AfricanAmerican History is how bad it is. So the history piece is one thing, but also even in this moment. Thats how i started off right . In this moment its all a about how we are diagnose, right . Slow death dying right . At what point do i have any agency to do anything you know, theres a distinction in the world between optimists and pessimists. Turns out that optimists get things done. Optimists succeed. It turns out that pessimists are right about the world. Right. [laughter] right right right right. And i just want to, i want to introduce a term. This is not an academic term, but its a term that i got from some of the black women that i worked with in detroit who were around 16 years old. And they said theres a difference between a struggle, the struggle and struggley with an ly, and they say a struggle is what we go through as human beings on this planet. The struggle they define as specific to the africanamerican experience in this country. And they said but struggley is when and they named this through what they saw happening to their grandmothers and their aunties, struggling is when you are constantly battling and fighting with no prospects of anything getting better, with no prospect of joy. And no one, no human being should live in that space. And so they, their counteraction to that or the way they thought about this had a lot to do with how they carried themselves, their ability to be creative not just in fashion, but to write poetry, to dance in ways that were in defiance of this idea of being struggley. We understand that there is a history for all of us, right, of working through and coming through. They even understood the history particular toy e in the midst of the trauma, the narrative that you have can be all about the trauma for a variety of reasons. But thats not necessarily the narrative that i have about black people. And its not one that i teach my students. Like, you need to understand the conditions that were pressing down at any moment. Like again you cant just be like and they were play i had somebody say somewhere that we need to get beyond this trauma pleasure thing, because even on during the middle passage, black women were having orgasms. Im like, now youve gone far right . [laughter] now youve gone far with your dichotomy. Yes, they may have been, but you know, it wasnt the pleasure cruise. [laughter] so we can talk about how were not all just damaged. Black women, theres stuff to talk about, you know . Dr. Painter, i think in your book am i correct in that you were saying we see the slave initially in upstate new york and that her first language was dutch. Yes. Not english. And i think when people bring out that trope of Sojourner Truth, they hear that southern accent. [laughter] so whether she says [inaudible conversations] but thats the point im making. The point im making is that people not only trot that out as saying that, but also they hear it in that southern black voice and that had nothing to do with when i read that in your book people are carrying on about Sojourner Truth without even knowing anything about her. [inaudible conversations] can you please i would love [inaudible conversations] could you talk about just that, where youre going with this, but also i would love if you could talk about the moment of the photographs yes. And the importance of yes yes. I want to say three things. Let me try to remember the three things. The first thing is so Sojourner Truth didnt say aint i a woman, any of that, the people who put that in her mouth dont even take step one to find out about her. I wrote a scholarly book on Sojourner Truth. There were two others that came out, and theres one since then, and we all say look she didnt say that. She said things that meant that that working class women need their rights. Women need their rights and women work hard. She said that she didnt say aint, arent, etc. Okay, thats the first thing. Lets just career clear that up. I dont want any of you [laughter] okay. The second thing youve taken black americans and kind of shifted it over a little bit to playfulness. Playfulness is good for fashion, maybe, but my book is called creating black americans africanAmerican History and its meaning, 1619present. And the themes are creation and trauma. So each chapter starts with a fullpage image from black fine art. So if you can get a hard copy, you have a Coffee Table Book with. If you can only get the soft copy, you have a textbook. [laughter] but they all they both have a lot of black fine art in it because artists can deal with the past in a way that scholars cant. And as we know, just look at me, im getting all worked up. [laughter] i was excited to read your book thats why i wanted to ask you [inaudible] yeah, yeah. So we, we need to keep the creation in mind. For me, it was fine art. But it can be entertainment, it can be a lot of other things. And what was the third thing i wanted to [inaudible] no, im not going to talk about no, no. Thats for you, thats for you. [laughter] you asked about the photographs. The way i really started drifting toward the way that i ended up going to art school was through working on Sojourner Truths photographs. Sojourner truth did not read and write, but she had her pictures taken. And i started because i was really fascinated by you know that photograph of Sojourner Truth that you see a lot where shes sitting like this . You know what im talking about . Shes very prim, right . You know that photo . I mean, there are several of them but, you know, shes never, shes never doing any of that. [laughter] shes sitting very nicely. And then before i knew anything there was this verbal so journaller truth who was Sojourner Truth who was ripping open her bodice and aint i a woman and all that sort of thing which was a very fierce kind of person. So in order to find out what was going on here, i started it ended up a book. But the photographs were Sojourner Truths controlled selffashioning. And she showed herself as a respectable, well dressed matron. She didnt show herself as an angry black woman or a freedom fighter. She was a person of the mid 19th century, and im going to stop with this last bit saying that part of our selffashioning all of our selffashioning most of our selffashioning is as individuals. And i think we should be proud of ourselves as individuals. This is very hard to do in our society which only wants to make us units of race or units of sex or units of sexuality. But each of us is an individual with a particular past a particular family, particular tastes particular body. And we do with it and we should own doing it as ourselves. [applause] i wanted to add one of the, i love this Sojourner Truth book. It was revelatory to me. And one of the things that i was most revelatory was not that she wasnt busy opening her breasts in front of people and talking about aint i a woman [laughter] that never happened either the whole ripping of the breast in the middle of a meeting. Also fiction. But the thing that i like the most is for a while she was part of this utopian community that had all this, like, free love going on interracial. It was interracial but it was not free love. Okay, so i made that part up. [laughter] but i like [inaudible conversations] so that she was a part of creating this utopian kind of idyllic community. And, again its not how Sojourner Truth has been given to us and this is why my book is called Sojourner Truth a life, a symbol. Two different things. Yeah. Speaking of individuality and this is a very selfish question because i admire all of your work so much and have read and used it in so many different ways. And i think it would be helpful hopefully not just for me, but if you could talk about the individual journey that brought you to the work. Not just wanting to uncover the trauma but the joy and the creation in the collective community creation. I think it would be helpful if you could speak to how you see your research, your writing as part of these creative, selfmaking projects and especially now with how you shifted or maybe it wasnt a shift from a historian to creating the archives, to creating with challenge and digital art. I think your individual stories of creation and fashioning are really important for all of us to understand and hear. Go ahead. Nichelle, do you want to start in. In start . Well, like i said earlier it came from a desire to share a part of history that i didnt think people were aware of enough people didnt know. I love history different books from, you know, different areas. But i find a lot of people avoid it because it is traumatic and it can be exhausting be all youre hearing is terrible things. So i found a lot of as a writer i admire other artists in different disciplines so i always an interest in singers and actresses and models and how they came to their art. Because a lot of them are different, very individual people and often not just like we were just talking about Sojourner Truth their journey is not the stereotypical journey that people tend to think. There was a dancer that i featured in my book, she was famous for a while her name was margo webb. And she only died maybe ten years ago. She lived to be over 100. But she was in a dance team called norton and webb and her dance partner was harold norton. And, you know, after their they had a short career of but after her dance career was over, she didnt just go in a corner and die somewhere. She went back to college to Hunter College here in new york. She was born in harlem. She finished her degree, and she taught school for 40 years. She had a nice life with a family and, you know she taught dance in many ways. I think people have this idea of people as artists if they dont become famous, they arent successful in their art, or theyre not a successful person. And thats not always the case. A lot of artists have had different journeys or theyve inspired other artists. She is the one who kind of sent Diane Carroll on the right path. Ms. Carroll celebrated her 80th birthday yesterday. 80 years. [applause] but shes, you know, josephine was the p friend to her who said oh, girl, you cant wear that. [laughter] so, i mean i just like the little stories like that, you know the little the little tidbits in history the Dorothy Dandridge and Nat King Cole going around hollywood pitching a tv series for them to star in. Turned down. Can you imagine if we could watch that on youtube today . I love that. I didnt see a lot of that in history. I saw a lot of dr. King and rosa parks. Which is fine, we need to know our history but we need to know all aspects of our history. I want to say it was clearly so important to everybody else, because the book started from the tumbler and the images online that got such an overwhelming response. I think someone called it a bomb to the soul, to see those images. Thank you. I had the idea for the book years ago but, you know, turned down like many writers are. Its expensive to produce, were not sure theres an audience for it an audience rose up, right . They didnt believe it, so social media was a way to engage that audience and to kind of show, you know, expose people to a picture of err that kit not in a cat woman suit. Sammy davis can jr. Put his money into the 1959 film they starred in. Theres a lot of things i would like people to think about when they think of these people. Not just the onenote thing. Lena horne pinned to the pillar, you know in i want them to think of other things, you know . Thats where that came from, from the tumblr page and my publisher actually approached me from that. So i was fortunate in that aspect. Thank you for that. Its a beautiful book. Thank you. Lets see my honestly, i remember i sat in on a grad seminar that nell was teaching after id already published my first book. And one of the things she would always say to the graduate students was theres so many questions that have yet to be asked, right . If you wonder why isnt anybody talking about this, its because no one ever asked the question. Yo i need to ask the you need to ask the question. If you dont ask the question its not happening. That, for me, helped make sense of the work that i had done up until that point which the very first thing that i wrote was a journal article while i was still an undergraduate at spelman that was called writing themselves into existence. And it was about black women who had been Freedom Fighters and what it meant when they started to speak and write their experience over and against the history that i learned. So again, i was an undergraduate, so Fannie Lou Hamer was this revelation for me. But so much of the history that i was learning even about the Civil Rights Movement was still very male and it would just say and then there was Fannie Lou Hamer, right . Right. But to really it hit me, her absence, the absence of her voice was as an undergraduate. So that piece in a way the first two books that i did have to do with writing other pieces of black womens history back into existence. So the first book about hair literally was because i understood the complexity of hair for black women as central to citizenship and femininity. Partly because i grew up in the south and in San Francisco california. My parents are divorced, so i split years. When i with when i was in florida, what hair meant my grandmother was all about me and miss bess city and getting my hair straightened. She was not ashamed of being black, she was a part of a very specific be kind of black community. But hair for her meant one thing, and it couldnt and it would cause trouble. In a segregated florida is no joke around race really. Florida has got a whole reconstructed thing going on. For a segregated black community, she would like while you cause that trouble on yourself . That right there of all the fights that we have, why that one . When i was with my mother in the late 60s, really 70s, you know, we were running around at the mar run county marilyn county courthouse. The differences of what hair could mean to black people in the same decade in different regions of the country and for different general rations generations, there were nuances there that were beyond politics and asimilar assimilation that spoke to the complexity of our experience, and i simply didnt see it when i was in graduate school. I simply didnt see black women i write about black communities, but my point of entry is often black women. I did not see the complex communities that a i recognize. And so hair, for me, became the first kind of thing. And while i was doing the hair book i stumbled across this group of hair dressers that madam c. J. Walker friended a publication called womens voice, and that was published for 20 years. These hairdressers all over the country basically like, wrote about the stuff they were interested in. If it was politics, they were not writing about how to get a man. Politics economics. Again, talking about black women as Business People in ways i had not seen. And its publishers we as publishers, we publish that . And the hairdressers, this is what they were doing with their money . And i could not find this publication anywhere. And this is a period where all you hear about is black women as maids and black women as escaping the south from sexual abuse and black women is the underbelly of they created a magazine. And then i found out they created another magazine. [laughter] and the way that i found that magazine, and ill stop, the way that i found womens voice having gone to black college i was looking for this magazine everywhere. I knew it existed, because people would mention it in various places. But none of the places that should have it the library of congress, none of the black press, i couldnt find it anywhere. I just, i would keep finding just little scraps of mention about it. And finally i called because i went to black college no disrespect to spelman whose library was actually one central library, but i knew that things were not always preserved and written down collected in a certain kind of way. So i literally called up Fisk University. I started calling black colleges and saying can you look in the places ill pay you to get an undergraduate to look in those boxes that i know that exist and just see Fisk University had the whole run. Wow. Yeah. And they sent it to me. [laughter] . [applause] but that has to do with knowing i knew enough to start calling howard. I knew enough to call the au center. I knew enough to call you have to know certain things about black people and black culture that a you wont necessarily learn necessarily outside of it to figure out how to research it. So thats, thats my thank you for that. Yeah. Well, i have to say that her first book was what got her to princeton. She sent me an email nell painter sent me an email from paris she sent you an email. You did. I sent her an email from paris. [laughter] ive done a lot of books and you know, they start in different ways. The first one was a dissertation. You write a dissertation, it becomes a book. Right, cheryl hicks . Yes. And the next book was narrative of jose hudson which is an autobiography of a black communist. And i was advised not to do that book because he was a communist, because he was a black southerner and because he was still alive. But i loved it. I still love it. The third book was a history of the United States at the turn of the 20th century. So that is not just black history, but it turns out that it turns out that a lot of things that happened to black people are useful for understanding larger societies or larger histories. And, you know, for the longest time when i was advising dissertations, i would say to my graduate students like cheryl who didnt listen to me either i would say, you know, take a topic that has thats not just a black topic, but in which black people play a large part. And then you can claim that you have mastered this big thing. And you have also read a lot about black people. I dont think anybody took that advice. [laughter] black people are just too interesting. No, thats not true, because i had some i had all of my graduate students were not writing about black topics. But the ones who wanted to write of black topics continued to write about black topics and didnt ta