Hosted by Jen Manion, associate professor of history at Amherst College, Dr. Mary Frances Berry discusses “Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations” in the first lecture in the History of Anti-Black Racism in America Lecture Series.
- Good evening everyone. I'm Catherine Epstein, Provost and Dean of the faculty and the Winkley Professor of History at Amherst college. It's an honor and a privilege to sponsor the inaugural provost lecture series and seminar. This inaugural series is titled "The History of Anti-Black Racism in America." Right now it's hard to think of a more compelling or important topic. COVID-19 has glaringly brought to the floor the systemic racism that is so prevalent in the United States. The virus has taken a far greater toll on our Black and brown communities than on others. This is due to the systemic racism present in all aspects of our society. In healthcare education, housing, the workplace, the criminal justice system, to name just a few, but systemic racism and particularly anti-Black racism is nothing new. The premise of this series is that history is a powerful and necessary tool for helping us deepen our understanding of racism in America today. As James Baldwin, once wrote, "The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it. History is literally present in all that we do." As a historian, I believe our college community needs to know much more about the history of anti-Black racism. Without that knowledge grounded in fact and learning, we cannot understand our society today. As an educational institution, we are and should be focused on learning. We pride ourselves on being a diverse community, and we repeatedly state that bringing together a diverse faculty, staff and student body enhances learning for everyone. It is enormously important that we learn from each other and from the personal experiences that we all embody. Interpersonal interactions allow us to understand the way that racism shapes the lives of individuals in our community. But even more is necessary. We also need to take an academic scholarly approach as well, so that we can understand the structural racism underpinning our society. For students tuning in. I hope that you are taking one of the many courses offered on race and racism in the United States this semester. And if not this semester, I hope you'll take such a course next semester. For faculty and staff, I hope that you are using this lecture series as a way to deepen your knowledge of the African American experience, but especially of the history of anti-Black racism in the United States. And that's true for alumni too. I greatly look forward to my own learning around the issues that our distinguished speakers will address this fall. Reparations, the struggle for the ballot, the idea of Black criminality and the expansion of our prison system in recent decades. Now for some thank yous. First, the lecture series is supported by a grant from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation to support the cultivation of public scholarship in the humanities at Amherst college. Next I wanna thank Jen Manion, associate professor of history, for organizing and facilitating this lecture series and the accompanying seminar. This was Jen's brainchild, and she's done a terrific job of envisioning this series inviting the speakers, and making this more than just a lecture series. It also includes a non-credit seminar. Individuals can sign up for discussion groups of up to 12 persons. Each of the discussion groups will meet for an hour in the days following each lecture and discuss the lecture as well as some accompanying readings and videos. The syllabus for the series will allow you to explore more fully, the issues discussed by each of our speakers. You can sign up for the discussion groups, wherever this lecture series is advertised, and you will see the link at the end of this lecture as well. Before I hand this over to Professor Manion to introduce our first speaker, Professor Mary Frances Berry, I want to extend my personal thanks to Professor Berry for agreeing to give the inaugural lecture in the inaugural provost lecture series. In the prologue to her wonderful book on Callie House, Professor Barry, it relates an anecdote about how at age 12, she became "An outlaw, a transgressor of racial boundaries." She had the nerve to listen to some records while she was doing the ironing for a white family. The mother of the white family, when she realized that the child, who would later become a professor, she exploded, telling her, you had no business touching those records, and you shouldn't be listening to such music in the first place. This episode had several ramifications. One Professor Berry's aunt worried that Mary Frances would become a troublemaker. Meanwhile, and perhaps more tellingly, the episode ruined Professor Berry's pleasure in listening to music, such as Beethoven's "Ninth Symphony." Professor Berry grew up in South Nashville, just a few blocks from where Callie House once lived. As she wrote in that prologue, she and Callie House both became troublemakers. In the spirit of the recently deceased John Lewis, both professor Berry and Callie House got into what he called and encouraged, good trouble. We are enormously lucky to be in the presence of a historian who made and makes good trouble. Not least good trouble has allowed the academy and us to learn the extraordinarily important and absolutely fascinating history of the African American experience in the United States. Professor Berry, thank you so much for being here and for sharing your insights with our community. And now Professor Manion will formally introduce Professor Berry.
- Thank you very much.
- Thank you.
- Thank you Provost Epstein for your support of this series and welcome to everyone watching at home. I'm Jen Manion, associate professor of history here at Amherst college. And it is my great honor to introduce tonight's speaker. Dr. Mary Frances Berry is a pioneering and prolific legal historian who has been the Geraldine R. Segal professor of American Social Thought and professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania since 1987. She received her bachelor's and master's degrees from Howard University and went on to the University of Michigan, where she earned both a PhD and a J.D. She is author of 13 books spanning five decades. The first one, "Black Resistance, White Law." A history of constitutional racism in America, charts the ways government officials use the law to suppress Black protest, but refuse to use the law to protect Blacks from assaults by whites. Her most recent book, "History Teaches Us To Resist," shows the important role that public protest played in key moments throughout US history. Arguing that nonviolent protest is a necessary ingredient of American democracy. For her accomplishments as a scholar, Dr. Berry has been recognized as a Fellow of the Society of American Historians and the American Society for Legal History. She served as president of the organization of American Historians in 1990. An impressive career by any measure, her accomplishments as a historian are simply a fraction of Dr. Berry's life work. She has had an equally distinguished career in public service. From 1977 to 1980, Dr. Berry served as assistant secretary for education in the department of health education and welfare. From 1980 to 2004, she was a member of the US Commission on Civil Rights. President Bill Clinton named her chair of the commission in 1993, a position she held until 2004. She has fought against many things; apartheid in South Africa, war in Vietnam, voting fraud, felon disenfranchisement, police violence, educational disparities, housing and economic discrimination, and the destruction of Black churches across the South, to list only a few. All in the name of racial justice and equality. A New York Times profile noted Dr. Berry is well known for her tenacity and sense of outrage at the condition of minorities and poor people. She is a tireless advocate, both on the front lines and behind the scenes for which she has been recognized with 35 honorary doctoral degrees and awards. 25 years ago, I walked into Dr. Berry's office in College Hall at the University of Pennsylvania, where she held her undergraduate seminar on the history of law and social policy. The room itself was an archive of the subject filled with photos of Dr. Berry and world leaders, newspaper clippings, awards, and other momentos of a lifetime of advocacy for racial justice. I learned about the life and legacy of one of Amherst's most notable alumni, the famed civil rights lawyer, Charles Hamilton Houston when we read and discussed his biography. Week after week, we read books, argued with each other and listen to Dr. Berry. I learned that knowledge about the past was an invaluable tool for those of us working for justice in the present. A lesson I carry with me to this day, and that has shaped the vision for this series. Tonight. Dr. Berry will talk with us about Callie House and the struggle for ex slave reparations. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Mary Frances Berry.
- Thank you very much, Jen. I didn't realize it had been 25 years. Wow! It seems like yesterday. And I'm so pleased that I was invited to give this inaugural lecture and I wanna thank the Provost and Dean of faculty, Professor Epstein, and all the people at Amherst who made this possible, and the donors and everybody else. If I miss somebody, I hope I didn't. I'm bringing you this from New Orleans, where I am now, while we are awaiting a hurricane. Let's hope it doesn't come by here too much. Well, what I plan to do, is to tell you why I wrote about Callie House and the pension movement, reparations movement, and what it did in general, and what that has to do with what we're doing now and what we might do in the future as we try to achieve racial justice. I come to you at a very sad time when George Floyd was killed. I was on BBC one night and they said to me, "Well, do you think that these kinds of killings will happen again, or is this the end of it?" And I said, I think that's a ridiculous question. Until we get rid of white supremacy and the role of the police in enforcing it, it's been happening, so it's likely to happen again. Unfortunately, that is the case. So we had a little back and forth on the show. But unfortunately since that time we have had several episodes. And this one with Jacob Blake is heart-rending because apparently I guess the police intended to see that he was killed, but he wasn't. So he's paralyzed as far as we know. And other unpleasant and tragic things have happened in the wake. I wrote about this book because I heard about Callie House first when I was a graduate student at Michigan, and I was at a reception for a distinguished visiting professor in Detroit. And all of us had driven over there to this reception to hear this great man speak. And we got there and was standing around and a man walked up to me and started chatting and said, "I hear you from Nashville. And there was a woman from there named Callie House, I'm told, that had something to do with doing something about the old ex-slaves." And he started telling me all these stories that he had heard from some other guy in his union on the assembly line. And that he had tried to find out something about it, but he wasn't a historian or anything. He didn't know how to do research. He was even told to go to the National Archives, but he went and they told him they didn't know anything about what he was talking about. So I went away from that thinking, wow. And then I asked the only Black woman who was a curator at the National Archives, and who had been there when I was an undergraduate and introduced me to working in the archives. Did she know anything about it? And she pointed to some materials over in the corner, down in the basement where she took me and said, "That's about that subject." So I read the stuff and I wrote an article, which I had published. And I assumed in the article, that Callie House was somehow a mail factor. She was some kind of criminal or something because the federal government had charged her with using the mails to defraud. And in those days when I was a young scholar, I thought that if the police charged you with something, it meant that you did it. And so I didn't know any better. So I in fact wrote this article, It didn't really say what she did, but I talked about what she had done. I went away from the discussion for years after that and wrote about a whole lot of other things. And then the subject of reparation surfaced again, when Japanese community was trying to get reparations for their internment during the World War II, and a lot of activity took place at that time, including the introduction of H.R. 40, which is the house bill John Conyers introduced to try to get a reparation study commission, which he tried to do for years and years. And last year it was introduced again, and yet has not been done. So I decided to go back and actually thoroughly research Callie House and found out what she did, because reparations was, again, a hot topic. And when I did it, I found out that not only was she not a criminal, but that all she was trying to do, was to get pensions for the old ex-slaves. She was born probably in 1861, she died in 1928. And in the period up to 1918, she was very much active in organizing a movement to try to get some kind of pensions. Remember that we didn't have social security then. So there were all these old people who had been slaves. She had been a slave and the elders among them had nobody to support them. And they were poor. And some of them were working for the same people they had worked for when they were slaves and were still working, even though they were elderly. One woman, I recall looking in the record, she was 90-something, and she was still working as the help, cleaning the house for this family she'd worked for as a slave. So Callie House heard from a pamphlet that was being circulated by a white guy who wanted pensions so that the ex slaves would get them, his rationale. And they would spend them in the South where most of them still were, and it would help the white families to redevelop the South. He saw it as an indirect way to get some money for the people who were in the South. Well, when this pamphlet was circulated, some people bought it, other people let other people read it. People read it to each other, if they couldn't read. And it circulated rather widely. And Callie House was in Tennessee, and she heard about it at church. And she said, "Well, I don't understand why we couldn't organize something like that for ourselves. Why do we need this man to do something for the white people in the South, all over the South, by getting money he thinks, for us, which we'll give to them. It doesn't make any sense." And so with the help of a local Black guy who had worked for the white guy, whose name was Vaughn and who got disgusted with it, and who told her that... What he did was he was gonna lobby Congress, send petitions off to Congress to try to get pensions. She organized this movement. It's a rather simple story after that. They traveled all over the South, they sent out pamphlets, they had meetings. They wanted to get the names of every person who had been a slave on a petition. There are some in the book and the petition notes where the person was a slave, who owned them, and so you could identify the people and actually find them and find families if you want to. And all of those records down in the National Archives, because they got petitioned. If the person could write, they wrote their name. If they couldn't, somebody wrote it for them. And then they just put an X. And all of these petitions were sent to the Congress of the United States. After a while, the local white people get very concerned about this movement. And they asked the federal government, they wrote letters, the letters were there, the files too. Saying, "You should stop this woman, she's exciting all these Negroes, they think they're gonna get some money. And when they find out they're not, they're gonna be mad. So we don't know what they're doing, but they go and have meetings in church and then they come out singing and walking up and down, like they're happy about one day, our day is coming. They are not getting anything. Why don't you tell them, then you used to stop this woman." Well, the records of the Pension Bureau at that time, which had its own intelligence operatives, was that they got concerned because they got so many notes from people who said, "Go get her, do something to her." They sent out undercover agents to go to some of the meetings in churches, to see what they were doing. And the undercover agents came back and said they weren't doing anything except getting petitions and having people... Have the names put on them and then they'd sing. They paid dues 25 cents a month. And they kept talking about well, someday, we might be able to get this. And they told their stories about all the bad things that happened to them. Then they went out singing and they went home. So we didn't see them do anything. So they said, "Oh, boy, we can't charge them with anything. What can we do?" Finally, what they did was they charged her with using the mails to defraud. By sending out pamphlets and notices of meetings and having meetings. Their argument was that she should have known that the government would never give pensions to these people. By her organizing them to get pensions, she was engaged in fraud. And the long short of the story is that they convicted her in the National Federal Court with an all white jury and judge, of using the mail to cause fraud. I found in the records at the National Archives, a file which had complete records of one of the chapters with names and everything. And it was in the litigation file of a lawyer who went to court, prosecutor. Lawyers put together a litigation file. And he went to court and told the judge and the jury that they didn't have any chapters. That it was all made up. And she was just a charlatan and a crook. But the file was right there. Today, any lawyer who did that would be debarred because that is fraudulent, not sending information that you had. Anyway, they sent her to prison. She went to prison in Jefferson City, Missouri. The federal government said that at the time that she was incarcerated, the organization had at least 300,000 dues paying members, which means it was the largest grassroots organization of Black people. And all of those petitions were sent to the Congress of the United States. Some of them were introduced and sent to committee, but they weren't acted on. And they're still in the National Archives. When she got out of prison and she went home to Nashville, she became ill and she did no more work in that. She went back to being a washerwoman, which is what her family had been, what she had been. But the movement continued. I traced the movement from that time through Marcus Garvey's movement, he supported the reparations. And some of the people in his chapters were people who had been in the chapters of her movement. And you can trace those people all the way up to the organizations that exist today, like N'COBRA and others, are people who are descendants of the people who were way back then in this movement. Also, while she was in prison, she was in the same prison with Emma Goldman, who some people may recall were radical history. And both of them were seamstresses and washer women. And they both sewed on the machines. That's what they had the prisoners doing. They made clothes, things like that. They were there together. And Emma Goldman made a detailed description of what was happening in there and how they did it and all the rest, which was very useful. Now what this book and what she hoped to do, what she hoped to do, Callie House, was to provide a basis for somebody, even if she didn't do it, to come along sometime and try to get reparations for these people who had been slaves. And there were about 2 million still alive in 1900. And if they had been given reparations, which for older people would have been $15 a month, and younger people would have gotten less. You could argue that we would have wiped out the debt to those people with one fell swoop, if a decision had been made to do that. But obviously there was no decision. Now, what does this have to do with anything else? After the Japanese movement for redress, which finally ended with a piece of congressional legislation, and other debates around what kind of reparations you would give, for example, to indigenous people who in the main, aren't looking for the kind of money, what they want is autonomy and their nationalism, which is something they've gotten in the Tulsa case and recently involved back in Oklahoma, that their nationhood has been taken, sovereignty has been taken away from them. So it's a different approach. Different movements towards different things. What it has to do with it is that the hope was that when the time came, and a bill could be passed and Congress might give reparations, all the information about slavery would be put in the mix. How hard it was, what it was like, the details of what happened after emancipation and all the rest would be used as a basis to give some kind of reparations to the descendants of slaves. When H.R. 40 was finally debated last year in the House, they didn't discuss any of that actually in any detail. It was sort of interesting. They talked mainly about Jim Crow and what has happened in the recent past and so on. But the people who argued for reparations for years, they thought that if you describe to people how awful slavery was, if you talked about convict leasing, and apprenticeships and the period after slavery and all the things that happened both to kids, and the grown people. And if you just described all of that, that people would understand that at least the descendants of slaves, even if you didn't include anybody else, and especially the people who had their names but on these petitions, which was very risky, would at least get something. That's what they thought. But that argument has not been the one that has been made. Now, whether you get reparations or not, since that time a lot has happened. You've had, Deandra a farmer, Paulman, a lawyer, Black woman lawyer, who brought lawsuits against banks and other people for the loans that they gave and the financing of businesses that used slave labor, and that used convict labor. And she got an apology from some of them and some money given to a few people. There have been people trying to get money for the people in Tulsa, where the 1921 massacre took place. They got commission reports and publicity and everything else, but not any resources for them. So there've been many arguments about what to do. Some people, recently in North Carolina, Asheville, I think it is. The city council decided to give some reparations to the local people for being moved out of their homes. But the whole concept of reparations for slavery and for the aftermath, which as one book says is slavery by another name, hasn't really gotten the kind of attention that people like Callie House probably hoped it would. Also the using they are using the mails to defraud argument that they used against her, they used it against Marcus Garvey. That's exactly what they used. They tried it out on her and they used it on Marcus Garvey. A lobbyist I know said that if you can go to prison for organizing people to try to get the federal government to give them something, a tax break or some kind of a appropriation, and you don't get it, or you think the likelihood is not that you will get it. And then that is fraud. He said, "I would be in prison right now. Cause that's what I do for a living. That's what lobbyists do." He said, "So I don't understand how trying to get Congress to give somebody something..." The other thing that's interesting about Callie House is "One Season," the book, is just from that little fifth grade education that she got in one of those schools that was set up after slavery, she remembered the constitution. She would talk about it in her letters, when the government was after her. And she didn't know why they were after her. She'd remind them that there's a first amendment to the constitution and that people have the right to petition. I learned that in school. Like some people today don't even know the difference between the declaration of independence and the constitution. Now, as to what that has to do with now, there are many Black people who support reparations. There are many people who are not Black, who support reparations. But there are many people who don't. And whether that happens or not, I don't know, but I think a study commission, it ought to be time to at least have some kind of study commission to get our bill passed, to look at it and what it does, it ought to look at the records of these people who were courageous enough to make a record. And I was also happy to resurrect Callie House so that people would at least know she existed and that you can organize, even against the odds, and that she was willing to do it. And put, she said, "I'll give my whole life for this cause." And that people who, even if they have a minimal education, it's like imperfect people can create change. People who are not well educated can make great change. So it's an example of what you can do if you are persistent. A lot of Black people don't want reparations. I've given talks where some have gotten up and said, "We don't need reparations and seem we're asking people for something." I found that an odd statement, but that's just my opinion. We should stand on our own two feet, saying that we don't need anybody to do anything, which I think ignores the history of race in America. One of the problems though, is that many people do not know the history of white supremacy. They don't know the history of race in America. They haven't been taught it. I have just recently been trying to explain to a corporation that invited me to give some talks about diversity and inclusion. That the reason why it doesn't work effectively is because most people don't even know why we have it. They don't really understand the history of race in America, so since we really don't understand it and how everybody's complacent, they won't understand why we need it. And since they don't understand why we need it, it's hard to make them understand that people should be doing something. That's especially true... It's true of Americans who people have been here forever. It's also true of immigrants. We haven't even had rudimentary education about history of America. They come to the country and nobody bothers to tell them anything about it. So they have no idea of why we are doing it. So I have told you about Callie House, I hope you will read the book and enjoy it. And I'm happy to answer any questions you might have.
- Wow. Thank you so much. It's such an important, powerful story. And after reading about her work, I just think, how could I not have known about this? How could we all not know about her effort? And I think the point you just made about how much she savored her education and how much she did with such limited education. And, it makes me think about... I think it's earlier in the book where you talk about the freedom schools and how in early reconstruction, they were seen as reparations. They were potentially apart of reparations, the access to education and how, as long as that was controlled by the federal government, it seemed to be growing. And it was a positive force that people savored. But as soon as the federal government pulled out and ceded control to the states and then states ceded control to the to the counties that they just evaporated. The quality declined and they lost access. And so I'm wondering if... What if you could offer us some of your insights about the role of education and potentially more centralized, federal control over funding for public education as a form of reparations?
- Well, the reason why we don't... First of all, the achievement gap has persisted in the United States, in the public schools. And in some places, the public schools have been abandoned. In New Orleans, for example, after Katrina and the floods, the state took the opportunity to fire all the teachers because they wanted to get rid of all the Black teachers. And they said, "We're gonna close down the school system, so that means we can fire all of them." So they did. And then they set up charter schools, the whole system they're no public schools in New Orleans, they're all charter schools. And then they went out and hired teachers. Some of whom were in Teach for America, the kind of students who were my students at Penn, some of who went into Teach for America then came back and told me how terrible it was because they really didn't know how to teach. I mean, they came back and told me that. "Dr. B, I really don't know how to teach. I don't even know about classroom management. I don't know all this stuff. I want to, I have a good heart and I wanna do the right thing, but gosh." And so it's a disaster, but the reason why we don't have centralized school systems is because we have federalism. And I remember when I was running education in the federal government for Jimmy Carter, Senator Claiborne Pell from Rhode Island was chair of the education committee. And he went to France or something and came back and he told the president, "We ought to have a national educational system like they do in France, where the federal government controls what's taught, make sure that everybody gets a good education. And on any given day in France, everybody's learning the same thing." And Jimmy Carter said to me, "why don't we have a meeting and bringing all the chief state school officers from all across the country and let him present his ideas and see if they support it, and then we could support it. And we did that and they all opposed it. They said, "Look, we have a 10th amendment, we have federalism in this country. The governors control their states, the chief state school officers get elected as they do in Massachusetts and everywhere else. And we like it that way. We want you to give us money. We want you to appropriate part of our budget, and the rest comes from our state funds, but we don't want you telling us what to do. We're not gonna go along with that, and if you try to propose it, we're gonna oppose it." And that was the end of it. So we have 50 disparate public school systems. 50 States deciding what they wanna do, even if they want to get rid of the schools in one place like New Orleans parish, because cities and parishes are in fact creatures of the state under the state constitution everywhere. And so we don't have any plan... The thing that affects us with everything we do, when you think about the virus and the COVID and all the arguments about what to do. Every state has its own way of doing what it says. The rules are, the CDC could make announcements, but they can't make anybody do anything. The president can't make them do it. And then the governor have power in the 10th Amendment. So we have money that is appropriated to the States. We have a program that's supposed to be for poor kids to help them. And we might be able to get a law passed that gave additional requirements. We had something under George Bush, "No child left behind." I think he called it. and we now have one, "Every student can learn." A program where the federal government makes, as a condition of giving you money, that you do something X, Y, Z. But most of the time, it doesn't make any sense. It's all politically motivated. What we really should... And then we say, why don't we give vouchers to the parents and let them go out and find their own, you know, whatever it is, education. But our educational system is a mess, it really is. And it's particularly a mess for poor kids. It's also, even where it isn't a mess, the virus and closing down the public schools where the schools are good and where the kids are, has been one of the most devastating things that can happen especially the poor children who don't have resources, who can't get connected, who can't even get to the school to get food or anything else. And nobody's figured that out, it's a federalism issue is really what it is.
- Wow, okay. And I just would like to remind our viewers that you're welcome to enter questions in the chat box. We have a lot of different questions coming in about all different angles of reparations here. So I'm gonna try to put some of them together and ask you... But there's both a question about what kind of... what are the reparations movements right now? What are people asking for and who would benefit from the campaigns that are happening? And do you have an opinion about whether they should be restricted to people who are descendants of slavery or more broadly distributed among the African American community?
- Okay. There're proposals that are being made and that may be considered by this commission, if it's ever set up under H.R. 40, that they would give reparations based on all the harm that has been done since slavery, by Jim Crow, segregation, poverty, all the things, the asset gap, the wealth gap, so on, so that there could be a reduction of inequality in the country. The debate about who should get reparations if we ever have them, will go on. My own view is that we should give reparations in the first, if we ever get them, in the first incidence, to people who are descended of slaves in the United States. That the United States government should, and United States institutions should. CARICOM the Caribbean, there's a Caribbean Commission, which is arguing for reparations for people who were slaves in the Caribbean. And they have had some success getting... The University of Glasgow has given them some resources. Some of the Brits agencies have given them resources. The argument is that nation that is responsible for the law and framework that made you a slave and permitted slavery to exist, is in the first instance responsible for what happened. Because if they hadn't had it as legal and supported it and permitted people do it, then that would have been a different story. So they get... If you are a descendant from someone in the Caribbean, you are in the United States or wherever you are. In the first incidence, your reparations should come from the place where your ancestor was a slave. That is the British, the French or whatever Caribbean ally it is or whatever colony it happened to be. So that would be the colonial enterprise. In this country, I don't know what the answer is to what you do after you give descendants of slaves in the United States. Some people say we should give it to anybody in the United States who's Black, whether they're immigrants or not immigrants. And some people say, well, it doesn't make any sense if their ancestors were slave somewhere else. I don't have any clear preference or anything else about any of that. As far as I'm concerned, as long as you give it to the descendants of the slave whose families actually signed those petitions. There are people who have died for all this. Then I think that whatever else, all bets are off.
- Wonderful. I have a bunch of specific questions about specific forms of reparations that have been thrown around. But then I also have a bigger question, which is, should we be talking about a different response since there has been so much resistance to reparations from white Americans historically, and even as you said, from within the Black community, is there another way to achieve economic justice for Black people in America that's different than reparations?
- Well, we've talked about different ways. Diversity and inclusion doesn't do it. The data on diversity and inclusion shows that it doesn't work for slave descendant African-Americans. In fact, I'd be interested to know in the enrollment at Amherst College of the Black students in there, how many of them are from families that are slave descended African Americans? I know that at Penn and at all, the big Ivys, as opposed to little Ivys, I don't know what the little Ivys have. That most of the Black students who are there are either second generation immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean. Well, they are. And that very few of them are slave descended African Americans. And very few of them are from the surrounding area in which the university happens to be located geographically. That's true of the Ivys. And the reason for that is that we aggregate the data on race. This is true of Latinos too, by the way. That most of the Latino students at the Ivys are not from people who have lived here in the United States and came legally and have children and some of them are poor and so on and now are in areas around the schools. They are mostly people from South America, Central America. They're people from Chile, from Argentina, from Spain, from all kinds of places, and this is true, not only of the students, but of the faculty. And so diversity and inclusion, because you aggregate and because you don't tease out, that is what we call dis-aggregation. The numbers, so you can actually see what you're looking at. You can escape, understanding that these things are the case. And so diversity and inclusion, which some people thought would do the thing of leveling the playing field and all that, hasn't really done it. Okay. Some people think that what you should do is simply give a certain amount of money to everybody who is at a certain poverty level. There's some program that has been proposed by Jim Clyburn and other people to do that. That would not level the playing field, because if you are trying to reduce inequality and you give everybody $1,000, you don't reduce any quality. You just gave everybody a thousand dollars. If there was already inequality, it just means everybody, whether they were unequal and not unequal or whatever, they got $1,000. So, but you could come up with some kind of poverty measure, which would capture lots of Black folk because Blacks are disproportionately poor. It would capture a lot of white people. If you were trying to relieve poverty and get rid of anything you did to relieve wealth, inequality would be wonderful. But one thing you might do, is in your admissions to higher education institutions, you might desegregate the data on admission. So you can see who you're targeting and how you're doing, because those are the pipelines for people to get good jobs and to move up in hierarchies all across the country. And we know that.
- And well following along that line, would you say then, could you expand on the role of higher education either in terms of tuition breaks or other ways that higher ed institutions could play a leading role in either reparations for people descendant of slaves in particular, or racial justice more broadly?
- Well, some schools have about, and made public their direct relationship to slavery. I mean, there's a Georgetown story where it wouldn't be a university if they hadn't sold the slaves. So what they're trying to do is make recompense by letting descendants come to the school for free and take certain other steps to make up for it. Acknowledging. One of them is acknowledging the past. People have to know... You have to know the past, and then you have to acknowledge it and own it, and say one thing that this poverty initiative, which is called the Low Income Student Initiative, that many colleges and universities have started participating in in the last few years has helped in a sense, because it has made them look around their own communities at the poor people who have been overlooked in the admissions process before, since when Martin Luther King was assassinated, the few years after that, many higher education institutions recruited a lot of poor Black students from their own neighborhoods to try to makeup for what had happened as sort of repairing the bridge. And after a while they stopped doing that. One, the faculty said, these students aren't prepared and wouldn't be bothered. And the students were difficult. They demanded things like Black Studies programs and all kinds of things. It created tension, so it dissipated. But this low income initiative, first generation, low income initiative, we have one at Penn and other places have them, has made us reach out. And one of the people we reached out and got was this young Black woman in Philly, who never would have been recruited Anea Moore, who was in my class, my seminar, the same one you sat in. When she was a first year, she demanded entry and I let her in. She was great. She graduated last year, she's a road scholar right now. Never would have been in Penn, the way we usually admit people, hey, she would never be there. People have to be innovative and imaginative. But they first need to count the data and dis-aggregate so that they know what they have and they know what they're trying to get.
- So in a slightly different direction, because I feel like I've been asking you questions from the place of accountability. We know that there has been incredible racial violence and racism and racial inequity, and we're trying to figure out how to respond to it. But I have a question here from a different kind of direction. And that is, is it really fair to ask people whose ancestors bitterly opposed slavery and they themselves were new immigrants who weren't here and benefiting from slavery, to pay into reparations now for injustices from the past that they themselves were not a part of.
- Right. That's a good question. It's often asked. And that's because most people do not know. Most people don't know, cause it's not taught, that the foundations of this country, the economy, the capitalist economy, because we are a capitalist economy, the constitution makes us one. We have private property, which can't be used for public use without just compensation. That means we have private property, which means we have capitalism. It's in the constitution. We have white supremacy and the slaves built the infrastructure of this country. The infrastructure that people go to Washington, when there's not a virus, to take their kids, to see the buildings and go to all the different institutions. Most of them were built by slaves, okay? The older ones, slaves built all those things. Slave markets were there. The slaves built them. And most places in the country in that early period, slaves built them. Washington, especially, and the economy of the country that was built up to make us a great nation in the 19th century. Cotton, sugar, the mills, the trade, all of it, the input to all of that was slaves. In other words, there wouldn't have been a prospering country for immigrants who are later coming to come to. If the slaves hadn't built all of that. And then immigrants who came in the 19th century added to it and worked hard at it. And immigrants who come later benefit from it, but they look around to see what's there. And then there's this great economy. It began in the beginning with slaves, even in the North, the slave trade. People ask me, why was it that Northerners supported keeping the slave trade open when they wrote the constitution and the debates? And why did some Southerners like George Mason in Virginia say, well, we don't need it anymore. It was because the Brown family and rode out, the people in Massachusetts who were slave traders, they were the ones who brought the slaves back and forth. It was all an economic enterprise and the economic enterprise. If there had been no slavery, the cotton gin, when it was invented, you had needed more and more slaves. South Carolina had more slaves they had Black people more than they have white people. And so when you come later to an enterprise and you see it all built up and there it is and then they're wonderful. And you say, "Well, I don't have anything to do with what happened here." You did have something to do with it. You are enjoying the benefit of it without the pain of it. And when you say you work hard, if you came here, slaves worked hard, they didn't get paid, which is why when they were emancipated and they weren't given anything, that they didn't have anything. And which many of them slipped back into slavery and kept on working as the conduct leases and apprentices and all the rest of it, the children in the factories and in dangerous occupations. So it's not fair to say, it's not even not fair. It's not true to say that I didn't have anything to do with that. I didn't get any benefit from it. But if you don't know the history, because no one ever taught it to you, then you wouldn't understand that. And it's understandable.
- Yeah, I wanna connect this conversation to current events and police violence. I have seen you do many interviews this summer about the police killings of innocent Black people and the protests that have sprung up across this country. And I noticed repeatedly in those conversations that you brought the conversation back to economic justice. And I'm wondering if you could tell us why and explain your thinking on the importance of that connection between police, violence, rioting in the streets for justice and why that is a story of economic justice in your mind.
- Well, because we have wealth inequality, because well, the two things. All the police are doing is enforcing what they are told to enforce, which is racist capitalism. It's white supremacy. Whether it was beginning with slave patrols or whatever it was... That's what police, they're just doing, what they're supposed to do. And it doesn't matter whether they're white police or Black police or Asian police, or whether they're Latino Police, they're doing their job, which is to control these elements. These Black people, they've been doing it. I mean, that's what they do. I've done hearings, when I was at Civil Rights Commission. Our police departments, all across the country, shooting Amadou Diallo in New York. And they had huge hearings, subpoenaed police and mayor and everybody, all of this. So that's what they're doing, their job. And until having to contain racist capitalism is no longer the job, then it will be their job, okay? Protect racist capitalism. White people, if you look at it carefully, you will see that many of the Black people who have been killed. Not all of them, Brianna Jones, Moore, was not in that situation. But those guys who have been killed by and large were in precarious situation. They live with precarity. George Floyd in an economic situation in which his living was precarious, which made him vulnerable to being in the position he was in which made it possible for him to be tamed and end up arrested and killed wherever he was. The man who was in the car, outside the Wendy's in Atlanta, precarity, poverty, precarity, no opportunity, no future. Eric Garner in New York who was selling loose cigarettes. Why is the man on the street selling loose cigarettes for a living? Because the kind of education, the kind of family support, the kind of thing that people need contextually was not there for them. And we have in the community, people over and over, who don't have the benefit of the reduction of this kind of precarity, which makes them vulnerable. They are best positioned to be in a situation where the police get called in or see them doing something and if they don't flinch or do whatever, and sometimes no matter what they do, the police are exercising their power and police exercise that power, not because they're bad people, but because that's their job, that's what they trained to do. That's what they're taught to do. And that's what they're doing. So I said, vulnerability, if you could have better education, if you could have better houses, if you could have better jobs, if you could have more resources, if you could have less precarity, these folks who were so vulnerable, wouldn't be in those vulnerable situations. So if you understand it that way, you can see the connection. And when you see people doing things like protesting. Right now, people are protesting because of what happened. They also have more time to protest because even people who are not in precarious situations are in precarious situations. Cause they're not working or they're not in school or whatever. And so they have the time and place and management to do it. But let's reduce the vulnerability, let's indeed level the playing field. Let's indeed do something about resources and all the rest of it, so that when people are engaged in crime or doing something that puts them at risk, they don't have the cards stacked against them. That puts them in that situation where they can be harmed. And let's not assume when people go around assuming that Black people are... White people assume that Black people are in a precarious situation. The Karen's of the world. They are right to assume that because many Black people are in a precarious situation. The white people who walked up, when I was standing under the canopy of a luxury hotel, just standing there or luxury apartment building. And they were going in the building and they looked at me, askance at me, standing in front of the building, just standing there and repeatedly, as they came in, some said, "Well, can I help you?" "What do you want?" And they went on in the building. Finally, the security guard comes out and says, "People are concerned, 'cause you're standing out here outside the building. Why are you standing here?" I pointed my finger up and said, "It's raining and I don't have an umbrella." but I was out of place. I was in a white space and because I was Black. They didn't know I was a professor, they probably wouldn't care. Chair of the US Civil Rights Commission, whatever I was, there was this Black person standing outside under the canopy of their building, who they assume is a vulnerable dangerous person who is in a precarious situation and they're standing outside their building. Those assumptions are often valid because of the social and economic situation and the lack of open mobility and the vulnerability and all the deficits that people face who are poor and people who are disproportionately Black. Did that explain it, Jen, or not?
- Well, I believe it, yes. It explained it to me. Some of our students here at Amherst College have shared similar stories, some of our African American students, of being questioned as not belonging or not in place. And I have to say, that's one of the reasons why I want to have these conversations and open up these conversations because we have to do better. And people have to understand this history, but to connect back to some earlier things you said just now about why people are in precarious situations and lacking a certain social safety net, access to jobs and better funding for social services. Those are some of the arguments that I'm reading about now from people who are saying we should defund the police. Is that part of your logic when you kind of make that case? Do you share ideas and a philosophy with people who are making that argument around defunding the police as well?
- Well, I understand why Black Lives Matter wants money that funds the police to be shifted. Some of it, into social services and other things that poor people need, who suffer from their vulnerability and the precarious state that they're in. And if funds were put into that to help them, they might not be, as at risk of having encounters with police. It's sort of like, their vulnerability might be reduced and there may be an indirect way to keep this kind of stuff from happening at the same time that we redefine what we want police to do. That's hard to do because as long as we want capitalism, and as long as we want white supremacy, it's hard to redefine what police do because. But I can see when people say defund the police, some people of course think they mean get rid of the police altogether. But when they say shift the resources, I can see why they want to shift resources. I can see why they don't want police in the schools. They're having police officers in every school, especially having them in schools as they do in some communities where the majority of the students are Black, because our school systems are segregated. What signals does that send? That means that you're getting put in prison early, before you committed anything. You might as well get used to it as a child. As a police officer told one of my students who went to work in a school under one of these programs where they go off and work. And she came back and told me that the kids were playing on the playground and they got into a fight with each other. And these are kids who were in like the third grade and a cop was passing by and came onto the school grounds and grabbed them to arrest them, and says to her, "Well, I might as well put them in the system early." So they're like targets. So you don't wanna start putting them in the system early by having the police actually in the school grounds, to keep order and all that. So the defund of police has been taken to mean that they wanna get rid of all police, which by now I think most people who paid any attention, know that's not what they're talking about doing, but they are talking about using the resources differently and I agree with that.
- So the movement for Black Lives was launched in 2015 in response to the killing of Eric Garner, Michael Brown and others. And more recently, some polls indicate that the protest of June in response to George Floyd, might've been one of the largest protests movements in US history, this upsurge of protest. And I'm wondering from where you sit on this five years into the movement for Black Lives, What progress has been made, and where do you hope it goes from here?
- First of all, since I happen to believe that protest is an essential ingredient of politics, I'm glad to see that the Black Lives Movement developed and that three women did it. Some people don't know, but on most college campuses, the people who are the heads of the Black student movement in many places are women. And they have been for quite a while. Instead of just being the secretary of whatever it is. And so I'm happy that they did this, and I hope that the movement persists. And I think that the demands that they have made in the documents that they put together make sense. Progress, the George Floyd, reaction to George Floyd and the huge protest that took place, took place on the one hand, because of the video of... We had a video of Eric Garner as seeing Eric Garner killed and Philando Castille, but it happened in the midst of the virus and the layoffs and the bad economy. And everybody had time and people were out of school. So there were a mass of people who were interested more who could go out and protest. Who had the time, the energy and everything else to go out and do it. And it was so egregious, especially for those people who keep hoping every time something like this happens, it is never gonna happen again. And then when they see it happen again, they say, "Wait, whoa! I thought, you know, having seen that." Maybe the police officer will have a second thought and not do that. But the police officer isn't thinking that. The police officer is thinking I'm in control, my whole mantra is to be in definite control and exercise that I'm in control because that's the way I keep control, okay? I think that that is what happened with George Floyd and the whole reaction to it. It had begun to dissipate. Congress passed, the House passed a bill to control police behavior. But the bill is a watered down version of something that even if it passed in the Senate and got signed by the president, it would stop anything that you see, because it says we should have videos and cameras, but we already have videos and cameras, and we already see these. It's not like we don't see what happened. And none of that... What will make a difference is when we attack white supremacy directly, when we attack that, we've defined police as engaging in certain behaviors. That's why they're not officer friendly in the Black community, giving the kid an ice cream cone and sitting in them up on the counter and saying, "Are you lost a little tyke? You know, one of those movies. The reason why they're not doing that is because that's not the way the community that they're dealing with that they're in control to control. That's not what we've said we want them to do. That's why they're not doing it. And so until we deal with that, we've got to educate everybody about why we have white supremacy, how it happened, how everybody is responsible, what we need to do about it. Then I think that... And we get rid of the precarity that I talked about, the vulnerability, the exposure to these risks. Then I think that this whole thing will continue. Unfortunately, it's going to happen again. It is going to happen again.
- So, getting rid of white supremacy, capitalism, these are big charges and I want... What's that?
- That's why we are not getting rid of capitalism.
- Okay, so then I want to create an opportunity here for... There's a lot of this phrase, like liberal guilt when it comes to racism. And I think a lot of us know that we benefit from white supremacy, but sometimes we get stuck and we're not really sure where to go from there. And I'm wondering what you would say to our viewers who are here, who are saying, "Dr. Berry, I want to be part of the solution. I want to help end racism."
- What can you do?
- What should they do? What do we do?
- Here's what you do. Here's some practical things you can do. You can tell the university or college where you went to start admitting people and going out and recruiting students. And dis-aggregating the data on who they're recruiting and to try to do something for that group of people who live in those poverty communities who are vulnerable, so that the next generation coming along, won't be vulnerable like that. Give them some opportunities. You can also try to work hard and insist on improving public education wherever you live, and the education of those students. You can also help to figure out some ways to open the schools there with the kind of distancing and all the different things that people tell us to do, or having school outside or whatever. Be keeping in mind the precarious nature of the existence of those children and what there'll be missing. They will have another, if this goes on, they'll miss two... They're already behind. They'll miss their education. Where you went to university or graduate school or law school, or wherever you... Have them take initiatives to bring in more people from these communities so that they have job opportunities. Also support legislation that will give actual real training for jobs that exist. Training programs, very often train people for jobs that don't exist. What's it gonna be if you're training for something that no longer exists. You get involved wherever you are. Also if you are white, don't ever be a Karen. Don't even think about it. Don't see yourself as walking around in white spaces, and what is this person doing? So that if a 5'2 Black person walks up and stands under the canopy who weighs 120 pounds soaking wet, you wanna know, "Why you standing under my canopy?" When all you had to do was look out at the rain. Use your brain, and try to be kinder and try to be more intelligent. Learn more about our history so that you understand how we came to the paths where we are, and then you might help us unravel some of this.
- Oh, thank you so much for all of your words this evening, especially that wonderful advice at the end. I'm gonna turn it back over to Provost Epstein for some closing words.
- So thank you so much for this really fascinating lecture and discussion. I loved how you moved from Callie House to this very wide ranging discussion of the situation in the United States today. And of course, I love your plea for people learning more history. So before we formally close, I'd like to make sure that everyone knows about the next lecture in this series. Martha S. Jones, professor of history at Johns Hopkins University will speak on Vanguard. How Black women broke barriers, won the vote and insisted on equality for all. The lecture will take place on Tuesday, September 22nd at 7:00 PM. Also, it's not too late to sign up for the seminar and join in a discussion of Mary Frances Berry's talk and the related readings. Join the seminar from the main event page, and you will then receive an invitation to discussion sections. Finally, thank you again so much Professor Manion, and especially Professor Berry, and to all of you in the audience for joining us and good night, everyone.