white power structure in this city left the Negro community with no other alternative.

So remember, he's responding to the clergymen who are saying, why are you even here? You are an outsider. Why are you coming here causing this trouble? So he's saying you guys left us with no choice, right? We didn't cause any trouble. We were merely protesting. But this is the. We have no other options, right? Because of the white power structure.

So again, the inequality, he says we know that the freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed. So again, he's justifying his reason for being there. He's justifying his reason for protesting, because if we don't ask, you're not going to give it. And we basically have been asking. So we have to somehow demanded.

Right. Because you're not just going to give it to us voluntarily. So again, he's responding to those clergymen. Then he says Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. So he's again acknowledging there are problems here in Birmingham. Okay. So while the clergyman may want to look at Birmingham and in isolation, you know, he's seeing it for what it is and he's calling them out on it and saying, hey, you know, you may choose to ignore it, but I'm going to I'm going to put it right back in your face.

So he acknowledged that, hey, this is what's going on here again. So that's segregation. It's about that inequality. And so that's what that is. An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself. So, again, you heard about that from a little bit earlier, that, you know, the majority and in that time were white.

The white majority are making these laws and they're making the laws that say these laws apply to you, They don't apply to us. Again, therein lies the inequality. So that's why you're seeing that conflict theory just all throughout this letter. He also talks about said the it's an ugly record of it's ugly regular police brutality is known in every section of this country.

So again, because the clergyman talked about the violence, but he talked about the violence on the side of the protesters. So he said, hey, is the police to have the record of brutality? And everybody knows it. So he's again, he's pointing to these clergymen saying just not, you know, living in reality or we have two different realities going on.

But I'm going to tell you what the true facts are. Right. And he was very direct in what he was saying. And then finally, he says, throughout the state of Alabama, all types of conniving methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters. So again, it's about that inequality. He goes on to say in his letter, he talks about how they are communities in and throughout Alabama, but particularly in Birmingham, where you have mostly black people living and not a single person person registered to vote.

So he said, So he's saying, you've done all these tricks, write these all of these rules and regulations and all of these impediments that you put in place to stop people from registering to vote. So again, it's about that inequality. And he pointed it out. And so again, guys, just take it and think about that just for a second, that these are Dr. Martin Luther King's words to other ministers.

And so I think that that's kind of a little eye opener, at least for me, when I read this letter, is that he was writing these words, you know, to other to other clergymen, Right. To other men of God. So he was thinking, so the last thing that we'll look at is the micro level theory, symbolic interaction, symbolic interaction.

It says it focuses on the meaning attached to human interaction, both verbal and non-verbal answers to symbols. Basically, what this says is that we as individuals, we have the we give meaning to things and the meaning we give something. It determines how we behave. It determines how we interact with someone. Right. And so it's very possible that two people can give different meanings to the two of two to something right.

So they're going to behave differently, right? They're going to use different, you know, the language that's going to be used may be different. And it's okay. You can have your perspective. But again, put this in context. If you have Dr. King responding to these clergymen who said, you know, why are you here, you came here causing trouble. Right.

They're not acknowledging all conflict that's going on and all the issues that are going on in in in Birmingham. They're trying to place all the blame on Dr. King and the protesters. So what does Dr. King do? He uses this powerful language in of itself. He is deliberate in his words. He's purposeful in his words. And the language says in here, I think and I could be mistaken, but I believe is some of this is for me, some of the strongest language I've ever heard from Dr. King, Right.

Where he's talking about, you know, you know, the police brutality and so forth. So when you look at that, this, you know, he talks about the sorry guys, you know, so the language that he use, he uses the nonviolent protest then of itself. And so he talks about that, how we're at the, you know, at the end of our rope.

This is the last thing that we the last things that we can take if to do this nonviolent protest. So that is a a symbol in others. So the injustice is a symbol. It says there's this white power structure going on. Right. And so it means something. And he's trying to break through that. The very fact that he wrote this letter, that's a symbolic act.

Right. Because he could have ignored the the the clergyman, but he was purposeful. Again, in writing this letter. He even acknowledged in the letter, he said this is the longest letter I think I've ever written. But he said, I'm in jail. I have all this, I have nothing else to do. And so this is the result. So the letter is pretty lengthy.

But he he acknowledges that. But he used this as an opportunity to to address all the ills that are going on, not only in Alabama, in Birmingham, but in society as a whole. He tries to tap into the shared values. You know, he's a minister, these clergymen, they're ministers, so he's trying to tap into that and see if there can be some common ground so they can better understand his perspective.

Right. And then he tries to tap into their conscience and he tries to say, you know, hey, let me explain to you what's going on here and why we're doing what we're doing. So maybe you can better empathize with us. Maybe you can better see our point of view. So he's trying to he's trying to tap into that.

So let's look at how he's how symbolic interaction is is shown in this letter. So, again, these are his direct words from the letter. So first he says, I am gravely disappointed in the white moderate. Right. So the white moderate, that's the clergyman who wrote him. He said, you're the white moderate. Again, we know about the overt racist that are out there.

Right. But it's you, the clergymen, who are blaming the protesters. It's you who the clergymen who are questioning me or why I'm here, Right. When all I'm asking you is for equality. Okay. He goes on, He says, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leader leadership in this community would see the justice of our cause and with deep moral concern, serve as the channel through which our just grievances could get the power, get to the power structure.

So he said, Hey, we came here hoping that at least the religiously leader would see our point and through them they can help us get through this and they can help us break through this white power structure. But the fact that he's having to respond to them mean it. That didn't work. But he's he's he's going right at them and he's telling them, I thought you would be at least you would understand this.

He also says, I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist. So in the the communication from the clergyman, they call him an extremist. Right. And this is where we talk about symbolic interaction. There is a clear meaning that they had when they use that term towards that. Dr. King Right. But he flipped the script on them and he told them, hey, I'm wearing this as a badge of honor.

You know why? Because when I think about it, he even in the letter, he said, you know, Jesus Christ, you know, he he preached unconditional love, unconditional forgiveness. Right. Helping our fellow man. So he was considered an extremist for his time. He thought he gave the example of of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote, you know, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

He said that was extreme, is thinking for the time he talked about Abraham Lincoln, who said, we cannot have a country that is half enslaved and half free. Again, that was extremist for the time. So he's saying, if you want to call me an extremist, that's fine. But my my understanding from my perspective, the word extreme is, you know, that's a badge of honor, right?

Because I'm up here with these. I'm up here with these these other these other people. Again, it's about the meaning that you give something, give to something. He goes on to say, I wish you had commended the Negro demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline to them in the midst of the most inhumane provocation.

So again, the the police to the demonstrators was horrific, right, with the attack of the police dog, the powerful water hoses from the fire department. But what the the clergymen did, they said, oh, we want to thank the police officer for keeping the peace. And so Dr. King is very poignant in his response to that particular part. And he said he was highly offended by that part, too.

He said, because what you should be doing is thanking the demonstrators who demonstrated courage, who demonstrated patience and vigilance. Right. And they you know so even in the face of what they were going through, they never resorted to violence. So he said to these clergymen, those are the people you should be thanking right. And we did that. Okay.

And so, again, you know, these words are really powerful from, you know, from from a minister to to other ministers. But again, that's done with purpose. Right. And finally, he says on one day the South will know that when those disinherited children of God set down that lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for the best in America, in the American dream and the most sacred values of our Judeo Christian heritage.

So think about that, he said. When these disinherited children of God, he said that to some ministers. And so he said one day, I hope you wake up and you realize that these are the people that you threw away. Right. Your role as a minister, you just basically turned your back on them. Right. And those are the ones that you should have been standing up for.

Okay. And so, again, I think that his his use of language, his use of symbols in this letter is was very powerful. And, you know, in terms of getting his message across and again, I can't state enough that I do encourage you guys to read this letter if I had a chance. And so just to kind of wrap things up, when you look at this through the lens of these sociological perspectives, so we see functionalism in Dr. King.

He highlighted the dysfunction in our society. Right. All of that that was going on in the dysfunction supported segregation and discrimination. So we talked about unjust laws and things like that. So, you know, things are broken. And so Dr. King highlighted that in this letter. From the conflict perspective, it emphasizes, he emphasizes, the power struggle and the inequality that exists in society.

And he addressed the power dynamics and the challenges that it challenges the status quo. So he said, hey, we cannot leave things as it is. We have to do more. We have to do better. And this finally symbolic interaction illustrates how meaning is constructed and excuse me, and symbols are used to communicate and interact. So again, he used this powerful tool of writing this letter to get points across.

And to be quite honest, they may or may not. I don't know the impact they had on those specific clergymen, but because they were written and they were deliberately, you know, there was deliberate thought and care into each word that he put on paper, and he actually sent it to the clergymen. I think that's powerful in of itself, and that's why we're here today.

That letter was, what, 1963? Here we are in 2024 talking about the value of that letter. So think about that. If he had just had a conversation with them, they would have heard whatever he said. But we wouldn't have. And so I think it's a very powerful tool that this letter is here for us to examine. And hopefully I've done him justice.

And it would just and I only highlighted a few of, you know, of the things that relate to sociology. Again, there there's much more in. This can be a whole continued discussion on the different aspects of how that matter relates sociologically and philosophically. But unfortunate lately, I had to kind of cut my time. And so I appreciate your time and I'm open to questions or comments or I mean, I think that, you know, in terms of his, you know, so we I think we we have gotten a sanitized version of him.

But I think that it really is catering to his whole idea of nonviolence. And I think that it was purposeful in making sure that that was what was shown and that was what was demonstrated to people, because that was the message that was that that people wanted and wanted to see. So I think it was very I think it was very purposeful and in terms of what information was released, what information was was written, and I love how you knowledge the King Foundation, where we may be able to go into more and we can see this other side of Dr. King.

Right. So we're just saying we have access to what they've allowed us to have access to. Right. And we go to this. We go to what's familiar to us. Right? So we all look for, you know, I have a dream speech and we look for that, right? We don't look into the nitty gritty of these other things. Right.

But now that we know that we have an opportunity to go and learn and learn more about him. But I just think that that's the you know, perhaps that there was a tried attempt to protect the image because, you know, his whole idea was nonviolence. Right. And so I'm sure that, you know, no one wanted any other image of him to be in in the public eye because they don't want anything to override the overarching message that he was trying to send, which was nonviolence.

And so that's my opinion. I'm not sure what you what your thoughts are on that.

Yeah. Thank you. And Dr. King also was a was an author. He he's written several books. He has the Power to Love. He has a book. Where do we go from here? Several books. And his writings, his writing is just as eloquent, if not more eloquent as you can see through this letter as his speeches. He was a brilliant he had a brilliant mind.

He graduated early from from high school. He went to college. And a lot of times when we see Dr. King in the black and white video is he's in his mid twenties when he's Dr. King, when he when he's chosen to lead the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was a very young I mean, I don't know how old y'all are, 19, 20.

But he was 24, you know, and 24 or 25 when he began to lead. So. KING As an extremist, I think it's important to note that Dr. King mentions that there is a difference between, a law and something that's moral. He mentions in the letter that everything that Hitler did was legal right? So it's this idea you calling me an extremist because I'm I'm I'm a rebel.

I'm breaking the law, I'm doing something. I'm going against society. So what Dr. King, what his mission was, was to do is to show that just because something is legal, does it mean that it's okay to do? I mean, obviously doing that time, notice the absence of the message of slavery. You know, he doesn't he doesn't mention slavery was wrong.

Today, we say slavery is wrong. But even in the sixties, he didn't have that as a tool that he could he could point to as being an obvious truth. Right. We know this a slavery wound, because there were people still then who probably wanted wanted it to go back to slavery. So I think separating this idea of of of of what is legal being what is right.

And a lot of people conflate the two. They say, well, if is legal, it must be right. You know, but but history has shown that we get me and can pass evil laws and and so our job is to becomes to to look at what is the just law. And Dr. King was saying that we have an obligation to to violate the law.

Secondly, Dr. King was say made a quote in the letter. He says justice to long delayed is justice denied. Even in Booker T Washington to Washington's day, Booker T Washington had a philosophy. He was the the president of Tuskegee Institute where George Washington Carver, who, you know, made so many peanut inventions, worked as as a professor. But Booker T Washington believed that if if black people just continue to learn trades, you know, don't go up too high, don't start studying philosophy and those abstract disciplines, just stay with the mechanics, be a carpenter, go into these communities, work for you know, work for the white people.

Then eventually you work hard enough, they'll give you your rights. And Booker T Washington and W.E.B. Dubois had this huge debate about this. Dubois was like, no, can't. They're not going to give us all rights. We now know, you know? And so Dr. King points this out in his letter. He says that that none of the progress that the civil rights movement made was ever just given to them.

He said it came as a result of legal action. So even the desegregation that we have in America, in the civil rights law was placed on the back of the bus boycotts, which cost the the bus and companies so much money that they said, you know what, we want your money a little more than we want you to sit at the back of the bus.

Okay, We're going to get rid of this. Right. And so it shows that people just not if someone has the advantage that is just not going to give up that advantage. And if you go in against the the status quo, the norm, then you are a rebel. You know, you're an extremist. And so this with this how Dr. King type those.

It just real quickly onto that one part of the letter. He talks about the Brown versus Board of Education, which said segregation in education is illegal. He says. So he you know, think about that. He's in jail for not having a parade permit while you have people in the state of Alabama who there is a ruling from the Supreme Court that says schools need to integrate and they were refusing to do so.

But that wasn't that wasn't what was talked about. What was highlighted was his role of not having a permit for a parade.

And they walked on the sidewalk.

Walking on the sidewalk. Right. So so so that, you know, so you have, you know, the powers that be breaking this major law. Right. Refusing to integrate. And, you know, so is that that narrative that's being told. And so a lot of it has, you know, with who's telling the story. And so you get you don't hear about that, that part of it.

But we know that that was happening with the within education at that time.

So and one more point before before we leave it, we often abstract using that symbolic language that you were talking about is so easy to talk about. Systems. Something is wrong with the system. But there really does the systems don't exist or what exist are people. The problems are with people. It's not with the systems, is with this this individual here and this with this individual here.

So, I mean, you can use the same system for good or you can use the same system for bad. It depends on the motivations of the individual person. And this is shows the necessity of this idea of Dr. King for a moral law allow this supersedes human systems. And that is obligatory to to us all, you know. But if we reject a moral all that we have in common, then what is the basis of my, my, my right or my obligation to to treat you with kindness or not?

And Mr.. What's the basis for moral obligation?

So thank you, guys.