north and groundwork's about the civil rights movement. dr. weathered. see thank you. [applause] it's good to have everybody out this afternoon. we have got a distinguished conversation here with my professor mary berry at the university of pennsylvania. [applause] barbara ransby is the author of a tiger free of ella baker of eslanda robeson and jeanne theoharis the author of the new biography on rosa parks. [applause] we want to start the conversation by talking about rosa parks.

what do we know about rosa parks, jane? >> i wanted to start today with an evening meeting. that evening is november 27, 1955. on that november 27 rosa parks came to a meeting at dexter avenue baptist church to hear tm howard, dr. tm howard talked about the recent acquittal of the two killers of emmett till. dr. king introduce fascinating and howard was there to spread the word. howard had been one of the key organizers in trying to get even a trial of those two men and after those men he had been acquitted was on a tour through the country to spread the word and to continue the organizing after that travesty had happened as the two men who had lynched

emmett till have been found not guilty. so this is november 27, 1955. rosa parks sits there and she is talking about the lynching of emmett till and he is talking about the deaths of two other organizers in mississippi who would try to register to vote and have been killed and she is angry and she is sad and she is despairing because she came to that night having spent more than a decade organizing around cases like this and what was particularly sort of exciting about this case was there have been enough organizing and enough awareness that there had been a trial and yet still the two killers go free. and i wanted to start there because i think many people

would have made the comparison between the lynching of emmett till and trayvon martin, but i think we can go deeper in that comparison and to think about that comparison not just as a comparison of sadness and of anger but of what follows. because i know all of you know what's going to happen four days later on december 1, 1955 and that is rosa parks who has spent two decades organizing. she begins her adult political life around around the scottsboro case in spent the past decade turning it into a more activist branch and so she comes to december 1, 1955 with a tremendous amount of organizing experience in a tremendous amount of activism and she comes with that evening fresh in her mind. and so she is going home from

work december 1, 1955 and at the third stop the bus driver realizes that the bus has filled and one white man is left standing and four people are going to have to get up. as she tells it, she thought about her grandfather who is a supporter of marcus garvey. she thought about -- but the bus driver said you all better -- and she thinks to herself this is not making it light on us as a people. she thinks about emmett till and she decides she had been pushed as far as she could be pushed, that to get up would have been consenting and she did not consent. and she said no. and so i guess i wanted us to start there today because i think the comparison and i think it's a very important comparison to be thinking about trayvon

martin and the light of that history but i think that history offers us something very profound and that is also the history of how people are moved to action, because she in that moment of all of the things that many of us are feeling denial, the anger, the sadness, then comes action and hopefully we can talk more about the kind of rest of her political life but i wanted us to start in that moment with her and then in that moment four days later where she makes, where she takes that and she turns it into agency and she turns it into action. thank you. >> now tell me -- thanks jeanne. [applause] i only got a chance to meet rosa parks one time and it was quite an experience but mary did you get a chance to work with rosa parks? >> well, i am sitting here thinking that my rosa parks is

probably different from most peoples. people's. i really like your book because your book tells the public a lot of things about her that most people don't know and they just see her sitting down on the bus. and i was up at the congress on mandela's birthday. my dear sister maxine waters from california organized a great celebration. they even had african dances, beating the drums. you can even see it on c-span. it was terrific. i never heard that much much noise and the laws of congress and speaker banner on the look on his face when he began to speak, he hadn't heard that much either. [laughter] but i was thinking and we all spoke about the movement and so on and brother nelson had a birthday but i was thinking about rosa parks.

knowing i had to come up here because i knew rosa parks. she came to the three south african movement demonstrations that we organize for a couple of years to get sanctions and all of that but i knew her before that. the first time i encountered her in 67 i have been in vietnam as a reporter when the riots happened and i came back right after the riots and there was a people's inquiry set up in detroit and rosa parks was a member of the commission. it was the people's commission. the sit down on the bus woman, she was on this commission and a radical lawyer who we all loved, a young black lawyer who was a radical, was the guy who organized it and after that to me was a parks was not just an icon. she was a person who i saw that

had all kinds of activist things that we were all up to all the time. she was spared and she spoke at the south african movement demo. we told her to speak and she spoke eloquently at that and before that was at the convention where she and i were both and gary when all the civil rights people were denouncing us. the convention and gary, she was there. rosa parks was there when jimmy carter had an anniversary of round and i was speaking because i was running education and i made a freudian slip and said something about the president i didn't mean to say and she just died laughing. and please do all the time, correctly used to say to me the reason why you have to go you have to go all the these things

and you won't get involved is so we can see each other. i was used to seeing her and talking to her all the time but to me she was on joanne littles committee. think about rosa parks in that kind of context. rosa parks believed like malcolm that you should use anything that comes to hand in the circle of freedom. yes. [applause] and so to define her as those meek woman who sat down on the bus and all i want to say about that is being up there and the congress and going through statuary hall where she is now and looking at sojourner and the emancipation hall and so on and i thought to myself, if people knew what we know about rosa parks she wouldn't be in there. if they knew what i am saying about rosa parks, she wouldn't be on this stamp. rosa parks, with these historians have done is what we call a work of recovery,

recovering the real deal about people. what barbara has done, eslanda robeson was overshadowed but her whole life was a wonderful activist and intellectual person they have recovered them like some years ago i recovered to callie house and the reparations juggle. rosa parks was at the first meeting of the revelations. you guys have to know what in culprit is. reparations, you all heard that. so when i think about rosa parks i think of her and those sad conversations and all those places and i think of her as a full-bodied kind of reformer and radical that she really was and how wonderful it is to have her up there sort of like when i

passer at statuary hall i kind of smile and say, if they only knew. [applause] >> speaking of recovery but are recovering in terms of eslanda robeson? >> well you know i think these two women, first of all its great to be on this panel was such fun historians and mary has bought the good fight for a long time with such integrity. but when i think of a comparison between the two on the surface there might not seem to be a lot in common but in some ways that both were the shadows of larger-than-life male political figures. rosa parks in some ways in the shadows of dr. king as far as how a story and has treated her and eslanda robeson because of her husband paul robeson and rosa parks as one dimension away and eslanda robeson almost

invisible. i can't tell you how many people said paul robeson's wife. i knew he had a wife but i didn't know much about her. eslanda robeson indeed was a remarkable person and a biographer's treasure because she had such a rich life and she spent a lot of time documenting that life so that made my job a little bit easier but she began her career as a chemist working at at columbia presbyterian hospital then quickly shifted to serve as the architect of paul's early career. she was his manager, publicist etc. but that's not really her main contribution our accomplishment. i was most drawn to her and interested and excited to do this work because of her largeness of her life and i mean that on a global stage. i think the importance of telling her story in particular and rosa parks is the international significance of their political contributions and eslanda robeson in

particular was an anticolonial activist, a writer and human correspondent, an anthropologist. she was someone who was there the founding of the united nations in 1945. she traveled to the front lines of the spanish civil war in 1938. she traveled to africa in 1936 to sub-saharan africa after a light -- italy occupied ethiopia. she took a ship to south africa and then uganda when the time that it was not only difficult but dangerous for a black woman to be traveling in colonial africa. spent a number of months there and met with someone about that antiapartheid activist oracle conference in the free state in south africa. that began her internationalism, her emergence as a world citizen if you will and it reminds us all i think of a very rich tradition of black

internationalism. the other thing, she also goes to the congo in 1946 after she writes a book and becomes quite a public activist and in congo she is followed by british intelligence. and my five follows her around belgium and the french congo worrying she is going to go into british colonies and write these rather -- and years later they were probably scared that she done at the time -- but to write this chronicle of her travels talking about the incendiary ideas she is promoting like africans being moved by their own kin in the words of one of agents. so she lived a very large life and really forged her own political identity and her identity as a black woman in a global context and in the context of embracing an african struggle and in the context of anticolonial struggle.

she had a class with -- and chinook kwame and coma and a good friend of the first prime minister of india and his sister so there was afro-indian, afro- asian solidarity which was pretty remarkable. in fact it was the sister of nehru the first woman president of the general assembly a good friend of eslanda robeson. their mother was in prison for independence activities in india. their daughter spent time at the robeson home and considered eslanda robeson their second mother so this rug-based third world solidarity that we saw in that period after world war ii, eslanda robeson was in the thick of it writing and speaking and of course this comes at a price. she and paul robeson are persecuted during the mccarthy era.

she is called for joe mccarthy's anti-communist committee and interesting way people thought because of her connection to paul which i think was part of it but joe mccarthy leans over and grills her about her political affiliations and she asks her about her 1945.african journey which was seen as subversive because it was an anticolonial document. the inquisitor, leans over and says are you sure you wrote this book? she was somebody who was not short on attitude so she said do you think i could not read a book like this all by myself? how dare you ask me that question. the other thing she ultimately goes to the committee issue sort of flips the script and she says i don't even recognize these people. this committee has on it southern senators who don't allow black people to vote in

their states. so you know she had that kind of defiance and that kind of toughness about her as she went into sometimes very dangerous political terrain. people have just gone to jail and then exiled and so forth and she was also outspoken on her anticolonial activity. >> i wanted to ask all of you, why is it, how does it come to pass that all of these great women have taken such giant steps and are visible in textbooks when our kids go to school? >> that's a tough one. >> i don't know. i don't think -- rosa parks of course is not invisible. just for sitting down on the bus part is everywhere but all the other stuff i told you because they don't want the children to understand that you know you can make good triumph of evil by doing a whole bunch of different

things and this woman had many dimensions and they don't want them to get ideas in their heads. the other part of it is that when people write books and when they do stuff they keep writing the same thing over and over again. for example when they write about the history of black people in the period after reconstruction up until the 1920s or 30s until the great migration to the north, they write about booker t.. wb and booker t. and then more recently there are people writing about the club women, the color club women bound and social organizations. even after i recovered the reparations that bend and even after i documented that this woman started a movement with 300,000 women asking for reparations in 1890 for all

those legs and she was an ex-slave herself, even after that was documented and everybody gave praise and gave their prizes and all that, when they went about the reconstruction of the great migration they write about w.e.b. and booker t.. and then they migrated to the north. and so it's really hard. part of it is that she was a washerwoman and these ex-slaves were poor people. i think eslanda robeson has a better chance of being included in the narrative then making a full picture of rosa parks. you did a wonderful book, both of you good but since robeson was, you know she was -- rosa parks was a working-class woman, down-home woman. didn't go to college and all that stuff but robeson wrote

things. the other thing is if you write something historians take you more seriously and will put you in books than if you just have records like the records of the people that were in the movement and so one and all the rest of them. so i think that's it. >> unless, unless you write really radical things. i was just thinking, clearly in one of the contradictions and interesting things about eslanda robeson was her class privilege which she ultimately risk and they lost a lot of what they had of course because of the left-wing views but in some ways paul robeson was blacklisted during the mccarthy era and he actually in some ways have been black worsted in history because even though that a certain amount of privilege and were educated at a time when certainly most black people were not, what even known about most of the places that they have traveled to so there was that privilege but when they allied

with a radical movement of the world and embrace socialism over capitalism and all that they become very dangerous and so you will see book after book where eslanda robeson would have been a logical person to include and she is just painfully absent. that is why rosa parks is reduced to one dimensionality and eslanda is kind of kept in the wings. i agree with you, people who don't leave a paper trail which eslanda definitely did that the people who don't leave a paper trail or don't have the skills and the lecture to do that. >> i think part of the other, one of the other issues in one of the other ways i think we see the civil rights movement represented over and over and we are seeing it again as we come to the run-up of the 50th anniversary of the what march on washington is the movement is only southern movement.

we talk about rosa parks full political history. that has to include her political life in the north. in 19578 months after the boycott and she loses her job during the boycott. her husband loses his job during the boycott and they're getting constant death threats. they had to leave montgomery even after the boycott ends because they are still getting death threats. they leave for detroit which is where her brother, her brother sylvestesylveste r. if you see this represented even in schoolbooks, this tends to be a little epilogue like a happy ending. rosa parks goes to the north, the vacation house. [laughter] when the rosa parks parks calls detroit the promised land and she will then spend more than half of her life, more than half of her political life fighting

the jim crow north. and keeping rosa parks in the south like mary and barbara have said the one dimensional picture of the placenta to southern bus. part of what she will do with the second half issue will be talking about transportation in north. she will be talking about housing in the north. she will be talking about police brutality, about criminal justice. these are issues he was working on in montgomery in the 40s and 50's but then she takes those and they don't stop. and as she puts the shoe doesn't find too much difference between what she leaves in montgomery and what she finds in detroit. yet i think our public history is much more comfortable with the civil rights movement in the south because that has a happy ending and it has an ending.

we have the civil rights act and the voting rights act and those are crucially important, but then the struggle continues and the struggle continues not just in montgomery and atlanta but continues in detroit and continues in new york and continues in pittsburgh and so if you look at what rosa parks is doing she is in all those places. and she keeps struggling against the death penalty, against the war in vietnam, against apartheid in south africa. she is working for conyers. she is looking at things like welfare and social services and housing and urban renewal. although the issues that face us today so i think part of why this doesn't get included is as mary said i think it gives us more tools to struggle with, to imagine if we have these histories that are northern, better international, that go into the 70s and 80s and

90s. and i think that is again what this history of recovery or reclamation, i think part of what it does i would argue that helps us see today differently. >> look, people -- those be the other thing is if you think about it no one ever let rosa parks. she would not talk. she would be at all of these things and she would be the symbol. rosa parks sat down on the bus. the only place where she got to make an actual talk about what she felt was when she came for the protest and got arrested that they were having on apartheid and they said you've got to speak. we don't want you just to calm and march. you've got things to say. talk to the people. but nobody was really interested in all those things just like the national council --

i told them one time you go to all these things with this for years. the men don't let you say anything from the beginning and usually people don't want you to say anything in the old days when he first started. they just wanted her to be there. rosa parks, they wanted her to be there so they could say ms. rosa parks stepped out of the bus and no one ever asked her what she thought about whatever it was. that tells you something because some people knew what she was saying. if they didn't, they were taught >> look, a lot of people in response to this horrible verdict are thinking about how do we organize ourselves and it seems to me that part of cutting these stories out of a woman like callie house who organizes the movement before -- organizes his movement or a rosa parks and the washer women and the working people in montgomery who marched and boycotted the

process all those times. although these are stories about how people build a movement and it seems that one way to demobilize us after these certain elections is to take away the tools of how did they get to these triumphs in the first place? you have to be organized and that is why i was so glad you wrote about callie house. it's embarrassing after decades of studying these things to realize you were always kind of a beginner because these very important stories that we need to know about. now one civil rights leader -- i was at the memorial and this was years ago. the young people in the movement came up and said he was illiterate. he was always late to meetings and things like that and on and on. i realize the young people who have come in living on the triumphs of this poor man who

founded one one of these black r organizations didn't understand who he was elated to get up there and it occurred to me that jesus did not write any books. everybody knows he made history. so just like jesus all these people i'm making history, and they rejected my first book. who are these people? they said they are the people who made history. so i think that's part of why i think we get one image and not another because it's demobilize is us. >> use raise the issue of book publishing at a literary event and merry talk a little bit before about why is it that history has been distorted and repetitious in terms of repeating certain myths and not including others which you know reminds me particularly of the way in which eslanda robeson approach to work. she wasn't intellectual but she

resisted a elitism and formality. she was trained as an anthropologist and never got her ph.d.. she was never recognized formally as a scholar even though she was a researcher and so forth and in a way that liberated her to say what she wanted to say outside of a canon or outside of restricted boundaries that academic institutions and sometimes publishers put on people and that is part of the myth making. there are knowledge industries that regulate the distribution of certain narratives and certain information and the center of that. they don't call it censorship. that is not an interesting story or that doesn't speak to me. ..

>> so journalism and the articles and the pamphlets this -- people don't read 500 page book. they read articles. we need to have newspapers and blogs, that's really what makes these movements work. >> i want to go back to the thinking about what they offer us today and then kind of what the myths -- i often talk about them is a fables because i think they're told to us to give us certain messages i would argue are sort of problematic. i think most school children now learn that rosa parks was courageous. right? but that courage is framed

through this image of a tired, accidental act that spontaneously bursts a movement. right? when, if we actually look at her courage, what her courage is about is something far more profound. and first, it's the courage of perseverance. right? she has been active for two decades at that point, politically active for two decades. she had made stand before, people she knows made stands before and they basically have gone nowhere. i think part of the lesson of somebody like rosa park, many of these activists, is how much courage is about perseverance, and that even when she talks about her bus stand, one of my favorite quotes is she talks about her arrest being annoying, and irritating. and i think in that she has

decided this is a line that's too far. but she has no sense this is the beginning of a new chapter. right? and so i think part of what we, i think, learn from these histories is that you have to do things again and again and again, and you don't see the moment that history moves until it's -- we're well into it. and so i think part of what the -- what we might call tissue call it a children's book, sort of story of rosa parks. if we have that story, it's -- you make stand, everybody rises up. except that's really not how it works usually. right? and so i think part of what these histories allow us to see is the actual work of organizing the actual work of having to do it again and again and again, there's not going to be a sign

that this act is going to be the important act. and yet, and still, part of why i wanted to start with that november 27th mass meeting on the acquittal of emmett tills' murderers, is if we imagine rosa parks that night, imagine king that night, right? they have no sense that in a week, history is going to be moving in a very different way. and part of it is that sort of taking what you have and taking the fact you have done things before and not letting that be the stopping place but a starting place. >> the other thing i think is a value of your treatment of rosa parks and your work, and also your life, is the connectivity. there's a way in which figures

get narrowed at times. but there's also a way in which issues get some returning -- shrunk and how we measure success and defeat. rosa parks wasn't just concerned bat seat on a bus. so, similarly, rosen did not confine her notions of black freedom and black politics, which was her starting point but not her end point to the u.s. borders. she was concerned what was happening throughout the african content and what was happening in asia. she traveled and met with the maury people in new zealand. a sense of connectivity of struggles. i wag recently in belfast, northern ireland, and anyone who visited there, there are these amazing murals and a road on which there are solidarity

murals which celebrate the grabbing freedom struggle in ireland, and i think back to when we appreciated a radical radical jim the connections that have to be made between the communities because we'll always get the crumb victories we're see and ones that are not happen? able. so in the larger rosa parks story in the work that mary francis berry has done for so many years, talking about haiti. talking about south africa, et cetera, that big picture, that globe sense of freedom we have to embrace. if the histories are going to be meaningful, and our own present and future, in the light of the zimmerman decision, and in the light of the fact that the world is on fire in many respects, from syria, to cairo, to all over. so, those are struggles we have

to about connected to and they're an extension of the black freedom movement. >> i think what is a takeaway from all this is that we quote a lot, and i do it in speeches all the time, frederick douglass. we all say, can't get freedom without struggle. we all say that all the time. people can recite that. when it comes to struggle, sometimes we act like we don't believe that's what you have to do. that it ought to become easier and easier as time goes by. somebody said to me, you know, i wouldn't have thought that since we got obama, that the supreme court would be deciding things against us and that zimmerman would be free. we got obama and we were all celebrating. well, a year ago, wrote a book with a chapter in it called

"blacks and the politics of redemption." and we say that black people would not learn until we all got the right to vote and could vote freely and elect people and so on. that you can't get everything from voting. voting is important and you have to do it. but that protest is an essential ingredient of politics, and so while we're going around quoting frederick douglass, that's think about miss parks, miss robeson and all these people, and real rise that people tell you, you don't need to have a moment or be protesting. all you need to do is vote. first of all they're trying to suppress the vote in case you hadn't noticed. but the lesson is that you really, really have to be -- you need a movement and you need to be persistent, and you need to not give up, and you need to be strategic, and you need to think about what you're doing.

so that you can make -- and that you can make change by doing that. and you don't have to be violent. you can be totally nonviolent. many ways to make change. so i think these are the lessons i learned. >> i was at the memorial for vicki garvin in died in '95, i believe. they did a video, and she was in a nursing home. and she said, i'm telling all these people out there, you have no excuse for not being active because i'm here in this nursing home rite can letters, trying to educate myself. so it seems to me that many of the women we're talking about were long distance runners. right? i don't think rosa parks ever missed a step. right? >> i think it's really -- one of the amazing things about writing a biography of rosa parks it's literally a biography of struggle in the 20th century and goes right up -- she was northern 1913, her grandfather

is a garveyite, the month comery bus boycott, it's the war on poverty and antivietnam, it's sort of a fair criminal justice system to apartheid so the death penalty, to u.s. policy in central america, to the million man march. >> you said that in the clippings you were reading, she is cut thing newspapers out and reading about the world. >> right. so, part of rosa parks' papers are at wayne state, and part of that are rosa parks' clippings from the 1960s and 1970s. so you get to see the issues she is following. before we had sort of lexus nexus and all this stuff, what you would do if you were committed intellectual political activist, when you read something you would clip it out

so you could show it to your friends. so rosa parks wasn't avid, avid reader. read multiple newspapers a day, black newspapers, black periodicals, and she saved many of them. and they're at wayne and you can see them, and you can see these different issues she sort of clipped and is reading in the '60 asks and 70s. she gives that part of her papers in the late 'sevenness, and it's amazing what she is thinking about. and so the kind of whole very variety of issues from economics to labor to international issues, to criminal justice, and seeing those issues as being connected. but it wasn't just one, but many. and so it's an amazing -- >> jeanne, most people hear that be civil rights movement, you imagine everybody knows who rosa parks is, so if she went into

the employment office right after this victory, she would be the first person to get a job. right? what is the truth on that? >> one of the sort of hardest parts of writing the book on rosa parks is the chapter in the middle which i call the decade of suffering. and that is, i think, part of the kind of accidental sort of bus lady, right? one of my students always talk about the myth of the bus lady. and part of the problem with that myth is that it also misses the amount of sacrifice that these kinds of stands take, and that in rosa parks' -- her specific situation, what a tremendous sacrifice her bus stand was for her family's economic and physical health for a decade at least. so, literally, they cannot -- they never find work again,

steady work again in montgomery, and then they move to detroit in 1957 and they still have trouble finding steady work. i mean in many ways, one of the heroes of my book is john conyer. rosa parks volunteers on john conyer's first campaign in 1964. persuades king to come to detroit on conyers' behave. king comes. conyers actually wins the primary by 40 votes. imagine american history, john conyers hadn't won. so, one of the first things he does,s he hires rosa parks in 1965. this is her first -- chev is working basically in what is a glorified sweat shop at stockton sewing company, doing piecework, and so part of i think -- again, i'm echoing what has been said,

the amount of -- again, we all know the frederick douglass quote but the kind of sacrifice it took. right? and the sacrifice it's not -- that goes on and on and on, and the willingness to keep doing it. she gets red-baited and instead of walking away, some goings to islander folk school and then they get red-baited and some people walk the other direction. and what rosa passion does is -- rosa parks asked her to be a sponsor and she says, i'd like to do something. so she walked into the fire in a certain kind of way. but highlander has been shut down in part because of, again, the red baiting that happened in the early '60s. so grappling with this, they're grappling with the difficulties many activists faced because of

their work. >> do you think about the council member western version of what hero is. that you got to -- not that you're going to make these sacrifices for your people. >> or a motion we have to be cautious of this, the notion of the single solitary person. mary mentioned the idea that barack obama was going to be the saviour. that's consistent with the notion that king or malcolm was a saviour, and maybe ella baker can be the saviour. but that mentality of leadership and politics is centering around individuals as opposed to collectives and communities comd movement buildings and organization, and i'm always struck, when i speak to young audiences, struck by the way cartoons and popular culture for children prepare us for that because there's always a single solitary hero that comes in and saves somebody, usually saving a

womanment so there's that idea of a hero as leader and saviour, and we mature and we still have that very immature view of politics. i wanted to pick up on what you said about the kinds of positions that people take. i actually was born in detroit the year that rosa parks came to detroit, and so my political awakening was in the context of the detroit rebellion in 1967. i new kenny cockerill, and all of the struggles as a teenager that i watched unfold in detroit, and i think we'd be remiss not a to mention the state of detroit today, the announcement of the bankruptcy of the city of detroit, which used to be a placey, particularly black working class people, could look to have a decent job and a decent life, and it was a place of struggle on all kinds of levels. labor struggles, struggles rained racism and police brutality. we had a group called, stress, stop the robberies, enjoy if a

safe streets, decoy unit that would set up young black people and shoot them or throw them in jail when the didn't respond to a ridiculous situation. so the struggle continues but these women remind us of the importance of taking difficult positions. rosa traveled to china two months after mao's revolution, spoke out about the what was happening throughout the -- at a time when that was absolutely seen as incendiary and sub versesive and so forth, and i think today, if these people were here, i hate to say what would they do. we don't have to ask that question. we have to ask, what should we do, and thinking out, not about the obvious issues but speaking out about the come complex issues which also include what is happening in south africa. the difficulties of a post apartheid situation where you

still have shanty towns and still have mass unemployment and so forth, and the situation in haiti or palestine. these are the issues of our time we have to name, embrace in the kind of courage that rosa parks or eslonda had. >> mary, don't want to out you as a long distance runner, but what would you tell young people looking at the verdict and thinking about how to work in a movement? >> if they're trying to learn how to -- i would say to young people -- not just young people but anybody, who is concerned about it, that they really should be organizing and bringing -- the legal system responses -- responds to pressure, and you may think the legal system is some kind of pure thingy judges make fair decisions and so on. i hope you don't think that

because if you do, you're crazy. the legal system responds to pressure, whether or not the justice department is going to find means of prosecuting this guy is going to depend on how much of a movement there is in the country. it's not going to depend on the little things people are reading in their office. if you believe that i have a bridge i want to sell you between brooklyn and manhattan for $40. so it's the movement. you have to keep bringing pressure to bear and organizing some sounding out what you believe and leaning on people, and when people start trying to cool you out, and say, oh, it's not that bad, you know, well, it is that bad. and so just keep on struggling. a couple of board i'm on, the folks on there were trying to -- some of our liberal friends were trying to cool us out because we were upset about trayvon bit

telling us, it's not so bad. we got all these other problems to work on. yes, we do, but we also have this problem. to work on. so, i think just telling people to organize, and to be consistent and to spend some of your time, and you might think that you could spend time doing more things that would be more fun, but i have to tell you that being somebody who has been a movement person all my life, have never been happier when i was involved with some other brothers and sisters, engaged in a struggle, no matter how hard it was, how long it took, or what we were doing, it was the best kind of high you could ever get. and so it is important work to do, and it can also be fun. >> that deserves applause. [applause]

>> i've been looking at this discussion of color blind racism and the post racial and a lot of other terms for this kind of thing. but i remember years ago at the ivy league schools other, lead places, there was this conversation that i found rather strange. instead of talking about abolishing racism, some people were floating the idea that what we needed was the brazilian solution. where people -- demobilize people by not -- let's not talk about race. and it occurred me, that's really a big program that these rulers have pulled out, this brazilian solution. we can't talk about race. and -- anyway, i hope i'm in the the only one that saw that. >> i don't think people believe that, and having been in brazil, i remember when a couple times i was there, and i was in the capitol of brazil, and i was

doing something for the u.s. government on education, and i was going around in meetings, and i kept seeing all these white people, and i said, i thought brazil had a whole lot of black people. i said to somebody, aren't there any black anymore brazil? and the said, oh, yes, i said how about in the government? they said, we have a woman, her anymore is ven neat to disill sew, she is a woman, she is in the government and she is black. i said, can i meet center she was the only one at that time. that was in the government. and then they had all these people i was going to meet with who i thought were black when i went back to rio, and they told me they weren't black because they don't have race in brazil. and i'm looking at them, well, you look black to me. i think that denying that there's race means that you can

have racism and then you don't have to count it, talk about it, say people should remedy it. it's like people say that zimmerman's killing trayvon had nothing to do with race. and i -- [applause] >> well, it did, and obviously the reason why he was following him in my opinion and looked at him and bothered hundred he was told not to, had to do with race. but everytime i had said that to people, you didn't say it. you should not talk about race. we're in post racial america. and then the president finally had to say something about it. i think he -- yeah he said race, i heard the word. so, i don't think -- we now have a proposal, you know, to stop counting people in the census, the studies that are done about the health of the black community, the white community,

the latino community to stop keeping track of that stuff because that's about race. but if you can't keep track of it, you can't analyze it, you can't remedy it, you can't talk about it. you can't improve it. so there's a lot of resistance to having people do that. so, yes, there is race. race is socially constructed in the academy, professors, we talk all the time about how race is not real, it's just socially constructed. and i repeat that, too. race is socially constructed. then i say, hey, it may be socially constructed but it is real. it has real impact. it can kill you while it's been socially constructive. so, yes, there is race, and -- >> lynching is essentially cop instrument instructive, too. >> it is a social construction. it's not -- but it's very real, political, social, and violent, and the thing about the trayvon martin case and the zimmerman

trial, it's both exceptional and ordinary at the same time, and that's the pain in it. it came to represent this larger question of mass incarceration, the criminalization of black youth. we had a teach-in about is in chicago a couple days ago. we had a room for 100 people, and people kept calling. we had to get a room for 500 people, and many, many young people came, some in the hip-hop community and spoken word community, and they cried. they just -- and they really were not just crying for trayvon martin, because that suggests, oh, my god, how could this happen in america. i wasn't, oh, my god, how could this happen in america. this is all too familiar, right? we have a prison industry that has an insatiable hung for young black and brun body that's part of the challenge of what we have to address in responding to -- whether zimmerman goes to jail or not, that larger problem is there and the elephant in the room that i think we have to have both the courage and

compassion to address in all of its largeness. >> since we're in new york, i have to say this. this problem of stopping black kids, latino kids, stop and frisk, you have here in new york. it's in other places but you got that problem in new york. people act like it's a new problem. i've been in media sin -- now they have thing thing about stop and frisk in new york. when did that happen? well, when i was chair of the civil right commission we did a report on the police department after diallo was killed. remember that? and we took all this evidence and subpoenaed all this material from the police department and did a big report to show that the black youth were being stopped and frisked and in most cases weren't charged with anything because they weren't doing anything, and analyzing, and made some recommendations. the police department said we're going stop doing that and never going to do it again. and of course they're doing it.

and i heard recently that there's some talk of making your police chief, who is in charge of all this, the head of homeland security in washington. i can't imagine that anybody thinks that's a good idea. but all of that is part of the attitude towards youth and making, as the president said, because there's a crime problem, this, there and the other, you just tar from -- use that word -- everybody with the same brush and every individual and treat kids in a way they shouldn't be treated. >> i want to echo mary's point in terms of thinking politically, they are quoting ray kelly, who presided over this massive, massive, stop and frisk, massively surveillance of the community, and i think that part of the aim making our voices heard has to be as new yorkers making our voices heard

about what kind of leader ray kelly was here and how that is not appropriate for -- to be elevated because of that work. because that would be elevating that work. and i think -- [applause] >> i think the second thing is to kind of come back to these histories is to sort of -- i think the part of the mythology of the histories also paper over the present-day reality. and so if we think about rosa parks and we think about people, remember rosa parks in 2005, and we have this massive state funeral for rosa parks. she becomes the first woman african-american to lie in honor at the capitol. that happens less than two months after the travesty of

hurricane katrina. there's no way to think about why we had a state funeral for rosa parks without trying to put a set of a more palatable image at a time when americans were asking much more important questions about persistent racial inequality in this country. so part of the dangers of the myth histories are the ways those histories then -- it was hockey story. look, what a great nation. this woman oh had been denied a seat on the bus, now she's in the capitol. look our great we are. we need be careful about the ways the civil rights movement is used to tell that story. and we'll hear it again as we come up to the anniversary of the march on washington. >> now for questions and answers you line up at this microphone. one thing a lot of people forget is no president attended king's funeral. it was a couple presidents living at the time. right? but none of them attended king's

funeral. so, that's a wakeup call for where we are. i know it's hard for you to believe but no president attended king's funeral. that's where we are. any questions or should we just keep on talking? ...

promoting women's leadership in the context of certain struggling and calling out very male centered and often time reforms of leadership in organization that she was involved in. she was involved in organization that our colleague eric mcduff if iy has written a book around. it was an organization of black women who were very international. they were in solidarity with women in kenya, south africa. many of the anticolonial struggles going on at the time. they also defended the right of black women in self-defense holding up the case of rosa lee who defended herself against an attacker and sent to jail. there was a large campaign about that. that kind of organization adds women not around narrow gender issues, but the right of women to exert leadership around, you know, traditional womens' issues, black women's issues and freedom issues in general.

another organization she worked with was the all-african freedom movement which she founded in london in 1961 with claudia jones who was new yorker originally from trinidad who was jailed and exiled for her communists beliefs. for her radical beliefs and they joined together to embrace the african des a per are a and talk about what liberations would mean for women all over the world. so we're holding up the issues i think was important. i think in term of how we see black women in history, i think we are still in a marcus syndrome. people fall in to it. i have looked in books it's embarrassing. we don't feel like token i. is necessary anymore. i think there's a way in which there's an exclusion. there's either a distortion in the case of rose is a parks or deletion in the case of it. particularly women who married

to certain men in the movement. i'm waiting for a great biography of loretta scott king. there's work on betty but there needs to be more. the women who were partners of, you know, who are in the shadows and women who can't be framed in the way, you know, are often left out. clearly gender was a part of it and growing consciousness and issue around which she organized. another journalist -- i want to mention this briefly. the journal short lived in the 1950s people who do archive l work it was a journal that paul cofounded with young historian freedom was a journal that highlighted black women's internationalism. it wasn't a journal that was a feminist or woman --

they taunt women quilters doing quilts for the movement. taunt women in south africa resisting the path. every single issue featured women in struggle. it's a publication we don't hear about. we -- women-centered journal of that era. rosa parks -- [inaudible] united front is organized. you have to write the -- [inaudible] joann -- right, i mean, hon and on. but by the -- it needs to happen cloture capital to make it a male

definition millions of women were fighting in self-defense. so we have to change the term of some of these discussions. >> thank you, yes. doctor, you mentioned micky who wrote for the periodical that he mentioned, freedom. one of the few places you can read in the original copy of the freedom which was a paper on which the editorial board here in the some berg. i did my dissertation here. a very helpfully librarian helped me pore over single issue. for truth and justs is in term of anticolonial work, and the importance of -- i want to ask about key point mentioned about pressure.

it will respond to pressure. they will respond to pressure. that's speaking to me deeply now, and also with regard to your work on el will baker that shows, like you said, the importance of organizing. people never -- one of the they think they think -- thicks she issued mentioned if the right kind of pressure was put on obama he would make the kind of decisions that would alleviate 0 prigs. -- oppression. if do think barack obama read your works, would he make the kinds of decisions he's making? you said very frankly even fell even if he that. those things that come about during the -- closing on public schools would

still happened. and i think with your basic point. even if he knew about that. and read your book -- could you elaborate on that? >> i think might be giving books a little bit too much credit. i wish my book was that influential. [laughter] i think the issue is beyond an individual that we need a systemic analysis solutions not around a single issue or a single individual. it's a matter of what we see as winning. because we can define winning in such a way that, okay, we won that struggle. you diminished what you're attempting to achieve so you have an art official sense of a victory. of all of the eloquent quotes

elle will left me with is the struggle is internal. it sounds simple pliesic. once we relax and have a sense of a plateau; right? that's when, you know, that's when a lot more problems and complicated problems begin to set in. because, you know, we're not staying on point. we're not continuing in a tradition of active organizing. so, i mean, there's many different ways to answer your question. it could be a long conversation, but, yeah, i don't think books do the job. books document and can inspire us to a certain extent, ultimately we have to have a resolve to go out and actually organize with friends, neighbors, coworkers, et. cetera. that's the challenge. >> you know, the word i've been using lately in my thinking it's a tug of war. i think then, you know, start to think it's over. it's a tug of war. we make progress. there's reaction. it's a -- >> at some point you pull and the other people all fall down;

right? [laughter] >> really a tug of war. [laughter] [applause] >> i'm actually interested in what shapes the consciousness of these women including shirley as a black female internationalist -- what sort of shapes their capacity to move beyond like their own central struggle here in the context of the us. and what extend how would they look at michelle obama? [laughter] >> that was an interesting add on there. >> exactly. [laughter] i mean, i think with rosa parks, i mean, there are many things that shape her political consciousness. certainly her family, her grandfather believing in self-defense. rosa parks was a lifelong believer in self-defense. her mother is definition of respectability. you ask and demand that people

respect you. that's the respectability she grows up. she meets the describe as the first real activist she ever met. who will become her husband, raymond parks. he's working on the scots borrow case. i think in term of thinking about the political consciousness. in many way it is starts there around the case. it starts with many of these cases; right, of both trying to protect black men from these kinds of charges, and simultaneously trying to get justice for black people, right, under the law. white brutality, cases of sexual violence as we talked about. cases of other brutality against black people. so her political consciousness starts in that work in that work. the scotts borrow case in the '40s and '30s around the cases as she in many ways take over

the montgomery ncaap to make it an activist chapter. then she's a reader. part of what i think we forget is the importance of black press. and the porn of the -- importance of the black press telling a different kind of news not just national but international. so that news of the world is coming in to many people's houses. that's informing them the struggle for the black struggle is not just a struggle in the united states. but a global struggle. >> you see a report she was also in the front of the bookstore at every lecture in detroit. >> right. i did a lot of interview -- the second half of my book is about the post montgomery, and i talked a to a lot of people that worked with her. she would be sitting there in the front row and she tells the story of going to a number of things at the shrine in detroit. she would be in the front and would like to have hand work.

she liked to keep her hands busy. she would literally be everywhere. that's what people told me. everywhere. a long time black bookstore owner in detroit, people may know ed. it would get there and be like damage, it's a rosa. she would be there. part of it was trying to soak up all of the different sort of programs, and knowledge and, you know, sort of what all the different kinds of -- i think the other kind of commonality here is the commonality of sort the united front and go where people who are doing good work are going. many of these -- long distance runners are doing that. right. they show up because people are trying to do good work. you don't have to agree with everything. they go anyway. >> i think the question of consciousness is really important, and i think for those who work in universities is particularly important because sometimes we think, you know, people think that's the locust of learning and understanding

the world. i was impressed about the dire i are writing. when the most of the world looked to africa as back word and needing to be uplifted including some african-americans, as she went there and said that's where i became an intellectual. that's where in talking with people who were not formally trained, she began to understand the world in a way she did not understand it. simply through books and academic training? so i think demystifying the way which knowledge gets constructed, and demystify universities as a sole viz inventory of knowledge. and it's important in term of where consciousness comes from.

you know, i remember my first economics class. we can't talk about process. it's like, how do we talk about economics and not talk about profit. you can theorize the material world in to something unrecognizable, but then going in to communities and communities of struggle. i agree with mary, that was a beautiful statement about feeling a certain energy and resilience and joy by trying to understand the world people who want to understand it to change it and not just understand it to get paid; right? which is partly what the university tries to do to us. i think the consciousness of a shirley was finding intellectual sources of knowledge outside of formal institutions. >> i wanted to say something quickly about the question of gender. gender. because it occurred to me that first the movement -- it was -- she was lead a movement with men

and women at the time when women didn't need movements. she was in the late 19th century didn't need social movement with men in them. women would be in clubs and different things. here she was the leader of this whole deal and went prison. the movement in the end, became the movement. in fact the chapter in new orleans is the chapter that mother moore came out of. some you may know queen mother moore. there's a continuity then that and the history of black nationalism going all the way up to an interest in africa and internationalism. the congresses and six pack through congress was the last one we had. and the rest of them. you ought to think about gender. when i was thinking about nelson mandela the other day,whinny

mandela would not have done the years he was in prison. you would have never heard of nelson. [applause] it was whinny that put herself on the line. half the time she was out there in detention out there by herself where they put her. the rest of the time she kept his image before the public. she did it. all of that stuff she did. the thing that is so impressive is nobody talks about it. that's number one. and number two, because she -- in the end, did some things like that people say why did she do that? some stuff at the end of her life, a few little things that some people don't like, her personal life and other stuff. if you had to live all those years you might do something a little changey too. [laughter] therefore she shouldn't be denounce forked that. the other thing to keep in mind is that nelson's second wife,

she's the freedom fighter. well the freedom fighter before she married, and has her own thing going for herself. i once wrote a paper about the civil rights movement male leaders and what their wives did and contributed to. most of the time the wives were doing most of the thinking, to tell you the truth. nobody was thinking about it. the gender thing, we have to appreciate what happened to people and that appreciate that women can be leaders too. if you think about it now, most civil rights organization are headed by men. is that true? the first time one had a woman in charge of it was when elaine joandz -- jones became one of the heads. which is one of the smallest ones. usually women don't -- whatever they do the naacp had

chairs of the board that were women. i'm a life member. i can say that. women get overlooked. the gender thing is disabling in at love ways. [applause] presented a whole paper at the conference and swayed the crowd and barack said that's what i've been talking about. the way get thrown out -- the other thing i want to say on the education piece is that most of these women are educating themselves. the higher education but educates herself and the movement is a revolutionary school.

they have the intellectual component to it. i say we have time for maybe one question. >> i don't know if we do. are we out of time? >> we are out of time. i'm so sorry. >> that's what the sign is. >> it's been a