Viewing on cspan which has been a supporter from the first year. We appreciate them very much, im with goodwin with the Mississippi Department of archives, if youve not already done so please silence your cell phones. Our panel this morning isa spotlight on mississippi civil rights. We thank bradley both cummings from sponsoring it, theyve also been withthe w book festival since the beginning, where grateful for that early support and for their sticking with us. We are in this room today, thanks to foreman watkins law efirm. We appreciate their support. Our panelists are Natalie Adams, Michelle Purdy and hezekiah watkins. Purchase copies of their books from vendors outside and you can find the times our authors will be signing in your programs. We will hear from our panelists forabout 40 minutes, and open the floor to questions. Please come to the podium in the center of the room to ask your questions. Be carefulof the ramp, dont trip. Now let me welcome our moderator, pamela said dc junior, director of mississippi ishistory and mississippi Civil Rights Museum. [applause] good morning, good morning. This is the first time 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 Adams who is the director of new college and professor of social and Cultural Studies in education at the university of alabama. He is coauthor of cheerleader, an American Icon and coeditor of geographics of girlhood identities in between and give her a hand please. [applause] doctor favors received his amp from State University and his phd in history from the ohio State University. He is assistant professor of history at clayton State University, give him a hand. [applause] Michelle Purdy is assistant professor of education and faculty member of the Interdisciplinary Program in urban studies and center on urban research and Public Policy at Washington University in st. Louis. She is coeditor of using past is prologue contemporary perspectives on africanamerican educational history. Give her a hand please. [applause] and last but truly not least, hezekiah watkins. In 1969 she was arrested at the Greyhound Bus station in jackson mississippi at the h siage of 13 where he was sent in a paddy wagon to Mississippi State penitentiary known as parchment penitentiary and placed on death row. Please give him a hand. I want the panelists to now give a small fiveminute overview of their books. Give the name of their books 1st and talk a little bit about it. Well startwith miss adams. Thank you and on behalf of my husband whos here and my better half on the and the coauthor of our book, just trying to struggle for desegregation in mississippi. I want to tell you how appreciative we are of that being part of this book festival and thank you for inviting us. To talk about our book , i wanted to take us back to october 29, 1969 and to a Supreme Court decision that isnt that wellknown. It was a case that originated out of mississippi. It was called alexander versus holmes, board of education and it was on this day that the Court Ordered 30 of the 33 School Districts named in the case to operate as fully unitary desegregated School Systems in january. They also gave a very clear about school and some implementation. All deliberate speed meant now. So on the eve of massive court enforced desegregation in his state in january 1970, governor John Bell Williams to a Radio Audience and i want to read this a little bit, a clip of what he said. He said i you in the fateful hour in the life of our state, the moment weve resisted for 15 years, that we thought hopefully to avoid or at least delay is finally at hand so let us accept the inevitable fact that we are going to suffer one way or the other , both white and black cause of the decrees of the court and with gods help, he says, 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 where the teachers, principals, superintendents, the school custodian, the cafeteria workers, coaches, other people employed by their school system. They didnt have any training in Effective School desegregation processes. They had little help from the state department and were often working in hostile local contexts and they were really very ordinary folks thrown into extraordinary circumstances. So how did they work through School Desegregation once the judges, politicians, lawmakers, the legislators, the representatives, that was the genesis of our research, that question is what originally drove us so we were very early on inspired by a quote from Barbara Kingsolver in her novel animal dreams and she has this 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, it adds up so we set out to interview local mississippians who were the boots in the field and one of the most significant social and cultural changes in this country. While we started out, we were going to interview teachers and principals, we assumed that was not going to be enough, that we had to guest are not much more widely and we then began focusing on interviewing teachers, students, parents, superintendents, school board members, Community Leaders and over a sevenyear period we interviewed hundred and we spent a lot of time in libraries and newspapers going through reams of paper because we were interested in knowing not only how desegregation played out differently in the state but how it was being chronicled differently in local newspapers and we focused on the years 1965 to 1971 because those were the years in which that was finally when the ac w and doj did in forcing desegregation. What we hope, we focused on the stories of our hundred world historians and in doing that what were hoping to do is to connect the macro to the micro, national to the local and by telling the stories of very ordinary folks who were in fact involved in the Civil Rights Movement,some of them willingly, some of them not. We hope to demonstrate how the daily minutia matters. Local politics mattered. Local leadership mattered. The decision that individuals made matters and individual and community strategizing mattered during this time in determining how School Districts transitioned into the unitary school system. We end the book by coming back to the present and we talk about what are the Lessons Learned by studying history because we certainly believe theresvaluable lessons. We revisit some of the communities that we featured historically earlier in the book to see how theyre faring today and we also connect educational history to current educational debate. We hear a lot about choice today. We hear about charter cschool legislation, 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 ways in which they were used during School Desegregation so thank you. [applause] good morning. Again, my name is doctor jelani favors, professor of history. Black colleges and first of all i want to thank the organizers of the mississippi book festival, i want to thank the panelists, special thanks to miss hezekiah watkins, its always great to be in the midst of true patriots so 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 our understanding of their t contribution to that Freedom Movement. As was mentioned i went to graduate school at ohio State University. They require us to say that, by the way and one of the things that immediately stood out, i was being introduced to all the fascinating books on the Civil Rights Movement and the research was outstanding and it discussed all the student activists that were merging throughout the movement but it was very little attention into their origins. There was never a true origin story and in my research here in mississippi i came across the findings and the words of an alumni who had gone to chicago for a conference in the early 20th century and she talked about the struggles that she was encountering in mississippi and she said that as a teacher in mississippi that she was simply trying to fill in the small cracks. And i think thats so crucial and important to understand, our understanding of what black alumni were attempting to do because as historians, thats what we try to do. Fill in these small cracks so one of the things i knew i wanted to do is tell a more complete or comprehensive story of the role of hbcus, so the name of my book is how black colleges foster generations of leadership and activism and i talk about seven different institutions that engage in a longitudinal study of historically black colleges,start off with the institute for color youth which is now cheney State University. Actually founded in philadelphia but now its located outside philadelphia, after that i talk about the title black and 10 academia, 1869 to 1900. I talk about in this college in greensboro North Carolina, one of two singlesex ofinstitutions dedicated to teaching africanamerican woman, the other one being stedman college, alabama State University, i talk aboutjackson State University located here in jackson mississippi. I talk about Southern University located in baton rouge and North Carolina a and then it university and i end with an epilogue talking about the current struggles confronting historical lack colleges that these are beds of the movement and one of the theories that i advance in this research is discussing something that i refer to as second curriculum. Outside of science, outside of history and all these other topics, black teachers and administrators engage in something that i identify as a set curriculum comprised of three basic components. Race consciousness, idealism and cultural nationalism. And race consciousness was so important for black youth being bombarded with messages of White Supremacy. Very much trying to teach them that they had no culture, hadno heritage. Black colleges provided a shelter where there was a powerful counter message provided and then of course i discussed this notion and idea of idealism, two of the major concepts that were being driven into the students time and again was it tdemocracy and citizenship, democracy and citizenship, the teachers talk to them about these concepts which seems odd because these are two of the most important things black people were basically being read up during this period. They were not allowed democracy of citizenship but you look at their scholarship and their being bombarded with these messages and the last one is cultural nationalism, black students were being taught the importance of black institutions, black businesses. One of the alumni came back to speak at two glue and told them we need three things. We need power, education and we need to own black property and this was long before booker t. Washington and the black power movement. Those were the messages circulating through black colleges and these play Critical Roles in shaping the movements and providing a critical space for black youth to thrive and ultimately those seeds gave rise to the modern Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s so im happy to talk more about that and fill in these gaps about the importance of black colleges and the role they played in the freedom struggle in this country. [applause] good morning, my name again is Michelle Purdy. Its 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 of this Couple School growing up so i think those in the cloud from Saint Andrews, i see some spaces and i think those who are tuning in, i think the book festival forinviting me to be part of this and i think this great panel that im a part of today. My first book, solo author book is entitled transforming the elite, black students and the desegregation of private schools and while it is not set here in mississippi, there are pieces of mississippi civil rights history that are important to understanding how and why elite private schools, schools such as Saint Andrews eg in jackson, why they decided to desegregate in the 1960s when they were not legally obligated to do so. The 1954 brown decision did not apply to private schools. As to why these elite private schools decided to desegregate. I focused my work on the Westminster School in atlanta, georgia, but within the context of the Civil Rights Movement but also what was happening nationally with Independent Schools whether in the south or s the north as they can did was race. There were a few i the north tht had admit a black students prior to the 1950s and 60s, but in general there was an awakening because of the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s that pulled on the moral tug of the white leaders of the elite private schools. They give you a sense of the what i mean elite, today westminster which was founded in 1951 about ten years ago westminster endowment was 208 million, making it the 14th most wealthy Independent School in the nation and the second most wealthy Independent School in the south. Today tuition hovers between 25,000 30,000 a day for daytime students. If your to go to an elite boarding school such as andover, looking at probably about 60, 75,000 in tuition and room and board. 1 of our children in the nation go to these schools that also belong to the National Association of Independent Schools. They were contending just as School Desegregation was an issue, as the civil rights issue was more broadly galvanizing in the 50s and 60s, these goals are kind to figure out where are we going to position ourselves in this debate. Are we going to be like the segregationist academy that were established after the brown decision . There are schools in jackson that were established after the brown decision as a result of not wanting to desegregate schools. Or b how are you going to stand, stand on us as those visitations starting to desegregate . I make an argument in the book White Private School leaders blur notions of public and private. They have threec incentives that pulled on them. One of the moral incentives of the Civil Rights Movement. You couldnt go anywhere in the United States and that no something about the Civil Rights Movement because of the television in the 1960s. It made the Civil Rights Movement come alive. Secondly, there was also a Public Relations incentive. We want to be like the segregationist academies . O we wo 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 f