something -- somewhat up for grabs. anyway, there is in compromise sometimes a lot of integrity, especially political integrity. finally, i would like to see us derive from history a much richer agenda for both pride and change. i like very much that richmond, virginia, has the museum which tries to visualize in its exhibits the african-american presence in civil war and throughout the conflicts that led up to the civil war. but when it comes to having both pride and shame for one's past, we who are americans have a great deal of difficulty combining the two. i like very much what psalm 15 says, that is a difficult

maneuver, i must say, and our politicians are not very good at leading us into something like swearing to our own hurt. one of the hurts we need to swear off of is our convenient superficial memory of what followed the civil war immediately in the era of reconstruction in the civil -- in the jim crow era. it's already been mentioned. i think we, americans, white people in the south and north have a great deal of repentence in our memory of what happened to african-americans in the years following the civil war. frank smith has been eloquent about this and also president ayers. i think david blight's sorry of that era is exactly right and it's exactly what most of us haven't quite remembered. said david, the age of jim crow

was not only the creation of aggressive southern legislature but the result of the north's long retreat from the legacies of a long war. amen to that. perhaps the most discretional era in american history, that era post 1865 in which with the politicians on both sides of the mason-dixon, african-americans were subjected once again to something like a slavery. that it seems to me is a kind of memory that needs at least the empirical realism and the rep t repentant spirit. by way we justify our ways acting toward each other. i'm not sure whether i made it within 15 minutes, joe, but that's my take on it.

[ applause ] >> my pleasure and honor to introduce honorable eleanor noorton. congresswoman now in her 11th term as a congresswoman of the district of columbia is the ranking member of the house subcommittee on economic development of the buildings and emergency management. she also serves on the committee on oversight and government reform and the committee on transportation and infrastructure. the congresswoman is a tenured professor of law at georgetown university, received her bachelors degree from ohio and her law degree and a masters degree in american studies from yale. i've been organizing meetings for quite a few years. i've learned to avoid inviting members of congress because

congress is a jealous mistress. we're very, very fortunate with the help of monica laws and to schedule with congresswoman holmes norton's staff, and she showed up exactly on time. thank you. >> thank you very much. my chief regret, of course, is that yes, my mistress is in session. and if anything i was concerned that i might not get here on time. but my chief regret is that i wasn't able to hear the panel because when i -- i read of what you were seeking to do here today, i know i would have been benefitted from being here especially in making these few remarks. now, i can imagine what my good friend frank smith said because he and i are long-time friends.

and frank gave me an opportunity to introduce one of my first bills in the congress, the bill that i'm especially proud of that led to the establishment of the first, and i suppose still only, memorial to the african-americans who fought in the civil war. frank has been prestigious in the way he's expanded learning about the war and african-american participation and the work and the memorial so that it is more than a memorial on u street itself. but a museum, as well. now, this 150th anniversary of the civil war, of course, is being observed across the country in many ways. i especially appreciate that e the -- that your form, the conflict preservation and

resolution forum is presenting this opportunity today. it's going to be a four-year commemoration as such. but i can tell you there has been little note taken of the sequescentennial in the congress. i introduced a resolution early on for the study of african-american life and study indicating that this was the 150th anniversary. and yet congress in many ways was the vortex of the civil war before, during, and after. dr. shriver talked about the dinner meeting where it was decided that the tradeoff -- i wish we could make more tradeoffs in the present congress. but that the tradeoff between the north and the south would be

as essentially it was. that the capital of the united states would be located below the mason-dixon line. and i can tell you that the capital of the united states, the people of the district of columbia were consoled by sovereign democrats for 150 years and did not get its home rule until 1974, precisely because of that fateful decision. it was not because at that time or at any time until about 1960 the majority of people living here were african-americans. it was because there was a fair number of african-americans and southern democrats, people in my own party kept the city from getting its home rule, kept it segrega segregated. i went to segregated dunbar high school. everything was segregated in the city.

the district had -- was one of the five brown versus board of education cases. this was the legacy of that fateful decision. it was a capital of the united states and was the capital of slavery. slaves were sold in the streets, slaves, of course, slavery thrived here even afterwards until nine months before the civil war when lincoln as i'm sure someone has said as a war measure liberated the slaves of the district of columbia. my great grandfather, richard holmes was among them. he walked off of a slave plantation in virginia. some storied notion of richard holmes. i tell it as it was told to me.

that richard holmes looked around, saw no one was looking and left that plantation. and that's how we got to the district of columbia. that makes me a third generation washingtonian. i'm glad he stopped here. his son and my grandfather richard holmes, the first richard came here in the 1860s, the second richard was in the d.c. fire department in 1902. the capitol itself was also as the center of the fight, it took a great deal of time and effort to defend the capital. precisely because of its location here. at the vortex between the north and the south and the capital was the center of the recovery of slavery as such. the aftermath of slavery with

the bureau, the university is a legacy of that aftermath of slavery. but i caution you that in looking at the civil war, it is very important to kind of line it against wars we have known. because we have known no war like this war. it is very different from wars. in the usual sense of the word. ofou in any other war, 2% of the population, but most of those were lost from disease. if you compare that to huge wars, wars where we lost mess men, the great world wars or the

most recent great war, world war ii, you will find that very quickly after that war, japan and germany were our allies. world war ii veterans go to germany and japan now to visit with veterans of that war without a great deal of bitterness. indeed without bitterness. healing from war, a war among countries appears to take place at least when men are sane more easily. healing from civil wars, it seems to me, occurs only gradually. the enemy does not go home, he lives with you, so to speak. in a real sense, if we look at the so-called healing from the civil war, from the black and white point of view. from looking at it from both

points of view, it seems to me fair to say that that healing began only with a passage of the civil rights statues of the 1960s. for blacks, the war left open wounds for decades. legal segregation and worse organized violence and terrorism in the south, legal segregation, in the nation's capital, official discrimination by the federal government, societal discrimination, condoned everywhere in the united states. for southern whites, the war had a similar, tragic, legacy. it left an economy still depending -- dependent on ag but without the

slave labor on which that economy had grown to depend. in. with the civil rights movement, not only did blacks move forward in the south and throughout the country, but the -- the south began its economic development full throttle. and companies began to move in large numbers to the south with desegregated schools and institutions. the sun belt economy was born in the south. those attitudes could not have been changed without the civil

rights laws. blacks and whites didn't get together in a room and say it's time now we began to talk to one another. the law was my great privilege to benefit of the title 7 of the 1964 civil rights act. the job discrimination act was seminal in getting people to be with one another, to talk with one another, to be supervised by one another. nothing could've promoted healing like that. the integration of the schools to some extent has been the same. but with the resegregation of the schools, it is not clear how much of that kind of among the fertilization among the races that many of us hoped for still

takes place. but many of the changed attitudes has been generational. let me read to you a short few paragraphs from a middle-aged woman. candid and makes a generational point i'm trying to make here. i grew up with a balanced view of the civil war. if by that you mean i was taug, lee high school, no less. that our side lost, hell the iast t still a confederate battle flag hanging in my father's garage, the same one that hung over my childhood bed until i was 18. this was written in april 25th, 2011. we were democrats, my grandfather told me in the '70s.

because lincoln was a republican. a decade later by the time i was in high school, my family would become reagan democrats. the type of folks who today populate the base of the older generation of the southern gop. and they made the switch totally along the culture fault lines dating back to the civil rights act, reconstruction, and civil war. this suggests that healing occurs because some people pass on, frankly, and the next generation -- the next generation whose views, world view, comes from a different context such as the civil rights movement is if you will forgive me more enlightened on issues such as race.

the civil war generation is still with us. they are the older generation associated with conservative politics. many republicans and many still living in the south. but if you look at the differences today between those blacks and those whites, even though they are starkly differe different, it would be hard to say that those attitudes weren't at least as much political today as racial. there is a fault line that carries over to be sure from

race of the past. but if you serve where i do in the house and have good friends and colleagues who represent such people and see how they vote, it is clear that the difference between them and me is largely a political difference what they have inherited and what i have inherited. there's interest in a congressional reconciliation caucus. but i caution you, members of congress coalesce the very busy people. they tepid to coalescer work, around issues. around events, around something that needs to be done. at the congressional level, it would be useful, perhaps, to speak of or indeed be present at times of racial division or

flare-ups. but there's not a great deal of racial flare-ups of that kind in this country on an ongoing basis. it seems to me that reconciliation commissions would be far more serviceable at the local level. because racial issues differ profoundly by location and races differ. so the whole notion that sitting here in washington we're going to reconcile the races across this great country might seem a bit arrogant if we weren't plugged in to where people are. is it black and white, is it hispanic and white? is it black and hispanic? both ascending groups who are

struggling offer for power against one another? who are you reconciling? is it the new asians who are often are found in the inner city marketplace? against who? the blacks or the whites or -- if you're going to reconcile, the first thing to understand is who you're reconciling. this is increasingly a multicultural, multinational conference and not that black country and not a black and white country. this is not the country of the civil war. and we better get used to it. already hispanics outnumber blacks. for most of my lifetime i talked about being a member of the largest minority group in the country. we are being left in the dust. and if that's all we had to be proud of, maybe we should have

been. i'm intrigued, very intrigued by the growth of this bilingual minority in our country that is growing so fast. and will change the country in every conceivable way and may for the first time make us speak something other than just english, bless their hearts. yes, there's a role for national leaders, particularly for the president of the united states who alone can set the tone as no other leader or group of leaders can. he is often in a position to foster reconciliation of every kind economic, racial. on a reconciliation caucus, i'm not heard a lot of talk about what to do or how to proceed. some caucuses are very active in the congress, others are

virtually dormant. they list -- they exist in name only. what determines a caucus in the congress? usually is a group that is pressing and is ascending and needs spokesmanship in the congress. so the black caucuses and congressional hispanic caucus and congressional women's caucus, the usual suspects, or people who press legislation like the pro-choice caucus or the republican study group. and most plentiful of all are the critical issue caucuses like congressional bike caucus, congressional climate caucus, congressional food safety, and all of those. and i don't know the last time i'm going to a meeting of any of them. yet, the caucuses do exist because together when there's a need and when we can do something and do come. the challenge for any

congressional reconciliation caucus is defined what needs to be done at the national level to get member interest, to get member participation, and make sure members can do anything about it. there may be such issues. i don't doubt there are. but i leave you with a notion it is a challenge to be serious about what role congress or members of congress wish to play a role of reconciliation to define it and then get busy doing something about it. thank you very much. >> very rich presentation. longer than we planned, but every word i hung on. we have about 20 minutes for

questions and discussion. this is an interactive forum. and we have mikes, so first hands up. >> i'm from a state that didn't exist at the time of the civil war, oklahoma. and i spent most of my professional career outside the country. when i've coming back to the united states, especially with a conflict resolution background, i was struck by how much -- and this really addresses this issue of the collective memory, come much of the symbols and the things we see visually and what we're hearing a lot about during this centennial that really promote a culture of conflict and a culture of war. i would like to mention three things. the statuary, the monuments we see everywhere around us, the battlefield that we all like to visit that celebrate war. and thirdly, and i think this may be the most sensitive one because it does come at the time of these anniversaries, and that

is the recreation of the battles. now, these are things that i don't know how we do that. do we relegate the statues to museums? do we cancel all of the celebrations of the recreations of the battles? i don't know. i thought it was very good to hear congresswoman norton to refer to the civil rights movement as one of the main counteracting factors of helping to create a culture of reconciliation. thank you. >> reaction? >> -- and we were talking about the radio show about what we should do about the statues on monument avenue since they have come up again. and somebody said should we take those down? and christy said no, what we need to do is put up signs telling people where they came from. people don't know those were put up 50 years after the war for very explicit sort of racial

politics. and that people to think those sort of grew out of the ground sort of a natural formation out of memory. and so i thought it was wise to say best way to combat history is not by taking it down, but other history that puts in context and shows we're always living. i thought that was a wise suggestion. i think you can do some of the things with the military, that are not going to go away. but think about, why were they here fighting? what was this for? so i think hijacking these sort of manifestations that you're talking about might be our best strategy. >> i would add too that -- sorry. first of all, battlefields don't just glorify war. i mean they certainly have. and until recently, maybe that was their primary function, but the national park service is now doing remarkably good things with telling stories of civil

war at battlefield sites. just one quick example. the new visitor's center at gettysburg which opened two or three years ago is superb. a lot of us worked on it over the years as consultants. and particularly the orientation zone. i was stunned at how good it is. i'm always prepared to not like the orientation zones because they're not made for us, they're made for a public. and usually they're sort of disappointing. this one not only had morgan freeman as the narrater, which is a good move, but it's so good i couldn't hardly believe it. and i walked out in tears because i didn't think i'd live to see that. they're great teaching centers, they don't have to be about glorifying war. i'm not for tearing down any monument. leave them all up and teach with them. there's a guy in texas, i won't name him, who has been on a personal crusade for years to take down every robert e. limee

monument, marker, memorial, or sentence anywhere in the public united states. and he used to try to enlist -- started with franklin, actually, and many, many other of us historians to crusade with him to take down -- he started in dallas, texas. basically we all told him the same thing, put up alternative monuments, work for alternative commemorations. you're not going to take down all the lee monuments and you shouldn't. >> let me just -- let me just -- add a couple things to that. first of all, we have a group of reenactors that is associated. we have women that dress in a period of dress, we have guys that wear uniforms, i have an officer's uniform. >> you're the president. >> well, i -- i took augusta just so y'all won't think i made this up. he was an officer in the civil war. he was trained in canada, and he

came here to be a doctor in what started out to be a clinic at a contraband camp and later became the basis of a hospital. he was a real person. now, there's one thing that takes place when somebody in new uniform, somebody in a confederate uniform, but somebody, an african-american civil war and a union uniform with a lapel. and so actually when i was calling, i said, well, you know, we've got to find a way to put another angle on this. we deliberately go to many of these places, including gettysburg, for the last eight or ten years, we march in the parade because this is just -- these things become a sorority fight, fraternity fight. going about their business again until we show up and remind people thais