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experiences of blacks, germans, done the third reich, and without fur the adieu, give you our moderator, tina campt. >> thank you. [applause] >> good afternoon, everyone. it is my pleasure to welcome you to our third panel of the day. the title is "50 years later." the panel is framed around what kind of progress blacks have made since the civil rights movement and the challenges that face african-americans in the 21st century. the organizers formulated two major questions for us to talk about. the first is, what historical and contemporary factors continue to make racial equality a contested and elusive concept in the 21st century? and second, what kinds of knowledge can we mobilize to face the specific challenges of racial inequity in our

contemporary moment. i'm thrilled to be in conversation with two and possibly three speakers, dynamic speakers and thinkersed today, and i'd like to introduce you to them before opening our conversation. joining us is farah griffin, the william b. rands professor of english comparative literature and african-american studies at columbia, and she has also served as the director of then constitute for research in african-american studies. her most recent book is forthcoming in september: harlem knock turn: women artists and progressive politics during world war ii. our second panelist is peniel joseph, who is founding director for the center for the study of race ask democracy, and the author of the award-winning, wait until the midnight hour, and dark days, bright nights,

from black power to barack obama. our third scheduled speaker is kendall thomas who is traveling from brazil and unfortunately has not yet arrived. we're hoping he will take the stage as soon as he does come. i'm going to introduce him in his absence right now. kendall is professor of law and cofounder and director of the center for the study of law and culture at columbia university, and professor thomas is one of thed did temperatures of the-editors of a key writing for the movement. so we have powerful and visionary speakers. [applause] >> hooray. welcome, kendall. get settled. make yourself comfortable. we are so glad you made it. i was saying to peniel and farah before we came on that in so many ways, president obama had

set up our conversation about blacks in the 21st century through his comments yesterday. but i want to put that into a larger context, because we're talking -- we're trying to take a backward and forward look on this national our conversation. the backward look is about, where have we come to, since in the 50 years since the march on washington. right? at the same time, this particular moment is framed by three undeniable events. the first is that in the last -- in the three and a half weeks ago, actually, the supreme court overturned the domestic marriage act, and struck down the voting rights act. at the same time seven days ago, george zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of trayvon martin. right? and yesterday, the first african-american president in the united states, barack obama, made his second public statement on the state of race religiouses

-- relations in the united states. so this is a key moment to reflect on 50 years later and what kind of progress have we made in black america? so, to start out with, i'm going to ask you each to comment on what you see as the impact of these three events on black political culture what they say about what kind of progress is or is not being made in the 21st century. >> thank you, tina. thank you all for being here. that's a very provocative question. it's difficult to come up with quick answers in the heat of this particular moment, but i'll try to address it. i think those three -- they're all three legal interventions, so to speak, at this moment. tell us the importance of understanding what racial progress has meant historically,

progress that -- the historical nature of what we call progress in the area of race, equality, is always characterized by movement forward and retrenchment. so, that there's never any straight sense of progress. we can look and say that we certainly have made great strides since then 1963 march on washington, and one of the key things we accomplished following that march was the voting rights act two years later, and yet here 50 years later he have a retrenchment on that key piece of legislation. 50 years later we have something that many of us know to be an act of racial violence where the person has been found not guilty. and yet i think the difference is, 50 years ago, we might not have been attacked for calling it an act of racial violence. right? and that shows you the way the

kind of retrenchment works. that the -- it becomes a more sophies tick kateed, makes it more difficult for us to name things that we know have to do with race, and those of us who call it an act of racial violence are then accused of being divisive. i don't think that would have been the case 50 years ago. so there's progress but always retrenchment, backlash, one step forward and maybe two or three or four steps backward, and we have to be aware of that. and i think these acts show us that. doma is a step forward, the striking down of the race -- the voting rights act is certainly a establish backward, and trayvon martin, i think, is both, because it's a step backward but the mobilization -- i'm so heartened by the mobilization around and it the refusal to give into the dominant narrative that was spun as a result of it. so progress and retrenchment.

[applause] >> thank you, tina, and thank you, max, for organizing this panel. i think we owe max a big round of applause nor 15th 15th anniversary of the harlem book fair. this book fair is part of a national conversation about race and democracy that we should be having in our communities everywhere around the country. that should be multicultural. multi racial, and multi generational, and we have been having these conversations in our communities historically throughout but we need to haven't the conversations among white papers and latinos and gays and lesbian young people, and it should be a national priority. first of all i'd like to throw out a provocation. i'd like to throw out a provocation that the difference between 1963 and 2013 is that in

1963, black people knew they were being opressed in 1963, they knew that they were being politically, socially, economically sub -- subjugated. and i'd like to throw out between 19 a 54 and 1965, what black people did then is transform fundamentally american democracy and did that with latino and white allies but did so with bloodshed. trayvon martin had ante seat departments in the 14-year-old black boy who was assays it inned in mississippi in 1955 for allegedly violating racial etiquette and speaking to a white woman. his body was placed in the tall hatch which i river with a belt tied around his neck. it was shown in jet magazine, and that spurred the nation to look at the price of white

supremacy on our democracy. we think about 1963, 1963 is the year of birmingham and the year that dr. king rights the famous letter from the birmingham jail, and in that letter dr. king says the activism going on in birmingham and the young women and men who are being arrested, sometimes as young as eight, nine, ten years old, are taking the nation back to the great worded of democracy by the founding fathers. king was being too kind because this country is founded on racial slavery. a conversation we still have not had. but 50 years ago with the march on washington provided was a litmus test for american democracy. when king speaks at the march on washington in 1963, he says americans of all colors and races have to struggle together, have to go to jail together, to try to fundamentally transform american democracy.

50 years later, and especially in the aftermath of barack obama's 2008 election we have celebrated an unearned victory, celebrated an unearned victory and talked about post racial america. celebrating the mythology of the end of racism and that's why people were surprised about trayvon martin. i'm heart 'ed the president spoke out yesterday, but he spoke and it and started to speak truth to power only because of the grassroots activism that forced him and compelled to speak. barack obama is not martin luther king, jr. or frederick douglass. barack obama is lyndon baines johnson and john kennedy north frederick douglass, he's abraham lincoln, and as soon as the black community has enough maturity to understand that they can level a respectful critique to the president of the united

states for not discussing black post. he says he is not president of black american. say fine but black americans are american citizens no matter what anybody says. we're american citizens and we should be advocating for an end of poverty, the end of racial in inininequality and the end of mass incarceration, so when we think about president barack obama we need to go back to what dr. king said in his last speech. the greatness of america lies in the right to protest for right. whoever is in the white house should be someone who is talking about an agenda that affects african-americans, even if that person happens to be the first black president of the united states. [applause] >> good afternoon, it's great to be here, and i, too want to join in the congratulations of the

harlem book fair for organizing this event, and allowing us an opportunity to talk about contemporary state of black politics. tina, you offered three imagesment one was of the u.s. supreme court's decision in the shelby county case, the voting rights case. we ought not to forget the court this past term also decided an affirmative action case, the fisher case, from the university of texas, in which affirmative action survived by a hair, and i'm persuaded that in that decision the supreme court is setting up the law to strike down racial diversity as a compelling justification for race conscious affirmative action programs, but taken together, think we can say three things about each of those is --

each of which offers us a perch on to the state of black politics in the united states today. about that supreme court decision in his opinion, for the court, the chief justice, justice roberts, said something that i do not think could have been said 50 years ago. would not have been said 50 years ago by a member of the u.s. supreme court. there's a moment in the opinion in which he frankly admits that racial discrimination in american life, particularly here in voting, exists. and goes on to say no one denies that. right? and yet by the end of the opinion, what he has given us is a legal judgment, a reading of the constitution, which effectively says, racial discrimination exists, no one

denies it, and we don't care. right? so, we're living in a peculiar moment in which, at one in the same time, we can admit the existence of racial discrimination, indeed of racial strat fix indication and subordination, on the other declare without skipping a beat thatthat is something about which we are justified as a nation. so there's a political culture of indifference to questions of racial inequality, which i think distinguishes our moment from 1963. and after the speech by obama, i may be getting into some hot water here because i read the speech quickly, and i read some of the press coverage, and what

strikes me about the press coverage is the extent to which the speech has been universally lauded for its sensitive and probing and profound insight into the nature of race and racism in the united states today. don't get me wrong. i'm very glad that the president chose, albeit a week of the event, chose to address the verdict in the zimmerman case, and that he acknowledged the real and widespread pain that african-americans and all americans who are friends of racial equality, who are committed to an antiracist politics, felt in the wake of the verdict. but as in so many of his other pronouncements about race, the president's remarks pretty much remain within the framework of what i called in my own work,

racial moralism. right? the telling as the late philosopher richard roarty once put it, a sad and sentimental story. this could be your daughter. if i had a son, trayvon martin could have been my son. if it were 35 years ago, i could have been trayvon martin. and the speech only gestured through the use of the word, context, which, depending on how you use it, can mean everything and nothing. right? to the structural forces that have produced a trayvon martin, and to the meaning of racism in the age of neoliberalism and that brings us to the moment of the zimmerman verdict itself, in which a judge instructed a jury, which reached a verdict, which

effectively held -- and this is another provocation -- that when it comes to circumstances like this, at least, a black man has no rights which a white man is bound to respect. i'm paraphrasing. [applause] >> i'm paraphrasing the decision of the supreme court in the dred scott case, the notorious case from the 19th century which predated the civil war. and for all our celebration about the sea change that we have seen in this country in many ways around questions of race and racial equality, since the early '6s. i think it's important for us, as we think about moving forward, not to lose sight of

continuity. am i saying there's no difference between racism in 1963 and racism as we know i today? no. i'm not claiming that. what i think i can say is that we live now as we lived 50 years ago, in a moment of racial contradiction. and we need to wrestle with the realities of those contradictions instead of wishing them away. it's that simple for me. [applause] >> i think everyone will agree those were very, very provactive statements, and i want to follow up on a few of them. i would love to hear you talk more about the contradictions each one of you is pointing out. the contradictions that you were mentioning between a historical moment during which there was a recognition of oppression, and

the contemporary moment that kendall was describing of indifference, and i think that relates directly to the cycle you were talking about, far remarks of progress and retrenchment, progress and retrenchment. to me it seems like one of the things you're putting on the table is how in this contemporary moment is race being erased in a way that takes away the possibility for action, legal action. protest is being put back on the table at a grassroots level. but i'm wondering if each one of you would like to comment more on the implicit criticism you're making to the way in which, for example, barack obama is asking us to participate in a national conversation on race, but at the same time saying that he cannot lead that conversation. saying that government is not necessarily the most effective place to have that conversation. but it should be had. so, i would love for you to tease out more of the

contradictions that all of you are speaking to in terms of what is race in the contemporary moment and how can be mobilize against it in a different way than we mobilized against jim crow, for example, 15 years ago. >> i think we must recognize and acknowledge the contradiction. and there seemed to be two kinds 60 response to the zimmerman verdict. people who say, i wasn't surprised. i didn't expect anything different. the system wasn't made to treat us fairly. and other people who were stunned that in this day and time that was the verdict we could get. and i think therein is the contradiction and the middle ground we need to discuss that we're in a moment where our country made tremendous strides and it elected an african-american person, president, as kind of an

exceptional african-american person president, the civil rights movement was quite successful in that it did knock down certain barriers. the games a few of us accessed. a few exceptional individual accessed, and yet there's so many black people who still suffer from all kinds of inequality. that was not addressed significantly enough, that therein lies those contradictions. so i think one of the thinks we have to do is acknowledge their existence, see how the absurdity in them. the absurdity in the judges' instructions to the prosecution they could say profiling but cooperate say racial profiling. so, there's a way that the case -- what are the possibilitieses when we can't even call racial profiling racial profiling, but when the prosecution can use race all the time and show woman who is

afraid of young african-american men because one robbed her house. can have pictures that evoke these racial narratives that will strike at the heart of the jury, and yet we can't say in the sense of trayvon, he was racially profiled. and the final thing i'll say, i think, with president obama's speech, it's the problem i have with personal anecdotes. we all have personal anecdotes. and i guess it's supposed to strike a kind of empathy in the hearts of the listener. i like obama. i think -- thought he was like me. i voted for him and yet he can't gate cab in manhattan, and that becomes a certain drama to the personal anecdote, a drama to the? and that becomes the end-all and be-all of the story, so when that gets lost when people are doing post speech discussion he said, trayvon could have been me 35 years ago. what gets lost is exactly what

he says when he say, but i can't do anything about it as profit the united states. the united states government -- i want to acknowledge your pain, black america, i understand it, but as president, and as a brother, i've experienced it, but as president i can't do anything about it. and i watched and i looked at twitter and facebook and everyone quoted that trayvon could have been me 35 years ago. but very little people paid attention to that part that said it's not the place of government. politics can't start the question, the conversation when the conversation needs to be had. personal anecdotes is good but it's really not in our service when it overshadows and trumps the work that really needs to be done. [applause] >> i'd like to build on what farah is saying here. i think that one thing we have to do, even for the audience ex-is talk bat definition of racism. when you think about racism,

racism is not about personal prejudice. it's about institutional, institutional subjugation and oppression. so the new racism is not about white and colored sign. it's about outcome, racial disparity, who is in jail and why? who has no healthcare? who is unemployed? who is racially profiled and who is stigmatized. so it's about outcome. who goes to predominantly segregated public schools nationally and why? who is poor and living below the poverty line and why? african-americans, 43 million in the united states, only 1.6% make over 200,000 a year or more. 28% live below the federallally mandated poverty line. another 27% make under 35,000 a year. so, for that group of people, things haven't gotten better in the last 50 years, and when you think about president obama, i think president obama -- we all have to question this. is the euphoria and the cultural

transformation of having a black president beautiful first lady and the first kids, enough if that black president cannot provide substantive public policy transformation that impacts the african-american communities and go beyond even the affordable healthcare act, which i believe is substantive. that go beyond the stimulus package, which i believe is substantive. but there is no urban agenda that this president has. there's no confronting what michelle alexander called the new jim crow, a mass incarceration. there's no confronting the condemnation of blackness and how that is connected to why black people are treated and dehumanized in the criminal justice system. the reason trayvon martin goes from victim to criminal is because of a cultural racism that infects the united states. i'll say that the contradictions we're talking about up here are not contradictions. they're part and parcel of race

and democracy in america. what dr. king and malcolm x and -- 49 years ago, fanny lou hamer said is this america before the credentials committee at the convention. 44 years old from louisville, mississippi, being beaten for voting rights. the said, is this america? lyndon johnson organized the press conference to take her off of national television because he said, who is that exposing the lack of democracy in the united states? so the contradictions that we're saying that you can have a black president of the united states, and you can have 841,000 black males in jail, that's not a contradiction. that's part and parcel how american democracy has worked. what the civil rights movement did, the black power movement did, what multicultural progressives tried to do is transform democracy and say there's a david way for democracy to work.

it doesn't have to work by condemning black people. by denying racism. the further we deny racial discrimination in this country and institutional racism and slavery, it grows like a cancer and tumor on our body politic. the further we refuse to confront racial discrimination and institutional racism, the more we just -- we're left confused about the outcome. how can there's so many poor black people, mommy? maybe they don't like to work. maybe it's not about the deindustrialization, it's not about institutionalized discrimination and not about harlem and brooklyn getting general the identified -- gentrified, and black people are left out. and certainly president obama is not confronting it, but we need to confront and it force president obama's hand. the reason he discussed trayvon martin is because of the grassroots insurgency from activists in this room and all around the country who demand

that the commander-in-chief speak out. john kennedy, june 11, 1963, talked about racism as a moral crisis that was infecting and distorting our democracy. that kennedy, and kennedy did that because of mlk, because of grassroots insurgency that forced the president reside hand. but the team medgar ever s dies, kennedy says civil rights is everything and it still is everything right now until we solve the problem of racial ion equality in the united states, this democracy does not have a progressive future. applause. >> so, what is the nature of this application i will simply join with what my co-panelist said and read to you a few lines from a letter written in march

of 1913. exactly 100 years ago. it's called, an open letter to woodrow wilson. and its author is w.e.b. due boys. you face no insolvable probable dem -- talk about the negro 0 problem. the only time it is insoluble is when insist on settling it wrong by asking contradictory thing. you cannot make ten million people century vial and dignified. docile and self-reliant, servants and independent leaders, segregated and yet part of the industrial organism, disfranchised and citizens of a democracy, ignorant and intelligent. this is impossible. he writes. and the impossibility is notle factitious. it is in the very nature of things. so, the possibility and the impossibility of a black politics are what we might call

the age of obama, is the contradiction of race and racism. is that contradiction, again, of a president who can engage in a certain kind of identity politics, identify with and as trayvon martin, on the one hand, and yet is willing to allow the complete and effective privatization of any conversation about this public issue that he has just publicly identified as an issue that ought to concern all americans. that privatization of race, i think, is the nub of the problem. this notion that race is something that affects our public lives but which, at its root, apart from racism narrowly

defined as knowing, purposeful, intentional discrimination by the government, right? apart from that very narrow situation, which we know doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of racism today, the rest of it is all a matter for private resolution. now, i think that a good part of the power of that vision, of what racism is and how it should be addressed, has to do with the extent to which our economy and our politics is governed by a world view that the -- called neoliberalism. neoliberalism as an economic program, and as a public philosophy holds that everybody and everything is grist for the

market. right? and that the imperative of the capitalist market and of the economic elites who steer that market, ought to determine public policy. we live in a situation in which the heart, as i see it, of racism against black people and other peoples of color in this country, is economic injustice, and yet under neoliberal order, this question of economic injustice is simply not on the agenda of public policy. we can nibble around the edges to be sure in talking about raising the minimum wage, right? in setting up healthcare collectives no single payer. but the fundamental transformation of the economy in

a way that would subject decisions about the distribution of shared public resource to democratic decisionmaking. that idea is weaker in our poverty than it has been almost at any time since the creation of the republic, and president obama, who represents that -- a valuable brand, is himself a commodity in the market place that we call politics. in an age of citizens united, when politicians can effectively be bought and sold to the highest bidder, one of the deepest challenges, i think, facing us, not just as people of color who are americans, buts a american citizens generally, is

the absolute and utter bankruptcy of a political system that claims to be democratic which in fact is controlled and run by corporate financial elite. and unless and until we are willing to acknowledge the eagerness with which a president who embraced ronald reagan, the architect of neoliberalism, as one authorize greatest presidents in the history of the country, as a tool of neoliberalism, we're not going to get anywhere. i believe that president obama and the interests he represents rely on our acquiescence in the name of a very narrow and

ultimately disempowering understanding of identity politics. identity is being mobilized in fact to disable, disempower, and defeat any claims to justice. on the part of the collective, us, who embrace that identity. so, that's the contradiction. the removal as the question of the democratic decisionmaking and the large questions of economic justice and racial justice. [applause] >> i want to follow through on many of the statements you've made, which is on the one hand a critique of leadership in its present form, and at the same time to ask us to consider the power of grassroots insurgency.

i think that's a contradiction -- not a contradiction -- i think that is a twin concept that are being created in the 21st century, and so i would love to hear you talk a little bit more about about-given the provocation that president barack obama has given us about the need for a conversation on race, and at the same time the creation, the offloading of that conversation into a private sphere, as you're pointing out. what would leadership look like? would it need to look like in order to connect to grassroots mobilization that barack obama is responding to. so i'm asking you to think the critique towards another moment. so what would it mean to actually be able to bring together effective leadership, what would that entail. how would the government be

involved? how would it domestic the -- how would it connect to the force at that time are actually soliciting a response, albeit a -- negative one. >> i think one of the interesting and most powerful things -- i think that's a great question -- that's happening already. we've got everything from color changes online to different grassroots, ai -- activists for the violence, the antipoverty. the incarceration, the book the new jim crow has been used all over the world, and mass incarceration is now on the agenda of the naacp. i think one of the things that mainstream black leadership has done in the age of obama, which i would add is now the age of trayvon martin as well. is they an ticket indicated their roles-- -- an ticket

indicated their roles as protesters and an abdicated their role as leadership, the different branches of government and the access means you get photo 0 ops with the president. he might woman to your conventions or organization's dinners but when it comes to tangible public policy initiatives, zero. you're not getting anything and what the black houston has allowed obama to do -- and i'm speak hearing of some can who has been critically supportive of obama. so i am not just attacking the president of the united states, and understand his plight as a black men, understand the right wing assaults and attacks on him. but we are citizens of this republic and you canner in abdicate your role as a citizen and let the president of the united states gate free pass because that brother has so much problems he doesn't have to care about the poverty rates in the

black community, or care about mass incarceration and what the clinton crime bill continues to do to the black community. he doesn't have to care about the difference between crack cocaine and powder cocaine and at the several level it's still 18 to one help doesn't have to care about racial profiling and he even wants ray kelly, the biggest racial profiler to he head of homeland security. we have to say, respectfully, brother no, you can't do that. even if you are the first black president of the united states. dr. king traded access to lyndon johnson's white house for the moral clarity there needed to be antipoverty and job legislation in the united states. dr. king died abdicating for 1,000 black men who are sanitation workers in tennessee marx memphis, and the reason he is assassinated abuse dr. king is bringing together whites,

blacks, latinos, to come -- native americans to come to washington where the poor people's camp is for the entire summer and is trying to bend the nation's will into effective legislation for poor people. so peek talk about dr. king as a nonviolent activist, and he was, but dr. king is a revolutionary. he is a 20th century american revolutionary, and he is using nonviolence as a tactic to bend the nation's will and to save what he calls the soul of america. so we can't have a black president that, because he is black we are unwilling to say, look, this is the black agenda we need. these one, two, three things, and that you have to push for this, both rhetorically and publicly policy-wise, and this brother gave a great speech yesterday but then he told us that him, as profit the united states, not just an activist, he can't do nothing about it. ler and we're supposed to say,

that's good? that makes no sense. that makes absolute -- he can't sign an executive order, can't make a speech about racial profiling. can't say we have to bring blacks and whites and latinos and asias and all these people in the united states, which is about to become a majority, minority country, we have to bring them all together to have an up to date conversation about what is racial integration mean, what does racial justice mean in the 21st century, and the fact that outcomes are about a part of our democracy. we can't do the color blind racism game and the color blind -- ian lopez coined the term and saying equality is a fact when we know racial outcomes show us inequality and discrimination in america. [applause] >> i'll go next. how can you follow that act? some of you in the audience may

be familiar with the very powerful say published in 1964, i think, by the man who organized the 1963 march on washington, the great black gay activist, byron ruston. he wrote an article called, from protest to politics. and in that article he contended that the time had come for black people to move their political activities from the streets, to the halls of legislature to the court and the executive branches there was something powerful about that call, and in the context in which ruston made it, it made some sense. we had the 1964 civil rights act, and we were soon to have the 1965 voting rights act.

so the legal architecture had been put in place to make that shift from a protest-based politics to an electoral institutional government organized politics, in which we thought to gain office to get on the school board, the city council, to be in mayor's offices to become governors, and, yes, even president. i think, however, that what the current moment ought to be telling us is that those of us who understand that the black freedom movement was a freedom movement, and not just a movement for civil rights, can no longer rely exclusively on the strategy of electoral government politics. we can't do it. we simply cannot continue to do

it. and we certainly can't continue to do it when the people we've elected are committed to a vision of leadership that involves, how did he put it, leading from behind? that vision of leadership around questions of racial equality, and the elimination of racial injustice as a pervasive feature of our common life, is simply not going to work. so, then, for me, the question becomes, what forms of leadership do we need and where ought that leadership come from? well, am persuaded that the leadership is almost certainly not going to come from the mainstream of the democratic

party. and there's no hope in hell that it's going to come from the republican party. right? so, i think we need to look, my brothers and sisters, my friends, my fellow citizens, to the left. and to our left, which understands the fundamental and intransgent resistance of a liberal democratic understanding of racism and racial justice. in pursuing that project, project of black freedom, in which black folk, brown folk, asian folk, native americans and

others, would be able, as king put it in 1963, to live out the full meaning of the american creed. to have full equal and substantive citizenship. that's where this question of outcomes really matter. that's when you have full equal and substantive citizenship. so my suggestion is that we need to combine in a way i think is actually beginning to happen, protest politics and electoral politics. because i see no other way out of the contradiction which, on the one hand, gave us two election cycles in the 2012 and 2008 elections in which black people were the democrats that voted in -- at the highest percentage. and on the other hand has given us an unemployment rate, 13%, which is higher than the black

unemployment rate was in 1963. those questions of social and economic justice are questions that for me demand, and can only be confronted, through a double strategy of protests and politics, which is informed by a less vision of social democracy or, if you will, of democratic socialism. [applause] >> i agree with everything that's been said and i would add one thing. over the past 50 years, a lot of the work that's been done, and maybe its just hasn't gotten popularized -- has been work that has challenged to us think differently about leadership, and i know that work has been done. i've read it, seep it, taught it, and i think we have very coned of old-fashioned notions of what leadership looks like.

it's still charismatic, and we people working making posters sitting barack obama between malcolm x and martin luther king, and we cringed because president obama was running for president of the united states and was running to be leader of the united states, and for some people that also meant his interests were protecting these kind of corporate elite interests that are often against the interests of poor people, regardless of color, and the questions of economic justice were never on the table. right? ever. so that work in the past -- i don't even say 30 years -- 20 years that taught to us look differently at what leadership looks like. it seeps into our analysis every once in a. why it seeps in when we mention the name of ella baker or sammy

lou hammer, but i think we have to go deeper. not only were they women, but what did they stand for? what did ella baker and ida mae wells -- they were involved in the protest end and i think that freedom struggle that kendall and peniel talk about, it was not the way to the promised land. we seem to have given that up when we put everything behind all of our wishes in the basket that would elect president obama, but they were leaders, grassroots leaders who understood that their positions were only as significant as they were capable of representing the interests of the people who put them there ella baker said strong people don't need strong leaders. i think we look to communities and groups of people who are organizing in their own interests, who puteconomic justs

incarceration and all of these domestic violence, all the things that assault our community, front and center, that should be one litmus test, so the things that assault our community on the daily basis is front and center on the agenda that so-called leaders presenting to us, i don't think we think it's only people who we elect and we don't think that black leaders or leaders of the communities are the people who have access to the media. the media doesn't make our leaders. and i'll leave you with the most recent vision of leadership that could be a model for us and it's not leadership of an individual. it was an article in the times, yesterday or earlier this week, about an organization of people, some of them former gang members themselves, who have organized to address violence, black on black violence in i think east new york and there has not been a murder for 353 days because of the work these people have done. right? [applause]

>> and it's work that goes on every single day, every minute of the day. work that goes on in the schools, work that goes on in the prisons. work that goes on at every level. there's a beautiful image in that story of young brother on a bicycle who sees one of these organizers and says, hotep when he sees him because he has hit him in school and nose this person. there are those models of leadership we ought to be looking to when we think about what does leadership in the 21st century look like? and they're out there. i know there's out there. they're don't get on msnb where hc all the -- on msnbc all the time but they're out there. >> i'm very aware that i want to leave 15 minutes for a conversation with the audience. but i want to end by putting one more thought out there, and it goes back again to barack obama's speech, and the way in

which he really did address this penal. at the end of the speech he said, i -- he wanted to leave us with a sense of hope, and he wanted to talk about the extent to which he does think we are making progress, and that things are changing and that he described looking to his daughters and the way in which his daughters encounter race, and saying that they are different than what he experienced. now, that was one of those moments when i thought about not necessarily the privatization of the question of race and dealing with it, but institutions. churches. education. the media. and since all of us are involved, deeply involved in each of those institutions, i want to end with a question of, what is the role of the law, of the academy, of the media, of social movement, of churches, in

intervening in this conversation . >> there's no single role to be played by any of those institutions, speaking of someone who professionally is part of the legal community, i want to be real clear that one thing i would not urge is an expectation that they law can do this work. if there's anything i have learned in the 60 years i have been thinking and working on questions of law, it is that the law's limits are sometimes greater than what it can accomplish as a political tool. but i want to go back to this question of the image that the president offered...

powerful and insofar as it holds out the hope for a transformation and change, in the hearts and minds of people and the way they think about what it means to have a race or two experience race in community

with, in common with and in concert with people who belong or profess or identify across the color line. at the same time however, as i am willing to concede as feminism i think has taught us that the personal is the political. the possibility of those encounters of the president's daughters and of the sons and daughters of those who belong to economic class from which the president president and mrs. obama calm, that is the expanse of a very narrow sub community, right? and of african-americans. so for me the question would be how do we go about building a

racial public and bi-racial public's eye in maine communities of people that include but are not restricted to people of color, committed to an antiracist agenda under conditions in which and schools, in the workplace, in our neighborhoods we are in many instances as segregated as we were 50 years ago. i do think that the media has a role to play in that and i think the institutions, they actually existing institutions and our communities can do a lot of work that they have not yet taken up. i am not a person -- but i believe institutions of faith and communities of faith have been doing extraordinary

work on these issues of racial justice across denominations. i think there is a role for the emerging secular black public to play as well, that this work cannot be done by anyone in our community and it cannot be done in any one way. thank you. [applause] >> very quickly we are doing this already at tufts university. we have a center for the study of race and democracy and we are a research center that is connecting race with democracy to public policy. we are working with ngos and working with scholars and activists. the latest chester hine said that fighters fight and writers write and we are supposed to do whatever we can wherever we can so i think we have extraordinary activist and scholars in this room. education is a big part of what we are trying to do but we are

trying -- though we are launching a national dialogue on race september 12 at the csr d. at tufts center for the study of race and democracy and we are doing that to connect not only trayvon martin that mass incarceration, violence against black women, poverty, to a genuine public policy debate. i have been in the aftermath of trayvon talking about a national conversation on race and democracy because too often this issue of race and racism and black people are made to fit outside of democracy in this country. we are made to feel as where the other, as we are marginal human beings even though black people are the people who have led to the longest to have the right to vote for the shortest amount of time but who fought in every single war this country has ever had. but people have thought died struggled and bled for democracy including the black women that pharaoh was talking about as well.

we can be part of this dialogue as leaders so i'm not talking about advocating our own leadership role and for those of us who were in the academy in ebony and ivory towers we have to connect the access we have two places like schomberg communities in oakland boston where i live right now and if we do that and we connect on social media and i invite people to join this conversation we will have enough leverage where mainstream communities trying to talk to barack obama he understands their other voices who are substantive to have power who are telling him something else and that is what we need to do. we need to be the voice that same look we want substantive public wolesi and we are not just going to settle for the cultural release and cathartic release of barack and michelle michelle obamaand such and malia. we love them