The final panel from this Years National black writers conference. Thank you for coming out this afternoon. We really, really, really are glad to see you here and glad you stayed over these four days. When i founded the center for black literature in 2003, one of the major goals was to host the National Black writer withs conference, and it was a vision of john oliver kilns who was poet and writer in residence at that time, and he would have been 100 years in january. He wanted to support the work of black writers by hosting programs and holding a conference every year. And we did this through the center for black literature where we have literary readings, workshops, symposia and Youth Programs for our students. Its called, our Youth Program is called reenvisioning our lives through literature. Weve continued to do this. And as i think over these last four days, i know John Oliver Killens would be smiling. I thank him for his visioning, and i thank all of you for coming together to celebrate the writers, to share with us in a discussion of how race impacts our lives and is reflect in our literature and to interrogate and develop a deeper understanding of the literary text that we produce. This years conference continues the tradition of ensuring that the text produced by black writers in the americas, asia, europe and africa, are known and read by the general public and are represented in our schools and libraries. We began on thursday morning with several hundred youth from grades three through high school. This auditorium was filled with young people. With scholarly presentations on the theme of the conference, a Program Featuring the elders. We also have a workshop featuring elders reading their workings. And we had works. And we had a town hall meeting on the role and responsibility of black institutions and black writers. We closed thursday with a poetry cafe with one of our partners, the brooklyn public library. On friday we continued with films with our partner african voices. , and we had our Opening Night with our honorary chair, reeder dove, and our awardwinning poets, Michael Weaver and roland phillips. Over the last two days, weve had panels and round tables on the topics decoded, hiphop, creating dangerously, the politics of race and gender, futurism and the book between the world and me. Publishing in the digital age, memory and creative writing programs as well as memoirs. Weve had talk shops on publishing, writing fiction, writing poetry and on book proposals. One of our goals is to expand the conference and to have satellite conferences around the country. We did this in february with a program on the conference theme at the multicultural center, multicultural conference which was held at Sacramento State university. And we want to expand our conferences to other places around the country. Our writers are our visionaries. Our voices of conscious. Our documentarians. I salute our honorary chair, rita dove, and our conference honorees, Michael Eric Dyson, Charles Johnson and woody king jr. And i salute our writers and our scholars and our literary professionals who were on our panels. We really thank you for all the work that you do. I also thank our elected officials who have supported this conference and our corporate partners. All of you have helped to realize the cigging enough cannes significance and value of this literary gathering. This Conference Takes Place over two years, and it really takes a village. I want to give a special acknowledgment to the center for black literature director Clarence Reynolds. Hes sitting over here. [applause] hes had tremendous responsibility for coordinating all of these activities. I also thank our coordinators for various components of this program. They are crucial. Bernadette sandy, Joylin Phillips [inaudible] simone, raquel bennett, tai allen, professors wallace ford, todd craig, victoria, Linda Jackson and joanna [inaudible] i thank you for working as a team to bring this together and particularly intently over the last several months. A special thank you also to our students and to the faculty who encourage them to attend. I think we had more students this year than weve had in a number of years. And i hope that all of you have seen the value of this historical moment and that it will be etched in your memory. And i thank our center for black literature Advisory Board. I think we have two Advisory Board members here, Richard Jones and patrick buddington, center for literature Advisory Board. [applause] we have many partners and supporters listed in your program booklet. Im not going to read all of them. And as we move to our Closing Program with Michael Eric Dyson and Khalil Gibran muhammad, i really, really thank femme there are coming out. I encourage you to support our writers, to support the important work of the center for black literature. We are the only center for black literature in this country, and we want to stay. [applause] you can make a donation online by supporting us. Thank you, enjoy the rest of this evening. And look on our web site for documentation of the conference. Well have videotapes, well have photographs, and youll be able to donate online. Continue to visit our web site and to be continually aware of the programs that we do. We need your support and we need your help. Thank you. [applause] yes. What a way to end a conference. A conversation with Michael Eric Dyson and Khalil Muhammad, writing race, embracing difference. Writing race and embracing difference. Heres what were going to have for you today. Bring out our two wonderful, esteemed guests. Lets give it up for them. [applause] and i dont want to read you the long bye owes, theyre in the program, so you can just glimpse those. So again, brother Khalil Muhammad [applause] michael erik dyson. [applause] [cheers and applause] so lets have a consideration. Thank you. Thank you. I am always honored to have the invitation of brenda green and Clarence Reynolds and to be at medgar evers. So appreciate you coming out. And, of course, to have professor dyson here with us is a really special treat. [applause] and just so that im always mindful that new york citys a big place, to anyone who is a longtime supporter, user or fan of the schomburg center, thank you for your support. [applause] so this Closing Panel was inspired by an essay written a couple of years ago called writing race in america x. The subtitle by david wright was white authors have a duty to create black characters. Now this is, in part, the frame for the entire conference, although it strikes me that theres an interesting way to invert the frame. Right. Here we have a black author writing about a black president and a presidency that has always historically been white. So one way to think about this is the obligation or the challenge of black authors to write about institutions of power and privilege that are wholly unique, separate and distinction from the black experience. Great. So thats how were going to think about the next 45 minutes in terms of having president dyson here. So the black presidency, when did the book start . It started first of all [audio difficulty] [laughter] okay, great. Want to thank dr. Green again and doc reynolds for this extraordinary event and for the honor of being here. And to professor muhammad, one of the most brilliant and gifted interlocutors more broadly across the intellectual landscape and schomburgs loss is harvards gain. But we know hell find his way back to harlem and to brooklyn very, very quickly. Lets celebrate his achievement [applause] i always said, for those who know me, i said, look, this is the leftwing skip gates. [laughter] i didnt know i was being that perspective perceptive, that he would actually go to the Institution Even more quickly than i thought. [laughter] so god bless him. You know, this book began the moment obama was elected president of the United States of america. I happened to be there that night in grant park where reverend jackson was shedding tears, people were looking askance at his tears, but i think they were quite genuine because he could imagine the path from dr. Kings assassination to now obamas potential inauguration 40 years later was a remarkable trajectory. And for much of that, he carried us symbolically as a tremendous figure. But i was there that night working for tv 1, making commentary, and i must say when wolf blitzer of cnn announced that this man has been elected as the 44th president of the United States of america, it was pretty remarkable. It was pretty, you know, it was pretty unbelievable really. And im in that, you know, tweener generation where, you know, we still have pride in black first, we still look to a certain degree to jet magazine to see what was on tv during the week and who was black. And i still remember Sidney Poitier flapping that black man. [laughter] still remember when that white man slapped him and he slapped him back in the heat of the night, that was new, right . [laughter] we didnt have twitter or perez hilton or takeout media. But when we saw that black man, that shining prince of black manhood, that was news. So im of that generation vicariously. I didnt live through it. Myself, as an older figure, but too old for some of the younger general races. So it was still generations. So it was still a remarkable thing that a black man could become president of the United States of america. And i was heading, as it turns out, to harvard the next day to do a series of lectures on jayz. Had my stuff written out, ready to go. And then i said on the plane right there, can i really talk about him when barack obama has been named the president of the United States of america . I said, nah, not really. So for the next three days, off the top of my dome, i lectured at harvard about obama and different aspects of him. So the book began there. It began to take shape, and its in [inaudible] forms, of course. But thinking out loud about what it would mean to have a black president , a figure of estimable worth and incredible intelligence and magnitude and the breadth of both his learning and his ability to convince america to vote for him. Because obama had an idea that no other black person in the history of this world has successfully carried forward. I will run the, historically, most powerful empire in the history of the world and so a lot of people wanted to. Hes the one to carry through with it. So i was intrigued by him, having known him since 1991, 92 as to what his presidency would look like. So the book began to take shape there. So lets talk about that. One of the interesting things about mikes book is unlike previous biographies of the president , this is a biography of the presidency. And its a key distinction precisely because the book, essentially, retells the moment of his inauguration framed by criticisms about whether he was black enough even as a candidate to a kind of early appreciation for the trajectory of criticisms that the president had faced and what he was capable of. So that kind of writerly intervention, i think, is important to note. But you have a story. You have a back story. So tell us a little bit about that back story right. Which gives you a certain kind of insight and credibility to talk about the man even before he becomes president. Thats why he is who he is, see . Is. [laughter] if id have known i was doing that, i could have [laughter] said that articulately, and i could have saved myself some trouble. Man [laughter] yeah, thats great. And thats exactly what im doing, right . What he said. [laughter] and the framework is, indeed, the presidency and how to this occupant has how this occupant has forever altered, colored, darkened the corridors of power by virtue of his presence there, an constitution that heretofore had been a white institution, a white male Institution Even more particularly. And so youre absolutely right. I wanted to take measure of that. I wanted to engage that institution to the degree that it would bend to and yield to the pressures, demands, insights, desires and preoccupations of this particular black figure but also the collective enterprise of imagination about political and social futures that black people would bring to bear. And so i wanted to do that on the one happened, but youre absolutely right on the one hand. But youre absolutely right. Having met obama for the first time at Mcdonald University in the outskirts of chicago where he, i and the actress Cheryl Lee Ralph were on a black history panel. [laughter] now, i can tell you hes a real brother because later on he said, you know, we were on that panel, mike, and you aint saying much to me, and i aint saying much to you, and we were basically looking at ms. Ralph. And i said no doubt about it, homey. [laughter] and later on when he said senator hughes, i said if id have known you liked yellow negroes [laughter] so the thing is, you know, we met then. We had cordial conversations. We joined the same church, right . Thats kind of a revelation. Trinity . Trinity United Church of christ. Jeremiah wright he gets more stuff out of me, im telling you. [laughter] so i joined the church. For those who were saying he never went to church, no, he went to church. He heard some sermons. [laughter] oh, im sorry, i couldnt tell because neither was i. So whats interesting, you know, intellectuals on the road, preachers, ourselves. So obama was there, you know, the way he is now is the way he was then; reasonable, balanced, articulate, humble, selfdepracating somewhere between cory booker and gerald ford with a little bit more color. [laughter] this guy right here. Right, youre right in that sense both in the shades of ideology along that continuum as well as his approach to politics. Because they were new black politicians in that sense. The thing about obama, of course, and, of course, cory booker and harold ford, they understand the need and necessity to be rooted in black america, all of them. The outcome may be different, but obama was also ambitious. You know, theres a story, as you know as a chicagoan, but obama was running for state senate, decided to run for state senate. The previous occupant of that office had decided to run for the United States congress after mel reynolds, then the occupant of that office, fell into some hard times. Right. And well leave it there. [laughter] and so the reality is that this woman said im going to run for that office. But when Jesse Jackson jr. Threw his hat into the ring, all bets were off. Right. So she said let me go back to the state senate, and let me do that. In chicago politics it was like everybody, you know, a pecking order. You served your time, you did your thing, this, this particular office then you have to acknowledge that the older person or the person more senior gets the nod. Well, the younger guy named obama wasnt really let me think about that. Not only did he think about it and said, no, i think im going to keep my name in and didnt give her her seat back rhetorically, symbolically. He said he was going to stay in the race. He figured out a way not only to remove her from officially being able to run, but everybody else who was on the slate. Challenged her signatures, right . Challenged her signature, but he got everybody else wiped out. Thats pretty machiavellian. Hes a real nice little guy, you think, tall guy and, yes, we can, yes, we can. That guy is ruthless at a certain level politically speaking, right . Dont hes the silent killer. Hes the kind of guy joking about donald trump and killing osama bin laden. Thats the kind of guy he is. That didnt start there. So obama was a guy i talked to, interacted with, engaged, worked with look, when he was running for the senate, at wbon, i think a womens expo, and i was the black radio, am station in chicago. Thats right. Critic, scholar of history. [laughter] history. Im just saying some stuff, hes breaking it down for you. [laughter] so at the bon, tell you how times were different, i was the headline name, and they wanted obama to share the stage. Can this young man come to your event, and you shout him out, use your [inaudible] to get the people to support him . I said, sure. And, you know, it was about the size of this room, and obama couldnt fill it. I was there, i was the headliner, i said, great. This young man that i want you to consider, right . So he came on and did his thing, and i supported him and, of course, endorsed him, gave him some dough as well. So, you know, that kind of thing. Back and forth. Id see him here and there. Linda johnson rices Birthday Party tell them who linda is daughter of the publisher. Ebony, you know . So id see him at the christmas parties, and wed talk. And i remember once i guess i should say this since its being recorded. I said, hey, man, look, im doing this book on bill cosby, and, you know, id like for you to blurb the book. And this is what he said. He said, he says, well, you know, michael, he says im sure its brilliant. Typically, you know . [laughter] finish he says the problem is that what you say in your book, people will automatically say im saying. Its not that i disagree, because i havent read your book and i dont know what youre going to say. Ive told all my friends that im going to have to start blushing. Ill certainly blurbing. Ill certainly be supportive. This dude was trying to be president already. As a newlyminted senator, i knew and i respected that i knew what he was about. I knew what his trajectory was. So i had that interaction with him, talked to him, engaged him, friendly with him. We werent th