it's tonight. we are honored to help launch a brand new book, in fact, a book that will be officially released on may 1st by an author who has been part of our american antiquarian society community for many years. robin bernstein is the dillon professor of american history and professor of african and

african american studies and of studies of women, gender and sexuality at harvard university. she's the author of racial innocence, performing american childhood from slavery to civil rights, which won five awards include doing best book prizes from the new england american studies association, the association for theater and higher education and the international research society in children's literature. for her first book, robin held a jay and deborah last fellowship here at a in 2008 2009. i will also add that professor bernstein has been a crucial advisor to acs current and e.h. grant historic children's voices after robin bernstein talks for a bit. she'll be joined in converse nation by kevin quashie, who is the royce family professor of teaching excellence in english at brown university. he's the author or editor of four books. most recently, the sovereignty

of quiet and beyond resistance in black culture and black aliveness or a poetics poetics of being black aliveness has been awarded to prizes. the james russell lowell prize from the modern languages association and the pegasus award for poetry criticism from the poetry foundation. so we are honored and pleased to welcome both robert robin bernstein and kevin quashie yee here with us this evening. and i'm delighted to turn the podium over to robin bernstein. welcome. thank you all so much. i am so thrilled to be here. thank you all for coming out tonight on this beautiful day. thank you. thank you, scott casper, for that lovely introduction. thank you. dan wolverton and stephanie corrigan for making this event possible. i think tied poor bookshop for supplying books for tonight's

event. and i also want to thank c-span for sharing this conversation with their viewers on american history tv. i thank the american antiquarian society writ large, which has been one of my most important intellectual homes since i had that fellowship here in 2008 to 2009. and that i was here for only one month and the month was completely transformative. it simply transformed my first book, racial innocence performing american childhood from slavery to civil rights. the expertise and generosity of the staff. the astounding resources and the camaraderie of the other fellows all enabled me to write a book that i could not have imagined otherwise. so many thanks. i also thank professor kevin quashie, who has generously joined me in conversation tonight. kevin has thanked, as has shaped my thinking since 2012 when he

published his luminous book, the sovereignty of quiet beyond resistance in black culture in 2018. i came to brown to share early work from what would become freeman's challenge. kevin responded with thoughts and questions. that pushed me to think in new ways about william freeman and his family being in conversation with kevin tonight feels like a gift and a homecoming. thank you, kevin quashie. i began writing freeman's challenge because of two moments of surprise as the first surprise happened when by chance i found a footnote about a theatrical staging of a black on white murder. and this was in 1846 in the city of auburn, which is in the central new york state, in the finger lakes region. i was astounded and here's why. my fields of expertise include american racial formation and theater and performance history.

so what i knew from both of these fields was that in the mid-19th century, white people absolutely did not want to see any representations of black on white violence on stage. it was too terrifying. it was to disturbing. it could not be contained within the framework of entertainment. and so for that reason, it simply wasn't present on the american stage. and i'll give you an example to show you how not present it was when people performed othello. othello, of course, contains a scene of black on white violence, and people would bend over backwards, turn themselves into pretzels to avoid showing that. and one of the things that they would do, white performers would perform the role of othello as an oriental ized character, as swarthy and as distinctly not american and certainly not african-american. so this is how much white people

did not want to see these images on on stage. so when i found this footnote, i knew that something very strange had happened to make white people behave in a way that was so different from other white people at the same time. so what? i asked was, what happened in auburn in 1846 to cause such unusual, such unexposed, acted behavior? so i started researching the crime that was the subject of the theatrical performance, and i started with the man who is at the center of it, whose name was william freeman. this is william freeman. i quickly learned that william freeman was an afro native teenager who was convicted in swore he didn't commit despite a lack of evidence. he was he was sentenced. he was convicted and sentenced state prison.e auburn

the auburn state prison was factories where prison prisoners were least two. private companies usually for $0.30 a day. the prison pocketed all of this money. the prisoners received no cut william freeman was forced to manufacture animal harnesses, to dye silk and to make carpets. these goods were sold throughout new york state to consumers. and this was my second surprise. i thought convict leasing in new york in the 1840s in factories is like many people associated convict leasing with the post-civil war south and also with agricultural labor. i was familiar with important works like michelle alexander's, the new jim crow and douglas blackmon's slavery by another name, and these books along with ava duvernay's film 13th, suggest that profit driven carceral practices began with

the civil war. after the civil war, with the end of southern slavery and the passing of the 13th amendment, which famously states that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist in the united states, except as a punishment for crime. but in fact, convict leasing existed in the north decades before the civil war. it developed in the context of northern, not southern slavery, the end of northern, not southern slavery and the auburn state prison where william freeman was incarcerated, developed this practice. so this project began with two surprises. and when i took these two surprises in a question emerged, which was did these surprises have any relationship to each other? was did the practice of convict labor in the auburn state prison somehow lead to white people behaving in auburn in such an

unusual way to figure out the answer to this question. i wrote freeman's challenge the murder that shook america's original prison for profit. so who was william freeman? william freeman grew up in auburn, in the black neighborhood of new guinea. he was born in 1824 into auburn's most prominent black family. his enslaved grandparents were vereds the founders of the duke of new guinea. william freeman grew up in a clit, lively social world, organized around private gatherings, church ai-avery action, home based education and work. but alongside william freeman near new guinea, something else was growing. and that was the auburn state prison. the auburn state prison was international, really famous because it innovated a novel form of incarceration. unlike other prisons at the time, the auburn prison was not

established primarily to punish or to confine or to redeem people. rather, it was built by white businessmen for the explicit purpose of stimulating economic economic development. the building of this prison in 1816 caused $20,000 in state funding immediately to flow into auburn. and at the time, auburn was a tiny little village with fewer than 2000 people. and $20,000 is the equivalent of half a million dollars in today's money. so you can imagine if you have a tiny little village with 2000 people and all of a sudden you have what is now half a million dollars flowing in, it is going to transform everything. and that is exactly what happened. the builders go, this was the plan from the beginning. the builders goal had nothing to do with justice or reform. their goal was to transform auburn from a village into a city, and that and that is what

happened. the business was the excuse me, the prison, the business. the prison that was a business was built on the banks of the west go outlet. so you can see right here this river,is the alaska outlet. and it was built on the banks of the alaska outlet for the explicit purpose of powering factories. so even before the pwas built, it was imagined to enclose factories for the purpose ufacturing goods. the deed this land here was sold to the state for $1 and the deed actu staat a dam will be built. and you can see the dam right there. a dam would be built in to to power tactoes inside the prison and also to power the private businesses of the men who sold this land for a dollar. so they the people who created this prison, viewed the prison as a vehicle by which to soak up state funds, manufacture goods, stimulate commerce, build

banking, and develop land and waterways. in short, they reimagined the prison as an infrastructure for capital ism. this economic plan was supported by what became known as the auburn system of incarceration. so the auburn system, a system of incarceration, has a number of characteristics. one is that the auburn system, the prison, ran through a system of extreme social isolation. the men who were imprisoned in auburn were put into solitary confinement every single night. and during the day they worked in factories. they worked together in these factories, but they were not allowed to speak to each other at all, ever. and they were not even allowed to look at each other's faces at all, ever. so this was an extreme social isolation.

people could go in auburn, literally for years without speaking a word and without looking at another human face. of course, people did find ways to communicate. of course, people did find ways to look at each other's faces. but that was extremely risky because another characteristic of auburn, another characteristics of the auburn system was extreme physical violence. so this and the violence was necessary to enforce the extreme social isolation. and because this is inhumane, this is unhuman. so there was solitary confinement every night, total silence at every time, at all times, and work in factories. and what's really important to understand is that the purpose of the social isolation, the purpose of the silence was productivity. the goal was to increase productivity. and the concept behind the isolation was not punishment.

the concept was how to control people and get them to work as much as possible. and that was the concept behind the extreme violence as well. so the auburn system is widely known to scholars of u.s. prison history. and one of the key ideas that i hope comes through in my book is to foreground what the system was for that. it was a system that relied on torture. it was a system that relied on inhumane practices, all for the purpose of manufacturing, all for the purpose of making money. and it absolutely worked. so here is what the prison looked like from the outside and you can see it looks like a giant ftory because that's basically what it was. and i want to point out just a couple of aspects of this. first of all, everywhere you see a smokestack that's marking th location of a factory. so you can count the smokestacks

and you know exactly how many factories there we in the prison. and these were all prison factories that were run by private comnies leasing prisoners. the other thing i want to point out about th image is the locomotive in the bottom left hand corner. so the train tracks acally grew in relation to the prison. they were bringingomita ariel to the prison. they were taking goods away from the prison. they were also bringi tourists to and from the prison. the prison was actually making additial money tough tourism, believe it or not. and that's something i can talk about more later. and the last thing i want to point out about that train, besides the way it marks the infrastructure of capitalism, is that locomotives were actually built inside the prison. locomotives were one of the one of the salable commodities is that were actually built by

prisoners in the auburn state prison. so i'd like to share a slice of friedman's daily experience in the prison. one of the things that's important to know is that the extreme size, social isolation and was designed to reduce workers, men to machines. and that was actually the language that was used that the that the prisoners should be like machines. and it was all designed to dehumanize and to maximize, to maximize productivity. so i'm going to show you i'm going to share with you a little bit of the daily routine that made that happen. every morning, freeman and the other men marched into the prison yard. they emptied their their light tubs, which were tose as a bathroom into the underground tank. rinse them with pumped pump water and set them aside. then they rejoined the lock step. this is the lock step. it's a form of marching very closely, and it's designed to

prevent men from talking to each other or from seeing each other's faces. they rejoined the lock step and marched through factorie produced carpets, clothes, barrels, furniture and more with each chamberenating a different racket, a different shade of smoke as raw material began tomoer or boil, as me peeled off to assume their workstations. the line dwindled. the last stop was freeman's the game shop. there, amidst gusts of dust, 72 men ma amal harnesses and hardware for carriages in 1841, which was william freeman first year. there freeman and others almost built almost 70 amal harnesses, plus hundreds of saddles, stirrups and related items. their work was sold wholesale oil at a total market value of almost $32,000. the contractor bought the year's labor from the prison for a fifth. that amount just over $7,000.

less than $0.35 per man per day. freeman's job was to file rough iron that had been imported from england. smoothing it in preparation for a lacquered finish called japan, running alongside nine other filers, he burnished the surfaces of buckles, rings and other hardware for saddles. freeman filed every morning for 2 hours, then marched to the mess hall for a half hour breakfast, marched back, filed more, marched, ate dinner, marched. filed every movement regimented every day, the same. another prisoner described this life, quote. each morning, when i seated myself in the shop and cast a look around me upon things, two familiar with my sight, my impression has been accompanied with a sigh. i am here yet. freeman resisted his forced labor from the start and he

resisted in a lot of different ways. he resisted by working as little as possible. he resisted by reducing his productivity. and he reduced he resisted by clowning around, which came with enormous physical risks. he he made other people laugh. and this was a very risky but very humanizing thing to do. and he also risked. he also resisted by telling the guards point blank that he did not want to work. he wanted to. he felt that it was unfair that he was being forced to work, as he put it, for nothing. he demanded wages. his claim was simple, but it challenged auburn's defense pinning idea. he insisted that he was not a machine, not a slave, but instead a citizen with rights, a worker. upon his release from prison, he pursued his claim through legal means. he appealed to magistrates who mocked and dismissed him.

and then william freeman turned to violence. william freeman committed a quadruple murder that terrified and bewildered white urbanites. a high a high profile trial ensued, and the trial got very big, very fast. and it got it. it made national headlines. and one of the reasons that it got so big so fast was that william henry seward, who was then best known as the governor of recent governor of new york, defended freeman pro bono. and, of course, we know that 20 years later, after this, william henry seward would become the secretary of state to abraham lincoln and he would broker the sale of alaska. if you've ever heard of seward's folly. that's him. that was in the future, however. the prosecutor was john van buren, who was the son of the recent president. martin van buren. so this was a clash of the titans, and it got very big, very fast. and the there were daily

transcripts of the trial, went out daily on telegraph, and they got published far and wide. the trial attracted the commentary of walt whitman, james mccune smith, horace greeley, a lot of very well-known people commented on it. now, freeman was entirely clear about why he killed he wanted back pay, and if he couldn't have it, he would have payback. but no one, the prosecution or the defense, wanted to hear freeman's challenge to the auburn system, because the auburn system was the engine behind auburn's prosperity. and by this point, the auburn system, the auburn state prison, was actually a major engine behind new york's prosperity. it was also a major player in party politics. so the prison was very important to a lot of different people, and nobody wanted to hear that

it was wrong to make people work for no pay. so nobody wanted to hear it. white auburn ites, particularly, did not want to hear it. so what they did to not hear this very clear critique that they could not hear what they did, instead was they invented their own story. they invented their own stories in order to drown out what freeman was actually saying. they could not hear the in their effort to silence freeman's critique of profit driven incarceration, white people developed two stories, which were both racist libels that were then relatively novel. the first libel that they developed in order to drown out freeman's challenge to the prison was what would later be called the black, quote unquote, social pathology model. and this was became a century and a half a century to and 2012 decades later became really important to the moynihan

report. so they are so seward argued that freeman killed because of of what would then become called social pathology. the other libel was created by the prosecution, and that was the libel of, quote unquote, innate black criminality. and that was the story that was told in the theatrical performance that was in that footnote that i found that surprised me. so much. white people in auburn wanted so urgently to deny freeman's challenge to the prison that they would actually rather see black on white violence, then hear that challenge. they were using the disturbing image of black on white violence as a distract action from something that they found even more disturbing, even more threatening, which was what william freeman was saying about the prison in their midst.

these paired libels were amplified and disseminated in stories about freeman theater, literature, visual images, and above all, the press. and then, of course, black people had to figure out ways to live with these emerging young, racist ideas. they forged many strategies, including what kevin quashie calls quiet. and i hope this is something that we can talk about in a few minutes. william freeman story is not over. today, we all live with the racist ideas that incubated in his trial and the auburn state prison itself still exists. it is now known as the auburn correctional facility. it is the oldest continuously operating maximum security prison in the united states and manucte ring continues to define it. today, all new york state license plates are manufactured in the auburn rrectional fality. so the people who manufacture your n yk state license

plates, they are literally walking in. william freeman's footsteps. so freeman's story is not over, but a portion of it actually might end literally in the next five weeks. there is a bill that is up to the need for the new york state legislature, and it's coming up in may. and there are there's two bills that are coming up. one is called the no slavery in new york act. and i realize that using slavery to refer to foed carceral lar a controversial thing. and that's something that we can talk about. but that is what this bill is called. and what this bill does is it it says it basically says thato one will be forced to work in a prison in new york state or any carceral institution in new york state. itoes not take away bor. it does not take away the opportunity to work for people who want to. what it does simply is it takes away the possibility of being

forced to work, which is exactly what william freeman objected to. then there's a second bill, which is called the fairness and opportunity act for a fair fairness and opportunity for incarcerated workers. and this bill addresses the second part of friedman's critique. freeman wanted not only to be not forced to work, he wanted an opportunity to build a life for himself. so when he wanted wages, he wanted not only wages, but everything that wages confer. he wanted economic stability, dignity, justice. he wanted self-definition as as a free man. his name itself. so this second bill addresses that part of freeman's challenge that he wanted dignity in his work. he wanted wages that could enable him to build a life. these two bills before the new york state are before the new york state legislature right now. and what they are doing is they

are delivering william freeman's message into the 21st century. it is time to listen and to act. so i ask you to consider going to 13th forward is a wonderful organization that is leading the the the the charge to pass these two bills go to 13th forward. find out how you can support these bis and together we can finally end forced labor in prisons in new york state. thank you. how are you? i'm great. thank you so much for being here. yeah, it is an honor to be here with you. thank you. i hope everyone's well and safe. thank you so much for that introduction. i'll say just briefly that on this is such a magisterial book

and by that i mean the musician david crosby was famous for saying that he loved things that were better made than they had to be. and what you've done in this book is taken a really comp fixated story in the way that perhaps every story about race in america is complicated because of our compounded in capacities of facing the thing. and you've just found a narrative way of trying to to witness what is difficult. so what would an incredible, incredible book. and i'm so glad that it's here. i'm so glad that people will get to experience it. congratulations. thank you. it's a gift. it's a gift to all of us. so you said in as you were speaking, you said you mentioned the kind of isolation and the

one could even think of the kind of metaphor of silences that reverberate across the story, not just in the prison, in terms of freeman's. freeman's what he's able to say about what he did, what people are able to hear and not willing to hear and maybe not willing to understand. could we talk a little bit more about how you as you're doing the research for this book, how were you thinking about how voice and expressiveness is operating across the story? yeah. thank you so much for that question and thank you so much for being here. it is such an honor to be in conversation with you. i have learned so much from kevin quashie and i'm so grateful to him for being here. one of the there were there were two prime directives as i was researching, there were two things that i was always trying to do. one was to hear william freeman voice. i was always trying to find his

voice. he never he he never see never wrote, he never wrote anything and he never wrote out his stories. so everything that we have from him is filtered through people who heard him speak and there's a lot of people in his family said what they heard. of course every single one of those people was bias and every single one of those people had an agenda so there were reasons to on a literal level belief in the one story about what was said but the way i heard him was by listening across the story. many people who were deciding the same set of events they all said things that echoed each other and harmonized which he --

with each other. so the first record was always listen to the voice and not just agreement that of his family. freeman had anst interesting family and they learned a lot about them. most of it is not in the written record. always trying to find their perspective for what they had to say about themselves and a really profound moment in the research, if onlyho they had to written and then i thought wild-eyed did write. they had two s. written in various ways. i just need to find it in the right way. one day i realized the name that the family chose for themselves the sir name because what when the grandparents came through they could have named themselves anything but they didn't come

the day chose the name free men and i realized that their autobiography. it's an autobiography in one word, freeman or that's what they wrote and that's the most important thing that i hear so that was one but then the other directive was to try to incur as little as possible. i don't have access to william freeman's interiority. ii don't have access to his psychology and i never wanted to overestimate my access to who he was on the deepest level. my second directive was always to focus on what he did, what he experienced and what i know he experienced. every moment when i was riding this i was asking myself at this moment in the story what did you see? at this moment in the story look

at could freeman here or not here because he was at one place beaten so badly while he was imprisoned that he became and so what could be here in what could he not here and what could he see say in what could aa and touch and what did he say? these were all the ways that i was trying to deal with silence. i was trying to find what i could find and go no further and not inferred things that i didn't have evidence for. i tried to let some silences just be silenced. >> that's one of the strengths of the project because there are those moments where repeatedly freeman and tell i me if i get this correctly, freeman said repeatedly to things. people asked him questions, why did you do this, or saying things to him about the trial he said i don't know in their

moments where you write around that i don't know because it's pressure hartley by being and in so it might be that he can't hear everything that people are saying to him and people may not be sensitive to needing to project to communicate in a way. it might be something else and i'd love for you to talk about that and that is balanced by the fact that he is clear that when he's asked and you know the moment i'm talking about, when he iss asked who made you this way? h what made you this way and he says -- >> he says the state. he is explicit that his real target is the state. he could not have been clear aboutat what his subject was and why he did what he did in people could not want -- they did not

want to hear his challenge toys the system that was making him prosperous. >> there's an incredible balance betweenwh a person who declinesr refuses whether it's performative or who says i don't know when being interrogated when the question is so singular that he is unwavering. >> yeah he did sometimes he said i don't know what what i suspected he did not here but i don't know that. that's speculation. he also was very good at refusing to answer questions he didn't want to answer so at one point when he is captured and he is interrogated at a certain point he just clams up. he decides i'm not going to answer any more questions and he uses silence. this is after he has been

released from auburn state prison and he's been living with five years of enforced silence and then he's arrested for his act of violence. and at this point he knows the power of silence. he knows how powerful it i is. he answers some questions in the decides he's done and he says i'm not going to answer anymore questions though he was somebody who was absolutely able to use silence and use it in that way. >> is such a great response because part of his saying the statement in this way is not only the way it's related to the way he uses silence but the way he manufactured the weapons to use for the murders. he picked some of that up from being in a prison also so they are just these part of the book is like laying to the lies of

prisons as a side of rehabilitation and the way in which he used his case as an exemplar of that lie. it's really terrific. could we talk about, there's a moment in your presentation and in the book chapter where you think about people wanting to know why did you do this? could you talk a little bit about why and how in your book and maybe even what. could you say a little bit about that as it relates to the complexities? >> freeman story has been told in some ways for almost 200 years. he's best remembered william stuart defended him using the defense and it was not the first defense but it was one of the first. it was extremely novel and

freeman set some precedence for the use of the defense in new york state. freeman's case, when it has been written about very often it's been written about in the context of the defense and in the context of legal history. the reason the defense is so important is that answers the question of why. why did he kill? at answers that question in a way that was very comforting. if your livelihood is dependent on the prison in the prison has been challenged its very comforting to hear that the person who committed this act of violence irrationally in every single way. so his story has been brought forward as a story and what everybody wanted to know when the moment and this infiltrated into the storytelling over a

decade was why did he kill? he told us why. he told u us why and there was o mystery. one of the things i did in the book was to say the real mystery is why people kept asking why? the real mystery is why they couldn't hear the answer that was so clear, repeated, very straightforward, why did they keep asking why and that to me was the meat of the second half of the book, how people got so psychologically invested in specific explanations for the times when the real story the real explanation was right there on the table. so ice flipped the switch in the part of bookyo that you are referring to maaco from why did he kill which is the question that everybody has been asking

for 170 years to why do we keep asking the question? and with what you asked also, when people could not hear the why the freeman gave them over and over the more they couldn't hear it the more they had to ask the question again and again and then they started to moving to questions as to what. the way you put it earlier in ourat conversation earlier was e quote unquote a or quote unquote and a link violence. what was the? these are more ways of avoiding hearing what he was actually saying. >> part of what you do what you did on a project related to this incapacity to hear and the book is really a compilation of the

incapacity to witness and to stay with, james baldwin talks about we must always try to bear and we aren't very good at trying to bear. you walk us through his diligence when he gets out a prison in terms of first trying to get recompense and he goes to magistrates and goes to try to get a haircut to clean up, he tries to get a job as a farm hand so there's this real, four-person who comes out a prison in his disoriented in all the ways having, it comes at five years later the town has changed and he lost most of his hearing and yet he has this kind of deliberateness about trying to build a life as a citizen. as complicated as that work can be he's trying to do right by being a citizen and wanting to be paid for myy labor. he goes through all of these

processes and it's amazing the book to have it juxtaposed that against the larger racist narrative of either its or some manifestation of that really idea that black people are somehow less than human. there'sis this across-the-board consistent incapacity to bear. there is no answer to why. the answer is the states. he told us it's the state. could we talk then about can you say something about what were the responses from, his family and from the black community because that's another part of the complexity of the story and again i will say in this forum and for anyone on line part of what i think is the accomplishment of the book is

how you really balance so beautiful he a difficult story to tell. not difficult because, not difficult only because of the violence. difficult because of how complicated interlocking parts of it are. can you say something as far as his family in the black community? >> answer the question i will go to an essay by angela davis davis. angela davis wrote this essay that was helpful to me in riding that this book where she lamented the fact that frederic douglass did not take up the beginnings of convict labor as a major cause. frederic douglass had a little bit to say about it but not that much can angela davis basically said wishing he had taken it up as a major cause when conduct

labor practices were in there at the scene and she met post civil war and she was referring to the south and we understand actually convict labor began in new york state which is where douglas was living in the fact that he never took it up is all the more astonishing if we are thinking from our perspective. one of the things i'm doing this book is answering this question, why was it not a major rallying cry for amazing people, really geniuses like frederic douglass and also harriet tubman who lived in auburn. she lived in auburn two miles away from the operant state prison or the second half of her life until her passing in 1913 so why wasn't there more organizing against the system and to answer your question

about his family, his family loved him. his family really loved him and that was really clear. some members of his family testified on his behalf in court which was an extremely brave thing to do and some of them suffered enormous retribution for their testimony. i want to really honor their courage and testifying of the half of free men. of them did that and some of them didn't. some of the members of his family and his community had difficulty hearing his challenge for some of the same reasons that the people did which was they were also part of an economic system. there were also embedded and the other reason was of course they work clairvoyant. why did fred rick douglass not rise up against the beginnings

of convict labor? one important answer is there was with no way to know know from this perspective especially in the mid-19th century what conduct labor would turn into. therew was no way to know in no way to imagine mass racialized incarceration. black people were disproportionately incarcerated in auburn state prison during freeman's lifetime but the actual numbers were small. they were relatively small. there were people who are upset about it at the time and there was no way to imagine 150 years into the future with mass racialized incarceration. so that absence of clairvoyance on anybody's part i'm certainly not clairvoyant and they e weret either. they were embedded in their own moment and they were indicted in

the same capitalism in the same economic structures as everybody else. so his family and his community were very mixed but i want to end with is the women in his family rallied behind him. his mother ralliedhe behind him and his sister-in-law who was his closest friend rallied behind him. his sister-in-law and debra depew testified onfi his behalfn court and she had a very hard time doing that but she did it. >> i'm so glad you mentioned his mother and his b sister-in-law. they both suffered mightily for it. i would also say indeed when you talk about his family cared for him there's this moment in the book where youyota talk about of course after he has committed

these murders the white community almost takes a frothy state it and wanting to an act extra justice against him and his family membersto to know how he was being treated. even with the complexity you just described is that incredible tenderness that i'm grateful to have in the book and when you are talking, one thing you showcase in the book is people in the black community were advocating for the things they were advocating for for schools and for voting rights and you said this thing which i hadn't thought of before because i'm not and historian of this era and you said something that's worth highlighting. for black activists in new york in the 1820s and 30s and 40s they were imagining the

opportunity to be able to defend oneself beforere a jury would he been the kind of incredible acquisition of citizenship such thatha the prison being against the prison wouldn't necessarilyn seem to be high on their list because they are trying to think about the opportunity to be like in order to defend oneself what should be the next step. these are complicated landscapes. >> i'm glad you brought up what was important to black communities. if they were not rallying against this nation's convict labor will was important to them and impact is what you said they were rallying around voting and the right to citizenship including the right to a fair trial and rallying around their own economic development and

rallying against because this was in the wake of the end of northern slavery. they were building churches and creating social constructs and doing all of these really important things and when you think about the urgency and the moment of all of these political projects we can understand better why it seemed not as important at the time except that it wasee really important. he was raising his challenge and we should understand he was not imagining the future. he was making this very simple claim and i think his power was

in its simplicity he kept saying he wanted wages for his work. he never even said i want the prison to close. he never said this prison system is inherently wrong and it should be abolished but he never said that. he never even said i want other people to be paid. he just wanted his pay that he deserved for his work. that's a very narrow claim and i think a lot of it is derived from the fact that it was so narrow and so undeniable. how can you look somebody in the eye and say no, you don't deserve wages for re-or five years of labor. the force was in the narrowness of the claim. >> we have a couple minutes. let's see if their questions in the audience. i could talkth all night and thk

you for waiting until a microphone makes its way around. >> should i stand? okay, i won't bend. thank you so much for that talk. it was awesome and i thinkt it's important you are notnl only bringing the story of convict policing up in the wave that pathologists in a black criminality was a story that this and not just the 20th century but so the century but so the rights and i think it's important work. i did have a question a more context driven question. you kind of alluded to this in your talk and i'm sure in the book that gets deeper treatment.

the penitentiary was at the center of this national and trans-atlantic conversation about prison reform and you kind of are highlighting, i don't know if it was attention with the profit driven component of the prison. what are the things i was curious about while you were talking about the fact that auburn was essentially a series of factories was his relationship to other penitentiaries in the north as well s as the south regarding te economic functions of it. the other was the system, beyond the disciplinary component was the economics and the export to other places. i did work in maryland and they'll have profit driven so would you describe those other prison systems as being convict leasing as well or how did

aware? >> i'm so glad you asked that and thank you so much for that. the operant system was very quickly exported and duplicated. almostduplicated instantly and exported across the north and across the united states and across the ocean and europe. these other prisons that have similar goals similar economic goals similar structures, they were all imitating auburn so a single example sanil quinn was built on the auburn model and this is completely explicit absolute deliberate. one of the reasons people were so interested in this system they were matching it. there were also many official

envoys so de tocqueville came to auburn and harriet martineau came to auburn. many people were coming in order to affect the system and make recommendations on whether it should be replicated. so auburn was at ground zero but it very quickly spread.ll all of the other systems we know about that have similar models they are all in direct relationship and direct progeny of auburn. >> phoenicia acts with robin thanks for the great talk and i was wondering if you can could compare it with the development of the post-war south? >> heather anka thompson has done important work on this, on exactly this comparison so what

thompson argues is we should understand southern convict leasing practices post civil war as an adjustment on the priest of a war practices originating at auburn. for her, for thompson the similarities are much more significant than they are different in their arm port and differences. southern post civil war convict leasing is not primarily and financially-based manufacturing for example are there important differences. thompson's argument is the similarities are more important than the differences and i agree with that. what i would also add is the line of influence are explicit and direct. the post civil war south is

exacting processes that were innovating in the north. and i'll go back to me just to say there's a really wonderful book about convict leasing the post civil war south and they produce so much knowledge that is so important and they told the story of post civil war convict leasing so vividly that it had these excellent books and the inadvertent effect of suggesting that that's the whole story. in fact these wonderful books are starting the story in the middle and the story they tell is important and correct and true but it's starting the story in the middle. by starting the story with the civil war and the end of the civil war what has happened inadvertently is the books have let the north off the hook. one of the things that i want to accomplish in this challenge is to put the north back on the huck. i saw a question over here.

>> i just wanted to ask, are therefore private prisons now? >> absolutely there are. c are they run the same way that they were run before? >> yes and no. different states have different laws so in new york state there's still imprisoned and forced manufacturing and one thing i want to state clearly is that auburn was never private prison. imprison them imprisoned for-profit we assume it's a private prison. the argument i want to make is when we are talking about her prison for-profit, meaning a prison thatfo was built for the purpose of generating profit, that's nott necessarily a prive

prison. absolutelyly it varies state to state how that manifests. in new york state there is no longer a partnership with private companies so in new york state it does not haveam the sae competition that william freeman experience where his work is being leased by a private company. that no longer exists. today in new york state there's massive manufacturing and they build materials that are sold only to the state itself so things like license plates for example. that is the difference in some ways. still forced labor andhe that's why the work is so important. they are working to end forced labor in prisons in new york city.

>> they do get paid but they get paid in new york state. they are plenty of incarcerated people in nine states who get paid nothing and it's forced labor and they get paid nothing and that's true in many states. in new york state people in prisons are paid for their work but they are vastly underpaid. for example the men who make license plates and auburn today to get paid 65 cents an hour. this is not a living wage only need to remember that william freeman wanted wages but he also wanted fair wages and that's not what we have in new york city today and this is an opportunity and this is exactly what that bill is all about. to add convict labor new york state. >> you make a point in the book talking about in 1840s there

were states that paid prisoners. indeed when he left after five years they gave him $2. and you'd talk about the kind of social pressure to produce that kind of modest compensation. the prisoners. we should stop soon because we are at about one hour but we can take two more questions. and then we have one upfront. >> in your talk you mention remainingat using humor. can you offer any particular examples of how he used humor's -- humor in these ways? >> while he was in one of these factories he would make faces and called other prisoners to

laugh. they were not permitted to but of course they did do it. this was not just him. this was a game that allowed prisoners played where they try to make each other laugh. it was a very humanizing game but it was also very dangerous game. if you will got caught he would be whipped for it and he was with multiple times. one time he danced and dancing was also forbidden. he was whipped for that. these are examplesm of ways he claims his humanity and resisted the dehumanization of the prisons. >> by everyone's description he was playful and a vibrant

15-year-old and got in trouble in ways like going into prison. you have cautioned us against the idea innocence and youth except in the case of black people, black boys and girls and young people. they don't get the same kind of innocence. when he came out to change in making this case about payment and about recompense he was a youngah person. he was a young person making this clearly forced argument that also adds to the clarity aboutw how portland it is. to make he was really young. he was a teenager while he was imprisoned and in aloud voice he acted like a teenager.

some of his bravado i associate teenager. a >> i was interested in what forest greely had to say and was there anyone who could grasp the importance of freeman saying this was a mistake wax. >> they were interested in it for the perspective of capitol punishment. he wrote multiple columns and spoke about it in his campaign against capitol w punishment and he was arguing against it in many cases includingd freeman's case. whitman wrote one column in which he really recognized it

and backed it up in a lot of ways. and his other columns he didn't do that at all. so it's a little painful because he heard it and why did he hear it in one moment and didn't in another moment? i couldn't say and i will answer for him, he was furious at william penn stuart. he clearly recognized the in stewart's defense of freeman and he was absolutely furious. >> part of the excellence of this book i will say again is the way in which you navigate theav complicated entanglementsf what it is to think about race

in american culture and they said this to you if one is building a class of trying to study the complexity, all these books that ask any reader to figurere out how the witness and participate and find your place in this story? i think we could say the. i just want to congratulate you and thank you, thank you for sharingat with us. what a phenomenal book. >> thank you so much. that means the world to me and i'm very touched that you would say that. thank you so much and thankyo yu all for being a part of this conversation. [applause] >> thanknk you robin bernstein d

kevin quashie.