Witnesses. Just because my own story touches on everything these three write about, i recommend all the books. Theyre wonderful. I and ellie native, which is something that does not surprise people as much as it used to, but my family came from the louisiana, from new orleans. My father came in 1942 during the war, and this kind of to margarets book. My family did not talk a whole lot about what happened in the south. You just did not hear a lot. I put it together over the course of my life, really. As an essayist, i always tried to sort of dove right i dont know write about the history of black folk and about my own individual life, which is very hard to do. I think im still trying to put those pieces together, so all these books speak to that effort, i think, by black people to continue to do that. We are in the era of black lives matter, which is the same campaign we have been running for a very long time. I think of dr. King in 1968. His last campaign for the sanitation workers in memphis. There are pictures of protesting , picketing, trying to unionize, and their slogan was i am a man. Our current iteration of that is black lives matter, and we have been making the same argument for a long, long time. What is interesting now is just how black people are doing it, how we meet this moment with lessons of the past, which dont ever feel like lessons of the past. Because we keep failing to learn them. Im going to kind of let you guys introduce yourselves if you can, and also just to say briefly i know this is really tough to do, but briefly in terms of civil rights and the black Power Movement, i think they have always been they are connected, of course, but if you could just Say Something about where you think that is at in 2023. We will start with daniel black. Good afternoon, everyone. I am daniel black. I am professor of africanamerican studies at a grand, marvelous place called clark atlantic university. Im very happy to be here. I sat down and i saw liquid death, and i said, oh, god, you know, here we go again, right . [laughter] but im happy to be here. This is my 30th year on faculty at hbcu. I wrote this book black on black for really one reason, and that was to really help or maybe two reasons, to help young people today understand the cost of black life, like, how expensive black life has been in this country. Every generation, black life gets more and more and more expensive. I want to believe that young people just do not know the price that somebody paid for their flesh. Thats the first thing. The second thing i wrote this is i believe that those of the black Power Movement now in hindsight would make different decisions than they made, one of those being integration. I think most elders now if they could do it again, they would not vote for integration. Mm. I think mark might have something to say about that, too. Do you want to introduce yourself and give your thoughts . Im mark whitaker. Im a veteran journalist. I worked for a long time at newsweek magazine. I was an editor there for almost a decade. I was in tv news at nbc and cnn. I still do some on your reporting for cbs sunday morning, but im also for the last decade or so, ive been riding books, and writing books, and my last book was about the legacy of the black community in pittsburgh in the middle of the 20th century, and it made me realize in writing that book that as a writer and author now trying to be sort of working on history, that there are stories of black history that have been told by black writers and white writers, usually the stories that have been told also by white writers have a white element, a white savior element for white oppressor element for interest to write to white readers. Other elements either have not been told or if they have been, they have been told mostly by black writers and black historians, often because they really just focus on kind of things that were happening within the black community and not necessarily sort of, as they say these days, centering, sort of, you know, white protagonists. Not that im not interested in those stories, but i thought the area where i could sort of contribute is by writing about those stories. After that last pittsburgh story, i started thinking about the black Power Movement, which is you know, had this profound effect, changed the civilrights movement, but the number of books that have been written about the black Power Movement compared with the Civil Rights Movement of dr. King, you know, is still tiny. So i set out with that idea that i was going to write about the black Power Movement, and i spent an entire year reporting and writing. I knew that the slogan black power had become popular stokely carmichael, it was not really his slogan, but he made it popular in 1966, so i started there, and a year later, i was still in 1966 because so much happened in that one year. Thats how i ended up deciding to write a book about the birth of black power focused on that one year. Ok, great. Margaret . She won a prize in journalism and black history last night. [applause] thanks so much. It is a great joy to be here with mark and daniel and with all of you. I know it is late in the day, and folks have heard a lot of talk and participated in a lot of discussions, but we will try to make this as lively and informative as we can. My book, im thrilled to say, was recognized last night. Never too late. Never too late. Those of you who are still writing, it is never too late. [applause] never too late to write a book and never too late to be a winner, ok . [applause] my book focuses on the jim crow era. The book is called by hands now known jim crows legal executioners. The book title comes from an expression used by coroners and others during the jim crow period when they were describing lynchings and other executions of africanamericans. There would have been hundreds of witnesses to these events, and yet, the reports, death certificates, and otherwise often would carry the words by hands not known. The premise of the book is we now know a lot more than we did about what transpired, who was involved, and perhaps most important, what his legacy is for us today. This book really addresses the jim crow era, jim crow era violence and resistance and law, looking at violence and resistance through the lens of law, looking at an era of our country, really the Confederate States of the south which were in effect lawless. I described these as an authoritarian regime with a purportedly within a purportedly democratic state. It looks at these three things and unearths new stories, new information to paint a picture not just of what lives look like then, so it is history for its own sake. History that helps us understand what it meant to be alive in that moment. Obviously as well, it is also history that informs us about the moment that we live in today, so that is the gist of the work. Let me just say one other thing. The book really began as i began to meet families who had experienced these events and who were carrying these stories as their own personal history, their own Family History. We traveled across the country to meet with folks who experienced these horrific atrocities, and our effort was to provide to them the material that the government had produced in these cases and to partner with the families to create a fuller, broader, deeper, and more meaningful picture of these events. What has been occurring to me the last several years are actually maybe last decade, that those folks who lived deep in the jim crow era, that generation, is leaving us. My father lived half his life in that era and then pack out, and he lived in los angeles. It did not have official jim crow but by custom had segregation. I was born in the early 1960s. We are losing firsthand accounts of that. I dont know, it is something so i was so glad to read your book. Lets talk first about theres Something Else i have been thinking about a long time. Integration, which is something we dont define that well. In reading daniels book and certainly reading marcs book, i thought i knew what it was. Theres always this tension around the idea that integration was sort of strategically the only thing we could do because separate and unequal was separate and unequal, right . The fight seemed to be for integration into White Society, but that was not really it, was it . There was always reticence about that, and many black folk were actually not in favor of brown versus board of ed, not that they thought that black people were unequal, but they could see where that was going to go nowhere. Or that was not going to turn out well. Mark, maybe you could talk about the year 1966, when i was four years old. Both at the time and now, even in some of the reviews of my book, people have said, why were people calling for black power . At a time when things were getting better, right . A lot of white folks out in 1966, you had the 1964 civil rights act, you had this Voting Rights act. It had been a decade since brown versus board of education, so from the kind of white liberal perspective, things seemed to be getting better, so why were blacks unhappy . Why were they talking about black power . Why were they unsatisfied . The fact is from the black perspective, you had a couple of things. You mention your family coming from the south to the north to the great migration through the great migration. Arent had played out in the south, but meanwhile, and for decades, there had been these families that had uprooted themselves, moved to the north, and found out that things were not that much better in the north than they were in the south, and as far as integration goes, in 1966, you have stokely carmichael, who takes over as the student nonviolent coordinating committee, ousting john lewis the great, you know, ally dr. King and civil rights icon. You had the formation of the black panthers in oakland. You had dr. King trying to take the movement from the south to chicago with pretty disastrous, violent results. And you had a young generation that was behind all of this, and they were saying a number of things. They were talking about black pride and lack consciousness, afros, keyes, all of that afros, all of that. When dr. King talked about a society where his children could live, that by a large was a project that had been advocated for five well educated, middleclass blacks by well educated, middleclass blacks directed by small segment of the situation which we would now call progressive, welleducated, middleclass whites, but most whites had no interest in living sidebyside or integrated with the sharecroppers organizers were working with in the deep south over the descendants of the migrants who lived in innercity oakland defendants of the migrants who live in innercity oakland or who lived in america by the 1960s, and they were right. They are still right, you know . One of the things black power stands for is politically and culturally, how do black folks continue to have a place in American Society as citizens, as voters, and in the workplace, but still living a life where fundamentally they are going to have to rely on themselves as a community and were not and probably never will fully be integrated with White Society . I think that is a very live issue today. The truth is for me and i think you are very kind [laughter] because i dont its that whites were not interested in living next to black people. I think most whites were absolutely opposed to it, and i think there is a difference, right . I really think that integration never happened. No. See, you cant force you cant force one people you cannot bus one set of kids to somebody elses School Without busing those kids to the school. Right . If you are going to call it integration. White kids would never bust black schools. So what in the hell integration are we talking about here . That did not happen. What we really mean is trying to change the focal reference of black people to believe the closer you become like white men, the more excellent you are. That is really what integration was ultimately seeking to do, and it did it in so many ways, but what black people really discovered, quite frankly, is that black children did not do better in white schools. Black children actually did better in dilapidated black schools because a teacher who loves you is worth more than a shiny building. [applause] and black people discovered that, but the problem has been that part of our liberation or too much of our liberation as black people, we keep using white models of institutions, right . Trying to get the black equivalent of that, as if that then will be black liberation. So that we try to find a black harvard, right . When there were schools far more excellent than harvard already. Thats how you get a boy who goes to harvard and gets a phd. People think its because he went to harvard, but its because he went to fisk, right . We have to know and understand this because if not, we will keep using the language folks have been talking about the notion of privilege, and ive been thinking about this. It is not a privilege to be overly it is not a privilege to have access. Excess. Whats a premise he is not a privilege. That is not something someone should aspire to White Supremacy is not a privilege. Its like people saying they are straight. What the hell does that mean . Straight just suggest that Everything Else is crooked. We have to revolutionize the way we understand these things, and black people have to be bold enough to say liberation cannot simply be the measure of what you have gifted blacks. Well said. [applause] i think thats very true, and i have to insert a little story. When i was younger, i was a kid, 1972, i was bus to a mainly white school. We were gifted black childrento. One of my good friends, who happened to be a white kid who sat next to me, she overheard her parents talk about what was going on in school, and were saying, those black kids are going to degrade us. My friend, he was nine, had to Say Something. He said, erin is the smartest kid in the school. This discussion of integration, we always talk about blacks breaking the ceiling, being the first in the setting, the first to do this, the first to do that, as if just appeared and we were not the first. We were the first they saw. The first they saw, right. I have a couple things to say here. [laughter] first of all first of all, in 1935, a lawyer named Charles Hamilton houston travel all across South Carolina and North Carolina, taking an old camera with him, and he took video not video, film of the schools in South Carolina and North Carolina to see what the Educational Opportunities were for africanamericans living in those states. Both films are still available, and i urge everyone who thinks that it is ok to go to a allblack school you are going half the time, getting second handbooks. You are not getting any microscopes. None of that is happening, and you are all in one room. I urge everyone to take a look at those films. Now, history is not linear. It is not linear, and its not dichotomous. It is not this or that, and it is not one line. It is a complicated thing, and you can only live in the moment that you are living in. After Charles Hamilton houston and the naacp and Thurgood Marshall took a look at the failure, the intentional failure to deprive africanamericans of education, they decided something needed to be done about that. We can sit here today in 2022 and say they put all their eggs in one basket and that was the wrong basket. They should have put them in a different basket. You can only live in the moment youre living in. You can only make decisions for the moment you are in and at that time in that place, they thought the only way to get the opportunities that africanamericans needed to live full lives full, flourishing lives, to get the Jobs Available to everyone else living under this flag, that the only way to prep them to do that was to press for integration. We can see we can say to them today that it was wrong. Derek bell, a famous legal scholar, wrote an article some time ago called serving two masters, and serving two masters, and in that article, he presented a theory about the engine which the engine of progress for black folk. He called that the interest convergence theory and dereks view, a professor bells view was that the only way africanamericans can progress is when what they identify as being in their interest is also in the interest of white people. He used that to talk about the difficult, challenging and perhaps in hindsight, limited and perhaps incorrect decision made by the leaders of the movement to integrate schools first. When we talk about integration, black folk and white folk, perhaps not in pittsburgh and not in detroit and not new york, all over the south, black folk and white folk live neighbor to neighbor across history. We are talking about where the doors were closed, the doors to the court were closed, the doors to the schools were closed sunday was the most sacred gated day the week. Lets talk about exactly what we mean when we talk about integration and the reason why those who are in a position to make decisions about how to advance black interests made the decisions that they do. Also i am thinking malcolm x. Malcolm x knew the fallacy of integration. That is what resonated, even back in the early 60s. Even civil rights advocates said its not one thing or this thing or that but everyone understood what he meant when, one of the things he said in his speech he said you can go out and integrate, you can go to those neighborhoods and integrate but pretty soon they are going to leave and take all the stuff and you will be all by yourself. And people would laugh but he was making a point, he sought is a waste of time. Everybody black knew what he meant. For that he was called militant and he was called antiwhatever. Antiamerican which i find really ironic. Can you speak to 66, i read this with great interest this was a turning point. Malcolm x talked about how this had to be a Freedom Movement not just civil rights it was bigger than that. Other younger people understood this was about human rights. Personhood. It was not just about the right to vote etc. Really black power to me means black empow