Events & Calendars The History of Anti-Black Racism in America Provost Lecture Series

- Good afternoon, I'm Catherine Epstein, Provost and Dean of the Faculty at Amherst College. Welcome to the final lecture in our series on the History of anti-alack racism in America. This series has been premised on the notion that to understand anti-Black racism today, we need to know much more about the history of Anti-Black Racism in the United States. In the past few months, we have brought to the college some of the most distinguished Black historians of the African-American experience in the United States. We started with Mary Frances Berry and learned about the long struggle of African-Americans to receive reparations for slavery. We then heard from Martha Jones, about the remarkable role of Black women in the movement for civil rights, as well as how Black women have shaped American political movements more broadly. Then we heard from Khalil Gibran Muhammad on how the white imagination has associated Black Americans with criminality and the deleterious impact of that association. And finally this afternoon, we are honored to hear from Elizabeth Hinton. Hinton's book "From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America," documents how the war on poverty that started during the Kennedy administration ultimately turned into a war on crime and drugs. The war on crime and drugs, in turn, led to an extraordinary growth of policing and incarceration among Black Americans. Sadly, however, all the while, the root causes of crime, poverty, and inattention to the plight of inner-city populations were left unaddressed. As Hinton painstakingly shows, the call for law and order, the war on crime and drugs found consensus among both Republican and Democratic administrations. Indeed, it was senators Edward Kennedy and Joe Biden who introduced legislation that eventually led Congress to pass the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, widely seen as the beginning of the war on drugs. The bipartisan consensus around law and order is yet another marker of how deeply anti-Black racism pervades American society. It is of course one explanation for Trump's electoral strength in the recent election. All this suggests just how much work we still need to do, to understand anti-Black racism past and present in the United States. Thank you, Professor Hinton, for being with us today and for illuminating such important recent historical trends. As our lecture series draws to a close, we owe a huge thanks to Jen Manion Associate Professor of History at Amherst. Jen developed this series, invited our amazing guests, and has also organized parallel events to the main lecture. Each speaker has held a session with a class of Amherst College students. Following each lecture, Jen has also organized hour-long discussion meetings for staff, faculty and students. Participants have read the speakers' work as well as related articles. I want to thank everyone who is here this afternoon but also those of you who have participated in one or more of the discussion meetings. Jen, thank you for your incredible work in organizing this series and thereby helping us all to gain a better understanding of anti-Black racism in the United States. And before turning this over to Jen, I would like to thank the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This lecture series is supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, intended to support the cultivation of public scholarship in the humanities at Amherst College, Jen.

- Thank you, Provost Epstein. Elizabeth Hinton is Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Department of African-American Studies at Yale, with a secondary appointment as Professor of Law at the Law School. Intense research focuses on the persistence of poverty, racial inequality, and urban violence in the 20th century United States. She is considered one of the nation's leading experts on criminalization and policing. Her path-breaking book, "From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America," was published by Harvard University Press in 2016. Hinton examines the implementation of federal law enforcement programs beginning in the mid-1960s, that transformed domestic social policies and laid the groundwork for the expansion of the US prison system. In revealing the links between the rise of the American carceral state and earlier anti-poverty programs, Hinton presents Ronald Reagan's war on drugs not as a sharp policy departure, but rather as the full realization of a shift towards surveillance and confinement that began during the Johnson administration. Before joining the Yale faculty, Hinton was a Professor in the Department of History and the Department of African and African-American studies at Harvard University. She spent two years as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows and Assistant Professor in the Department of Afro-American. in the pages of the Journal of American History, the Journal of Urban History, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Boston Review, the Nation, and Time. She also co-edited "The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction, with the late historian Manning Marable. I've been a big fan of Dr. Hinton's work over the years, especially her 2015 essay in a special issue in the Journal of American History called, "A War within Our Own Boundaries Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and the Rise of the Carceral State." This essay highlights the key arguments of her path-breaking book that followed. I teach her work regularly, and I have to say for myself that after reading it I had one of those aha moments where the rise of mass incarceration finally made sense. Dr. Hinton brought together so many missing pieces to the puzzle none more provocative than the now well-substantiated claim that progressive Democrats actually partnered with conservative Republicans in the making of mass incarceration in the US. I am thrilled that Dr. Hinton has joined us this evening and we'll be sharing some of her new research, in a talk entitled Criminalization, Inequality, and the Stakes of 2020.

- Thank you so much, Jen and Provost Epstein for that introduction, and also for inviting me to participate in the lecture series on anti-Black racism. Especially coming at the end of such distinguished colleagues whose work I admire, including yours, Professor Manion, and also to Austin Huot. Thank you for helping to handle logistics and, of course, all of you for coming. I so wish that we could be in person but I'm happy to speak with you under these circumstances nonetheless. It's truly an honor to be here. What an intense and crazy year 2020 has been. We now have the election behind us for the most part but the virus is surging and continues to unmask many other viruses in America. And of course this summer we witnessed the largest mass mobilization in American history, with millions of people protesting anti-Black racism and police violence on the streets of cities in all 50 states and 4,400 some cities worldwide. It started, as many of you, I'm sure know on May 25th after a devastating incident of police violence with deep historical roots. A white police officer jamming his knee into the neck of 46-year-old George Floyd for nearly 10 minutes, as three other officers held Floyd's body down on the streets. In his final moments Floyd, unarmed and in handcuffs, pled for his life and repeatedly informed the officer and the crowd of bystanders that he couldn't breathe. Thousands took to the streets in peaceful protest the night after Floyd died demanding justice for his life. Demanding that this time the officers involved be held fully accountable for their actions. Minneapolis residents, in turn, responded to the buildup of unanswered grievances and the lack of concrete changes to their immediate living conditions, problems of under protection, intentional segregation, and structural exclusion that have only been exacerbated by COVID-19, by using the available resources at their disposal. Throwing rocks, bricks, bottles and firebombs at buildings, police precincts, and police cruisers, and by taking goods and foods from major retailers, such as Target and AutoZone, and then burning these and other institutions, like this Arby's, to the ground. Police unleashed tear gas and rubber bullets on protestors in response, and the National Guard was deployed. In total this summer, more than 17,000 National Guards are on patrol in the streets in American cities, in 23 states, and Washington DC. The Trump administration deployed federal troops to DC, Portland, Seattle, Kansas City, Chicago Albuquerque, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee under Operation Legend and Operation Diligent Valor. Trump borrowed his law-and-order, presidential campaign rhetoric from Richard Nixon and Make America Great Again from Ronald Reagan. And in the context of mass protest for Black lives in 2020, the not so subtle appeals to white racism and the divisions the authoritarianism of Trumpism made the election about what kind of country we want the United States to be. Will we continue along this undemocratic and misguided policy path that has criminalized, racially marginalized groups, and the poorest among us for generations, or will we fulfill finally, the unfinished promises of the abolition of slavery and Jim Crow by supporting the structural transformations and redistributive changes at the national level that tens of millions of people demanded across the United States and the world last summer. In 2019 people of color under 16 were the majority of people in that age group and by 2050 white people will be the minority. The Trump administration and its supporters in Congress are showing us just how far they will go to keep their power, to retain white supremacy in the face of these monumental demographic transformations. These are the problems, that have been central to American history and why the types of violence we witnessed this summer have been a nearly perennial occurrence in United States since the civil rights movement. When Trump tweeted the day after George Floyd died, quote, "When the looting starts, the shooting starts," he was quoting Miami Police Chief Walter Headley who said the same thing at a press conference in 1967 after Miami similarly exploded. We have not seen a wave of urban violence like this since the long hot summers of Lyndon Johnson's Presidency. Between 1964 and 1972, the United States confronted the greatest moment of sustained domestic bloodshed since the civil war, and clearly we've been living with the aftershocks of this period since. Every major urban center burned during these eight years, but the violence was not just a problem in archetypal ghettos like Harlem and Watts and in majority-Black cities like Detroit in Washington DC. It could happen in any place where Black residents were denied access to political and economic resources and lived in segregated, unequal conditions. Together these events caused hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage and shaped the lives of the store owners who found their businesses decimated, the parents who lost their teenage sons to riot police, and millions of other Americans in between. Through the rhetoric of our politicians, media coverage, and much of the academic research on this subject we've become accustomed to refer to these events from Harlem in 1964, to Philadelphia just last month, as riots. Or what those left of center sometimes refer to as civil disorders. We are then left to view these moments in a historical vacuum as riots, as something meaningless and irrational. Devoid of any political motivation and ultimately criminal. This is the position from which the Trump administration responds to the violence today, and how President Lyndon B. Johnson responded from its inception. Johnson announced following the release of an FBI report on violence that swept eight cities during the summer of 1964, quote, "The riots as well as other criminal and juvenile delinquency problems in our cities are closely connected. Each riot began with a single incident and it was aggravated by hoodlums and habitual lawbreakers," end quote. Johnson dismissed the possibility that these hoodlums shared many of the same grievances as civil rights protestors. Three years later, Johnson would tell the nation during a televised address delivered in the middle of the unprecedented violence in Detroit in 1967, quote, "There is no American right to loot stores or to burn buildings or to fire rifles from rooftops. That is crime." Before this point, riots in United States had been mostly perpetuated by white vigilante mobs who were hostile to integration and who took justice into their own hands, often with the support of local police. A riotous lynch mob as large as 5,000, many of whom came from out of town descended on the Black community of Springfield, Illinois in August 1908. Randomly destroying Black businesses, driving Black families from their homes and executing two Black men. Mobs in East St. Louis in 1917 made Black war time factory workers and their families choose between being burned alive or shot to death among other acts of terrorism, in one of the bloodiest riots of the 20th century. This white supremacist violence only escalated as Black migrants continued to flee the terror of the segregationist South, in greater numbers after World War I. Searching for better opportunities and safety from the white mob. 25 cities erupted during what is known as the Red Summer of 1919, when white and Black residents fought and killed each other on the streets of Chicago and Washington, DC. In the rural community of Phillips County, Arkansas where Black tenant sharecroppers were attempting to unionize, white emergency posses killed at least 200 people. Another 200 would be killed in Tulsa, Oklahoma two years later in what is known as the Greenwood Massacre carried out by 2000 white men who were deputized to commit various atrocities against Black residents with the full backing of the county government. And race rights spiked again in major cities during World War II. White supremacist violence continues to pervade American society although in the post-war period local police came to assume many of the previous functions of the anti-Black punitive tradition, that keeps racial hierarchies in place. When white people no longer appear to be the driving force behind rioting in the nation's cities and Black collected violence against exploitative and exclusionary institution surfaced, 'rioting' became associated with criminality and grounded the intensifying clamor for law and order. As President Johnson and others saw it, rioting and crime were two strains of the same disease in Black communities that could only be cured by more police. The McComb Commission determined in its report on the Watts uprising in Los Angeles in August 1965, quote, "These riots were each a symptom of a sickness in the center of our cities. The commission identified the cause of the sickness not as systemic racism but disintegrating Black families who set in motion a spiral of failure for their children leading them to a life of crime and welfare dependency. It was the riff-raff of the ghetto who fueled the violence, so the theory went, the criminals, the young, the unskilled, the jobless, they rioted, they burned, and looted seeking momentary thrills to break their tedious lives. Such pathological understandings, never a frame through which authorities considered acts of white terrorism, reinforced a sense of general disorder in urban centers and justified lawmakers decision to enlist the police to manage that disorder. So a proper account of violence in the post-civil rights era depends on our ability to interpret it not as a way of criminality, but as a period of sustained insurgency. The violence emerged in response to a moment of tangibly felt racism. "A single incident," as Johnson said most often touched off by a police encounter. But the tens of thousands of Black Americans who participated in this collective violence were rebelling against past harms, past wrongs and the systems that preserved unequal conditions over generations. Unlike the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, the Weatherman or other revolutionary groups active during these years, these instinctive community-based rebellions sought concessions from authorities in the areas of unemployment, housing, education, and law enforcement. And a reordering of the status quo so that Black people would no longer be treated as second class citizens in their city and country. The violence served as a message to the nation that civil rights reform, an unprecedented war on poverty, and nonviolent direct action tactics were inadequate to solve the problem of racial inequality. Something else was needed. Johnson himself recognized, in the same July 1967 speech on Detroit, where he linked rioting with crime and disentangled that from civil rights protests that quote, "The only genuine, long-range solution for what has happened lies in an attack mounted at every level, upon the conditions that breed despair and violence." The president's rhetoric indicated that he favored social programs but in practice he increasingly looked to law enforcement as a short-term solution to manage the manifestations of these conditions as they appeared through rioting and crime. Other liberals joined Johnson in the shift to the second half of the 1960s, as the rebellions increased in intensity alongside the rollout of civil rights legislation and new job training, remedial education, and community action programs wondering if perhaps, the social welfare intervention had gone too far. Viewed as riots, as criminal acts that could only be controlled with law enforcement, Johnson and other authorities never seriously questioned the way the war on crime launched one year after the war on poverty, may have also been culpable for the violence. Instead, they embraced the expansion of American law enforcement as the best strategy to handle race relations moving forward. The decision to respond to the rebellions with police force was not a foreground conclusion however. Johnson's own Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders known popularly as the Kerner Commission offered a promising but unperceived alternative to the escalation of policemen incarceration. In its final report on February 1968 which went on to become a national bestseller as a mass-market paperback, the commission warned federal policymakers and the nation that absent a massive infusion of public resources, promoting greater access to political and economic institutions, quote "Sufficient to make a dramatic, visible impact on life in the urban ghetto. A rising proportion of Negroes and disadvantaged city areas might come to look upon the deprivation and segregation they suffer as proper justification to engage in large scale violence followed by white retaliation." The Kerner Commission grim forecast came to fruition almost immediately and continues to shape American life to this day. Federal policymakers did not heed the warnings of the Kerner Commission or take seriously what residents told elected officials, newspaper reporters, and researchers, about how rebellion could be prevented in the future. Nor did authorities take the persistence of rebellion as an indication, the strategy of increasing state surveillance and militarizing crime control forces in Black communities had inflamed the violence, that officials wanted to prevent. But the Johnson administration did blame the riots on Black men between the ages of 15 and 24, and developed a new national law enforcement program to target that demographic. When faced with alternatives, lawmakers pursued a punitive path that advanced racial injustice. The rebellions appeared most threatening in the summer of 1967 and in the 137 separate incidents that follow the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968. Our memory of these incidents largely stops there but the rebellions endured for years to come. Between May 1968 and December 1972, at least 960 segregated Black communities across the United States, which was 2,326, separate uprisings that met the vast majority, in mid-size and smaller cities that journalists and scholars tend to overlook. Most of the violent encounters, involving Black residents during this period began in response to the policing of ordinary everyday activity. Through these four years nearly 40,000 people were arrested, more than 10,000 were injured, and at least 220 people died. Even less recognized in this wave of Black rebellion in the later period are the Latinx Americans who similarly took up violence in an effort to secure equal rights, improve unequal conditions, and challenge emerging crime control apparatus. At least 200 rebellions were carried out by Latinx residents after King's murder. The majority of them in Puerto Rican communities in the Northeast. Although many state and local officials joined national policymakers, in primarily targeting young Black men for new punitive programs after 1965, Latinx community suffered from increasing levels of police brutality and the shared conditions of mass unemployment, degraded housing, and unequal access to educational resources. Along with Black rebellions, these events should be recognized as part of a much larger political impulse arising from shared grievances among people of color and drawing our attention to the inherent discrimination with American law enforcement and the criminal legal system. The rock-throwing, fire setting, and window breaking that emerged in more than a thousand Black and brown communities during this largely forgotten window, happened after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, into law. Johnson had called the war on crime in March 1965 one week after he sent the voting rights act to Congress beginning an unprecedented investment into local law enforcement that was prompted in large part by the continued problem of Black rebellion. As Americans fought the Vietnam war, federal policymakers ramped up police operations on the home-front to battle political radicalism and rebellion, creating a pipeline to deliver army surplus weapons and technologies to local law enforcement. City officials took advantage of this freshly available federal resource to control Black neighborhoods. In between the launch of the crime war and the enactment of the Safe Streets Act, the federal government spent 20.6 million funding 359 programs that modernized police departments with riot control training programs and with military grade weapons like AR-15 and M4 carbines, steel helmets, three-foot batons, masks, armored vehicles, two-way radios, tear gas, and a handful of low costs police community relations initiatives thrown in for good measure. The Los Angeles Police Department, still recovering from the Watts Rebellion in 1965 received the second-largest grant and a helicopter in 1967. Seen as the foot soldiers of the war on crime, as President Johnson called them, the federal government ensured that police as a counter-insurgent force would be prepared to face their domestic enemy. Although Black communities had been vulnerable to targeted surveillance, frequent encounters with police, mass arrests, illegal searches and outright brutality in the century after emancipation. The official launch of the War on Crime at that residence segregated low-income neighborhoods in big cities like New York, mid-sized cities like Phoenix, and smaller cities like West Point, Georgia, would be patrolled by police departments with an arsenal of riot control equipment at their disposal. By 1970, federal policymakers had allocated some $40 million or about 300 million in today's dollars on such equipment for local law enforcement. At the same time, the Safe Streets Act and it's 330 million outlay for crime control supported the influx of police officers in urban areas that seem prone to rebellion. But the strategy of militarizing local police forces and saturating communities of color with police and surveillance failed to have a measurable impact on the crime problem itself, in the poorest most vulnerable urban communities. Even as national crime rates declined significantly in the 1990s, the moment when federal policymakers, accelerated the term towards zero-tolerance policing and mass incarceration in the communities where police and surveillance loom large, Black and brown residents are vulnerable to premature death. In this sense, the wars on crime and drugs and the hundreds of billions of dollars allocated to fight them represent not only gross violations of civil liberties but are arguably the biggest domestic policy failures in the history of the United States. The large-scale rebellions of the last decades of the 20th and early 21st century, Miami in 1980, Los Angeles in 1992, and Cincinnati in 2001, share many of the same causes and characteristics as the collective violence of the earlier period. But these were volumes and the political violence that followed the beginning of the mid-2010s emerging response to the way policing measures advance, inherently racist criminal legal system that disproportionately ensnared millions of women and men of color deepening segregation and inequality in the process. The conditions that bred the police encounters and legal injustices and precipitated the rebellions of 50 years ago and today would not have happened and could have been avoided entirely had national lawmakers and law enforcement authorities decided to respond in a different way to the enlightened protest at the post civil rights era, in both its non-violent and violent forms. Prevailing interpretations view the rebellions as a break from the nonviolent direct action protest tactics of the civil rights movement. The second reconstruction which promises of the civil war and its aftermath aim to integrate American society and extend the bounds of citizenship. It secured the right to an education, to shop at certain stores or eat in certain restaurants and to vote. It made racism no longer acceptable in American public discourse and created a growing Black middle class. But with the War on Crime came new forms of social control and with them a new form of resistance. As the Reverend Charles Cohen, a prominent activist who preached the politics of armed self-defense and community controlling in Cairo, Illinois pointed out, quote, "Voting rights could not be eaten or made into clothing and shelter." The rising generation that spawned the unrest and segregated urban communities during this period was prepared to take the socio-economic aims and civil rights protests to their logical conclusion. This generation spent their childhoods witnessing the civil rights movement unfold and were now approaching adulthood in the era of Black power, emboldened with the kind of courage to meet police violence with violence, that perhaps the older generations could not have possessed. Even if they did not participate and often served important roles in calming the violence many residents resonated with and admired the determination of those who stood up to the forces of anti-Black racism with rocks and fire. As a Black activist in Alexandria, Virginia, put it quote, "The expression the youngsters put forth is a deep and hidden expression of older Blacks." The sit-ins, marches, boycotts, voter registration drives, and legal challenges that defined Black politics in the post-war period had not addressed structural inequities or provided protections from the lived realities of police and white supremacist violence. For many Black Americans, the choice seemed to be give up and accept their inferior status in American society or fight back. An older Black resident in York, Pennsylvania a city which suffered from one of the most devastating rebellions of the era in the summer of 1969, one that involved the twin forces of police violence and white vigilante terror explained quote, "The cops are out shooting at people or busting heads, and you go down to city hall and they say they didn't do it and that's all there is to it. You can't buck city hall. We've been going to city hall for years. Somebody's going to have to get hurt. That's all there is to it." If government authorities were unwilling to protect Black residents from police brutality then self-defense, the politics Black Americans had adopted historically under white terrorism and government complacency in an attempt to create safer conditions in their communities, presented itself as a rational alternative. In addition to serving as a form of protection among the nation's most vulnerable, violence might force local, state, and national politicians to respond with greater urgency to Black residents' demands. As a spokesman for the Hartford Black Caucus declared in 1969 after young Black residents engaged in confrontations with police and damaged nearly a hundred billion, with rocks and fire through the summer quote "The power structure reacts to riots and violence. This is the Black man's only power." By their actions, those who participated in the rebellions argued that violence was a necessary strategy to secure economic access and full civic inclusion for not just Black people but for all Americans. It can be a struggle to imagine that the young people who threw rocks at police or who looted local businesses as political actors and this bias has influenced the writing of history. Even scholars and activists interested in forms of resistance to systemic racism have been reluctant to take seriously the political nature of Black rebellion. Yet just as much as nonviolent direct action rebellion presented a way for people of color to express collective solidarity in the face of exploitation, political exclusion and criminalization. And arguably the success of the nonviolent direct political action that characterized the civil rights movement, and is the guiding principle of protest today, depended on the presence of violent direct political action. As Martin Luther King Jr. himself recognized the power of mass nonviolence rose in part from its ability to suggest the course of power, of violent resistance should demands not be met. Therefore, when we reflect on Black protests past, present, and future, we should endeavor to see both its violent and nonviolent expressions as entwined forces. And to do that, we should attempt to understand violent rebellion on its own terms as a form of direct political action, that has been just as integral to the history of the United States and freedom movements. Both violent and nonviolent traditions have continued to ground movements for social justice. But the violent conditions which have shaped Black life for four centuries have made violent responses to those conditions, a feature of American life from the very beginning. Indeed, what I've been describing, what happened this summer, and what we voted on exactly two weeks ago has been one of the central problems of American history. Slave owners constantly fear their human property would exert their self-defense by escaping or that groups of enslaved Africans would take revenge on their white masters. Slave patrols, America's first system of organized civilian based law enforcement were charged with depressing potential and insurrection by raiding slave dwellings, disbursing gatherings and patrolling the areas around plantations and towns. These essential duties became the fundamental logics of American policing. Maintaining the social order and preventing violent retaliation among oppressed people of color by making them objects of surveillance and controls. Under the terms of the Declaration of Independence, enslaved Africans were justified in rebelling against the forces that kept them in bondage. The contradiction between the American founding values of liberty and equality, and the governing principles of racism and exploitation sustain the conditions that bred rebellion in the early republic and in contemporary America. Thomas Jefferson author of the "Declaration" and owner of more than 600 slaves in his lifetime embodied this contradiction perhaps better than any other. As he wrote of rebellion in 1785 "Notes in the State of Virginia," and I'm just going to read the last lines which are the most famous ones. "Indeed, I trembled for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. That considering numbers, nature and natural means only a revolution of the wheel of fortune and exchange of situation is among possible events." Jefferson went on to observe in this offsite of passage that the exchange of situation was on the horizon. That the slaves were rising from the dust and he hoped that their total emancipation would be realized quote, "With the consent of the masters rather than by their extirpation." Eventually, Jefferson knew, the violence of racial oppression would come back to haunt the nation that was built upon that oppression, and he hoped that when it did, the ruling elite would fix the contradictions that have cursed America from the beginning. To ignore them would bring peril in the future. Jefferson cast Black rebellion as a self-fulfilling prophecy that he and other founders had set in most motion. A menace that would remain as long as racial hierarchies were preserved and state violence mobilized to preserve them. Paraphrasing Jefferson, some 180 years later Lyndon Johnson remarked to the rebellions that follow the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. quote, "What did you expect? I don't know why we're so surprised. When you put your foot on your a man's neck and hold them down for 300 years and then you let him up. What's he going to do? He's going to knock your block off." Despite their awareness of and even sympathy for the causes of rebellion, neither Jefferson nor Johnson, limited by their own racism, were willing to lead the nation in righting the wrongs of history. They left it to future generations and by doing so ensure that inequality and violence would continue to tarnish American life. Had policymakers and officials at all levels of government taken rebellions as an opportunity to seriously listen to residents' demands and reconsider the purpose and function of police, the negative consequences of the punitive approach to urban problems might have been avoided entirely. The most important lesson from the rebellions that police violence precipitates community violence, escaped policymakers and the scholars they consulted. Instead, led by the national government, authorities allocated billions of taxpayer dollars into the wars on crime and drugs and gangs, and mass incarceration that only seemed to make the problem worse on all sides. Rather than contend with underlying causes officials further criminalized entire communities where unrest materialized for the remainder of the 20th century and into the 21st. Taking together the history of this violence demonstrates that patrolling low-income neighborhoods with outside forces does not effectively control crime. In fact, it establishes a dynamic where residents and officers view each other as the enemy, rendering both sides less safe. Officials overlook the fact, that young Black people were and continue to be much more likely to suffer harm or death with police lingering in their community, either by each other or by an officer whose job is extensively to protect them. Michael Brown, who was fatally shot by Ferguson police eight days after he graduated high school, it's such a legacy of this policy path sustained over five decades. And Brown's death in 2014 sparked the renewal of violent political rebellion the United States had not confronted since the long hot summers of Johnson's presidency. Back then residents demanded policies to address the state-sanctioned violence, mass unemployment, deplorable public schools, and inhumane housing conditions. Policymakers and officials gave them policing surveillance in prisons instead, turning mass criminalization into the engine of racial inequality, in the aftermath of Jim Crow. And in doing so, authorities left the central contradiction of American society unresolved and recast its most recent and repressive elements in a new guise. It remains to be seen where this criminalization, this mass supervision, and imprisonment, will poison American society even further. We, as a nation, still fail to reckon with the wisdom Martin Luther King Jr prophetically offered toward the end of his life one that recalls Thomas Jefferson's own warnings that quote, "Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention. There is no other answer. Constructive social change will bring certain tranquility. Evasions will merely encourage turmoil." More than a half-century after King's insights and more than 200 years after Jefferson's, it is clear that America will continue to catch the fires of rebellion until the structures of racial inequality are finally dismantled and the police are no longer empowered by authorities to manage the material consequences of conditions that are beyond their control. Thank you.

- Wow. Thank you so much. You basically answered all of my questions. So right now I'm trying to decide whether to ask them anyway and kind of have you elaborate on some of your points. But actually, I'm going to go right to the questions from the audience because there is a question that I think touches on one of your last points that you just made, and it really is about the role of police in Black communities. And I'm just going to read right from the prompt. This person said some Black communities would apparently like to reduce police presence, while others would like more and better policing, can you help us understand why?

- Yeah, so I think part of the key is the better policing, right. I mean, we shouldn't be surprised that residents in communities that are experiencing high levels of crime want better protection. And this is a dynamic that I actually have explored with colleagues of mine who also work on issues of policing and crime control. The political scientist Vesla Weaver and the historian Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, and we called this concept 'selective hearing' in a New York Times, op-ed. And basically what we argue is that Black Americans in calling for more and better police, that is usually tied in with a lot of the kinds of demands that I was talking about that animated both non-violent and violent political rebellion. Socioeconomic investments into under-resourced communities. You know, more money spent on education, decent housing, basic social welfare services and a more kind of imaginative view of what crime prevention looks like. And so despite, you know when residents call for better policing, policy makers tend to hear more policing. And so one of the things that's, you know, one way we can think about it is that of all the demands predating the sixties but in the post-war United States, that Black communities and communities of color have called for the thing that they've gotten most of are police surveilling and incarceration. Very rarely are residents in over-policed, under-protected communities just calling for more police, but instead, that is the demand that gets taken up. So, in that sense that's why we call this selective hearing because policymakers have not heard or responded to the suite of things that Black residents in these communities have asked for.

- Thank you and I actually want to draw on that op-ed because it's very insightful, and I wonder if, building on what you just said, if we could kind of connect the dots from that argument to what is defund the police. What is that movement about? You know, I feel like you're right there. So I'm just wondering if your answer...anyway.

- Right. So this, I mean again you know, we can go back to the Kerner Commission and that's why I think that that report is actually so important. Because again it's these like contesting visions of how should we respond to basically the material manifestations of poverty and racial inequality as they appear in crime and violence or social harm. And instead of making an investment right there in the sixties, right in a full-employment program or job creation programs instead, the federal government decided to invest in essentially a job creation program for police. What defund the police is doing, is essentially asking us to rethink these investments. And you know, that's one of the reasons why I emphasize so much, I think the big takeaway from my first book and my research is that the hundreds of billions of dollars that we've invested into crime control programs that all levels of government have not made a measurable have not actually kept communities safer. Have not actually successfully prevented violence, social harm in these communities. And so now it's time for us to maybe go back to what the Kerner Commission recommended and think about a different set of investments that we can make into communities. You know, I see the best kind of way to foster public safety, to prevent crime in the future is not to put more police on the streets to look for potential suspects but instead to think about how we can invest in educational opportunities how we can get people jobs, how we can make sure that people live in houses that don't have rats and roaches running through their beds. To me this is what public safety is about and this is, in the long run, a much more effective use of taxpayer dollars, that can actually improve lives rather than just criminalize, punish, and incarcerate people.

- I find this just so insightful and helpful because talking heads and well-meaning interested people, I feel like people have just been going around in circles all summer. Like, what's the answer to police violence and is it this, is it you know which like lever do I pull on first? And what you just said, and you know, what you said in that op-ed is not just that. Yeah, it's about socioeconomic inclusion but it's not just that we're saying that now, you have this incredible example of historical contingency, where a lot of people just like us had this same conversation in the 1960s. Were reading, and talking, and listening, and trying to figure out what's the right thing and they made a terrible decision. And so like what is to like, how can this moment of incredible upheaval and you know potential transformation in 2020, which is intensified for all the reasons that you laid out in the beginning, how can 2020, what policymakers and liberals do, not to reproduce the errors of the 1960s and seventies?

- So, and I think actually this goes to the earlier question about you know, about defund right. I mean, it's not, that is...thinking about it as I'm making a different set of investments or divest, invest, I think in some ways it's less polarizing than defund, but really it's making a whole different set of investments. Because every time this happens when we think about reform and really since the Carter administration, urban policy and crime control policy have been completely intertwined. We don't really have a separate, we can't imagine how to approach urban problems outside of policing functions and so so much of this is getting beyond that framework. It's really disappointing when you know I think it was in maybe in July or August when Joe Biden's response essentially to the protest was a $330 million investment into more police training and more body cams and equipment. And you know again, one of the things that our history shows us is that like is that investing in training and equipment is always the response to these problems. And always the response to police violence and that hasn't worked. And so you know, one of the things that we need to begin doing is making investments into communities themselves and into vibrant community organizations that are addressing these problems and that have been either forced to rely on crowdsourcing funds or private money in order to survive because so much of public funds are diverted, especially in low-income urban communities to law enforcement where in many of these places the police budget is more than half of the municipal budget. Which eats up of course you know, many fundamental social welfare programs. So yeah I mean, I think the first step is to no longer you know we don't need to spend more money on police departments at this point. You know, we need to rethink public safety in terms of how we can actually empower community members to keep their own neighborhoods safe.

- Thank you. I have a question about police unions. Someone is wondering what role you see police unions playing in the war on crime, and what changes in regarding those unions, would need to happen for us to see some of the dramatic changes that are necessary?

- Yeah, so that's a really tough question especially because so often police chiefs, even chiefs who say that they want to make progressive reforms kind of always blame the unions as a stopgap from doing so. And you know in part, I think that we need bolder police chiefs and policies that will actually change the bargaining power of unions. I mean so much of the lack of accountability and the lack of enforcement of police violence that we've seen, you know certainly in the last five or six years has to do with the fact that police unions have all of these safeguards for their members. And so it's really, really difficult to actually actively pursue officers who have records of excessive use of force or misconduct. And so you know, part of it is we of course don't want to prevent people from unionizing but we've got to rethink what these unions mean in terms of and really the threat that the power of these unions pose to the safety of the community themselves. And so I think we need a new set of policies that will be able to combat police union power but also police chiefs who will be bold and brave enough to take on the unions in enacting more progressive and enlightening set of policing measures.

- To that end, I have a question. Someone is wondering if, do we have any good examples? Are there any cities or police unions that are actually doing this well, that have responded this summer in more progressive ways and more effective ways for those of us who care about racial justice?

- So I think, you know again in part, because of the power of the unions and the culture of policing, it's a struggle, it's been really tough. Like even in Minneapolis you know as a city council did take strides to initially defund the police and think about a new community-based model. You know through the fall and in months since in part because of pressure from the police department. And in part also because in response to the protest and in a kind of sense of anti-police climate officers have withdrawn. They've withdrawn from communities and said, well I'm not going to interfere in certain situations. They become almost paralyzed in the sense that they're like well if I respond to certain calls in a certain way I might be accused as racist. And so in Minneapolis, we've seen in a way the kind of earlier push towards defund in some sense is not actually materialized in the way that city council members themselves and certainly activists would have envisioned. But I do think that there are some promising police departments who are making important reforms. For the past four years or so I've been working with who I consider to be probably the most progressive police chief in the country and that's Eric Jones in Stockton, California, and as part of a Department of Justice Program that started during the Obama administration, largely in response to the unrest in Ferguson, in Baltimore and other cities and the kind of state of police killings, that we became aware of through videos and social media during this period, selected six cities to implement procedural justice and to try to improve trust and relations between police and residents of color in particular. And in Stockton actually developed one of the more, I think bold approaches as part of the national initiative and conducted what they call Racial Reconciliation which is kind of problematic because there wasn't you know we could argue that there's never been really conciliation between communities of color and police. But part of what Chief Jones sought to do is to uncover the kind of history of racist policing within this Stockton Police Department, in order to use as a basis to build trust with communities and to hold listening sessions between rank, and file officers, and community members. And that's partly where I came in. Chief Jones opened up the records of the Stockton Police Department to me and I've spent a good deal of 2016 and 17 in Stockton and try to make it back as frequently as I can although COVID has made that more difficult. But in helping the police department achieved these reconciliation objectives. And there are a few other officers who are really committed, to what's called like fact-finding and truth-telling and taking accountability for past harms. Whether that's lynching you know in the early 20th century or that's excessive use of force and police brutality in more recent years, and attempting to use history as a tool to improve police-community relations. And you know, all of these reforms in a lot of senses are very limited but I do think that you know, history is a tool for us that can help us get past and understand the long history of mistrust and hopefully give officers the tools to recognize the kind of larger socioeconomic and political dynamics, of what it means to be an officer who's coming in to a low-income most likely community of color as an outside force. And where that is an act in itself that leads to mistrust and fear really on both sides between police officers and community members.

- Thank you. I want to shift gears towards the question of public protests and violence. And it is another area in which I think history offers us a lot. In the Boston Review in May, you like helped unpack the Minneapolis Uprising in context. And what you said is quote, "It can be a struggle to imagine some of the most over-policed, marginalized, and isolated Americans as political actors. And this bias has influenced the writing of history." And I just would love to hear you elaborate on this. I know you did raise that in the talk as well but how this idea affects public perception of public protest and also the legacy of Dr. King in non-violent protest, as representative of the model civil rights movement and kind of how that complicates... or peoples assessment of an ability, you know how people judge and perceive street protest that turns violent. And whether that's seen as a departure from a more model non-violent civil rights movement protests of the sixties. And obviously, you know you just told us these are all part of the same thing, but I know people aren't there, and if you could just help us a little bit more explicitly like, what is the role of violence in public protest for social change in this moment for Black Americans seeking justice?

- Yeah, that's a really important and tough question. I mean, I think you know part of why it's important for us to take those who do feel that violent forms of protests are the only available means to achieve larger goals, I think is really key because and this is one of the things I really tried to emphasize in the talk is that, you know that these incidents of rebellion, these incidents of violent political action are rooted in the same set of socio-economic grievances around employment, and housing, and education that we associate with the mainstream civil rights movement. And in labeling people who participate in violent forms of protests and dismissing them as criminals, or as hoodlums as Johnson said we hear the same rhetoric, again and again, today from President Trump and from people like Senator Tom Cotton in the pages of the New York Times. You know this isn't going to actually, labeling this as criminal, which is what we've done historically this continues to prevent us from actually realizing or identifying what the larger structural forces are that breed this kind of protest in the first place. And you know one of the things that I think is a really important dynamic of the sixties and also of protest today, the so-called riots, were completely dismissed. They were seen as violent and criminal by federal policymakers, and in many ways, even though you know contrary to a lot of the myths that we tell ourselves or the kind of dominant interpretation of the rise of federal law enforcement offered by many of my political scientists and sociologists friends. You know, crime was not in 1965 when Johnson called the War on Crime, was not at an all-time high as you know many policymakers at the time would have had people believe. It was that the murder rate in '65 was actually lower than it had been in 1930 and in the early 20th century that the crime that was new, were these that the crime that was new, were these expressions of collective political violence that ended up getting kind of swept up and used to ground greater law enforcement intervention in these communities. And so, you know then and now you know had we thought and taken seriously the larger conditions that breed and lead people to feel as though they've exhausted other options and that nonviolent protest isn't going to get them ultimately the demands that they're seeking or to bring about the change that they want. We've got to begin to actually listen to people and think differently about how to respond to these forms of protest. You know, one of the things that made 2020 and really the protests from the mid-2010 beginning with Ferguson onwards unique, is that unlike you know Watts, or Detroit, or York, Pennsylvania that I mentioned in the talk, the more recent violent political protests have all started out as peaceful marches and vigils and ended up becoming violent when police show up in riot gear, heavily armed, throwing tear gas at peaceful protesters and things like that. So again you know even in response to completely peaceful protest today law enforcement tends to treat these gatherings these demonstrations as something that's violent. Which in turn ends up precipitating violence among the protesters. So again you know, this criminalization of protest in general and the kind of continued criminalization of those who see violent rebellion as the kind of next logical phase of protest to achieve aims that had seemed to be unmet through non-violent means, we've got to begin to think about differently and we've got to begin to respond to just like so much of it. You know, I kind of sound like a broken record but we've got to begin to respond to outside of law enforcement and police. And so, you know continuing to label violent protests as criminal and even peaceful protest as criminal creates the cycle through which rebellion and the entwined forces of non-violent and violent protests becomes an enduring feature in the United States.

- Well and I found that, such a powerful part of your talk when you offered us the long history of white violent protests being not problematic. Some of the those kinds of vigilantes, social control efforts just getting tied up and professionalized into the police. And then the Black violent protest becomes criminalized with the rise of the civil rights movement. I just want to shift gears again, because I want to talk about the Mellon Project. And so you know, one of the reasons why we're in this moment, is because of mass incarceration, because America disproportionately incarcerates so many people, especially Black and brown people. And the denial of educational opportunities and job opportunities as you've explained, at the heart of this whole big web. And, you know this summer for people who don't know the Mellon foundation announced a $5.3 million program to fund freedom libraries, in prisons across the country. Dr. Hinton and the poet and activist, Reginald Dwayne Betts will select the books. So I would love to hear why this project is so important and how it's going.

- I'm so glad that you asked about this Jen. Especially in a setting such as this, because you know and I know that this is something that the two of us share. But you know as scholars who work on these issues and someone who works at a university it's really... We're all complacent in mass incarceration and it's up to all of us. It's not just about the federal government changing policies We all have a role to play in getting us out of this mess that we're in. And I think universities have a really, really important role to play in the sense that, and private foundations, in the sense that you know more than race, education is a far more important predictor in determining future incarceration. So if you're a white man or woman without a high school degree, you're much more likely to go to prison than a Black person with a high school degree. And so I think as university educators, especially at elite institutions we really have a responsibility and an opportunity to provide educational opportunities, to the least educated in our society. You know and that's really the group of people who are systematically incarcerated, and it's something that I'm really committed to that I've, you know at Harvard and here at Yale. I think it's imperative that universities step up to provide educational resources to incarcerated people. And the Mellon Project you know it's housed at the Justice Collaboratory at Yale but it's funded through the Mellon Foundation. And as part of that effort, this was the genius idea of Dwayne Betts as Jen mentioned. And we intend to or we will install basically 500-book mini-libraries in prisons and juvenile prisons across the United States. And right now we're in the process of selecting the books, and they're going to be a wide range of titles. Fiction, non-fiction and you know, imagine this not only as.. And in part it's because you know, it's difficult to get, not all prisons have the resources and prison authorities you know, can be hesitant to include a really robust educational programming especially at the secondary level. So we're trying to provide people with resources and sets of books that they might not have access to in prison libraries, especially since you know most of the books in prison libraries tend to be like crime novels or romance novels. And we're hoping that this project will help bring some of the best and more recent titles into prisons, to help foster a sense of community among incarcerated people, through discussions and through self-education, but also to give people a window into a world in which so many incarcerated people, are systematically denied access to.

- You know I thank you for working on that project. When I read the announcement in the New York Times that day, I just my heart stopped. It was just a moment where I felt like the world is changing. It's amazing. I have one last question and I think while we're on the topic of education, some of our viewers are wondering how we can best support students and other young people who are engaged in social justice activism, who want to be a part of the movement, perhaps, how can we help them get skills to be successful activists. You know in whatever way that means, we'd love your insights.

- Well there's so many I mean, you know there's so many different ways. I think the first thing that comes to mind is just keeping informed on these topics and knowing, as a historian I'm going to say, knowing our history. I think especially in a moment when things like Donald Trump's patriotic education initiative are really trying to rewrite and obscure the history of racial class and gender depression in the United States, it's really important that we are aware of these histories and that we support those people who are doing that work. So part of it is to you know and this is a project that I think you know all of us who are committed to social justice engaging in in an ongoing basis. Just keeping ourselves educated and trying to learn as much about the kind of root causes of a lot of these issues as we can, and then sharing that knowledge with people. And that tends to spread through communities. I think right now it's community organizations and working with community groups. You know not just on our college campuses, but in the cities where our you know, colleges and universities are located. To me, you know the movement that's happening within communities is really the future and so I think, especially in a moment when you know so many community organizations that are doing important work, to foster and promote public safety are so underfunded and understaffed, and under-supported. It's really key as we build this movement that it's not just about protesting, which is really important right. Because that's what puts pressure on our elected officials to actually make the changes that we want to see. But at the same time it's important that we identify and support those organizations, working to advance social justice in our communities and volunteering our time, donating money, or helping to organize, you know as allies and supporters, I think it's really important.

- Wonderful thank you so much.

- Thank you for having me, this was really great.

- What really moved me was the emphasis on education and not least history in thinking about all these issues. It's really sort of a great reminder about why lecture series such as these are important. Not to speak of all the other you know, fascinating things you talked about this evening. So thank you so much. A few reminders before we close. If you are a seminar participant please sign up for the discussion section. You have gotten an email to remind you to sign up. Thank you to everyone who joined us this afternoon. And for your engagement in this lecture series. This week we will have an event, linked to the fifth anniversary of the Amherst Uprising. This Thursday at 8:00 p.m, there will be a session about how the being human and STEM initiative came out of the Amherst Uprising. In the spring, we will have a number of lectures sponsored by the President's Office on race and racism. Please stay tuned for these announcements about these events. Thank you again, Professors Hinton and Professor Manion. And goodbye everyone, have a great evening.

- Good evening, I'm Catherine Epstein, Provost and Dean of the faculty at Amherst College. Welcome to the third lecture in our series on the History of Anti-Black Racism in America. This series is premised on the notion that to understand anti-Black racism today, we need to know much more about the history of anti-Black racism in the United States. We need to know how the history of racism has shaped every aspect of our societal structures, from housing to education to policing to voter suppression, and much more. Moreover, the fact that anti-Black racism has had such an enduring power in our society brings even greater urgency to the need to address anti-Black racism today. With this goal in mind, this series features some of the most distinguished black historians of the African American experience in the United States. Tonight we are honored to have Khalil Gibran Muhammad join us. Professor Muhammad has written path-breaking work on how crime statistics have been used in the past 130 years to blame African American communities for crime, rather than to point to the structural racist environment in which they lived. As the next speaker in our series, Elizabeth Hinton has written of Muhammad's book, "The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Urban America," quote, "The role of social science research in creating the myth of black criminality is the focus of this seminal work. It shows how progressive reformers, academics, and policy makers subscribe to a statistical discourse about Black crime, one that shifted blame onto Black people for their disproportionate incarceration, and continues to sustain gross racial disparities in American law enforcement and criminal justice." Professor Muhammad, thank you so much for joining us tonight. I'd like to say just a few words of thanks to Jen Manion, Associate Professor of History at Amherst. Jen came up with the idea of doing a lecture series, and she is the one who has done all the work to bring our wonderful speakers to Amherst. At the same time, Jen has organized parallel events to the main lecture, each speaker holds a session with a class of Amherst College students. Following each lecture, Jen organizes hour-long discussion meetings for staff, faculty, and students. Participants read the speaker's work, as well as related articles. I want to thank everyone who is in attendance this evening, but also all of you who go even further and do the readings for the seminar and join Jen for discussion sessions. Jen, thank you for organizing the series, the class discussions, and the non-credit seminar. Thank you for everything that you've done to make this series the success that it is. Before turning this over to Jen, I would like to thank the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This lecture series is supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, intended to support the cultivation of public scholarship in the humanities at Amherst College. Jen?

- Thank you, Provost Epstein. Khalil Gibran Muhammad is Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. He is the former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library, and the world's leading library and archive of global Black history. Before leading the Schomburg Center, Khalil was an associate professor at Indiana University. Khalil's scholarship examines the broad intersections of race, democracy, inequality, and criminal justice in modern US history. He is co-editor of "Constructing the Carceral State," a special issue of the "Journal of American History" from 2015, and a contributor to the 2014 National Research Council Study, "The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences," as well as the author of "Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Urban America," published by Harvard, which won the 2011 John Hope Franklin best book award in American Studies. Much of his work has been featured in national print and broadcast media outlets, including "The New York Times," "The New Yorker," "Washington Post," "The Nation," "National Public Radio," "Moyers & Company," and "MSNBC." He has appeared in a number of feature-length documentaries, including the Oscar nominated "13th" and "Slavery by Another Name." Khalil was an associate editor of the Journal of American History, and prior Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice. He is a member of the Society of American Historians and the American Antiquarian Society. In 2017, he received the Distinguished Service Medal from Columbia University's Teachers College. He holds two honorary doctorates, and is on the boards of the Vera Institute of Justice, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Historical Society, and "The Nation" magazine, as well as the advisory boards of Cure Violence, Common Justice, The HistoryMakers, and the Lapidus Center for the Study of Transatlantic Slavery. Khalil is an award-winning teacher at Harvard, and has received numerous honors for his commitment to public engagement, including BPI Chicago's Champion of the Public Interest Award, the Fortune Society's Game Changer Award, Ebony Power 100, The Root 100 of Black Influencers, and "Crain's New York Business Magazine" 40 Under 40. A native of Chicago's South Side, Khalil graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in economics and his PhD in US history from Rutgers. I have long admired Professor Muhammad, both for his scholarship and public advocacy. His definitive work, "The Condemnation of Blackness," shatters long-standing claims by scholars that the racism of the criminal justice system was concentrated in large-scale prison labor camps in the South. Rather, Muhammad turns our attention to the North and shines a critical light on people viewed as progressive intellectuals and reformers. It is there, in the seemingly race-neutral work of Northern reformers and social scientists that the myth of Black criminality was legitimized. Professor Muhammad's scholarship has been at the heart of my course on the history of carceral culture for a decade, challenging my students to critically reconsider one of the most foundational myths of modern American life that has been used to justify both police violence towards Black Americans and mass incarceration. It is my absolute honor and pleasure to welcome Professor Khalil Muhammad to Amherst College to speak with us this evening about his path-breaking historic research and its relevance today.

- Thank you, thank you very much, Jen, and thank you to Provost Epstein for creating and supporting this series. I think it's really important, and I'm beginning to redefine myself as a historian of racism because all of us have become far more attuned to language and the mixed cross messages when we talk about race as somehow causative of this. I like to evoke, as something that my colleague from Radcliffe last year said, that race is not a comorbidity, the death of people in brown and black communities from COVID-19, it's racism. And so I'm becoming a little bit sharper about how I think about these things in relationship to my colleagues. So I decided tonight to share the bulk of my lecture drawing on a new preface that I wrote for "The Condemnation of Blackness" that came out a year ago, and the reason being, one, I haven't done it before, so it's kind of neat to get to do. I'll draw from it, along with some other observations that I've prepared for tonight's lecture, but also because, as you'll note in the lecture itself, there's a lot about a year ago that's very different from today. So with that, let me start. In the late fall of 2007, around the time I was editing the first edition of "The Condemnation of Blackness," I was administering the final exam in my Urban History course. One of my students handed in his blue book with an unusually cheerful smile. He was excited to share the news that he would soon be heading to campaign in Iowa for Senator Barack Obama. The moment has stayed with me because until then, I had given little thought to Obama's candidacy. Voting in the Democratic Parties had yet to begin, and if I'm honest, at that point, I didn't think he had much of a chance against Hillary Clinton. A couple of weeks later, Obama won the 2008 Iowa Caucus, and in November, he was elected the nation's first Black president. This incredible historical moment found me both awestruck and, I have to admit, panicked. My book was headed to press with a divisive race title that I feared no one would pay any attention to. Yes, I could still count on other historians and a few research librarians to notice and purchase the book. They would appreciate my findings that Northern white liberals and progressives were a big part of the history of racism in America's criminal justice system, a major correction to most histories that focused exclusively on Southern racists with their lynch mobs and chain gangs. I trusted that academic readers would see my new claims that today's crisis of mass incarceration had its roots not only in the Jim Crow South, but also in Northern cities. But I was convinced, like most authors, that everyone should, in fact, read this book, not just because I had poured nearly a decade into writing it but because I thought it could genuinely change how we thought about race, crime, and punishment. By population, by per capita incarceration rates, and by expenditures, the United States is, after all, exceeds, after all, all other nations in how many of its citizens, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants are under some form of criminal justice supervision. The number of African American and Latinx people in American jails and prisons today exceeds the entire populations of some African, Eastern European, and Caribbean countries. The United States didn't get to mass incarceration without mass participation in the criminalization of black and brown people by liberals and conservatives, Northerners and Southerners, Republicans and Democrats, whites and some blacks. And so by a long shot, the United States is, in fact, the world's leading jailer, and no aspect of national life, from the economy to education to electoral politics, has been untouched by the scale and scope of racialized policing and punishment. With a more honest and complete record of the nation's past, I hoped more people would learn from this history and choose to create a more compassionate, fairer, and racially just criminal legal system. And yet, in the hype of what many claimed was then a new post-racial America, I fretted that this book would be drowned out by the euphoria of all that "hopey changey stuff," as Sarah Palin once dubbed President Obama's vision. So I got the bright idea to change the title to "The Condemnation of Blackness" before the election of Barack Obama. In addition to making my vision less gloomy, I thought I might even be able to sell more copies by attaching my work to the wildly popular new president. Needless to say, I didn't change the title of my book. The first black president has come and gone, but the history told here remains the same, and if anything, the lessons are more urgent. When I first conceived this project, I wanted to answer a pretty straightforward question. I had learned about the use of the law after slavery and Reconstruction to criminalize black people, strip them of their newly earned civil and voting rights, and then force them back onto plantations as sharecroppers under the threat of punishment or death. Knowing all of this, I was curious about what happened in Chicago for people like my great grandparents, who left Mississippi during the early decades of the Great Migration. I was particularly keen to examine the criminal justice system outside of the South because I came of age when the first viral video of police brutality sparked protests. In 1991, nearly a dozen Californian highway patrolmen severely beat an intoxicated black motorist named Rodney King on the side of the road for speeding. King was the Emmett Till of my generation, just as the slain 17-year-old Trayvon Martin and the 22-year-old Rekia Boyd are to my children's generation. None of the history I had learned helped explain the anti-Black violence, the miscarriages of justice, and the callous disregard and cheapness of Black life in a supposedly post-Civil Rights America. What I saw through the lens of my work was not tragedy in the killings of unarmed people, but the long arc of history. These were predictable outcomes based on the logic of weaponized fear and a legal system designed to associate blackness with dangerousness. We hear a lot about implicit bias research these days, and how our brains, especially white people's brains, see young Black people as older than they are, more threatening, and less human. This research has led to implicit bias training in some police departments and prosecutor's offices. But implicit bias is not the whole problem, nor does it alone change the rules governing use of force or prosecutorial discretion. For a century and a half, many of the best and brightest minds in America have produced volumes and volumes of research proving that on average, white people should be suspicious and downright fearful of Black people. We've heard a lot about this certainly in this election season. Our brains did not end up with blind spots on their own. We have all been taught early in life with whom to play, where to go to school, what neighborhood to live in, where to work, even where to shop, based on the risk of criminal victimization by a Black person. Racial bias, like segregation, is not accidental, it is deliberate. The point is to know precisely how racist myths were built in the first place, as well as understanding why they endure. In this, we might choose to discard them and to dismantle the policies they uphold. If the myth that Black people belong to a criminal race had died a shameful death in the South during the Civil Rights Movement, there might be no new edition or even a first edition of "The Condemnation of Blackness." It is precisely because the idea persists and has metastasized into other forms of racial criminalization that we must continue to pay scrupulous attention to this past. President Obama's successor in the White House, Donald Trump, has claimed repeatedly that Mexican rapists and criminals are flooding the country's borders and that he's keeping these same criminals out of the suburbs. Such myths have been extremely harmful to their intended victims. These myths are also pillars of the economic, political, and cultural infrastructure of America. The notion of Black criminality starts with Black resistance to enslavement, akin to defying the laws of gravity for Black people. It was inevitable that they would violate these laws because to be human was, for them, to be criminal. Their comings and goings, their gatherings and fellowshipping, their loving and laughing, carried the weight of sanction as far back as the 17th century, and of course, slave patrols were established to maintain, through violence and the threat of violence, the submission of enslaved people from uprisings and self theft. But we really don't get notions of Black criminality in the way that we thought of them today until after slavery in 1865. Those slave patrols brought landowning and landless whites duty-bound together in a shared collective project of policing Black life, and in many ways, that is the through line to our present. All of this, including ideas about Black criminality, are part of slavery's legacy of justifying why Black bodies have been used for white wealth creation, electoral politics, and popular culture. The end of the Civil War did not bring an end to plunder, political race baiting, and blackface, as we certainly saw in the story of Ralph Northam's Virginia medical yearbook from the 1980s. White supremacy did not die with slavery, it evolved during Reconstruction. The deliberate choice to abolish slavery except as punishment for crime left a gigantic loophole, in that the South attempted to leverage putting Black people back into some form of slavery during the earliest days of freedom. What that amounted to was that all expressions of Black freedom, from political rights, economic rights, and social rights were subject immediately to criminal sanction. People who wanted to negotiate fair labor contracts could be defined as criminal, and the only thing that wasn't criminalized was the submission to a white landowner to work on their land. Shortly afterwards, a lot of the South built a robust carceral machinery and began to sell Black labor to private contractors to help pay for all of this, and for the next 70 years, the criminal justice system the society many whites claimed was now free of racism, African Americans had no excuse for their alleged crimes. It is hard to truly appreciate how soon after slavery many Northern white elites and some Black ones used crime statistics to emphasize the personal, that personal responsibility, bad behavior, and broken homes, and not systemic discrimination in the Jim Crow period or the age of separate but unequal accounted for these racial disparities. Crime statistics fueled gendered notions of Black male pathology, and when linked to illegitimacy rates, doubly burdened Black woman by defining them as sexually deviant and undeserving of the protections of womanhood. The turn to racial crime statistics, let me repeat, was a cutting edge idea made for modern times, built to last, like the electrical circuitry invented in Thomas Edison's New Jersey lab in the 1880s. That old technology is still hardwired behind the walls of our homes and workplaces, and it even powers our smartphones and laptops in this very moment. The old and the new often go hand in hand. If we refuse to see continuity and insist only on change, then we will miss what's behind the walls of our society, miss how it all works. We will not understand how it is possible that America built the greatest punishment system the world has ever known. The hunt for crime data to prove Black inferiority started in the 1890s when the New Jersey-based demographer Fredrick L. Hoffman began looking. Black people had only recently become citizens and therefore subjected to criminal prosecution in courts of law. Hoffman mined census reports and the local arrest statistics of a half dozen cities, from Chicago to Charleston, South Carolina. He showed that the, quote, "criminality of the negro exceeds that of any other race of any numerical importance in this country," and he insisted that the causes had nothing to do with structural inequality. The real problem, he noted, was a lack of personal responsibility. "Until the negro learns to respect life, property, and chastity," he warned, "until he learns to believe in the value of a personal morality operating in his daily life, crime will increase." Over a century later, the Department of Justice investigated the Ferguson Police Department in the wake of the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown. Federal agents found systemic racism among police offers and unconstitutional law enforcement practices, and yet, in their report, federal investigators wrote that Ferguson officials claimed that, quote, "Harsh and disparate results were not problems with police or court practices, but instead reflected a pervasive lack of personal responsibility among certain segments of the community." Three threads weave Frederick Hoffman and Ferguson officials' ideas together. First, racial disparities and crime rates are interpreted as Black traits, as pathological norms within Black people, and reflect group behavior. Second, neither criminal justice bias, nor structural racism, they argued, explain high crime rates among individual black people. Third, and finally, the language of personal responsibility implies a justification for anti-Black discrimination. Despite the separation of more than a century, both moments occurred in post-Civil Rights eras when police agencies were on the front lines of regulating Black citizenship. Indeed, there has never been a moment in history when law enforcement wasn't playing this role. "Too often, the policeman's club is the only instrument of the law with which the negro comes into contact," wrote Kelly Miller, a Black sociologist at Howard University and an anti-racist reformer, in 1935. "This engenders in him a distrust and a resentful attitude toward all public authorities and law officers, none can doubt that such a kindly attitude would go far to convince the negro of the value to himself and advantage of law obedience and good citizenship," Miller concluded. Kelly Miller's observation were part of a broader effort by Black reformers to fix policing a century ago. National Urban League researchers, such as Anna J. Thompson, a Black woman, and Ira Dea Reid, the Director of Research and Publicity at the National Urban League, conducted several studies of policing in the 1920s and '30s and found widespread evidence of discrimination and abuse. More than 30 years later, after the 1960s uprisings, the Kerner Commission came to a similar conclusion and made several recommendations. The Commissioners believed nothing would change without first acknowledging the structural racism built into policing, they called for the better treatment of Black citizens, more effective police protection, the establishment of independent citizen review boards, and an end to aggressive patrol. Sound familiar? When the esteemed social psychologist Kenneth Clark, whose research informed the Brown versus Board of Education decision, testified before the Kerner Commission, he saw history repeating itself. "I read the report of the 1919 riot in Chicago, and it is as if I was reading the report of the investigating committee of the Harlem Riot of 1935, the report of the investigating committee of the Harlem Riot of 1943, the report of the McCone Commission of the Watts Riot in 1965," he wrote, doubting that yet another report would make any difference. "I must again in candor say to you members of the Kerner Commission, it is a kind of 'Alice in Wonderland,' with the same moving picture re-shown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction." Neither Kelly Miller nor Kenneth Clark lived long enough to read the New York Police Department's Mollen Commission report of 1994, or the Los Angeles Police Department's Rampart Investigation of 2000, nor did they witness all the federal consent decrees and Justice Department reports, numbering something like 69, documenting in city after city a pattern and practice of unconstitutional policing, Pittsburgh in 1997, Cincinnati in 2001, Detroit in 2003, New Orleans in 2010, along with Seattle, Cleveland in 2012, East Haven, Connecticut in 2012, New York, Albuquerque, Portland, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Newark, and Chicago in 2017. All except one are places outside of the South, where law-abiding residents were systematically profiled, harassed, and abused. Countless men, women, and children, cis, trans, and queer folk, were harmed with over four million stops in New York City alone. Their crimes? Living while Black. 100 years of police brutality reports reminds me of a lynching roll published in 2014, and in 2014 report by the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. Four years later, Bryan Stevenson, the founding director of the Initiative, opened the National Memorial for Peace and Justice to honor the lives of over 4,000 victims of racial terror lynchings. The roll illustrates a state by state tally of every documented lynching from 1877, the end of Reconstruction, to about 1950. The lynching roll and the memorial itself are devastating proof of systemic racism in America. No matter the guilt or innocence of the victims, the state was complicit in the killings, given that there are no known prosecutions for these murders, done in the plain light of day. There is an arc of history that connects lynchings past to policings present, but some Americans continue to reject this view. They exclaim, "Blue lives matter" in utter defiance of Black Lives Matter activism, and they falsely equate doing a job, even if at times a dangerous one, with living in one's own skin. But there are no blue lives. Blue is not a shade of humanity. Blue is not protected by Civil Rights laws. Last year marked the 100th anniversary of the Chicago Race Riot, which led to the first Blue Ribbon Commission on racialized policing in America. In the summer of 1919, white beach goers stoned a Black child swimming in Lake Michigan to death because he had crossed an aqueous color line. While Blacks protested and pursued justice, white mobs attacked Black pedestrians and home owners. Blacks fought back, 38 people died, hundreds more were injured. The Chicago Commission on Race Relations found evidence of systemic profiling, abuse, and corruption. Officials testified that officers routinely arrested Blacks on suspicion, brought them into court without a bit of evidence of any offense. A former police chief admitted that Black migrants naturally attracted greater suspicion than was attached to the white man. Such startling testimony proved that police bias and discrimination in a big Northern city were baked into the arrest statistics, leading the commissioners, in 1922, to abandon racial crime statistics altogether. And surprisingly, a century ago, the Chicago officials blamed much of the problem on implicit bias. Quote, "We recognize that these practices and tendencies are," they explained, "in large degree the unconscious result of traditional race prejudice." They recommended all criminal justice agencies must deal fairly and without discrimination with all persons charged with crime. From the beginning, the collection and dissemination of racial crime data was, in fact, a eugenics project, reflecting the supremacists beliefs of those who created them. It was an intentional way of sorting humanity, not by an objective standard, but by a convenient tool that simplified reality, justified racism, and redistributed political and economic power from black to white. The influential Harvard scientist Nathaniel Shaler wrote in an "Atlantic Monthly" article in 1890 that statistics can lead the way to a new understanding of Black people's true racial capacity. The statistics Shaler called for were not facts, they were artifacts and traces of intense social conflict and ideology, they also underwrote discrimination in all areas of public life. With vicious circular reasoning, a new data revolution became the basis for labeling an entire group of people criminal and then stripping them of their human and civil rights. Felony disenfranchisement law spread state by state, and are still with us. Law enforcement's dogged faith in the crime statistics numbers to this day is, as the late Federal Judge A. Leon Higginbotham once wrote, "The same old poison of racial prejudices poured into new bottles." Once we committed to measuring Black lives and their worthiness as citizens and human beings by crime statistics, we never stopped. One of the most perverse uses of racial crime statistics by liberals and conservatives was to measure educational effectiveness by crime rates. Researchers published reports of how many Black vocational schools and colleges had alumni with criminal records. Southern leaders claimed education actually turned Blacks into criminals, citing census data that showed Black people were better educated in Northern states, but still had disproportionately higher crime rates than in the South. President Theodore Roosevelt used crime data to make a commencement address at Hampton Institute in 1906 where he told the graduates they should be proud that only two students out of 6,000 had marred the reputation of their school. He then warned that no challenge in Jim Crow America was a greater danger to them than fighting the criminality in your own race. Imagine the cognitive dissonance and psychological toll on those graduates, talk about being triggered, that year when 62 Black people were lynched and no one punished. We are still asking some of the same questions. "What have the thousands of Black churches and schools and colleges produced and maintained at the cost of more than 150 million dollars," inquired Thomas Nelson Page, a prominent white Southern intellectual in 1904. "We may first inquire," he noted, "has the percentage of crime decreased in the race generally?" Since the end of slavery, access to public education for Black people has been optional, or at least contingent, based on crime rates in ways that have not been true for the majority of white Americans. A Harvard economist published a study in 2012, quote, "Does school choice reduce crime?" He found that it did not, but in fact, greatly reduced criminal activity, that is, school choice, or charter schools. Should we be relieved? I often say to my students that any serious analysis of Harvard alumni's criminal activity over the span of the school's 384 year history would likely register huge economic costs to millions of people with severe collateral consequences. No one is counting, I mean, I'm happy to be proven wrong, but whether I'm right or not misses a larger point. No one is asking the question because no matter how big the financial crimes are, or how repugnant the corruption and illegal behavior of white elites is, there are no racial stakes. Underlying every education and crime study rests a preposterous racial assumption from the past: are Black people criminals and uneducable? Maybe schools don't matter, maybe schools cost too much, maybe schools are incapable of fixing these people. The early innovator, Hoffman, designed the education and crime blueprint when he wrote, "In the statistics of crime and the data of illegitimacy, the proof is furnished that neither religion nor education has influenced to an appreciable degree the moral progress of the race. Whatever benefit the individual colored man may have gained from the extension of religious worship and educational processes, the race, as a whole, has gone backwards rather than forwards." One generation after slavery, Hoffman's use of crime and illegitimacy rates established the view that Black education was a waste of time and money. To him and many others, the statistics proved resources were better spent educating whites. Even today's studies that pursue such research in the name of educational equity affirm the legitimacy of the enduring assumption. We're still counting and correlating and making tough on crime or smart on crime decisions about what Black people do or don't deserve in America. By always centering the conversation about how many Black people are currently under some form of criminal justice supervision, the collective guilt of Black people remains the core logic that continues to drive policy debates. In education, school effectiveness is not only judged on the basis of crime statistics, school itself, in too many instances, has become a correctional institution. In his Pulitzer Prize winning book, "Locking up our Own," James Forman, the Yale Law Professor, describes a series of terrifying and humiliating police raids at the Maya Angelou Public Charter School in Washington, DC during the spring of 2000. School officials organized a town hall meeting with police officers, the students told the officers what it felt like to be treated like criminals. The Black cops responded that the school was in a high-crime neighborhood, and suggested that maybe they should wear large student IDs. Many of the students had learned about the history of antebellum slave laws requiring manumission papers and South Africa Apartheid-era passbooks. Even those students who had studied none of this history could intuit the problem with IDs forming rights, as free citizens, they deserved the presumption of innocence. This realization was a crushing blow to student morale. "We can be perfect, perfect, doing everything right, and they still treat us like dogs," said one student to Forman. This is what collective guilt looks like. And yet, it does not have to be this way. One of the most rewarding aspects of sharing my work with others is making the case that although the past is still with us, it doesn't have to be the future. I've served on a New York City Anti Gun Violence Taskforce, contributed to a National Academy of Sciences report, testified before Congressional staffers, like Senators Mike Lee and others who eventually wrote the bill that became the First Step Act. I've visited German prisons on an international trip to look at what are alternatives to what correction facilities look like when a do-no-harm approach sits at the core of the notion of punishment. Still, in conversations with empirical researchers, policy makers, and criminal justice practitioners over the years, I have seen up close how unevenly historical scholarship informs their work. They tend to prefer quantitative data, and often are a little suspicious of academic history. One of my economist colleagues admitted to me that she didn't really understand history. Another colleague told a fellow historian at my university that she didn't get race, this, of course, all before this past summer. A senior criminal justice policy official in the Obama administration told me that he didn't have time to read much history. It is clear to me that they are influenced by history in the way that Baldwin described in his 1965 essay, "The White Man's Guilt," which I know frames this series. The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. Their own personal sense of the past most certainly shapes what these empiricists want to study, the theories they apply, how they design their research, what data they create or collect, and how they interpret their findings, and yet some quantitative researchers are either oblivious or duplicitous about how race and racism shape their work. When I asked the leading crime economists at the University of Chicago, who works closely with the Chicago Police Department on various gun violence research initiatives and policy interventions, how he accounted for the Department's enduring problem of racism and police violence, he was speechless. He indicated that race was not central to his work. That surprised me because we spoke in late fall of 2017, not long after the revelations about the killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times, and then the officer was recently convicted shortly after this conversation, Jason Van Dyke. When the coverup of McDonald's murder was made public, protesters took to the streets, Black activists helped bring down Police Chief Garry McCarthy, Cook County State Attorney Anita Alvarez, and, many believe, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who chose not to seek a third term in the 2019 election. Moreover, my conversation with this UFC economist happened just months after Justice Department officials released a damning report on racially discriminatory conduct amongst Chicago Police after the first police brutality reparations payout in American history had been made, 5.5 million dollars to 57 victims of police torture. Going back to the 1970s and lasting until the 1990s, Jon Burge, a Chicago Police Commander and a former military investigator in Vietnam oversaw a midnight crew of officers who extracted false confessions from Black citizens with cattle prods, plastic over the heads, and guns in their mouths. More than 100 individuals were tortured, resulting in 83 million additional dollars in abuse and wrongful conviction settlements. For all that "The Condemnation of Blackness" has to say about the history of weaponized Black crime statistics, racial profiling, and police brutality in Northern cities, it also makes the case that crime did not and does not have to lead to more policing and more punishment. In showing how white liberals used high crime rates among whites in just the opposite way to decriminalize the native, poor, and immigrant, it is possible to see what change looks like using the past. When I've engaged community members, social workers, congressional staffers, and even cops, this is the part of the story that really gets people's attention. It is the least well known and most surprising history. Neither white crime nor violence justified harsh punishment and discrimination in the progressive era. To the contrary, liberal researchers at the time called for less policing and more pro-social interventions. They avoided the language of personal responsibility, they rejected a focus on chastity and morality. They described struggling whites and immigrants as a great army of unfortunates, driven to madness, crime, or suicide by an unfair economic system. "It is the struggle of the masses against the classes," Frederick Hoffman, yes, the same man, insisted, betraying his own racial double standards as the foremost proponent of using crime statistics to justify anti-Black discrimination. These compassionate white researchers and reformers redefined white crime and violence as symptoms of class oppression, and they built on-ramps to higher paying jobs and exit ramps out of poverty. Like the brand new interstate highways leading to the all-white suburbs of the 1950s, progressives paved the way for statistical white flight a generation before. Gang affiliated and criminally involved whites in America's fast-growing intercity slums most certainly heightened public safety concerns at the time. In 1903, a Boston researcher found that the Irish had the highest rates of petty crimes, and the Italians topped the list for major felonies. Chicago's Jane Addams, the most influential social worker and community activist of the early 20th century, witnessed white on white violence daily for decades. After describing the grizzly details of a gang-related shooting where a Polish youth shot the brains out of an Irish boy, Addams wrote, quote, "This tale could be duplicated almost every morning. What might be merely a fight is turned into a tragedy because some boy has a revolver." Another white teenager from, as she describes, "a little farm in Ohio," has shot and killed a policeman while resisting arrest, and was now awaiting the death penalty. A prisoner reentry organization in Chicago focused on the families of the incarcerated by calling attention to the struggles of white mothers who were left to rear their kids alone, and their 1907 annual report is an illustration of a single mother with five small children, standing on the porch of her dilapidated home. She holds an infant in her arms, one child stands behind her, another is at her side, and two are fighting in the street. This white woman lives in a bad neighborhood with broken windows, there's a saloon behind her home, and on the corner is a cop arresting a white male suspect. This is what urban disorder looked like before it was shaded black and brown. Progressives did not fight crime with an early vision of broken windows or stop-and-frisk policing, they focused on root causes. Below the illustration of this broken white family is a caption that speaks for itself, "How criminals are made. So long as there are bad tenements, sweat shops, brutal policemen, bad jails, child labor, dishonest and grinding employers, saloons and gambling dens, so long as boys are taught to fight and allowed to carry firearms, so long as fathers are indifferent deserters and mothers must maintain the family by the washboard, so long crime will continue. What will you do to help this association to prevent it?" In the face of an epidemic of scenes like this one, liberals helped immigrants and poor whites by building a new and improved social and economic infrastructure to support them, new housing, new labor laws, new jobs, and new criminal justice policies, kind of like the defund calls for today. In 1904, 50,000 youth, 90% white, came before Chicago's new juvenile court, the first alternative to incarceration. According to Addams, none of these young people or their parents were to blame for their crimes. As she wrote, "We certainly cannot expect the fathers and the mothers who have come to the city from farms, or who have immigrated from other lands to rectify or to fix these dangers." Personal responsibility was off the table, and abusive police were part of the problem. What happened then to the great grandchildren of those troubled white teens who had come from other lands? To judge by the standards of how Black descendants of the Great Migration are still assessed today, we might ask, how many Italian Americans committed armed robbery last quarter? How about Irish American burglars? Or Polish American drug dealers? The fact is, no one knows, no such data exists anymore. The numbers stopped being relevant when immigrants became white. They still committed crimes, as individuals in all groups do, but when the leading criminologist, Edwin Sutherland, announced in 1934 that the second generation appears to approach the native-born of native parentage in regard to the kinds of crimes committed, he provided the scientific rationale for statistical white flight. From that moment until now, it was no longer possible to use crime statistics to single out the Irish. They were decriminalized as a racial group. They became part of the statistical baseline of a universal white norm. It is that baseline upon which black and brown deviance is measured today. White liberals created a hierarchy in the end that privileged white over black criminals. White people's crimes were a primary reason to help them, it was just the opposite for Black people. Their crimes were used as evidence to contain and control them. Black people were redlined out of the decriminalizing, rehabilitative policies of the progressive era, as well as the New Deal and the post-war suburbs. They were locked into a statistical ghetto that helped to justify the physical one they would fight so hard to escape. History shows that crime data was never objective in any meaningful political sense. Crime statistics have never been just about behavior, no matter how obvious it may seem that the numbers speak for themselves. They are proxies for beliefs, a way of defining reality and seeing things. Whatever truth they represent in counting actual arrests or real prisoners is itself a reflection of intense social and political struggles. The choice to single out this group or that one in crime data has always been a reflection of ideological and political power, and still is. In the midst of the Trump Administration's early efforts to enact a Muslim travel ban, officials wanted to create new crime data, Section 10 of Executive Order 13769 called for enhanced statistical surveillance of the crimes of certain foreign nationals. No matter how many more white Americans commit acts of domestic terrorism than others, Section 10 was aimed at stigmatizing and banning Muslim immigrants. The same held true in the administration's call for a national emergency at the border. No matter how law abiding immigrants are compared to their native counterparts, Trump officials insisted, based on their own creative math, that Central Americans are a criminal menace. Nearly 50 years ago, at the dawn of the post-Civil Rights era, the Black novelist and literary critic Albert Murray warned about the dangers and threats of social science data to underwrite the contemporary folklore of racism in the United States based on white norms and black deviations. He cautioned Black people to see the social science statistical survey as the most elaborate fraud in modern times. "African Americans," he added, "should never forget that the group in power is always likely to use every means at its disposal to create the impression that it deserves to be where it is," he insisted, "and it is not above suggesting that those who have been excluded have only themselves to blame." Looking back through the lens of "The Condemnation of Blackness," it is hard to disagree with Murray, but many do, law enforcement especially has doubled down on crime statistics in what is now the era of big data, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics. Old ideas yet again have been programmed into the latest technology. At a 2015 "New York Times" Cities for Tomorrow Conference on the newest advances in technology and data analytics for everything from urban environmental sustainability to crime control, then Police Commissioner William J. Bratton spoke about the New York Police Department's latest crime fighting tool. I sat in the audience, anxious to hear him speak. With a broad smile and supreme confidence, he praised the newest release of the pioneering crime mapping software, known as COMPSTAT, which had been at the heart of stop-and-frisk policing when it began a generation ago. He likened the newest version to the 2002 film, "Minority Report," starring Tom Cruise as head of a special pre-crime unit. Set in Washington, DC in the year 2054, officers gathered intelligence from a trio of pre-cogs, human-like beings who can predict murders and identify killers before they act. Bratton was almost giddy about the comparison, the unintended pun on the film's title seemed to escape him. Two years later at a 2017 Heritage Foundation Summit on "Policing in America, Lessons from the Past, Opportunities for the Future," Bratton gave more details about the architecture of COMPSTAT 2.0. "The software is based on algorithms and advanced data mining techniques we call predictive policing," he said. Effectively, it's the COMPSTAT of the '90s on steroids in the 21st century, and just like all new technology promises, it was guaranteed to be better than before. "It is discriminating, not discriminatory," he bragged. "It is precise, not prejudiced." Until he retired, William Bratton was known as America's top cop, starting his career as a military police officer in Vietnam, and then onto Boston in the 1970s, he spent the next five decades running the biggest and most racially troubled police agencies in the country. Bratton served in six departments coast to coast, from New York to Los Angeles, and back to the Big Apple. Several of these departments were subject to federal investigations for police brutality, either before or after he left. Over the years, he developed a strong personal sense of history, covering the entire span of the post-Civil Rights era in policing, but unlike many critics of aggressive policing tactics, Bratton has rarely if ever publicly questioned the value of social science data, except when the research critiqued police racism. In his heritage speech, he celebrated the theoretical founders of broken windows policing. The criminologist George Kelling and the political scientist James Q. Wilson he called "Two personal heroes of mine." He also repudiated the Kerning Commission findings, which he said he had read in 1974 to pass the sergeant's exam for the Police Department. "They believed at the time," and listen carefully, "that the causes of crime were racism, or poverty, or police practices, in many instances, unemployment in demographics. They thought those were the causes, they were not. They are not, and they never have been." Bratton's emphatic dismissal of the Kerner Report and all the published evidence of police bias since demonstrates just how enduring Hoffman's original innovation with racial crime data has been. In this pandemic moment, I think we're able to see more clearly that the very people our many systems were designed, the very people at the heart of the premature death in this moment, both from the pandemics of racist policing and COVID-19, that these mini-systems were designed to minimize their civil rights and civil liberties. These very people who the nation depends upon to keep our hospitals and utilities running and our groceries coming into our home. And yet we know from this history that policing has long been the sharp edge of a political sword used to cut the heart out of Black resistance. Policing is not only repressive, it is causal and symptomatic of the conditions in which violence thrives. The very instrument that we produced as anti-Black racism cannot be the same tool that saves Black people. What this moment leads us to is a crossroads, to define justice beyond a individual case, but to define justice as a form of limiting what police officers have been able to do, which is to protect white privileges in America. Some people call that defunding the police. Some people call it abolition. But what it all means is that there should be less policing of Black America and more investment in the infrastructure of Black communities, just as was true for those European immigrants and native, low-income white Americans so many decades in the making. Thank you very much.

- Well, thank you so much, Professor Muhammad. Your work is so important and it's so powerful. I feel so moved by your words, and I taught your scholarship for a long time now, and hearing it again, I'm reminded of its originality and importance in helping us reframe this moment and understand how we got here. And I have a whole bunch of questions I want to ask, but also bring some in that have come in through the chat. But I think since we ended on police, I actually just want to jump right in to a question on policing. It's so funny, I brought up some statistics from a Gallup poll, so I'm totally uncritical in my own use of statistics. But I thought in this moment, many people who might not have thought about policing or police violence are now alarmed and think that something has gone wrong in American policing to allow this visible unrelenting wave of violence against Black Americans. And a Gallup poll from this summer said that among Black Americans, 88% think that major changes are needed, and among Asian Americans, 82% think that major changes are needed. And perhaps most astonishing, among all racial groups of Americans, 58% of them think that major changes are needed, and another 36% think that minor changes are needed. So only 6% of the people are saying that no change is needed, and I'm wondering, given your knowledge of the long history of policing, from slavery to the present, does this seem like a moment of potential for change? And related to that, would you characterize policing as a system that is currently broken and in need of reform, or that is doing what it was designed to do all along?

- So I think I'd be a fool not to say that that polling data is not encouraging, and evidence of the possibilities for serious transformation of public safety in America. But we know polls are fickle, from '62, the majority of white Americans supported the Civil Rights Movement, and by '66, they said, "We've done enough, it's time to move on." So we shouldn't take much comfort in the way that public opinion can show evidence of willingness to think through things if we don't see the policy apparatus follow soon after. And I think the political marketplace still leaves some doubt in my mind as a historian, what is the appetite, for particularly the Democratic Party, to lead this work? And I guess what would be more hopeful to me, we'd see the evidence of elected officials pursuing real structural changes in terms of the distribution of public dollars away from police to simply do crime control and crime prevention, which is essentially what they do, to addressing public safety through non-law enforcement means. To borrow a term that's becoming more common in some circles, to civilian-ize safety. So I think that until we see more examples of that, I won't hang too much faith on public opinion.

- So you mentioned the need for holding public officials accountable, and related to that, someone has submitted a question, asking how we can hold the U.S. judicial system responsible for the criminalization of Black Americans.

- So I guess that means the role that judges place in adjudicating the merits of the arrests and the prosecution itself, meaning that by some reasonable guess, it appears, in a lot of cases, that a lot of bad justice is being meted out, and so why haven't judges done a better job of dealing with this? Part of that, so I'm filling in the question as I understand it, and I hope that comes close to what the questioner intended, part of this is explained by basically four decades of stripping judges of the discretion to actually judge the merits of individual cases, and that was legislative, and that was state by state and federal. So judges basically had very little discretion once a person had been indicted for a crime, if they were found guilty, a judge could not change the punishment. On the other side of that, the power of prosecutors to compel 95% of criminal defendants to plead out to lesser charges in lieu of lesser jail time also meant that we invested in prosecutors, many of whom are elected. Not all, but most are elected, this incredible discretionary power to saddle people with a lot of potential time, and to withhold exculpatory evidence, even when a defense attorney would have reason to make a stronger argument for an individual's innocence. This is why the notion of collective guilt is so important, because if you look at this whole system from 30,000 feet, in many ways, it doesn't look like it even mattered whether this particular 19-year-old Black kid actually did whatever, somebody's gonna be churned in the system, and that's all that really matters. So I would say that it's really the prosecutors after policing that deserves more scrutiny for how we got to where we are, mass criminalization, because judges simply didn't have the power, as much as they should have, because it was taken away from them.

- So you reviewed a new book by Elliott Currie in "The New York Times," and your analysis in that review is incisive, and I want to pull out a quote from that and then ask a question, and I also think there's another question from the feed that attaches to it nicely. And I think if you take away, I think this is just a really powerful thing for the viewers to grapple with. You said in "The New York Times" recently, quote, "Whether most white Americans admit it or not, they consider Black people both the deserving victims and the dangerous vectors of violence who bear the burden and the blame for much of the nation's exceptional record of death and destruction." And my original question for you was, why is history such a powerful tool in setting that record straight? And someone else's question for you is, what advice do you have to counter arguments that people do throw out with statistics?

- So yeah, I think that I can only say, make a claim like that in light of a very long historical record. And I think part of the critique you heard in my lecture is that it is the deliberate disavowal of this history that is both part of the public's relationship to this past, a denial and a disavowal, and it's also the complicity of the social science community, largely the quantitative scholars who have rejected historical arguments and evidence as a way of contextualizing administrative data, the kind of data that shows up in the census, or in the uniform crime reports, or other things. And so I stand by the statement because I can see that history of denial and disavowal, and the deliberate ignoring of history in terms of empirical research, which really dominates, from a practitioner's standpoint, the policymaking that goes on in the criminal justice system. So people have simply turned away from these histories, as if they don't matter to the world that we actually live in, which is why the Bratton quote is so powerful when he's delivering the speech as kind of the apex of his career, saying, "Looking back, Kerner was wrong." I mean, that's incredible. There is no way to minimize the role of Bratton as a singular figure in the history of policing for the past 50 years who is on the record saying Kerner got it wrong, this has always been about criminals, and not about a system. So that, to me, is evidence. That's the footnote in "The New York Times" book review to the whether white Americans admit it on not because certainly Bratton sits inside of that space. I think you had a part two question, or a second part of that-

- Well, I was kind of giving all the credit to history as the vehicle for smashing these myths, but one of our viewers said, well, how else, do you have any other advice for countering-

- Oh, yeah.

- These arguments and myths based in statistics, maybe for someone who's not historically inclined, but has a different toolkit that they can draw on.

- Yeah, so Jen knows this from the review. I mean, the book itself is, both redefines the statistics as the facts, in a way, but also points to the problem that, it's not so much winning an argument about the truth of the statistics, it's what they mean. And so when I tell the story of high rates of criminal victimization in white communities, what I'm telling you is that people use the evidence of criminal, the numbers, as a way of saying, we gotta help people. We have to do something beyond policing because policing is not helping the situation. So that's what defund is really about. I mean, to turn away from the echo there, for Black activists, to say, we don't have to have an argument here about whether Black people actually do harm or not in their own communities, the only question is whether police are actually helping to minimize the harm, or are contributing to it. And then in the absence of a question about whether the police, the role they play or not, are all these other systems that we know were built to minimize Black life in a healthy, productive way, and so why can't we focus on those things, why can't we reinvest in those things? So that's what I would say. The easy quip, of course, is to point out that an opioid epidemic brings with it lots of crime and mayhem, and yet the public health response to it has been the dominant narrative, as compared to the crack epidemic. A lot of white Americans may convince themselves that we've learned from our mistake, but if that were true, we certainly wouldn't have a Republican president in office promising more law and order, and to protect white people from the suburbs, if some percentage of Americans still didn't believe that Black people deserve more punishment for their drug addictions, and white people deserve public health.

- Thank you, I want to stay on history for a second, but also connect it to capitalism. In the much celebrated and also now controversial 1619 Project, you contributed an essay on sugar, that characterized sugar as the white gold that fueled slavery. You detailed the violence and profitability of sugar plantations, especially in the antebellum era Louisiana, and wrote, quote, "Most of these stories of brutality, torture, and premature death have never been told in classroom textbooks or historical museums. They have been refined and whitewashed in the mills and factories of southern folklore," end quote. Well, I cut you off, obviously, I ended your quote prematurely. But again and again, we see history weaponized as a tool of white supremacy, and I just wonder, when you think back over the field of African American history that you, your mentors, and your mentors' mentors have built over the last 50 or so years, where would you... are we winning this fight over history?

- Well, we're certainly making progress. I mean, that I do truly believe. I think that, one, I'll say that the explosion of historical fine art informed by history, like the work of Kara Walker, or Hank Willis Thomas, the photographer, are part of a broader moment over the past 20 years, Steve McQueen's work in "12 Years a Slave." A generation of artists and writers and creatives and scholars have revisited slavery with fresh eyes, with different perspectives, and have created a, I believe, a younger generation of people who have much greater awareness. The reach of Ava DuVernay's "13th" cannot be overstated. It is a brilliant work of documentary, even with its flaws, I mean, there are scholarship flaws in it, but as a matter of a work of creativity, it's incredible. And so I'd say acknowledging that work and then 1619 suggests to me an arc of change, and a mark of possibility that one can also measure in the resistance to it. The President's call for patriotic education is evidence that all this work has hit a nerve. And so the goal is to keep forging ahead.

- Before we end this wonderful conversation, I want to totally go in a different direction, if you will, come to me and talk about higher ed and this new project that you're involved in. Can we go there, is that-

- Very quickly, yeah.

- Oh, okay, so let me explain it to the, so I recently learned that Professor Muhammad is the Faculty Director of Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability Project at Harvard's Kennedy School, where you are investigating the effectiveness of diversity and inclusion efforts in some private organizations, and also nonprofits, and where claims of diversity and inclusion or equity and belonging seem to fall short, and also what models work. And I know the project's in an early stage, but I'm wondering if you would share with us any preliminary findings or insights, especially as it pertains to higher education.

- Yeah, so actually, the work itself grows out of serving for a year and a half at Harvard on a university-wide Diversity Committee with Mahzarin Banaji, who is the co-creator of the Implicit Association Test, and Frank Dobbin, who is a sociologist who studies private sector diversity efforts. And we learned a lot working together as a threesome to sort of report back to Harvard. So I'll just, I'll mention two important findings, of which also informed the Theory of Change and the IARA Project, which is what I call this work. The first is that if leadership is not fully committed, it's not gonna happen. Too often, leadership is outsourced, the responsibility to a CDO, a chief diversity officer, and then moved onto the real business of the firm, the university, the organization, et cetera. And so what we know is that if the leadership signals to the senior leadership that this is not really their responsibility and it's on the CDO or it's on the people who do the diversity work, then it is doomed to fail, period. The second thing that we've learned is that every process of organizational change requires some socialization process, which is to say there must be some collective accounting for why we're doing this work. Too often, directives have come down, we've got trainings to impose, we've got a guest speaker here, you should attend, and that, in many cases, we've learned backfires, and the representational goals around diversity often flat line or diminish. So there has to be a process whereby people who are skeptical are included, as well as people who are converted, and through that process, you can arrive at implementation of policy changes that people may not entirely agree with, but feel like their voices have been heard. So I'll stop there because we're still learning, and there's a lot to share, and it's complicated. But those are two important things that a lot of places do not do.

- Thank you so much for all of your insights in such a wide ranging conversation. It's been a real pleasure.

- Thanks for having me.

- Muhammad and Manion for that really intriguing conversation. I mean, the sweep of the history was amazing, and then it sort of got down to this what I thought this really striking contrast between the crack crisis and the opioid crisis, where you really kind of zero in on sort of this whole story, and how that's one way that it ends, which is just completely fascinating. A few reminders before we close, if you are a seminar participant, please remember to sign up for discussion section. You should have gotten an email to remind you to sign up. Thank you to everyone tonight for joining us this evening and for you engagement with this lecture series. The last lecture in the series will be by Elizabeth Hinton of Yale University. Professor Hinton will talk about "From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime." That lecture will take place on Tuesday, November 17th, at 5:00 pm, please join us for that lecture. Thanks again to professors Muhammad and Professor Manion, and good night, everyone. Have a great evening.

Good evening, I'm Catherine Epstein, Provost and Dean of the Faculty at Amherst College. Thank you for joining us for the second lecture in our series, The History of Anti-Black Racism in America. This series takes as its premise that in order to combat anti-Black racism, we need to know much more about the history of racism in the United States. We need to know about how the history of racism has shaped the economics and politics of our country. And in turn it's structures of housing, education, policing, and much else. Tonight, we are honored to have with us Martha Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. Professor Jones recently published "Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All." One of the arguments of this book is that its protagonist, Black women activists, believe that their struggle to win the vote for all women would advance humanity as a whole. And this was not a narrow one issue movement. Instead when Black women struggled for rights, they struggled against many of the world's ills from racism, to poverty, to colonialism. And just to drive the point home that they have strived to better the lot of all humanity, since Friday evening, we have mourned the loss of Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. We have recalled her amazing legacy in promoting equal rights for all human beings regardless of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or other identity. But few have noted that among those who helped to shape RBG's thinking was Pauli Murray, one of the women featured in Martha Jones' Vanguard. Pauli Murray was a lawyer, professor and social activist, and it was she who came up with the legal strategy that Ginsburg later employed to convince the Supreme Court to bar sex discrimination, that is, applying the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause to gender. As Ginsburg has said of Pauli Murray and her colleagues work, we owed them so much for they kept the idea and the hope alive. And RGB further noted, we're standing on their shoulders. We're saying the same things they said, but now at least society is ready to listen. While showing the outsize influence of Black women's activism in the United States and beyond, Professor Jones also points to another significant feature of this movement, how Black activists remembered and celebrated each other. From generation to generation, they named their clubs and groups and even their children after their foremothers, from Phillis Wheatley to Fannie Lou Hamer. Most movingly, to me at least, is that in the introduction, Professor Jones talks about her own family history and the strong women who proceeded her. As one of the enduring features of the Black women's movement for political rights, this culture of celebration and honoring is itself a strength and wonderful contribution of the movement. Honoring past contributions and achievements of those who were not recognized in their time is crucial to reminding all of us that individuals from every group can excel at all human endeavors, whether women in STEM fields or Black women in the field of jurisprudence. So thank you, Professor Jones for joining us and sharing your work with us this evening. Now I'd like to briefly thank Professor Jen Manion, Associate Professor of History, who in turn will do a formal introduction of Professor Jones. Jen Manion came up with the idea for this series and then quickly turned the idea into action. This lecture series not only features the most distinguished historians of African-American history today, as if that were not enough, but Jen has also organized a non-credit seminar around the lecture series. After each lecture, Jen facilitates hour-long discussions based on the lecture and some accompanying readings. I want to thank the 170 staff, faculty and students who have signed up for the seminar. And I'd also particularly like to give a shout out to the over 50% of participants who are staff members at the college. I'm thrilled that so many of you are eager to engage with the history of anti-Black racism in America. You are committing time to reading and discussion in addition to watching the lectures. Meanwhile, Jen is spending many hours planning, organizing, and facilitating these discussions seminars. And of course, she's doing the conversations with our esteemed guests. So thank you, Jen, for that amazing work. Finally, before turning this over to Jen, I'd like to note that this 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. Jen, it's all yours.

- Thank you, Provost Epstein. My name's Jen Manion. I'm an Associate Professor of History here at Amherst College. It's my great honor to introduce to you Professor Martha S. Jones. Dr. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. She is a legal and cultural historian whose work examines how Black Americans have shaped the story of American democracy. Professor Jones is the author of "Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights "in Antebellum America," published by Cambridge University Press in 2018 and winner of many awards, including the Organization of American Historians, Liberty Legacy Award for the best book in civil rights history. The American Historical Association, Littleton-Griswold Prize for the best book in American legal history, and the American Society for legal history, John Phillip Reid Book Award for the best book in Anglo-American legal history. Professor Jones is also author of "All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900." Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2007. I actually want to read one of the blurbs from that book because I feel like it gets at the heart of Dr. Jones's work. This blurb says, of All Bound Up Together. "This book is groundbreaking in its reconfiguration of Black women's rights as part and parcel of both the black freedom struggle in the 19th century and the first wave of American feminism. It recasts both stories in critical ways, and more important, makes clear that they are deeply intertwined. This work is a tour de force." And that was from our dear friend, Nancy Hewitt. But now most recently, the newly released book on which tonight's talk is based, "Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All," published by Basic Books. Professor Jones is recognized as a public historian, frequently writing for broader audiences at outlets including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, USA Today, Public Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Time. She has curated museum exhibitions, including "Reframing the Color Line" and "Proclaiming Emancipation" in conjunction with the William Clements Library, and collaborated with the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, the Charles Wright Museum of African American History, the American Experience, the Southern Poverty Law Center, PBS, Netflix and Art. Professor Jones holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and a J.D. from the CUNY School of Law. Prior to the start of her academic career, she was a public interest litigator in New York City, recognized for her work as a Charles H. Revson fellow on the Future of the City of New York at Columbia University. Professor Jones currently serves as the president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. Every January members of the American Historical Association meet for our annual meeting. This past gathering was in New York City, just two months before the spread of SARS COVID-19 stopped life as we know it. Like many historians of women and gender in the U.S., I had been thinking about the significance of the upcoming Centennial of the 19th Amendment, which was ratified on August 18th, 1920. The amendment states, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." I wondered how this commemoration would be framed, what stories would be told, and what others would be overlooked? Flipping through the conference program, I came across a plenary entitled, "Looking through the Glass Window: The Women Without the Vote 100 Years Ago," featuring a phenomenal group of historians, including tonight's guest, Dr. Martha Jones. It was exactly what I needed, both the reflection on the latest work in the field of women's history, centering women of color, and a reminder of the imperative that these stories not be lost or buried in the rush to celebrate the Centennial. At this session and in her work more broadly, Dr. Jones interrogates the ambitions and efforts of both ordinary and extraordinary Black women. Those who have long been neglected by history books. She's an active public intellectual, committed to the power of history to help us understand and transform our world. I have long admired. Dr. Jones' dedicated and skillful use of social media, especially Twitter, as a tool for teaching community building and transformation. It is my absolute pleasure to welcome Dr. Martha Jones to Amherst College this evening.

- Thank you. Thank you to everyone at Amherst College. It's an honor to be here. I really very much appreciate the extra effort to convene us under these circumstances has been so important I think for many of us to have the opportunity to see one another to talk together despite not being able to get on the plane and the train. So thank you so much for the series and for having me here. Thank you to Provost Epstein for a very generous and careful reading of Vanguard and for presiding over this series. And of course, thank you to Professor Jen Manion for including me and for remembering that not so long ago, but in the pre-times when we were together in New York to talk about some of these questions. My theme this evening is indeed the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in August of 1920. We are marking that amendment centennial. And part of my work has been to help us move, if you will, in our thinking away from some of the myths that surround the amendment and closer to the important but complicated history that is where it really resides. The story of the amendment is I think indeed one facet of a national reckoning with the past, especially a reckoning with the role that racism has played in shaping the nation. And my hope tonight is that through this conversation and the many others like it that you all will have, there'll be an opportunity to better understand, for example, what happened in 1920 as a way of aiding us in moving forward. Now, if you mentioned to me that you're celebrating the centennial of the 19th Amendment, celebrating, you might notice that I'm a little uncomfortable. So don't get me wrong. I finished a book as Professor Manion and Provost Epstein have mentioned, just finished a book on the history of Black women in the vote. And so I'm as interested as any of us in its anniversary and its significance. And still I haven't really been able to muster up a spirit of celebration for the occasion. Sometimes I think too much celebrating gets in the way of the story that I want to tell you tonight. When we appreciate that it was an open secret in 1920 that Black women's disenfranchisement was a part, a presumption, a foundation of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, that understanding, I think fits awkwardly with events that feature laser light shows and period costumes and marching bands. The members of Congress who promulgated the 19th Amendment, the state lawmakers who ratified it, and the suffragists themselves, all understood that nothing in the amendment's terms prohibited the states from strategically using poll taxes and literacy tests, understanding clauses to keep Black women from registering to vote. Nothing in the new amendment promised to curb the intimidation and violence that threatened Black women who came out to polling places. Voting rights and voter suppression went hand in hand in 1920. Now the good news I suppose is that I'm a historian and nothing in my job requires me to plan commemoration festivities. My work instead is to cut through the half-truth and the myths about the past and equip us with the critical tools we need to think about the future of our democracy. Some 25 years ago, historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot looked back on the celebrations that marked 500 years since 1492. That was back in 1992. It was the year in which Christopher Columbus was said to have "discovered" the Americas. Trouillot warned historians away from that occasion. He was concerned that we would be drawn into promoting sanitized partial truths and even myths that the occasion demanded. The difficult history of European contact and conquests with the indigenous peoples of the Americas, including that of Columbus was, Trouillot was right, muted and even omitted altogether in efforts to cast that anniversary as a celebration. Such framings may have filled the coffers of tourist venues and souvenirs sellers, but they did very little to promote critical understanding of how colonialism devastated the people in the lands of the hemisphere. So when asked about why I have stayed home from celebrations, I know that the centennial of the 19th Amendment does indeed mark a milestone in the American story of voting rights. I add that remembering that era of voter suppression may also help us see more clearly how ballots are being withheld from Americans in our own time. It might even encourage us to recommit to the ongoing work of ensuring the voting rights of all Americans. And I'm eager to contribute the stories of Black women to our collective understandings of the 19th Amendment. But as a nation, we're not quite yet ready for that grand celebration, the promise of voting rights for all, still, I think regrettably remains out on the horizon. So let's look at August 1920 when the 19th Amendment became part of the constitution and let's take on I think two of the most predominant myths. The first is that when the amendment became law, all American won the vote. We even sometimes hear that all American women were guaranteed the vote after the amendment was ratified. The second myth is one that almost runs counter to the first and that is that no Black American women gained the vote in 1920, that racism kept all Black women from the polls. So let's replace those myths with history and recognize that voting rights in America have always been born of struggle, that the battles waged 100 years ago for constitutional right and against Jim Crow still echo in 2020 as American women continue to work against voter suppression and for full access to the polls. So what happened in August 1920? The U.S. Secretary of State certified that the 19th Amendment to the constitution had been ratified by the required 36 states. It took another week, but the amendment became the law of the land after Tennessee ratified. And let's just pause to look at the language of the constitution now. "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex." What precisely did that mean then for American women? Surely now laws that reserve the ballot to men violated the constitution. They no longer had the force of law. And still the 19th Amendment did not promise American women the vote. Laws, state laws, still kept women from the polls based upon age, based upon citizenship and residency, based upon mental competence. It was still true in 1920 that American women who married foreign nationals, husbands who were not American citizens, were denaturalized and not only lost their citizenship, but lost the right to vote. So women who showed up to register in the fall of 1920 still confronted many hurdles even if sex was not one of them. And of course, there was one additional barrier to women's votes that persisted even after a federal amendment. And those were barriers that emanated out of racism. Now, it was true that the 15th Amendment, which had been ratified in 1870, had expressly forbid the states from denying the vote to any man because of race. But by 1920 lawmakers in the South and West had set in place hurdles that while silent on their face about race, had the net effect of disenfranchising black male voters. Poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses had effectively kept many black men from casting their ballots since the 1890s. This along with unchecked intimidation, the threat of lynching, sealed the deal. Local voting officials effectively constructed a color line without ever expressly invoking race. So did American women win the vote in 1920? Not all women. African-American women in too many states became merely equals to their fathers and their husbands. State laws disenfranchise them in an end run around the spirit of the 19th and the 15th Amendments that both registration numbers reflected the effect of discriminatory laws. In the fall of 1920, Black women presented themselves to voting officials, but many found the books closed. We can look at examples from across the nation, Kent County in Delaware where Black women turned out only to be subjected to what were called constitutional tests. They were required to interpret a complex provision in the constitution. I challenge any of us to interpret the Electoral College without a lot of study, but here local officials use the Constitution and its complex provisions to keep Black women from the polls. In Huntsville, Alabama, only a half dozen Black women were among the nearly 1,500 who registered and the explanation was clear. Officials applied practically the same rules of qualification to women that had been applied to men. In Savannah, Georgia, officials imposed the letter of the lawand concluded that while Black women had turned out, they weren't entitled to vote because they hadn't been residents and registered for six months before the election. Now, how could they have? Registration opened in September and the election was in November. And this ruling meant that no women in the State of Georgia could vote, but it was an explicitly racialized interpretation of the law, one intended to keep Black women from the polls. And still at the same time, even before 1920, there are African-American women who are exercising a right to vote. State governments had extended the franchise to women, and importantly, in states like California in 1911, Illinois in 1913, New York in 1917. And by 1920 in those places, Black women were already seasoned voters. They managed to cast ballots there in the fall of 1920, in the wake of the 19th Amendment, but they didn't need the amendment in order to do so. Now Black women anticipate the challenges they're going to face at the polls. And in some localities, they importantly come together to organize suffrage schools. One example is from St. Louis, Missouri, where the women affiliated with that city's Black YWCA, the Phyllis Wheatley Branch, come together to teach one another how to register, how to pay a poll tax, how to pass a literacy test. They even attract men who are also eager to vote. And in St. Louis, as in many jurisdictions, the stakes are high. St. Louis is in the early stages of imposing residential segregation. Those local ordinances are being approved by voters at the polls. And so Black women are determined to get registered in that city precisely because they want the opportunity, not only to experience their own political power writ large, but because they are interested in combating the ongoing rise of Jim Crow segregation in their hometown. Now, if the women in St. Louis are largely successful, Black women come by the fall of 1920 to make up somewhere between 10% and 20% of the more than 110,000 new women voters who registered in that season. There are other places where African-American women face brutal opposition. In Daytona, Florida, for example, the educator and suffragist, Mary McLeod Bethune, has spent 1919 and 1920 registering African-American women to vote. Her school in Daytona, today's Bethune-Cookman University, on the eve of election day in the fall of 1920, will be visited by white robed Ku Klux Klansmen who march onto the ground of Bethune Girls' School in an attempt to scare Black women and their allies away from the polls. They will turn out in important numbers the next day. And many of them will cast their ballots. But by 1922, the violence is relentless. And this extraordinary effort by Black women in Florida to become part of the body politic will be roundly defeated by Klan violence. So what to do? African-American women are organized nationally in what is as close to a suffrage association as any organization they will create. The National Association of Colored Women had been founded in 1895, had included suffrage on its agenda, but was as committed, for example, to defeating Klan violence and lynching. They had long lobbied for federal legislation that would curtail the violence that confronted Black voters at the polls and elsewhere. But in 1920, Hallie Quinn Brown, an educator, Black Methodist Church activist, member of the NACW has been elected president of the association. And she is charged with leading now hundreds of thousands of Black women into a new political moment, one in which the 19th Amendment is behind them, but the realization of voting rights is still out on the horizon. Hallie Quinn Brown concludes that what a next step is or will be for Black women is to win federal legislation. Laws out of Congress that will give teeth to the 15th and the 19th Amendment and permit Black women to defeat on the state level the Jim Crow laws that are keeping them from the polls. Hallie Quinn Brown launches the strategy with an eye toward an Alliance. And she will call on Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party, one of the organizations rightly credited with a radical campaign that leads to the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Alice Paul's National Women's Party convenes in the winter of 1921 and Hallie Quinn Brown goes out of her way to be there. This is the meeting that is going to mark and celebrate the 19th Amendment and Hallie Quinn Brown is sure that African-American women need to be present. And at the same time, she appears with a delegation from the National Association of Colored Women, a delegation that looks to win Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party as allies in this ongoing campaign for women's full enfranchisement. Hallie Quinn Brown will be disappointed. Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party will fold up the organization in the winter of 1921. And Alice Paul will move on to a new campaign, still grounded in the program of women's rights. She will initiate, in 1923, a campaign for the equal rights amendment, a campaign that still persists until today. But she will leave, if you will, African-American women behind, leave them alone to build a new movement for voting rights, one that will take the form of litigation, led importantly by the NAACP as it chips away at the foundation of Jim Crow, including challenges to the limits placed upon voting rights by the individual states. That campaign will include, continue to include, voter education and voter activism on the ground. Black American women who will continue each season to press for registration, to press to get to the polls. And they will be very much inspired by women in cities like Chicago, where Black women are able to use their force at the polls to tip the balance in local and state level elections, sending the first African-American man to Congress since 1901, for example, in 1928. There are powerful lessons that African-American women will use their strength at the polls, vote as a bloc to support Republican Party candidates and on the state and local level, begin to exert real influence to become voters of consequence. Even in the 1920s, this kind of work will continue to inspire Black women, even those who were disenfranchised. And of course, this road that begins in 1920 will continue until 1965 when finally Black women and men win that federal legislation that Hallie Quinn Brown had been calling for in 1920. The Voting Rights Act will be signed into law that year by President Lyndon Johnson after a grassroots profoundly courageous campaign waged locally in many Southern cities and towns across this country. African-American women like the great Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Diane Nash, Septima Clark and others who will put not only their ideas to the test, not only insist on their principles, but put their bodies on the line in a campaign that will mean that neither Congress nor the president can resist the force of the claim for black voting rights and the "teeth" of the Voting Rights Act. This is in many ways, the culmination of a long campaign waged by African-American women. One of the ways in which Black women I think radically transformed the story of the 19th Amendment is indeed by rendering it one-stop, one episode in a much longer story of voting rights in this country. I'm someone who's resisted the term "suffrage" in relating a great deal of this history because I want us to see the connections between the campaign for the 19th Amendment, the long road to the Voting Rights Act and even until the struggles for voting rights in our own time. The 19th Amendment prohibited the states from denying the vote based upon sex, just as the 15th Amendment and forbid the states from using race when determining voting rights and still as we've visited tonight, many American women did not have the unqualified right to vote. As was true in 1920, where a woman lives, for example, the fact of that long history of residential segregation that was correlated to race still keeps many women from the polls today, just as states used laws that were neutral on their face, that did not expressly deprive voters of a right to the polls by virtue of their race or their sex. Today, we have these facially neutral laws, voter ID laws, the shuttering of polling places, the purging of voter rolls, all conceal their intent to deprive voters of color in the United States from getting to the polls. We live under extraordinary conditions in 2020. The pandemic has given voting rights a new urgency and yet has imposed a set of conditions that will require voters, Black voters, but all voters in this country perhaps to risk their health and their wellbeing to get to the polls. This history of the 19th Amendment is more than myth. I think it is a cautionary tale for where we sit today. And still I think it would be unwise to suggest that nothing has changed in 100 years since the 19th Amendment. We appreciate I think the important degree to which African-American women, especially since 1965, have become a force in American politics. We could point to the Black American women today who continue to vote as a bloc to consolidate their political power and to tip the balance in critical contests. I'll mention the 2017 special election in the state of Alabama where African-American women's votes put the Democratic candidate, Doug Jones over the top in a tight contest. There, Black women use their voting power, used it as a bloc and flipped that Senate seat from red to blue in a Senate where as we are all witnessed to nearly each and every day "every vote counts" when making and promoting legislation. I can point to the more than 120 African-American women who are running for Congress in 2020 coming up in just a few weeks. This is a record shattering number of African-American women. The high bar had been 48, four years ago. This year, more than 120 Black women vying for seats in Congress, I think conveys how far Black women have traveled in a very short time. I can't end without mentioning Senator Kamala Harris, of course, because Senator Harris has shattered another glass ceiling, if you will, for African-American women joining Joe Biden on the Democratic Party's ticket. And perhaps some of you heard Senator Harris' acceptance speech just a few weeks ago during the Democratic National Convention. I sat up in my seat when she first credited her own mother and then name checked six women, all of whom who appear in my most recent book, "Vanguard", women who she explained, we all stand on the shoulders of Black suffragists like Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells, Mary McLeod Bethune whose confrontation with the Ku Klux Klan we heard a bit about tonight, Diane Nash, Fannie Lou Hamer, those extraordinary sheroes of the modern civil rights era. And Constance Baker Motley, a member of the NAACP legal team that chipped away at the foundations of Jim Crow, bring us Brown versus Board of Education. Constance Baker Motley will go on to a remarkable public career as a federal judge for the balance of her public life. So here as much as I am not someone to celebrate, I am not someone to tell us that there aren't things worth remarking upon and that are remarkable about 2020. I'll look forward to staying tuned with you all as we move through this election season and beyond. And I hope that the stories of Vanguard both help you to think critically about where we are, but also will inspire you to commit and recommit to voting rights in this country, much in the way that the women I write about did 100 years ago. So with that, I'm going to say, thank you and I believe I'm going to turn things back over to Professor Manion who will work with us on the question and answer. So thank you all very much.

- Wonderful, thank you so much, Dr. Jones. There's so much to talk about and unpack. And I would love to hear you tell us a little bit more about Alice Paul and Hallie Quinn Brown, and why it's important for us in 2020 to still grapple with an understand the significance of most white suffragists abandoning Black women? And what's the legacy of that for us now?

- I take it that you all in the Amherst Community as in many of our communities have been asking pointedly and deliberately, how did we get here in 2020? How is it that anti-Black racism has not only persisted as a set of attitudes or ideas, but seems to permeate so much of our public life, our institutional life? That I think is the question of this historical moment. And one answer to that I think lies in, the way I would put it, the missed opportunity of the suffrage movement. That is to say that at every moment in the long road to the 19th Amendment, African-American women are present, are engaged, are amendable, if not, available to working in alliance with white American suffrage leaders. What they are not willing to do is to work in sustained community with organizations and with figures who themselves are trading in anti-Black racism. But I can't help but have sense that Alice Paul misses an opportunity to, if you will, invest in and contribute to the interest of all humanity by staying in the voting rights struggle with African-American women. There are some pragmatic dimensions to that. Paul is a brilliant strategist, political strategist. And certainly it would be fascinating to imagine her alliance with African-American women and how she would approach the struggles around Jim Crow. But she steps away. And to my mind, it really is that missed opportunity that speaks to the limited political vision that many suffragists work through, which was the sense that somehow questions of race or color or racism were questions for another movement, a different movement for civil rights circles and that weren't a women's issue. And I don't know how that sounds to your 21st century ear, but it rings very discordant to me to imagine that we don't understand how racism is a women's issue. But in fact, I think that's the position that Paul takes. And I think that we live with the legacy of that even in some of our best feminist thinking that somehow racism is a civil rights issue to be managed in other quarters and that women deal with women's issues. Of course, for someone who studies Black women, those things are impossible to pull apart.

- Thank you. I think this ties into that. You mentioned in your talk and in the book about Black women's collective power and how they mobilize that and use that in so many ways and I want to draw us back to an op-ed you wrote this summer called "Black Women in Politics are No Longer a 'First'. "\They are a force." And you cited that statistic that came out of the 2016 presidential election, 94% of Black women voted for Hillary Clinton while white women's split between Clinton and Trump. And I just wonder if you could, with your both historians and cultural critic, lawyerly hat on, hats, unpack that for us a bit.

- Sure. In the immediate lead up to the 19th Amendment, the premise that all the major proponents and some of the antagonist trade-in is the promise that the amendment will not enfranchise African-American women, especially in the South. And we might just ascribe that to general anti-Black animus, racism. But there's more to it. There's a lot of speculation about will women vote and how will they vote after a federal amendment? And generally white women are expected not to turn out in large numbers, but those that do turn out are expected to vote just like their husbands and their fathers. It's an awfully sexist, sort of projection. But that is to say that white women are not expected to shift the balance of power between political parties because they will split. And indeed they do. And so, anti-suffragists will say women's votes are just simply duplicative of men's votes. They won't make a difference in the outcomes. But African-American women, everybody expects and everybody knows from the examples of New York and Chicago and Los Angeles and San Francisco, everybody knows that African-American women are highly likely to vote as a bloc and in 1920 support the Republican Party. It's the old Republican Party, folks know there is a major party shift that follows on the 19th Amendment, but they are expected to. And this is what really leads white Democrats to, once the 19th Amendment has been ratified, to get behind women's votes and campaign to get white women to the polls. Because the fear is that Black women will get to the polls and they will begin to shift the balance of power and shift the outcome in elections, especially on the local level and to some degree on the state levels. Nobody's expecting Black women quite yet to shift a presidential contest outcome, but it is very likely that Black women can determine who might be mayor or alderman who might sit in state legislature, or be the local constable or justice of the peace. That is possible even in 1920. So this is to say that this is an old story. What we see in 2016 is an old story about African-American women who deliberate and organized collectively as Black women and develop and this is partly the work of historian, Leah Goodloe, who says women do vote as a bloc in the United States, but it's African-American women who do. And still 100 years later, we see that pattern evidenced in 2016 with white women voting a set of interests that are not contained by or consolidated around their identities as women, but voting many other kinds of interests, African-American women working by way of a long standing and carefully honed political identity that permits them to come out in those numbers and us to anticipate that they will.

- Your explanation of just the tremendous range of ways Black women were enfranchised or not enfranchised around the 19th Amendment by location and class and all these things has inspired a question. I think about the implications for that right now. And so someone wrote in and is wondering if you could talk to us about how women around the country can help to ensure that Black women in "difficult counties" can actually get to vote?

- So I love the question, but if I could I'm going to just turn it a bit. Because I think actually where we are right now is that African-American women are the model for how to get out the vote. What we know about Black women is that they not only vote as a bloc, their turnout is disproportionate to that of other Americans. And so when folks ask me, what are the lessons for our immediate moment? I would say tune in to the African-American women's political organizations, civic organizations, churches, YWCAs, and more and study up on how it is that they are organizing for November, study up and how they are organizing around the challenges of the coronavirus where a lot of our get out the vote on the ground tactics are going to be constrained by the virus conditions rather than worrying about how to get Black women to the polls. I would say study Black women so that other communities can adopt their strategies and approaches to getting out the vote because that is the story of Alabama in 2017, that Black women work out of the very same sorts of organizations that they were working in 100 years ago in 1920, out of the church basement, out of the YWCA hall, in sororities, in clubs and more. That's precisely what's going on as we sit here having this conversation and I hope you have a chance to tune in in your own community to learn some of their tactics and strategies because they have proven to be powerfully effective.

- Thank you. I have two related questions about voter suppression, to the extent to which you'd like to speak to this issue. One is, what role do you think that this year's census and it's potential manipulation will be playing in relation to voter suppression? And then also, do you know... Could you share with us your take on some of the most egregious forms of voter suppression that are currently happening?

- That's a great question about the relationship between the census and voter suppression. My understanding is that, there's a great deal to be concerned about because the census response rates have been very low, perhaps understandably given the complexity of our conditions. But what is the census for? Why do we conduct a census? The census data gets used for many things. Social sciences love the census data and extrapolate many things from it, but it's purpose is in apportioning representatives to Congress and then allocating federal resources back from Washington to states and localities. So we will feel the affects of census under-count in some communities for a very long time, for a decade or more. And so I think this is one piece. What I don't think we learned in the census experience was how to overcome the logistics of what it means to engage in a national communal enterprise like census rnumeration or voting. And so I don't think there's a lot of wisdom coming out of the census that is fueling the best thinking on how now to deal with the vote. But we will feel the consequences of the census enumeration, unfortunately for a very long time in those communities where Americans have been grossly under-counted. The second question is about the worst of voter suppression. That's difficult to say. I'm not sure, which is to say, I think it's all the sum total of the worst. But there's a way in which, whether it's a voter ID requirement or it's an exact match requirement when you get to the polls. I think these moments when voters who personally, individually present themselves to voting officials and are turned down and are turned away and are refused the opportunity to cast a ballot, these sorts of scenes I think stay with voters a very long time and contribute to voter suppression far out beyond the occasion of any given election. Whether your feeling is anger at being denied the opportunity to cast your ballot or frustration. Or it might even be embarrassment or humiliation. You've somehow been publicly branded illegitimate or not entitled. I think those kinds of encounters with officials have long-term implications for voting. Now, I did see at least one news report that came out of Virginia this week as voters there began early voting in-person. And adjacent to the polling place, in the report I saw were protestors whose presence and exuberance and more, it was suggested, was functioning to impose fear on voters. And that is very reminiscent of 1920 that Black American women when they do vote in many localities in 1920, turn out in numbers, hoping that is a strategy for resisting the same kind of intimidation that surrounds polling places in 1920, even shy of violence, though violence is also a factor, even shy of violence. The prospect of a mob, of jeering, of epithets and more, we can see in the newspapers from 1920, how Black women were harassed when they arrived at a polling place, when they waited in line. And so that in Virginia, to my mind is a level of voter intimidation, not just suppression, voter intimidation. That once again, we know the ways in which violence and the prospect of violence keeps people away from the polls for a very long time.

- So I want to shift gears a little bit back to history and your take on it. I think one of the themes that unites your scholarship is the claim that Black women have built, shaped, defined, and improved American democracy for centuries, right? In all different kinds of ways, whether or not they had formal political power. You refuse to have their advocacy reduced to a single issue such as suffrage, although you wouldn't know by our conversations tonight. Follow the women where they gathered into churches, especially rather than bemoaning their absence from other spaces that are traditionally deemed political. And I would love to hear how you got there. What are the life experiences, the books, the archives? What opened this window for you early on to take this approach to the past?

- I think many readers are surprised that Vanguard begins not with women in politics, but in part it begins with women in church. That seems, I think to many readers, like a somewhat unorthodox way to begin a history of women in the vote, but there are a couple of things that came out of that. But I'll start by saying, this goes all the way back to my very first year in graduate school when I was rooting around for a topic that would let me think about Black women, public life broadly and power and the struggles around that in early America. And I came across a very rather obscure microfiche collections. I did that on purpose because I'm thinking if you know what microfiche is, you're either really old like me or you're really like a hardcore history major. But microfiche was this sort of cellulose cards that you used in an awkward reader back in the day. And I found this souvenir program from a church conference on microfiche. And there was an illustration, a composite, portraits of luminaries. And one of them was someone named Reverend Mrs. Mary Small. And I said Reverend Mrs. It's usually the opposite. It's Mrs. Reverend or something. It was inverted and I thought, "What is a woman minister doing here?" It's 1905 or something. And I started to pull that thread as we do and discover that in Black Methodist Churches, there had been, by the beginning of the 20th century, nearly 100 years of debate about women and power and authority that was very much couched in terms of women's rights. So I returned to that in this book. And part of what I'm searching for are women activists and looking for Black women in the places where they develop their sense of politics and power, where they wrestle with men over authority and office, holding and voting, all of that happens in the church. But also what I'm interested in is ideas. And I'm really interested in how Black women develop in the 19th century, a political philosophy, a critique that says the ideal in American politics is a culture that is devoid of racism and devoid of sexism. And for most of our history, Black women are alone in holding that up and insisting on that as an ideal. And it turns out that one of the origins of those ideas is with Black church women, including Black women preachers who I write about in order to overcome the sexism in their church, have to read the Bible and study the women in it and develop a sense of history and politics and a political theory that will, on a good day, carry the day and get them things like preaching licenses and later from Mary Small ordained to the ministry. But it all starts in that microfiche is what I want to say. That I'm the kind of historian who really believes in the archive and the more obscure, the better. And I'm very indebted to Mary Small, who does make an appearance in Vanguard and very happy to be able to lift her up a bit because she really was somebody who just changed my thinking on a dime.

- Wonderful. So I think I have one last question. I would be remiss if I did not ask your insights on the White House Conference in American history. I'm just going to read one line that President Trump said. He said, "The left has warped, distorted, and defiled the American story with deceptions, falsehoods, and lies. There is no better example than 'The New York Times' totally discredited 1619 Project. This project rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom." And I wonder if you could speak to that remark and reflect on why histories of slavery and the African-American experience are being challenged in this way?

- Yeah, well, thanks for that, Jen Manion. Bcause I want to keep my remarks short and in bounds. But I will say that, I think first thing to say is that probably we shouldn't be terribly surprised that in a moment as fraught is this one that history becomes one of the battle grounds where we are waging these [inaudible] This is not the first time historians have been in the crosshairs of difficult politics and more. And that is because I think because the stakes are high. Our nation rests on many sorts of pillars, but one of them is a set of stories about who we are and what our origins are and how we got from here to there. That's not unique to the United States, but it's essential to the United States. And I do think it's stunning that the White House would imagine that this is somehow a new turn or somehow a revelation, regarding this is a revelation about what historians have been saying for a very long time. I think as long as you and I certainly have been historians, there's been no question, but that the story, the intertwined story of American slavery and American freedom is a pretty stocked narrative. It's not a provocative one, not a new or novel one, especially And so The 1619 Project, which enjoys a different platform then our books do, I think it's fair to say, elevates a great deal of that work, that thinking to a broader audience and perhaps some more politically more plugged in audience than our books sometimes do. And yet I just don't think there's anything in the 1619 Project, which is vast and multifaceted and has generated extraordinarily interesting and important debate, I don't think there's anything in it that is a surprise to us as historians even if we might quibble about the fine points. So here we are. And the last thing I'll say is, I don't know if this is true for you, but it's true for me that you can be a historian, especially historian of early America. and lament that you work too much of the time in relative obscurity, that we do the good, great work of the archives and the articles and the monographs and it oftentimes feels like our conversation we have with one another. Well, here, I think as historians, we have a remarkable opportunity to be part of the conversation in this critical moment. So I wouldn't have wished this upon us or our field, but I do take it to be an opportunity for us to weigh in immediately and meaningfully. And so I'm deeply admiring of those of us who have taken the challenge of the White House Conference and the president's remarks. I read Ed Ayers, for example, today on reminding Americans what history is, how it works and what we know and how we know it. It's an opportunity for us even though it comes at a politically very difficult time.

- Now, I just appreciate your thoughtful answers. And I asked just because I know you are so committed to connecting those dots between our very archivally anchored serious historical monographs and a general readership. And you're one of the scholars that I admire for doing that so effectively without allowing the integrity of your historical work to be compromised. So, it's just been a great honor to talk with you and much appreciation for all of your scholarship. And I'm going to turn it back over to Provost Epstein.

- Well, thank you, Professors Jones and Manion for that wonderful conversation. I think what moved me most was again, the strength of Black women activists and all that they have done for the country. And you really described that nicely with how they expanded the vote and how they worked against voter suppression. So I really appreciate that. So thank you so much. Before closing, I just want to give a few reminders. So if you are a seminar participant, remember to sign up for a discussion section. And meanwhile, I want to thank everyone in the audience tonight for joining us for this important conversation. And I want to remind you that the third of our lectures in this series will be held on Wednesday, October 14th at 7:00 PM. And it will feature Khalil Gibran Muhammad, speaking about The Condemnation of Blackness. So thanks again to Professor Jones and Professor Manion and everyone have a great evening and good night.

- 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.