Its the true crime account of the fbi highway serial killings initiative. Check it out. Anywhere you buy books. All right. As begin, please silence your phones. Joining us today for the panel and the legacy of racism, antonia hylton, Edwin Raymond and jonathan haidt, the three rights. All right. So i want to start just by introducing myself. Samuel brown. Im the chief civil of the pima county attorneys office. Im also the board president of the dunbar pavilion. And im going to take 10 seconds to plug the dunbar. If youve never there. Its a former segregated school in tucson off of main in oracle. If you got a chance, come check us out. Its its the hub of african the africanamerican here in tucson. And wed love to see you come by the dunbar at some point. I want to start. Thank you. Thank you. I want to start with antonia. Her book, madness, race and insanity and a jim crow asylum. Antonia, if you can just in a minute or less, please summarize the title for the room. Oh boy. Yes. In one minute. Madness tells the story of a 93 year Old Institute of an asylum that was founded in 1911. In the heart of the woods in maryland and. It was originally called marylands hospital for the insane, a name that i think you a lot about what this institutions was and and what it did to and in the Community Around that it served there this was the only hospital in the state of maryland that for decades was willing to treat black people who were suffering with Mental Illness or accused of having some some kind of diagnosis and tell the about century long of this institution really a window into the american psyche as a way to explore the legacy of race and Mental Health. And to look at this industry, this field that today feels so broken to americans of every background and to situate black in the black community and and what happened to them in this space. And so the hospital really becomes microcosm and in the book i tell you about this institution through the eyes, through the experiences and the stories of the real patients and employees who lived and worked there. But really, its a greater story about our countrys fights over integration, freedom and how we were going to live up to our promises is all through the eyes of Mental Health and people and communities efforts to strive for safety and and peace in this country. And, you know, its really such an honor to be here on this panel with all of you, because i think that our work overlaps and thank sam. Its excited to be here with you. Thank you. All right. Next, we have Jonathan King life. Its called king. And its about king. But really, you know, the of this book was to create a more intimate portrait of king a more nuanced portrait. I say in the book that in hallow king, we followed him in creating a National Holiday and a monument and a thousands and a hundred public schools. Weve turned him into this icon and forgotten he was human. Forgotten how radical he was. Weve forgotten that the i have a dream speech had a first half that talked Police Brutality and reparations and fact that america had made a promise that it had come back with insufficient funds on that check and i wanted to write a book that reminded us that king was someone who failed, who had flaws, who had frustrations, who was deemed unpopular. He was two thirds of all americans. In 1966. So they disapproved of martin king, not that they disapproved of his stance, the vietnam war. They disapproved of him, period and in large part, as were going to talk about later. That was that was due to the fact that the fbi was surveilling him and spreading rumors about his personal life . So i wanted to write a book that showed he carried on despite it all of that, despite the fact that the nation on him, then his own government turned on him, he not only continued his fight for justice, but he doubled down on his beliefs in god and in our country that we could be better. And thats what i set out to do. So sweet. Thank you, jonathan. Thank you. And edwin traveling all the way from york. An inconvenient cop. My fight to change policing in america. So, first of all, thank you all for being here. As many other panels. So were glad that youre with us. In my teenage years, rather than allow negative with police to deter me from the Police Department it actually inspired me. And after eight years, i became a whistleblower. And my life changed forever. Front cover. New york times magazine. And you know, everyone reached out all the cops that needed support people that stopped believing in the system, people who are very cynical that say, you know what, if if there could be more cops, you maybe theres some hope. Our reporters reached out and i decided to write this memoir as central repository for all the information that ive gathered in 15 years with the nypd. But this is not just about nypd. Its about policing in america as whole. Thank you. I want to start. Antonio and jonathan, with you. You both did extensive interviews and work the writing. I want you to talk about that process, how it informed the but also how it impacted you personally. When we start at the heart of madness is an oral history and that was deeply important to me because one of the things i found very quickly as a researcher who was digging into archives to try to reconstruct the story of this institution was that most of the records, a vast majority of the records that survived about brownsville were written by and from the perspective of the people who decided to construct it who were leading this institution, who for decades were all white who in many cases had openly, very bigoted views of the community that they were supposed be serving. Many of them were prominent segregationists who were involved in passing things like the first apartheid ordinance in baltimore in 1910, which inspired much of the south to then set up similar jim crow laws all over the place. And these are the folks who had their names on roads on in this institution. And so if i took their word for what the institute was, how it was operating, what its purpose was, i wasnt actually going to be telling you the truth. And so i needed to build really deep relationships. This community in maryland, really in the area. And so ive spent the last ten years. I started this work as just a 19 year old in college calling people up, introducing myself to them, telling them that i was really about this place and about telling the story about us and our communitys place in Mental Health. Because so often were excluded. And how can i put your voices front center . And so every person that i met, every new family that i connected with, they started to open doors for me. But it was really slow, painstaking work because. For so long, black people have been mistreated by these systems and told that their voice didnt matter. And so at first, when i called them. They werent always excited to welcome me into their home and to talk to me or to revisit challenging memories as i can, as you can. Many people whove worked in asylums, places like this, that lee carey until the very end. And so ive spent last ten years really deeply embedding folks and and interviews and their voices as really compliment dont with what i found in the record and ill give you an example of of what i mean that. If you look in the early decade brownsville history what you find that often the people who ran the place were really interested in how much money the patients who were living there could make for them. They were putting patients to slavery sort of style working abuse. They were running a massive for them. They were constantly pushed to offset the costs of their own care. And so when you look at monthly reports about how the patients are doing, their health is conceptualized, it is talked about as capacity to labor to provide something to bring money into the state that how they viewed black patients. But when you talk to actual patients survivors families, former employees, especially a generation of Health Care Workers who then came in to integrate the place, they have a much more complex story. They can tell you the true sites sounds and smells of what it was like to live on these wards and to be a person in this place. And they do a great job of of bringing you through the ways in which those early years in the 1900s and the beliefs that we had about black people and patients at that time informed every era that came after that. So you see the connections through their voices between what was happening in 1910 and what we see in our Mental Health care system to this day. Something that, of course, affects people of color disproportionately, but actually implicated in affects all of us. And so the short answer to your question is that interviews are the soul of this book and the story of institutions like crowns will cannot be told. If you build a relationship with the community first. Thank you. And it reading the book that you really put there into into into crowns both really cool and i learned something very cool that dr. King chewed on his nails which is something did as a child. And its something that i think you only learn by speaking to people who knew . Him. Yes. And antonia has we beat she spent ten years on her book. I spent six on mine, often get topped in that category. Yes. You have to interview people to find out if it is nails, you know, Ralph Abernathys children who hung out at the king home all the time told me that dr. King used to shout the tv screen when he watched game shows and that he would hide his cigarets from the kids because they would sneak them and throw them away and flush them down the toilet. These are the humanizing details that that i wanted and thats why i interviewed 200 people for this book, including you know, kings neighbors from childhood who remembered like what they would have for snacks when they came home from school. His favorite was white bread with and sugar sprinkled on top. So those are the details that, you know, bring a man to life. And i want to connect with something. Antonio said too is that often the white media is telling us the and we need to get beyond that. And one way that i got beyond that in this book, i found how you might ask what is their new to say, dr. King . Well, dr. King had a private personal archivist whose papers were at the schomburg in harlem, and the boxes had never been opened until i requested them. Coretta scott king recorded made tapes when she went to work on her memoir. And those were never heard until except by her ghostwriter until i requested them from the library. And even more importantly, to get to your point about how you know much of this history is being told about people of color by white people. The montgomery bus boycott, i discovered, was documented by sociologists black sociologists at Fisk University, and they went down there with notebooks, interviewed everybody as it was happening. They conducted an interview with rosa parks before the news media even knew who she was. They interviewed those. The regular folks who were walking to work every day. Instead riding the busses. They even interviewed klan members and they would write down conversations. They overheard heard in the community. Its this gold mine of material. And ill just tell you one story from those and i want to take too much time. But what you really see happening when you listen to these voices is that the fear is disappearing and king and the Civil Rights Movement and the montgomery boycott is helping them overcome the fear that has been used to keep the community in check for so long. And they did this interview with a named dele cooksey, who was a housekeeper working for decades with the same white family, and the housekeeper her was in was at the house where she was working. And the woman said, you know, i would be happy to pick you up and take you to work daily. And, you know, dr. King is just giving you guys, all these crazy ideas and. You know, you dont need to get so upset. I you well, dont i . And dele cooksey said she she told her boss, dont you dare talk about dr. King that way. This is a man sent by god and weve been rabbits too long. And we aint in that rabbits no more. And you see, you know, thats the kind of interview you were never to get anywhere else, only because Fisk University sent people down there and to write about what was happening in real time. And thats the kind of research that sounds like we both really got a lot from in our processes. John king, thank you, edwin. Yours is more of a current account. Youre a reporter about whats going now and your experience. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah. So lets take it back to 20, 20. Right. Another new virus. You know, every few years we hear about these viruses in other parts of the world. But this one was different. Right think the first the first famous person, i think it was tom hanks. I was watching it like tom hanks has been tested positive for covid 19. And then Society Comes to a stop right . All the distractions are suppressed. And at this time are at 7 p. M. In new york, everyone outside. And theyre, you know, the sirens are going off banging pots thinking the First Responders and the essential workers and george floyd happens. It was a 180. We went from thinking cops, thinking First Responders to protest and think about it. Distractions are suppressed. Its not the pandemic. Its not climate change. Right. These global issues, the thing that gets everyone outside, all around the world is the policing black bodies in america. The george floyd video went viral and everyone started protesting. All right. As at the time i retired from the Police Department as a lieutenant at time, i was working 19 hours a day at protest. But journalists from japan, italy, you name it, france, journalists from all over the world were coming to interview me and others about whats going on. So i especially in an election general election year, there are many subjects are polarizing, but none so much like that issue of policing. Right. Right now there its either cops can do no wrong or abolish the police. And what my book offers what this memoir offers is more of a middle approach. Right. I highlight the voice, not mine, but the voice of what i call the justice minded people in, Law Enforcement, who can see it for what it. Right. They also run towards the gunfire. They do the job. They know the difficulties of the job. But at the same time, they are not blinded the brotherhood. They can what the detriments are and they are ready to move the needle in the right direction. So what im hoping comes from this, as people learn not just my they realize, you know what, maybe there is some hope. Ill tell you. Last summer early in the summer i sent a copy to a very conservative white friend of mine whos also in the nypd. And also sent it to another friend whos whos an abolitionist. She literally said, im the only police also shell ever speak to right. And when they were both done, the the conservatives. You know what, ed . Maybe there is room for improvement. You know, maybe maybe cops, maybe we dont have it. All right. And the abolitionist said, ill deny this if you ever it, but i cant say who she is. She said she said, maybe we dont need to abolish. Maybe there is another. So thats what im hoping that this book delivers, powerful stuff, man. And. I want to i want to quote for the question from madness the Civil Rights Movement made criminality a disproportion fortunately prevalent in racialized the issue setting in motion a of events that stretched the definition of criminal behavior and strengthened every part of the carceral apparatus. Some white leaders and doctors willingly or unwilling witting or unwittingly misread anger as Mental Illness and use tools of psychiatry to punish, not to heal communities they were meant to serve. A backlash occurred during and after the Civil Rights Movement. Institutions designed to heal like asylums. Institutions designed to protect americans like the fbi were turned against black communities. Jonathan and edwin, your books touch directly on the interaction specifically between black men and Law Enforcement, starting with. And edwin, id like to get your reaction and in antonio. How does the fbi treatment of Martin Luther king para what we see in modern policing. Wow. Well you know most of kings career was in conflict with Law Enforcement. Going to jail was part of his strategy. And, of course, now that sounds like just another sit in. But it was not just another sit in because going to jail had peril. And every black person in america knew that going jail could sometimes be something you dont come out of. And king went to jail 29 times in his career. And he was petrified every time. Thats why Ralph Abernathy went with him. So often because he knew that king had a hard time emotionally psycho, logically dealing with being there. And its part of kings courage that he made that a part of his strategy. He knew that the world paid more attention when he was in jail. He knew the world paid more attention when bull connors dogs were attacking peaceful protesters. He knew the world paid more attention. When, you know, small black bodies were being hurled walls by Water Cannons and that was the price they were willing pay to prove that they believed in democracy. And as far as backlash, ill just say one more thing. August 28th, 1963, king gives the most famous speech of his life, the famous speech that we all know that we teach, our kindergarten children. I have a dream and it really does seem like a moment of incredible hope for this country. The newspapers, even the white saying this might be a crossroads. We might really be at a turning for this country. We might be to start dealing with the the sin of slavery and the systemic racism. And we might able to be a better place. And the next day, the fbi assistant, william sullivan, writes a memo for his boss j. Edgar hoover that says, given kings oratory, given his power to unite the masses we must now consider him the most dangerous man in america when it comes to race. That is the backlash. And theres more backlash because weeks later, the 16th