An honor and pleasure to have you here for us to begin a series of conversations that we hope will be a blessing to many. For thisthi evening is to create a cap conversation about the lee jackson windows and the larger issues of race and the legacy of slavery and our nation. Know the recent history of events regarding these windows, i invite you to read about that history in the information we provided for you within your program on tonights conversation. This is the first in an ongoing series of conversations over the next two years intended to foster conversation and a deeper understanding. While the leadership of the cathedral made the decision to remove the confederate battle flags from these windows, the larger question of whether the windows should stay in the sanctuary or be moved to a different location was intentionally left open for a period of two years so we might engage in conversation and education around the difficult issues of race and our history and our present life together. As i said in my letter that is part of your program, these windows are about history but they are also about our future. How will we move Forward Together . How will we learn from one another . Oow can we use the windows tw right new narrative of our history together. The conversation we are having tonight and the ones who will have over the next are part of a much larger conversation taking place nationally. An important conversation around race and the legacy of slavery. As the Cathedral Community we are hoping to create a place within this sacred space where learn from onend another with open hearts and minds. That seeksmodel always to reconcile all that is broken and ourselves, and our community, and in our culture. Bese conversations may well uncomfortable at times. They involve difficult subjects. But they are important conversations and it is important that our hope over the next several years with gods help we can create something that is positive and uplifting for us all. We are so grateful for your presence and we invite your participation not on in this program but in future conversations. If you would like to share your ideas about the nature of some of the future conversations and you would like to share with us in this journey, i would invite you to look in the back page of your program where there is a link where you can go and sign on to be part of this journey together. So welcome, we are glad you are here. If you will permit me, i would like to start with a prayer. The lord be with you. The lord be with you. Let us pray. God that your holy and lifegiving spirit may so move every human heart that the barriers stomatitis may crumble that divide us may crumble, suspicions disappear and hatreds cease. That our divisions being healed we may live in justice and peace through jesus christ our lord. Men. I will not repeat the bios but it is my great pleasure to welcome our participants, dr. John koski, dr. Kelly brown douglas, dr. Rexx harris, and our moderator ray suarez. Please join me in welcoming them. [applause] welcome tond monuments speak. Thanks to the panel. And thanks for being willing both audience and panel to wrestle with some of the questions that arise in a people, and people, when they have to face their own past and what the past tells them today. We are here this evening because symbols speak. We are surrounded by them. Red and green traffic lights, elephants and donkeys, gothic towers, the cross, the lamb. Saints are all around this building. They stand mutely and mostly unlabeled and statuary, paint or stain glass. They identify themselves through language understood by the artist and by the viewer. Saint philip with an arm full of stones, st. Peter with his keys, sebastian shot with arrows. Twoa with a platter and eyeballs. They work as a language in part because of widely shared understanding, a consensus about what they mean. The red hexagon of the stop sign does not have parties chiming in to register their objections or insist it doesnt mean stop at all, but in fact it means speed up. Symbols have meaning. Symbols speak. They derive their power from common understanding, except when they dont. Can they change over time . Can they be repurposed over time . Can they have layers of meaning that come from context . Who displays them . Who witnesses they display . And can common understandings render some symbols hard to use . Can the passage of time at meetings that leave us very clear on the fact that symbols speak while some of us wish they would just shut up . Today we come together in this church to discuss the display of windows dedicated while this church was still under construction to memorialize generals robert e. Lee and thomas jackson. As we are gathered here, not in front of the memorials which are over there by president wilson, let me tell you what lees inscription says. To the glory of god, all right just and merciful, and undying tribute to the life and witness of Robert Edward lee, servant of god, general in chief of the armies of the Confederate States whose compelling sense of duty, serene faith and unfailing Courtesy Mark camper all ages as a christian soldier without fear and without reproach. The windows show the general as a soldier, educator and engineer. Stonewall jackson is shown ineling prayer fully cantwell of bugler plays any reads the bible. He is shown in an adjacent ,indow as an armored crusader arms uplifted while heavenly trumpets play. Like arial reads, stone wall at his steadfastness, swift as lightning, mighty in battle, he walked humbly before his creator whose word was his guide. This day is erected by the united daughters of the confederacy and his admirers from south and north. For the moment the confederate battle flag sedin removed from the windows and replaced with rectangular pieces of colored glass. The days, the windows, they were made. Can their meanings change over time . Can what is appropriate or acceptable change over time . How has time shaped americans understanding of the civil war and the reallife flesh and blood men, the actual robert e. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Do they belong in a church . In the windows throughout this building you will find prophets, apostles, martyrs, saints ancient and modern. Yes, and you will find political leaders. Two of the right by the front door. Abraham lincoln and george washington. What does it mean for them to be affected in a house of prayer for all people . And what the designer of the city called the great church for National Purposes. Joining me in this conversation from left to right is dr. John koski, historian at the American Civil War museum and author of the confederate battle flag americas most embattled emblem. Sitting next to him is the reverend dr. Kelly brown douglas, theologian here at Washington National cathedral. And sitting here directly next to me is dr. Rexx alice, associate director of Curatorial Affairs at the National Museum of African American history and culture recently opened here in washington. Dr. Koski, i want you to take us back to the period when these windows were being imagined, designed, and installed. It was a time when americans were preparing to look back at the centennial of the civil war approached. The were experiencing dixiecrat candidacy of Strom Thurmond for president in 1948. The departure of the final and oldest confederate veterans. There were actually know firsthand witnesses to the war. They were leaving the stage. It was sort of a secondary memory passed down to people rather than experience spoken of firsthand. Where were we at as a country, and in our commemoration of the when wer in that period got to the early 1950s when they were being contemplated . Dr. Koski i will stand. Can everyone hear me . He has not asked me to digest my entire 300 page book so i will not try. A little bit of background before the 1950s. He mentioned the dixiecrats in 1948, a very important year in the history of the Confederate Flag in particular. Let me start with the immediate aftermath of the civil war. There is the old adage that the winners write history. Most of you know in the American Civil War, the real exception to the rule. Maybe unique in modern history. The losers in the American Civil War and quite the role in shaping our understanding of the history. Where itrief period was clearly not a good idea to go trotting out the symbol of the confederacy during reconstruction, after that period the white south was more or less allowed by the federal statues toto erect their dad first in cemeteries, monuments to their dead, to their soldiers, their heroes in funeral spaces and later public spaces. History ofd teach the confederacy and of the war from the southern perspective. A type of history that became influential nationwide with gone with the wind and birth of a nation. It influenced the shaping of the American Civil War. From the 1880s, beyond world war i they Confederate Monument in Arlington Cemetery was erected in 1914. The last monument on monument avenue in 1929. This extended well into the 20th century, the last major confederate reunion in 1932. The last veteran actually died in 1949. Perioe while in that long the confederate battle flag was part of the ritual of white southern lifed. In the loyal they ceremony, the rituals of the confederate memorial organizations, these dedications of monuments, it was a familiar part of the ritual of white southern life. It was restricted very much to those kinds of rituals. That kinds of things many of us grew up with since 1950. The world in which every pixie business had dixie in his name had a Confederate Flag as part of his logo. That was foreign before world war ii. It changed in the perio just befored world war ii as the flag took on a meeting for the south meaning for the south, specifically the white south. Admit that it meant not just the army, but the white south. American serviceman from the south fighting overseas, american southern boys and their football teams when they were going to fight the northern football teams adopted the flag as their symbol. Ofotal if you will totem what it means to be a southerner. Roughly 1948 and just before, the flag started to have a more prominent currency on the southern landscape. A lot more people are using it. A lot of people noticed and were against it, including the united daughters of the confederacy that believed it was not good for that flag to be used outside of mr. Quickly a strict lee memorial context. The dixiecrat themselves the not adopt the symbol, but most of the young supporters accustomed to using the flags in a casual way associated the flag with the dixiecrat movement, which of course began to protest the embrace ofpartys stronger civil rights platform. It took on a meeting of protest against the civil rights movement. As well as continuing to be these other things. In the aftermath, what the headline writers dubbed the flag became popular in the north. People were asking why. Was this somehow part of the dixiecrat movement against truman, or the coonskin cap in the hula hoops and other youth fads of the 1950s . The press concluded the latter. It is just a fad. The African American press was warning against the flag is a symbol of racism but this union in the context of the cold war. We needed to present a united front in this flag suggested disunity in the nation. That was the context of the early 1950s. This interesting period in which the flag went from a restrictive symbol revered by its owners, heritage groups essentially owned it, symbolically and otherwise. It was essentially pandoras box opened. For those of us that grew up in the 60s, 70s and 80s, the culture we knew began in the late 1940s and early 1950s with the flag fad. United daughters fought very much against this. They persuaded many state legislatures to pass laws that punished the very things that many of us knew growing up. Beach towels with Confederate Flags on them were punished by law as desecration of a sacred symbol, a misuse of the battle flag. It was not the africanamerican press, but the protectors of the confederate flame initially reacting against it to make sure it was used only in the revered memorial symbol and not the way it became by the time of the civil war centennial. That is the context of the early 1950s for the use of the flag. Dr. Brown douglas, would we install a set of windows like that today if today . If we did, how would it be different . What an easy question. [laughter] as i contemplate that question i ask a prior question. And that is what we have even installed those windows in 1954 or beyond. Because they were installed in 1953. 1954, in response to the brown versus board of education decision, confederate symbols began to gather new meaning or different meanings as even dr. Koski points out in his book. Those meetings began to become clear that the symbols were symbols of white supremacy, or at least segregationists symbols and symbols that stood against the decision of brown versus the board of education and against integration. Myself, thek to cathedral that installing those windows in 1953 because the culture certainly changed in 1954. Today i think that perhaps a series of questions would have to be asked that maybe were not asked in 1953 when those windows were installed. The overall question is this. What does it mean to be the National Cathedral . We would have to ask the question who are we . By themore driven nations civil religion and its sense of itself . Or are we more compelled by who we are as a church and the theology of a church whose god liberated the slaves from egyptian bondage, and whose god we claim is most manifest in jesus who said i have come to set the captives free . I think we would find ourselves today having to ask the question of what does it mean for us to be in Washington National cathedral . Does this mean we happen to be we are a social institution that happens to be religious so we service the civil religion of the nation . Or are we indeed a church, which is called to show for the glimpse of god in the world and perhaps these questions were not asked. I dont know. Thoughure it seems as the lisa jackson window forces us to call leejackson windows force us to call the wisdom they represent. Even the daughters of the confederacy spoke of this civil respectsthat in many sanctified the confederacy and raises lee and jackson is not simply heroes of the confederate war, but they are also saints. We would have to ask those questions which would cause us to really contemplate and ask of what ituestion means for us to be a National Cathedral. Dr. Koski was careful to point out when he talks of the south and of the logo for the south east speaking particularly of the white south. In his book eight knowledge is time and again that black americans simply were not asked. They had no voice in that conversation as we came up with consensus symbols. Yet black americans were speaking. Not being heard is different from not having anything to say. Lets talk about those years. From the mid1940s to the mid1950s. What was going on in black america and was there a very conscious sense that this alternative narrative of the past was gaining legitimacy and gaining force and heartening hardening in the public consensus without a lack american counter narrative being given enough space . Back to world war i and the experience of black soldiers when they fought in commands andfrench you look at the experience of most of them being one where they ate in the same restaurants as the french, they rode on the same buses, the same transportation, they fought in the same units, they trained in the same units, they were treated differently than they remember and the america of that time. They fought in the war, and then they returned home with this new expectationis new that if this happened in france and if i was allowed to feel differently and to feel more like a man, to feel more empowered, to feel like i was then this white man, is something that is possible in america. America and back to it was the summer of 1919. They call it the red summer of 1919 because of the number of riots that took place during that period. They come back to a continuing environment of lynching that started in the 1890s but was still going on. They come back to a reminder that the quality they felt and they experienced in france, they would have to leave in france or they would have to fight even harder for that environment to exist in america. Adam Clayton Howell and others coined the phrase the new negro. Createw negro began to all kinds of agencies and all kinds of organizations that in some way supported this idea of the quality within the community. But even as the naacp and the urban lake and the National Council urban league and national couil of women began to exist, there also was the barnett inf ida memphis and trying to in some way speak out about injustices going on in tennessee. She had to leave because they burned down her house. She had to leave and go to the north. Somewhere around 6 million africanamericans left the south and headed to the north, to the urban cities of the north using the chicago and robert abbotts paper to give them information about where they might settle in philadelphia. Where they might settle in new york. Where they might settle in boston. They left the south because for them this confederacy we are discussing and talk about, this confederacy was not for them a cultural icon that was popular. It equaled lynching. I am trying my best to be objective about what we are discussing and talking about. Paint remember all this when you talk about pride. I remember all this violence when you talk about liberty and justice. I just remember all of these. Boy. A young white i live in williamsburg, virginia. Illiamsburg was called the restoration at that point everyone came to williamsburg to see the town that rockefeller built. I lived there. We lived on the east side of the town. Right across the road from me was a White Community. We did not have to have a wall of. We knew we stayed on one side and the White Community stayed on the other side. Riding day, one day i am my bi