[inaudible conversations] good morning Everyone Welcome to the fifth annual mississippi book festival and welcome everyone doing on cspan which is been a supporter of our efforts from the very first year. We appreciate them very much. Im chris with archives and history. If you have not done so please silence your cell phone. Our panel this morning is a spotlight on mississippi civil rights, we think energy for sponsoring it. Theyve also been with the book festival since beginning and we are grateful for the early support and sticking with us. We are in this room today, thanks to foreman Watkins Law Firm we pretrade their support. Our panelists are natalie, johnny, michelle and heather and you can purchase copies of their books from vendors outside and you can find the times are authors will be signing in your programs. You will hear from our panelists for about 40 minutes and open the floor to questions. Please come to the podium to answer your questions. Be careful of the ramp. Help me welcome our moderator for this panel pamela, the director of the Mississippi Museum in mississippi history and civil rights museum. [applause] good morning. This is the first time that this panel has been in the morning. So thank you so much for coming out. Im going to do a small little introduction of all of our panelists. We have natalie who is the director of new college and professor of social and Cultural Studies in education at the university of alabama. She is coauthor and American Icon and coeditor of geographics of girlhood identity in between and give her a hand please. [applause] doctor favors received his phd in North Carolina and in maine phd in history from the ohio State University. He is a sister professor of history at clayton State University. Give him a hand please Michelle Purdy is a professor of education and affiliate faculty member of the disciplinary programs in urban studies and the center on urban research and Public Policy at Washington University in st. Louis and coeditor of using contemporary perspectives on africanamerican educational history. Give her hand please. [applause] and last but truly not least. Heather watkins. In 1961 she was at the Greyhound Bus to see in jacksonville mississippi at the age of 13 where he was sent in a paddy wagon to Mississippi State penitentiary known as the penitentiary and placed on death row. Please give him a hand. [applause] i want to panelists to give a fiveminute overview of their book, give the name and talk a little bit about it. We will start with ms. Adams. Thank you. And on behalf of my husband who is who is here in my better half in the coauthor of my book, the struggle for desegregation in mississippi and i want to tell you how appreciative we are about being part of this book festival and thank you so much for inviting us. To talk about our book, i wanted to get back to october 291, 9692 Supreme Court decision that really is not that well known and it was the case that originated out of mississippi and called alexander versus home board of education. It was on this day that the Court Ordered 30 of the 33 School Districts that were named in the case to operate as fully unitary you segregated School Systems in january. They also gave a very clear call about School Implementation and all deliberate speed now meant now. On the of court enforced desegregation in his state in january 1970 governor speaks to a Radio Audience and i will read a little clip of what he said. He said i speak to you in the faithful hour of the light of our state and the moment we resisted for 15 years and we fall hopefully to avoid or at least delay is finally at hand. Let us accept the embeddable fact that we will suffer one way or another. Both white and black because of the decrease of the court. And what god help let us make the best of a bad situation. Now left to deal with hundreds of decisions that had to be made during this time. Were the teachers, principals, superintendents, the school custodian, the cafeteria workers, the coaches, other people employed by the local school system, they did not have any training in Effective School desegregation processes. They had very little help from the state department and they were often working in hostile local context and they were very ordinary folks grown into extraordinary circumstances. So how did they work through school said degradation. In the lawmakers in the legislators that the representatives moved out. That was the genesis of her research. That question is what drove that. We were very early on inspired by a quote in her novel animal dream and she has a great quote that says wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work that goes on at that. So we set out to interview local mississippi who were the boost in the field and one of the most significant social and cultural changes in this country and while we started out we were just going to interview teachers and principals and we assumed that was not going to be enough that we had to cast our net much more widely and we began focusing on interviewing teachers, students, parents, superintendents, school board members, Community Activists and leaders in over a 70. We interviewed over 100. We also spent a lot of time in libraries and newspapers coming through microfiche and reams of paper because we were interested in knowing how desegregation played out differently in the state but also how it was being chronicled differently in local newspapers. We focused on the years 1965 to 1971 because those were the years when d. O. J. Finally started enforcing desegregation. We really focused on the story of our 10 100 oral historians bt we hope to connect the macro to the micro. National to the local, and by telling the story of ordinary folks who were involved in the Civil Rights Movement, some willingly and some not. We hope to demonstrate how the daily minutia matters. Local politics matter, local Leadership Matters and the decisions that individuals make matter and individual and community strategizing matters during this time. In determining how School Districts transition into the unitary school system. We in the book by coming back to the present. And we talk about the Lessons Learned by studying history because we believe theres valuable lessons and we revisit some of the communities that we feature historically earlier in the book to see how it is bearing today and we also connect the educational history to current educational debate and we hear a lot about choice today and we hear about Charter School legislation and tuition vouchers, tuition tax credit, public funding for private schools and all of these have an origin in School Desegregation so we should understand while there are so many communities that are rightly suspicious of those measures today because of the way in which they were reviewed during School Desegregation. Thank you. [applause] good morning again my name is doctor giuliani favors a professor of history. Black colleges i want to think the organizers of mississippi book festival and the panelists and a special thanks to mrs. Watkins. It toys great to be in true patriots and heroes of this moment. Thank you for your sacrifice. [applause] black colleges are one of the most important cornerstones of the black Freedom Movement. And for too long those gaps have not been filled in terms of understanding of their contributions so that Freedom Movement as was mentioned i went to graduate school at the ohio State University, they require us to say that by the way. [laughter] i was being introduced to all these fascinating books on Civil Rights Movement and research was outstanding. It discussed all the student activists that were merging throughout the movement but it was very little attention given to the origins. There was never a true origin story. In my research i came across she talked about the struggles that she was encountering in the state of mississippi and she said as a teacher in mississippi that she was simply trying to fill in the small cracks. I think that is so crucial and important to understand of what black alumni from black colleges were tempted to do. We try to fill in the small cracks and one of the things i knew that i wanted to do. Again the name of my book is sheltered in a storm in leadership and activism. I took about seven different institutions and i engaged in a study of historically black colleges and i start off with the institutes of color youth which is now changed in 1837 outside of philadelphia. After that i talked about my chapter entitled academic in 1869 to 1900. I talk about Bennett College in greensboro North Carolina, one of two single institutions dedicating to teaching from american women and i also talk about alic Alabama State univery in montgomery and Jackson State University in jackson mississippi. I took about Southern University located in baton rouge, and i talk about North Carolina in the midst of the black Power Movement. Then i talk about the current struggles confronting historical black colleges. But these are seen beds of the movement in one of the theories advanced in this research is discussing something i refer to as a second curriculum. Outside of math, science, history and all these other topics black teachers administrators engaged as knowing as a second curriculum and that was complain of three basic components. Waste consciousness, idealism, and cultural nationalism. Race conscience was so important for black youth who are being bombarded with messages of White Supremacy. Very much trying to teach them that they had no culture, no heritage. Black college provide the shelter where there was a powerful counter message provided and of course i discussed the notion of idealism, two of the major concepts that were causally being driven for the students time and time again in democracy and citizenship, democracy and citizenship, they talk to them about these concepts which seemed odd because those are the two most in porton thinks the black people are basically rid of during the period they were not allowed democracy and citizenship. Black students were being taught the importance of black institutions and black businesses and in fact one of the alumni of the college in the 1890s came back to speak and told him we need three things, power, education and own black property. This is long before the black Power Movement. Those were the messages circulating throughout back colleges. These provided a go space for black to thrive during this time. And ultimately it gave a modest Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Im very happy to talk more about that and fill in the gaps of the importance of black colleges. ,. It is an honor and a humbling experience to be in the state capital of my home state. I was born and raised in jackson mississippi and i attended Saint Andrews growing up and i think those in the crowd from Saint Andrews. I see faces and i think those who are turning in and i think mississippi book festival for inviting me too be a part of this and i think the great panel to be a part of today. My first book is entitled transforming the elite. There are pieces of mississippi civil rights history that are important to understanding how and why elite private schools such as the andrews here in jackson, why they decided to desegregate in the mid1960s when they were not legally obligated to do so. The 1954 brown decision did not apply to private schools and in fact those of us who know something about School Desegregation history we know that often times private segregation is the cabins were established especially by the White Citizens Council in mississippi so white students would not have to go to desegregate his schools although desegregation moved at a snails pace as we know. That is part of the setting as to why the elite private schools decided to desegregate. I focused my work on the schools in atlanta, georgia within the context of the Civil Rights Movement but also it was happening nationally with Independent Schools whether they be in the south or in the north as they contended for the race. There were a few schools outside of the north that admitted black students prior to the mid1950s and 60s but there was an awakening because of the Civil Rights Movement. And of the elite private schools. It gives you a sense of what i mean, westminster which was founded in 1951 and it was 208 million in making it the 14th most wealthiest Independent School in the nation and it hovers between 25,030,000 to date for days time. If you were to go to an elite boarding school youre looking at probably about 60 to 75000 in tuition and room and board. About 1 of her children in the nation go to the schools that also belong to the National Association of Independent Schools. So they were contending just as School Desegregation was an issue, the Civil Rights Movement was more broadly galvanizing in the 50s and 60s, the schools were trying to think where we are going to position ourselves in this debate. What would be like the Segregation Academy that were established after the brown decision and there are schools that were established after the brown decision as a result of not wanting to be under desegregate schools. How will we stand on the side of those institutions that are starting to desegregate. I make an argument in the book the White Private School leaders blurred notion of public and private. They have three incentives that pulled on them. One of the moral incentives of the Civil Rights Movement. You cannot go anywhere in the United States and not know something about the Civil Rights Movement because of television in the 1960s. It made the Civil Rights Movement come alive. Secondly there was a Public Relation incentive do we want to be like the segregation academies. Will our students be accepted as the most elite colleges and universities if we remain segregated. Third there is a financial incentive and thats where mississippi comes into play. After alexander versus home decision and 69 black mississippians are continuing to fight, they are continuing to resist and they are resisting the fact that private schools here in mississippi that have discriminatory admission policies are still allowed to have Tax Exemption from the irs. So its in the 1970 in a case called greene versus kennedy that if schools had discriminatory admission policy they could no longer receive Tax Exemption status. Again that is part of the larger context of the book. In the second argument is a courageous navigation. Thats how the black students courageously navigated a contradictory and complex School Culture where on one hand you had option fundraisers and celebrations of the south and the other hand and white students even before black students asking questions about how will westminster handle School Desegregation. Just to close. Seven black students entered westminster in 1967. I focused on the first five years of School Desegregation in westminster in 1972 on the founding principal doctor William Presley retired. There were mixed experiences. This research was done through archival work at westminster and various archives in atlanta and throughout the south as well as oral history interviews. Just to give you a glimpse of what day one was like for one of my most reluctant interviewees, michael, they took his younger brother to convince him to talk to me. This was michaels description of his first day at westminster. During the first year no one could prepare me for the hypo logical story i was about to receive. The very first day of class eighth grade i walked in and the dominant white males about eight of them, many on the Football Team immediately surrounded me and how naively i thought, their welcoming me too class. Then they proceeded to humiliate, hit, push, shove, and hes me into hysteric so iran to the bathroom to hide and cried. So we know what happened