annapolis book festival. i am even more delighted that >> good afternoon i am delighted to be here and that we are seeing each other in person. [applause] but before we begin make sure your volume is turned on please turn it off you will talk in an open up to audience questionsut the title of the panel what has shaped our history and policy and we're really lucky today to be joined by two of the best writers in the country on history and race. we have the author that the state must provide a why colleges have an unequal. look at the history of higher education of how much harder black americans have had. and also some names to be a little more familiar i found the yearbook. also a reckoning with the history of slavery and where. [inaudible] he can go to place and observe for those that are funny and reserve judgment every willg talk about that in a panel. thank you for being here. [applause] each of you had a book cannot yand 2211 year after george floyd and here we are in 2022 did we really have a reckoning? today have a reckoning in any real sense quick. >> it is interesting. thank you for being here. one of the centerpieces focuses on historically black colleges and universities to educate the population of what america i did not want to escape through the country's history. the institutions are going through this renaissance of attention and to that reckoning from philanthropic universities in the money coming from the federal government but you are also still seeing the piecemeal all motion toward making effective change and it hasn't yet manifested in terms to transformational he changing the situation for the lion share of people. . . . . put the university can make $500 million in private donation. to say all bubo you never received a 2.2 million dollars the largest ever single donation of 150 year history. i think that thinking about the scope of the past two years in the grander scope of american history is really only a blip, it if it continues that's when you start to see the. >> do we see a real reckoning with anything in this country. >> i think what is happened is over the past ten years with an unofficial start of the black lives matter being trayvon martin staff over the past ten years there is undoubtably been ssa shift in public consciousne. for many, many people who now understand racism not just as an interpersonal phenomenon but a systemic and structural and sociological. i was i joking 2012 if you would ask a buddy what redlining was, they would've been like that's rihanna's lipstick. now there are people who have different lexicons, different language, different toolkit which to understand the reason one community was one way and another is another way and putting people in those communities but what has done to those communities generation generation there has been a shift and we see this with a go race theory bogeyman an intense backlash as well millions of people are telling a different story about this country and nuanced honest, one that includes multiple perspectives, one that takes a set of historicalno phenomenon d complicates her understanding so we don't just understand manifest destiny as a good that brought the u.s. from one coast to another and we understand that it killed millions of indigenous people we don't understand the homeless because we are giving a lot of immigrants country access' to land. recognizing to clearing the land and yet to kill indigenous people. that's an example toha complicae stories of characters as they fell before 12, get the stories there are many major other people tied to the previous story of america. and tighten america's singular being the shiny lightto of the hill and anybody can w make it. once the version of the american story is revealed to be untrue oron have to the only part of te story a lot of people begin to experience not only as a threat to the america they believed ine but america of who they o understand themselves, not only an inconvenient need to re-affect history it becomes an expertst essential crisis, you millions of people are telling you is not necessarily true. every moment throughout this country and dropped the country to prevent teachers from teaching the very history that explains why the country look the way it does today. not only fearing the loss of material. there has been a shift in recognizing limitations and recognize it is a three steps forward, two steps back or three steps back depending on the situation ingn the moment we can recognize there is a shift in consciousness even if that is not necessarily always translated into the necessary material and legislative ctervention that would have a real material on black and indigenous people. >> one thing that's really clear this country cannot escape its history. the good have to do with the things that they did 400 years ago, 300 years ago, 200 years ago. i was really struck that you took higher education every reported as the education is the hardest seat because you have a very simple story. you need to go back generations youet the context for what are reporting. why did you choose education. i think that it really hinged upon i was trying to look at inequality more broadly. in the same thing the education straightforward this is something that is seemingly simple. you start to dig into it with all the additional -- there is with the broader lens of inequality with this idea of inequality from the first address that george washington gave congress in 1790 in speaking to membersrs of congre. higher education, that's where we build good citizens in understanding at the foundry, these are people thinking about this is a place where we develop citizens and people learn thehi national character. yet they were taken of shutting out the entire class of people. working through as i reported a higher education at the chronicle t you come across thee laws or bills. you think about the g.i. bill and you a think about ho expanded. there are all of these points, 17 million acres of land from 250 indigenous tribes and build what we have night was state university, arbor university, cornell and for 30 years these institutions or 30 years or longer most of these did not enroll black students. i was state university the first school to accept the grant did not enroll its first black student to the federal government said you have to accept them to the predominate institution or create in hbcu, that ended up being george washington carver. if you think about the amount of time that they were able to build credit and currency. you saw flagships thatts are enrolling black students. public high school graduates are black. and places like north carolina where chapel hill enrolled a present black students. located across the board there were all of these individual instances. one of the think the best helps people understand thatht granularity of it. the supreme court says you have to enroll her instead the state of oklahoma brushes in five days and since usual law school we hired a part-time faculty, this is where you can go understanding the granularity of all that was important. in the broader structure. it was in the capital building it was one of the floors they turned into a makeshift in the classroom and that her three faculty members part-time for what will be full-time work preaching ultimately did not attend. you saw the way w that the state was trying to hold on. when george was accepted into the university and put them in the hallway he was looking intoo the class when the supreme court said he couldn't do that anymore and they put a bar to segregate they were very important and that helped. >> notably the years that this was happening. they laid the foundation for the board of education. >> notably there will be people that were alive during the american history that is the thing that we can get that is that close. if adams is a history, years is a bit on the road. i'm sorry you went to eight separate places and you observed and you talk to people and you came away from your thoughts. there are tens of thousands of this country. it was in 2017 i watched statues comeme down a rapid majority of hblack cities and there was more than there was to enslave people. what is the implications of that what does it mean to get to school had to go down to the boulevard to get to thehe grocey store had to go to jefferson davis parkway. my middle school was named after the leader of the confederacy my parents live on the street and after someone who owns 150 t people. they are not just symbols reflected with the stories and the narratives that communities carry and policy and public policy in the federal holiday and schools and more effectively understand the way communities have been disproportionately harmed. we get a new orleans evidence thinking about my hometown and growing up in a place that was one of the busiest in the country and realizing i did not understand the history of the city that it had on my city in my state my country and thinking about michael professor walker johnson a historian at harvard johnson said soul by soul he said the whole city is a memorial to savery people paved and then the buildings and soil what are the places of the people in new orleans who are talking about this in the places that are not talking about this but they should be talking about this, what are the places between, then i got curious about other places throughout the country. i started looking around and visited dozens of different places and started writing about eight of them and what i love about the book like this in the, travelogue and go to go to this place, me too talk to this operson we have to go to a place and you think you're gonna write about itme but then a story taks you to different direction. in civil war battlefields, went to petersburg it was an interesting place i was having a conversation with the parkhe ranger in the book project you should go to this confederate cemetery. there is a difference between the regular black eye don't go to the cemetery you have to go to the confederate cemetery. and i ended up spending time in targeted people there the womans who would run the site discussing inhabited conversation out of the corner of t my eye. she sees it and she flips it over. i was like that was dramatic. i don't know who they are. another moment i have to, the chapter ended up being about me spending the day with members of the confederate, memorial day of the. i did not write in my book that i was going to go do that i have no interest. sometimes a story takes you in the direction that it wants to go and it shows you how it wants to be written. that kept happening at variousou stages throughout this book. >> what are the most remarkable things to ask about this if you have these interactions there are places where you clearly not so much wanted initial up anyway. you don't judge the people who hide the flyer or judge the people who adored thomas jefferson i don't care what he did with sally hemmings. it you maintain a distance from them and then you leave the scene and you give us context for what was going on. there were a lot of journalists in this day and age would want to dive in there and judge. what do you think it is about you to observe and not reserve judgments. >> there is a version of this book in which i spend the day with confederate veterans and doing daily show kind of thingus very clearly making them look ridiculous. for me that is not a natural part. i also really wanted to understand why they believe so many things that run so profoundly countered to the evidence at hand. all the conversations with jeff members of the confederate veterans in the salt-and-pepper and ponytail the round valley and the biker vest with a conversation he was told me when he was a boy his grandfather used to take into the cemetery and his grandfather used to bring them to this gazebo in the cemetery and they would sing the anthem and watch the deer come out at night at the sunset and they would watch the fireflies dance from one tombstone to another in his grandfather would tell them they didn't try to work for slavery or oppressed people they fought a war to protect themselves against northern invasion they fought a war to protect the culture inn their family and state sovereignty and now he brings his daughters to the same cemetery and tells them the same story that his grandfather told him in the same songs that his granddaughters sing to him. that was really important crystallizing moment demonstrated for howow many peoe history is not about primary sourceto documents or evidence it's a story that there told in the story that they tell and heirloom across generations is not only pieces of history but to my point that he made earlier representative of the pieces that you love. another you said the warden have anything to do is slavery but if you look at the confederate profession like mississippi very clearly in 1861 our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery. they're quite clear about it but again that represents an j exponential threat to how jeff understands himself. if he accepts the information he would have to accept his grandfather's lying if he accepted his grand father is lying it with her and to crumble and disintegrate into disintegrate which somebody relationships in his community and family are built. you only get the understanding from genuinely approaching somebody and trying to understand. what you can make character tours of themselves. the more unsettling piece of confederate veterans, it felt like a family reunion, it was an intergenerational familiar piecr of it where it was clear how the story was being passed down across generations. was clear the glue connecting people and allow the story to persist in this way. if i went in with an antagonistic or 70 said something that was incorrect, in the book i thought it was a much more effective thing to talk to people, get a real sense. the next three pages will be evidence about all of them this is about slavery. this particular project that is more effective in a more effective tool. the civil war was that about slavery i would if we could do a quick poll, have any people learned that in school i certainly do and i was born in 1991. align the civil war in public school and about states rights, we did not mention slavery very much readd we talked about the north wanted one thing in the south wanted another in slavery was very unfortunate but we did not go i in deep in seventh, i eighth, ninth, tenth grade. i wonder if you could talk a bit about how education in this country has served at times explosively miss educate people. will we the black voices, black professors black students out of conversations by not educating people. we lose our history because were only told one person and that is a version that is palatable to people in the classroom. it has been historically right and it's an idea ofde sanitizing of what american history is, the revolutionary war and stuff happens you have the civil war and then in barack obama until the deer path of progress. maintaining to clint's point and how you build an identity around the story that allows for a very straight line view of american history at the glorification of our founding is a need to make this place more exceptional even if there's a struggle there's always denied towards progress and it ignores the fact that reconstruction happened but you also have the civil rights in s the southern strategy and that progress is met with the intense pushback. ticket 1871 when alcorn state university was created a black college in mississippi in at least a decade.00 $15000 a year, year later they reduced it to $5500 here. we would rather resign than this college close to enroll and admit a black student. the absence of an explicit denial in getting back to the founders and actively shunning people out of the citizenship and taking away what are the critical citizenship and you keep undereducated that is denying them a fundamental right up there of their citizenship. it's often said that america has traditionally had an antagonistic relationship that extends students and is very difficult thing to untangle the k-12 level is p tied up and maye we can bring students outside of the district because of the supreme court in the 1970s you can bring people across quality in education. i don't know we are at a moment, what are the things they get about the renaming of the college buildings and stop the transformational change that they want it's important step of getting people to a place of acknowledgment of where the country was of what the roots were in the bones lie. as we move forward with this understanding of the and equity you could start to uproot some of those pieces. it took 100 years there is a small piece in the act they were required to give money equitably and also to match the federal government funding. in the early 1900s it is clear that states were not matching this funding. there was a bill in congress that worked its way around 1914 that effectively would have forced states to report whether or not they were matching their funds for the morale act. a bill to make states report their funds until 2018 and the farmville wheatland two years of consistent information where we could've had more than a century. the knowledge and the explicit this is it something that lawmakers actively said there were several o racist tirades on the house floor during this debate, you can't tell us how to spend their money. we know how to spend our money and we will hold back as much as we want to effectively and these are fascinating to me. >> those little things. >> this brings up a good question reparative justice and how black people are cut out of education and out of jobs in the history surrounding. when we think about reparation people singularly and financial intervention looks like, that is undoubtedly a necessary and important you cannot specifically prevent a specific demographic of people from having access to upward mobility for centuries and when you attempt to repair them and not specifically target the groups of people prevented from having access. this is what i think about allew the time it's a new deal and talk about education is a singular and contemporary middle-class and millions of people out of poverty after the depression and the thing that was a great catalyst to experience a certain level of energetic washing otherwise this would've happened. while that is true the new deal specifically prevented back people from having access to the majority ofea the benefits in te early years black people social security minimum wage the list goes on and on the single rate of catalyst and of the course of the century you don't give it to another group of people people want to act surprised with desperate outcomes along the lines that's only one example al range of social policy throughout the 20, 19th and 18th century that specifically prevented black people in various contexts other groups of people from having access would more effectively improve the conditions what the a same time saying those people are responsible for the terrible conditions of the community. in order to repair that, not only do you have to have the material intervention targeted towards the groups that have historically been prevented from having access to them but you also have to educate people to understand the material intervention. if you only move towards the intervention and the policy intervention but don't engage for public consciousness about the history of the country in the history that is made it and these things are necessary in the first place then people will only begin to tell them the story which many people do about how those policy interventions are unfair or reverse racism or politically correct or whatever the case may be.