Cspan. Org podcasts. Catch washington today for a fastpaced report of the stories of the day. Listen to cspan anytime. Just tell your Smart Speaker play cspan radio. Cspan, powered by cable. Thank you pastor. Thank you pastor keaton, missus keaton, members of morris brown ame for walking us here tonight, and particularly that choir we could listen to you all night fortunately will have another chancece so thank you pure thank you outlook and everyone. It is so nice to be back together and have an opportunity to discuss things that matter in this community and discuss how we cannd make them better. And i want to thank, i hope you have an opportunity to get some of the food that was served up outside by first of all Maurice Brown member Reggie Simmons cooking up a lot of the sides, and then we had benjamin come down here from South Carolina. You so committed to what the form means and what its doing hes a lawyer in South Carolina in the county council met in kershaw county, and he drove down here and coat the chicken and the sausage for us, and he did just cook it. He donated his time and donated all that food, and that is a commitment to the community and we thank you so much, my friend. I want to thank in some other people while went get started. Make sure i w get responses rig. Dominion energy, l hopper foundation, the joanna foundation, federal bar foundation, maryland, marvel, Bradley Anderson and hardy, also a law firm. South carolina port authority. The boeing company, the Patrick Family Foundation here lynn, boomtown and, of course, the law firm. Some other brief thanks to our dedicated board members. Obviously it takes some effortd and a lot of planning to do the things we do at the form and particularly pilaf event like we are doing this evening. Line in particular i would like to call your attention to is chair of our future and past committee bo moore, Professor Emeritus and dean and social sciences at citadel who is the diligent architect of the program you here for tonight, so thank you. And others you see a lot of people from mp strategy around who really make this event happy and can happen happen. Thank you all for doing that. A couple housekeeping items. You may know that wete are welcoming cspan here tonight and we are a certainly happy to have them. Please remember to turn off your cell phones and silence them, and if, when youre seated we really encourage you to stay seated until the intermission if youre able to, and that will just allow for easier filming for everybody. But it is again great to get back here together. Thank you to pastor manning and his continued stewardship of the charleston form in our relationship with Mother Emmanuel Church and the commemoration activities every june. Next week it will have been seven years since the hate crimes committed at mother emmanuel appear and this seemed like a long time ago pure it does, but weve had constant reminders along the way, including of george floyd, the victims in buffalo recently. We still have a long way to go. And it is a forums purpose to get us in their attempt to get us there as a community and as a model for the nation here s why we bring people together. We tried to bring different perspectives and forge a common, forge solutions out of that, and understanding of the ways we can move forward together. And the form as you may know focuses on four social pillars really, education, economics, policing and criminal justice, and what we c have for tonight, what we call the future of the past. And whats interesting is our surveys have revealed, in the past couple of years you may have seen the surveys. That are available on our fancy new website for you to review. You can get everyone to agree on goals for education, for treating People Fairly by law enforcement. You can agreen on all of these goals in these areas, but really still is a division are these issues that seem less practical but certainly more emotional of a divide for our society, but that is of these issues of the future of the past. And so we want to bring everyone together and have an understanding of why only 36 people in the tricounty area think that our government is handling controversial statues and monuments in the correct way we want to find out ways to get there to where we can all appreciate that all reasonable people in the low country believe that we aree handling t the right way, at least in an acceptable way pure and we couldnt have better guides for our journeyr to find the correct way to do things that our panelists tonight. One quick mention, our second panel of Public Officials will have two faces with those who are not in your program but he should be familiar to you, councilman and reverend middleton will step in into one spot, to elect people couldnt be with us because of personal issues, and city councilman ross appel will be here in the other spot. And we certainlyly you can understand that they are not only good Public Officials because they are ready and willing to do this but they are engaged enough to be able to do that on short notice. So thanks to them for rounding out our second panel tonight. But starting with the first panel, i would like them to come join me ono stage if you would, moderator extraordinaire for the form John Simpkins who was heading the empty seat currently which is creating an economic and equitable infrastructure costs the south. Next to him we have doctor walter edgar who everyone im sure knows is a preeminent history of South Carolina, but not only that, one of the first Voting Trustees of the interNational AfricanAmerican Museum which of course is a nice segue over to doctor Tonya Matthews who is a steering our interNational AfricanAmerican Museum to educate the world about these issues starting in january this coming year. And we are thrilled to have dr. Doctorbe blain roberts, charlesn form of them and coauthored with awardwinning book on these very issues about our very Community Called the garden. Down at the end we have Michael Allen who is an awardwinning history with the National Park service who have dedicated so many years to these very issues in our community. And i thank them so much for joining us. F john. Thank you. Thank you, brian. Good evening, everybody. As a fy to be here at morris Brown Community church, even with a little bit of feedback, and it will be a pleasure to lead you alter a conversation today where we talk about public history, how we were a member the past, which passed we choose to remember, and what choices we make in doing so. I am going to allow my colleagues appear on the panel to introduce themselves in one way by responding to probably the easiest question you will get today, which is, how do you enter this conversation about public history in the low country and in South Carolina . Where are you as you enter this conversation . Dr. Edgar . Dr. Edgar as of right now or over the past 40 years, it has been an evolving process, both personally, with communities and certainly with organizations. Things and rather dramatically things have changed and rather dramatically. My late friend charles joiner, a great historian, his quotation, in 19 94, speaking of South Carolina as a community, i know we have come a long way since 1960. Some have dragged their feet all the way, but they have come. Some say there has been no progress but they have forgotten where we started. Some will stop here because they cannot see how far we have left to go. When my friend said in 1994i still think is true today. We did start somewhere along time ago. We have come a way, but we still have a way to go. I think i come to this in an interesting way. Even though i am now stewarding the interNational AfricanAmerican Museum as its ceo, there are days i feel like i am coming into the space as a member of the general public. My background is in engineering. My liberal arts lean is into poetry so i come into this space on sort of a constant and continual learning curve, and now i am jumping into this space, as i have been as a public historian, but i still have that fascination with these stories with surprise or chagrin that i am just hearing the story, the amazement that other people do not know the story. And thinking about, to your point, what should be the inspiration behind talking about how far we have come . I think one of the reasons we resist that conversation is because of the fear that someone will say, far enough. And so i think that gets in the way with the fact that, if we have come this far, clearly, whatever is ahead on the journey is something we have been prepared for, and i think what we are also seeing are the shadows of an unreckoning or a non on nonreckoning. You may be moving along but you are still dragging some stuff along with you, so it will catch up to wherever you are eventually. As i think about public history, which is about how to apply history to modern questions and conversations, i am always struck at how much easier some of the conversations i find myself in would be if we already knew the earlier story. And then what does it take to give people a space for what i call a courageous curiosity to admit what is unknown, to slow down, go back, pick it up just a little bit, and then have a conversation about what happened last week or last month or seven years ago. Hi. I am Blaine Roberts and i have lived and i lived in charleston from 2005 to 2007. I come into this conversation as a nonnative charlestonian who was here and i was troubled. We went on a lot of tours of charleston when we lived here, my husband and i, who is over there in the audience, and we were very disturbed by some of the things that we heard on these historical tours that we went on when we were here. We did not hear much about the black experience at all. We didnt hear anything about slavery or segregation. We heard nothing about africanamerican accomplishments, and so the two of us became very interested in why the Tourism Industry developed the way that it did. So i think my perspective then comes from deciding to figure out how that happened, why that happened, and immersing myself in the historical archives, really for the better part of a decade, all over town, the South Carolina historical society, the special collections at the college of charleston, the Avery Research center, and really digging through the records to figure out why certain charlestonians were charlestonians were only telling part of the story and ignoring a really significant part of the citys history. So thats kind of where i am coming from, an effort to really understand the deep history of the narratives that emerged in charleston. Good evening. My name is Michael Allen. I am retired from the National Park service. To your question, ironically, 42 years ago this very week, i began my journey with the National Park service, of all places in our american experience, at fort sumter. That first week of being there in many respects put me on the pathway of sitting here this afternoon. Why would i say that . Within the first week or two of me working in this transitional place in our american experience, i was peppered with such questions as, why are you here and what do you as a person of color or a black man have to do with the story of fort sumter and the American Civil War . And beyond that, what version of the civil war will you be telling us . As a youngster 42 years ago, i had to digest that. One day, while walking through fort sumter, i thought maybe i should walk through here as a tourist, not as an employee. So the first thing i did is i went into the gift shop. I began looking at the gift shop, the various titles of books that were being presented and sold to the public, and i did not see myself in the bookshelf. The next thing i did, i walked and took a look around in the museum. I mean, that is where we go to get the information of where we are. Again, i did not see myself in the museum. There was a voice in my head saying, well, this museum was built in 1961. Then i began to listen to my fellow employees sharing the story and the journey of the site as well and i didnt hear myself in their narratives. So either i was out of place working at this transitional place in American History or the agency which i worked for for 37. 5 years, the National Park service, perhaps was out of touch. I did not believe that i was out of place, so from those conversations 42 years ago, and the journey that ive been on and have worked with many of you all sitting in this audience, in many respects, i can say perhaps changed the narrative in some way. Does that mean we have reached the Promised Land . No, but i believe today we are in a better place in our interpretation then when i stepped on that area of fort sumter, because i can look here and see pastor matthews and the director of the National AfricanAmerican Museum and realize that some of the conversations i had 42 years ago allows her to sit here today. We all, if you do not know, are sitting in the gullah Cultural Heritage corridor, which stretches from North Carolina to florida. Perhaps, we are having conversations that 42 years ago would not have been a reality. So i come to this from a personal perspective of my experience, the opportunities and the partnerships and relationships that have allowed me to be part of this change. But i believe we still have a few miles yet to go. Thank you for that book end comment, mr. Allen, because he reference to dr. Eggers earlier comments about when he quoted chaz joyner about how far we have to go. A broader question about the notion of narrative, the creation of narrative, who tells the story certainly came out in your responses as well as the way that is processed individually and collectively. We have our stories. Sometimes there are stories that we tell each other individually and then sometimes there are stories that we tell collectively. All of this to say that history is contested. The past is contested. How do we accurately and comprehensively and completely grapple with our past when there is no consensus on what that past is . And this is a question for anyone who chooses to jump in, not any particular person. There is no consensus, and i was thinking first of all, michael did mention the reconstruction National Park, which is rare in this world. North carolina just appropriated 16 million for the reconstruction National Park. We have got the part but we dont have 60 million the park but we dont have 16 million for it. And i heard blaine say sometimes presentations are made, whether it is at Middleton Place or colonial williamsburg, explaining the lives of africanamericans, bipoc, whichever term you choose to use, and sometimes the white visitors, that is not what they want to hear. Tourists, probably, and i dont want to mischaracterize anyone, probably like gone with the wind history better than they do what really happened. Blaine, you are looking at me, because weve had this experience at williamsburg. The Oldest School for africanamericans in the country is at colonial williamsburg. Why are you all doing this . That is what our interpreter said. Why are you doing this . I think thats true. There is a historian at the university of mississippi who wrote an article about this. The title was, nobody knows the troubles i have seen but does anyone want to hear about them when they are on vacation . And i think that gets to the core of the problem. I think it is the case that for much of the 20th century, many tourists wanted to avoid these hard questions and issues, but i have been somewhat encouraged the last couple years. I think that the traveling public is much more aware and much more interested than they were previously, and there are a couple good examples in charleston that i think would illustrate that. One would be mcleods plantation, which some of you may have been to. It is an outstanding historical site that centers the experiences of the enslaved. You do not even go in the big house. And of course, that type of tour would have been unimaginable, you know, even i think 20 years ago in charleston. So i think that that has changed. A similar site in louisiana would be the whitney plantation. Some of you may have been there. It is a similar approach. So i am cautiously optimistic that we are changing what people are able to handle when they are traveling. So let me throw in sort of a let me throw in a sort of potentially alternative perspective to that because im curious if thats one of the stories we told ourselves to allow us to get away with the stories we were telling. You still have to know somebody who knows somebody to get into the new africanAmerican History and Culture Museum at the some sony and, ended this point at the smithsonian, and at this point, you know you will take a lot of deep breaths and rub a lot of shoulders. We have Brian Stevens as brian stephensons project in alabama. So we have projects like plantations or civil war sites. They are growing into a new story and finding the audience is already there. So i want t