tv American History TV CSPAN October 31, 2014 10:59pm-1:07am EDT
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not the french and spafrnish war. thank you everybody for coming. i appreciate it. let's get those hawkeyes this weekend. with live coverage of the house and senate on c-span 2, here on c-span 3 we show you the most relevant hearings and publish affairs event on on weekend c-span 3 is the home to american history tv with programs that tell our nation's story including six unique series. the 350th anniversary visiting battle fields and key events. american artifacts touring museums and to discover what artifacts reveal about america's past. the bookshelves with the west known american history writers. presidency look at policy and legacies of commanders in chief. lectures in history, delving into america's past. real america featuring
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government and educational films from the 1930s through the 70s. c-span 3 created by the cable tv industry and funded by your local cable or satellite provider. watch us in hd. like us on facebook and follow us on twitter. >> next on american history tv in prime type, discussion about the brother hoofd sleeping car porters. one of the first unions in the united states. and timothy wolteres talks about king james's war from the 1740s between european colonial powers. next on american history tv a panel discussion on the history and legacy of the brotherhood of sleeping car porters one of the first african-american labor car unions in the united states. randolph who helped organize the union as well as the struggles
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of female members. they also discuss the national park services members to help preserve the neighborhood of chicago where many of the railroad workers lived in eerily 20th century. this is hosted by the association for the study of african-american life and history. it is about two hours. >> thanks everybody for coming today. we have a great panel today. my name is alan spears, i'm the director of cultural resources from the national parks association based out of washington, d.c. npca served as leading voice of the american people on behalf of their national parks since we were founded in 1919. and it is our mission to protect and enhance america's national parks for current and future generations and we are a very, very proud partner of aslh, association, and a partnership that i take great pleasure in
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and i'm grateful to the association for hosting their 99th annual conference. that's a big accomplishment, and look forward to work with them on their centennial next year. that's quite a thing to look forward to. we have a couple of objectives today. we will take about two hours to chat with you. about some very important topics. a phillip randolph, sleeping car porters and ongoing campaign to commemorate that legacy by adding a unit to the national parks system on chicago's south side. that will commemorate george pullman, industrialist, capitalist, model town, labor strike and unrest associated with that community and the mergens of the sleeping car partors and a phillip randolph. we have two connected that we will talk to you about today. i just wanted to say before we get started, if people could make sure if you got a cell phone, please place it on silent or vibrate or turn it off.
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just so we don't have birds chirping and portions of moez mozart symphony in the presentation as we go forward. a hardworking entrepreneur and as a businessman he traveled on sleeping cars in the decade prior to the civil war. anti-bellum period. he found them to be mostly cramped and mostly uncomfortable. after a couple other business ventures that were successful, he decided to launch himself into the industry of creating luxurious sleeping cars that could accommodate high end travellers that would allow them to travel by rail and do so in luxury. now he was successful from the start, just before the american civil war. one of the things that happened to sort of expedite the fame and fortune of the forman company was linked to the assassination of president abraham lincoln. when lincoln's body was sent back to springfield illinois, the train that took lincoln or his body back to his hometown
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add couple of pullman cars attached to it. and at every stop the reporters would lament on the untimely death of the president but also comment on the luxurious plnatu of the cars and they became something of an overnight sensation in that regard. so business got a boom from the tragedy of the association of the president. after the civil war, pullman did decide that maybe some of the best work force for porters working on his luxurious sleeping cars would be formerly enslaved african-americans. he felt that for the reasoning at the time was that these people would know how to work in close with white clientele but yet not get in the way. and pullman went on to be one of the largest employers in the united states. that led to the emergence of the brother hoofd sleeping car porters and ultimately a phillip randolph as a leader of that
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union. and we will get to the other aspects of pullman's industrial struggles. the union. and we will have our panel's experts talk about that and i want to introduce folks that will be sharing this information with you today. we've got dr. cornelius byron from cornell university and is it university of pennsylvania, university of pennsylvania. i think we have university of maryland in your program so please note that correction. sandra washington, the associate regional director from the national park service. and senior average coordinator for the conservation association. we will have presentation from each of our panelists running about 15 minutes or so. and we will have dialogue, and panelists and follow-up questions and use the last half our of the session for interaction with the audience with questions an answers from people out there. so if you have questions, be prepared to ask them. we have the mic up here up
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front. and if you don't want to move down and use the mic, use your loud outdoor voice and start thinking of some responses to the presentations that we will hear. i would like to turn it over to dr. bien am. >> thank you for being here. i will give you a brief background on myself. it is a way of coming to understand my journey with randolph as a research topic. i'm originally from louisville, kentucky and went to school at university of virginia where i did my undergraduate work and graduate work and it was during those years between sort of 19 to 21 or something like that, where i really kind of came to an epiphany about history and my life that led me to randolph as a topic. my freshman year, first semester, i took a history course, and we were talking
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about black soldiers in the war. first war, rather. and it got me to thinking about my own kind of personal narrative. and i wept home over the winter break and began quizzing older relatives about the '40s and the war and that sort of thing and come to find out that several of my relatives, including my father, i'm not as old as you might think. but my father fought in the second world war. i like to say that my father was the original rolling stone. but that might be too much swagger for the session. but the important thing here is that my ferj's cousins, my father stationed in europe, he was stationed in the pacific. share with me letters that my father had written from europe back home, pictures of my father in uniform. and this kind of sparked my imagination about the narrative of the black experience in the 20th century. and this began my journey toward
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graduate school, a doctorate, and ultimately a book on randolph. and so, i sort of give that biography as a way to kind of understand how i see randolph and the struggle that he leads to pursue an agenda of economic justice, of social justice. that in fact bridges the -- i don't want to say divide in civil rights or economic justice, but in some ways those two things are repaired but randolph in my mind is central to the link that connects these kind of reform agendas. so i began my dissertation with the title, fighting for identity, a phillip randolph reconciliation of race and class and that sounded like a great title to me as graduate student.
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not so great now, but ultimately, it became the basis of my book a phillip randolph and in that book i try to detail four key things that i think are central about randolph and his role in the modern civil rights movement that there is a struggle for social just tlas begins to take shape and in the first or second decade in the 20th century and runs into the 20th century. some people might argue that it begins continuing today and maybe a different form, different shape. but the four point i try toly out with randolph in my study of his career really between say 1915 and 1955, first i look at randolph's effort to engineer a program of mass action. and when i say mass action, i mean mass action in mean mass action in the
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traditional form where you're gathering a group of people to take some sort of concerted initiative to reform social processes, social circumstances that are oppressive to them. and that's how i sort of imagined mass action and sort of write about it. and randolph really is at the forefront of this kind of social reform initiative. beginning withi its march on washington movement and creation of fair employment practices commission and the first -- sorry, the first administrative effort to implement a kind of equal employment policy on the government. this is a really important kind
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of innovation for the civil rights movement. it really becomes the basis for other mass action campaigns. to follow. certainly, in the 1960s. now i don't want to suggest that randolph was the initiator of mass action. certainly, you had things like the don't buy where you can't work campaigns that go all the way back to the 1920s in new york. the -- sorry, the pittsburgh couriers double d campaign can be viewed as mass action. strategy. these things existed. what i think randolph does in a really important way. is take those kind of campaigns that while very coherent in their articulation. maybe less coherent in the application and bring them together with a particular
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constituent group, right? and this really becomes one of the innovations that i see randolph sort of pushing forward when it comes to mass action campaigns, linking a specific program with a specific group to lead it, right? as opposed to the couriers call for double campaign but not really targeting a specific group to lead that campaign or local organizations, organizing these economic boycotts of stores that don't hire black employees but aren't focused on mobilizing a constituent group to lead that effort. randolph in my view is innovative under that respect, taking a concept mass action and really giving it a kind of con vietnam form. in ways that hadn't existed before and really kind of sort of lay the ground work for what will come later in the '50s and '60s. secondly, i try to point out
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that randolph is particularly astute in how he understands the way in which minority groups can maneuver effectively in the context of american interest groups politics. before anyone else, randolph understood that when possessing limited political leverage, the most effective place to apply that leverage is not the congress. is not the legislative body with multiple politicians all with their own agenda but rather the executive branch where one person controls policy. whether it be the governor or the president. and this becomes an incredibly important vehicle for political and social change moving forward. prior to randolph's march on washington movement, which led to his pressuring of roosevelt and the creation of the sepc,
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most of the civil rights groups, particularly the naacp, looked to congress. this is true with the anti-lynching campaign that was pursued through the' 20s and '30s that came to nothing where you could always have a block of southern congressmen that would stall any potential legislation that they deemed sort of a nacima to the racial politics. but the new deal when the political landscape shifts for democrats in particular, where you have this political coalition of urban dwellers, people who move to cities, emerging -- i shouldn't say emerging, but a more coherent labor movement but democrats from the north are certainly much more responsive to the kind of -- the kind of political demands that someone like randolph begins making in the late '30s and '40s.
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so understanding how limited political leverage could be best applied to greatest effect is a really important thing. and randolph understands before anyone else that in those circumstances, african-americans had the best chance of affecting public policy by pressuring the executive branch and not the legislative branch. of course this becomes the model that we see going forward. king certainly has relationships with various members of congress but the most celebrated political relationship that king has is with the kennedy brothers, right? executive branch whether the president or attorney general and this becomes an important kind of model for civil rights activism moving forward from randolph in the '40s and onward. thirdly, i think randolph understands better than anyone else that the notion of social justice of genuine social
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justice isn't something tied to necessarily to race or class, but rather to the degree to which an individual's prepared to be a faithful citizen. if someone is prepared to, for instance, serve in the military, that person should be able to operate freely as a full citizen, full partner, in a civil society. and so for randolph, civil rights should be based on the degree to which any person, man, woman, black, white or other is prepared it fulfill the duties and accept the responsibilities of fateful full citizenship. and so this becomes his conception of social justice. which is somewhat different than sort of the socialist conception that really kind of focuses on sort of a labor theory of value meaning that brokers are the ones who produce and therefore
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the ones who should benefit from those products, if that makes any sense. but rather to say that citizenship isn't bred by class. citizenship isn't bred by race. citizenship isn't bred by gender. citizenship is bred by a willingness to fulfill a -- the duty, the citizenship. he has this great line where he says that since all man are a people contributing to progress, all should ben frefit from that progress and this is his conception of civil rights, what constitutes genuine social justice. a equal tarian or a more egal tarian humanism than it is a kind of straight forward either left progressive orientation around identity, whether it be class, race or gender. and something much more expansive. and then lastly, randolph really
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has this important realization about the nature of what civil rights looks like. it is not simile the right to vote or right to serve in a desegregated military. but it is about the right to earn a living wage. that the federal government should be in the business of securing not only civil rights but economic opportunity. this was the full measure of what civil rights meant to randolph. and of course this is what would be around johnson in the civil budget, which is 15 billion, which sound relatively small in today's currency, but $15 billion budget initiative to combat poverty. right? but this is no different than really king's poor people's program, right? poor people's movement. in the late 1960s. and so, in all of these ways, i
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argue that randolph really tries to -- or really does in fact provide important philosophical organizational and sort of actionable leadership for the civil rights movement that's become. and we can talk more about what those -- about some of the implications of those ideas are for contemporary labor race and gender politics. i won't prept randolph as a grand progressive because as mindi will point out, he is a man with flaws. but i didn't mean to sort of put that onus on you. and my intent here is to say that as i teach my student, the great thing about history is
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that it shows us that even flawed people can do great things. whether it be randolph, abraham lincoln, king himself, all of john kennedy, all of these people have their particular flaws and in -- in an odd way, they are linked around the way in which gender prays out socially. although lincoln perhaps not so much. but nonetheless, you can have flaws and still have tremendous impact on not only your immediate sort of contemporary sort of circumstances but also in the way people see in the future and so that's what i try to teach my student and so that is someone like randolph or king or others particularly here in memphis are so important. and so i guess with that, i'll probably pass the baton on to someone who can speak more coherently more than i, perhaps. and we can maybe come back to some of these issues as we go forward in our discussion.
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>> good afternoon. i really don't mind being the critic but i do feel a little bit -- i do want to thank you about some of the things you said because i don't think i can actually tell you the story as to how i got to a phillip randolph. well i can. well, i will do that. when i was a graduate student at howard university, i actually met rosina caruthers, the secretary treasurer, of the brotherhood of sleeping car quarters and i got together over to their house and got to know for a few years before she passed. and then went when she passed, i was given the responsibility to go and clean out her house because we would were donating the house. she left everything to the leadership conference of civil right. so i got to go clean out her house and of course, within that
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i found her autobiography. i found boxes of auxiliary material. i found all of the papers from her first husband, caruthers, who, as you may know, a harlem renaissance pilot, activist including unpublished manuscr t manuscripts and it was very interesting. when she died, she was 106 years old. and yet she still didn't slow down. when somebody would try and walk her from place to place in her house and you tried to, you know, you do that old person shuffle. and if you are going to -- just let me go by myself. and always the way she short of approached, i think, life. and another quick story about letter which i think people may appreciate and a title and other papers and i'm not talking about here and she had a fondness, a true liking, i would even say a love for a red dress.
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and she wanted to be buried. and she was very clear about that despite the fact members of her presbyterian church felt this might not be most appropriate thing for an elderly woman to be buried in. she got letter way of course. that's how i came to start working on the brotherhood of sleeping car quarters and particularly thinking about some of the things that mrs. tucker had talked about. some of the things that i also knew from other research that i had done. so one of the things that i had focused -- i actually have a formal paper that i may or may not have and i probably won't just in the interest of time, but one of the things of course that led to doing this work, the book in the brotherhood of sleeping car quarters is to think about the sexism with which randolph has been accused on more than one occasion by many people. both buying fers and
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contemporaries. and sometimes, and this is just wait it actually works. what we now see in hindsight as sexism does not consider sexism in a prejudicial way at the time he was operating. and most of the many years he was operating, i think obviously he, you know, it is part of the conversation. and in the 1920s, '30s, '40s and 1950s and up through the march on washington, the kind of sexism that he practiced, or he believed in, i think stemmed from his view about what i call man hood rights. what i called man hood rights. and that is the view that the notion of equality and some of this goes to what cornelius was saying and the quality is to measure how equal black men were
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to white men. how equal black women were to white women. so this was not a competitive kind of -- it was a sex segregated kind of equality, if you don't mind me calling it that. and different model of working on different issues and approaching different issues. and of course, yes. reinforced male privilege. and yes of course it stunted women's potential for leadership and particularly as leaders of men. that would have been something that was to, you know, almost everybody in that movement and in that time. and but there's also another part of that and that's where it gets into what i call the politics of respectability. but by that, i mean that to have women act in a role or to do things that seem to defy society's accepted role of women.
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undermine claim for civil rights. if black women had to go out to work but white women did not, then what you are doing is you're creating a situation of inequality of black women vis-a-vis white women. and in politics of respectability was not even -- and i just talked about work, but that's not so much, it had a lot do with public behavior and a lot do with caruthers tucker wearing the red dress too, frankly. but these are kinds of things that i spent time looking at. and so when we talk about sexism and about political representation in that time. and i think that the other way to think about this in terms of randolph and you know, i think you said too very well, cornell, is that i know you could call randolph also to see things based on his political philosophy goals and beliefs.
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but i like to think of him as an organizer. and i think approaching him as somebody who was in some ways that consummate political organizer, that this gives us a different view, too, of the ways that he organized movements. the by's approach had the participation of women in those movements, and basically the way that women themselves viewed him and their role in those movements. what i thought was, in other words, despite, he had many victors and a few spectacular failures. and i think we have to not forget those. and i don't think that's criticizing, but it's true. but you know, as i said, failed to recognize women and he refused to support effort that would apolish sex discrimination in the workplace. he did not support the equal rights amendment but that of course the way the movement did not. he did not support equal pay for women. but again, most people in the labor movement did not.
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and i think these are some of the things that you could criticize him for his political or policy stats but i think there's another way of looking what he in fact did. i think that what you look at is to think about the ways he deployed women in these movement. basically he had three roles. i associate this in my article. but it has been the chapter in the book we're doing. and women were either very traditional, either mothers, they were teachers or they were wives. of course that's one lesson but those three roles for randolph were the most important ones. and this meant -- this is the kind of sexism but it did not mean that women couldn't participate in the social justice movement in trade union organizing. women could and more importantly did raise money. they made introductions, gave randolph into various community. couldn't otherwise get involved
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in. they got together with grass roots supporters, pushed through all of that office grunt work. and one of the things that you know, you don't people tend to dpoer get about in organizing the campaign, know that there's a labor intensive part to doing that. anyone who knows that getting out the vote means going from door to door. it also means and think about this before computers. this is before, you know, sometimes before many of the machines and where you know, you are typing all those letters. you are making telephone calls. you are sending telegrams and sometimes you just, you know, literally are going door to door stuff. so that kind of organizing and in fact sometimes out organizing opposition, doesn't depend on charismatic men. it does but it doesn't. what it depend on is a massive volunteers. these are largely women. almost all women who perform those tasks who actually
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produced the monster rallies on the march on washington movement two produced activity and mass organizing and mass action that cornelius refers to. and this is not something of course that was exclusive to randolph. i think that what we now call civic engagement what's in fact at the time mostly women's work. and that's, you know, if you think about it, that's a different way of looking that the. and that the way we look at civic engagement in the mid toth century. there is a habit of refusing to acknowledge women's participation. and that tends to reinforce the gender bias of modern political activism and american citizenship. and one of the ways this comes out then is to think about the ways that what happens when that sexism comes to the fore. alice baker is known for criticism she made in the late
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19 as but she is said to criticize much earlier when she was working with randolph in the '30s. wally murray, the reverend or lawyer or the great activists was one of randolph's proteges an she claims the term jane crow to describe sex aggregation. baker, murray, anna arnold headsman who we will talk about later all privately question the sexism that went on during the 1940s and organizing march on washington movement and organizing national council for permanent fpc and other things that randolph wasn't involved in. but it was not really until the march on washington, until 1963, that the debate about male prif lemg became a public one. it was then that jane crow had to go. it was then that the pink tees, notion of having women decorate the room, make the coffee, type
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the memos and run the mineograph machines was questioned. we can see this kind of deployment of women in these capacities of wife, of teacher, of mother throughout randolph's career. when we look at the latest au auxiliary, we are really talking about the wives. of pullman workers who were there putting together and they had this role of not just bringing together other women but also to teach their men how important mass organization was. randolph recognized unless have you that united front you weren't getting in and i think that's important. but the gender division of lanor despite randolph's belief in it he also clearly rejected the notion by other black leaders
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that women's public activism would take away from their respectability. so he did challenge sexism in the sense he didn't say you have to stay home, he said can you do these things, please come down to the office and help us make these phone calls and make the coffee and the rest of it. this is fine work for you to do. in other work, in other campaigns, there was a decided effort that women didn't need to be there. this is something to think about in terms of the way he challenged it in just by keeping and and giving women this opportunity to do it. because tlaf there were women who had full-time, though temporary, movement jobs. there were times when few people did. and this provide training for later leadership roles that they had. at least a dozen black african-american women who worked for him who became the powerful social justice
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advocates under their own right. for example, as i mentioned, ella baker is someone he worked with in the 1930s. and later as we all know, became the genius behind the student coordinating committee. pauly murray who organized the mass protest against the execution of shared cropper odell waller and later helped found the national organization for women. dorothy heights, long reigning president of the council of negro women is also spln, whoed with randolph. anna arnold hedgeman from the council permanent for fpc and later part of the cabinet of new york city mayor robert wagner. the legendary leader of the teachers and e. paul lien meyers, based on harlem in new york and as i also said, mrs. tucker who was part of the
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ladies auxiliary but from the impoverished african youth and with her own naacp award and everything else throughout her life. those are are the kinds of things that by being able to participate women did learn leadership and become activist in their own rights. so than of course we get to the march on washington. the march for jobs, peace -- jobs and freedom. i was at the '83 march and i know that's. right for the '63 march. if you think about the march as it was originally conceived, a phillip ran do. who decided in december of 1962 they marked the he is not ten yl area of the emancipation proclamation but the momentum for that and endorsements and support for that march, that would come in august '63, burst in over time and in the eevent
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of that summer, and ending in police dogs and fire hoses and fascination in mississippi, that same night, now if you think about this, there are a lot of things going on. president kennedy of course today respond to these events and famously held a nationally televised address in which he announced his intention to sound a civil rights bill to the congress. and king in return responded calling for a massive military monumental fit-ins on congress that would insure its passage. but king's call for massive acts of civil disobedience under washington, turned into an order order orderly celebratory movement on washington. but there's a sub plot i want to draw attention to in this story. and this begins, i go back to
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kennedy. kennedy, of course, the beginning of his administration showed more interest than women's issues than he did on issues of race or discrimination. he established a federal commission on the status in which he made dorothy chair. the charge of the commission was not merely to issue a statement supporting equality of opportunity but instead to suggest affirmative steps to see that doors are really opening for training, selection, advancement and equal pay for women. of course as i mentioned, equal pay legislation was controversial. and randolph, as i said, did not support it because he thought, like other labor leaders that if women were given equal pay, that would allow employers to drop the wages of men. that was overcome and the act prevailed and kennedy signs that
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bill into law on june 10th, 1963. the next day, birmingham, o'connor letting loose doings and fire pressure hoses and firing a shotgun multiple times and murdering the leader of the mississippi naacp. as a result, what came out of this is this uneasy coalition of the civil right groups. and 1,000 people, 2,000 buses as well as planes, trains and automobiles. and this is not all day all night kind of thing. and in the headquarters in harlem, and jobs to volunteers interestingly not as sex segregated as one would imagine
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that had been in the campaigns. and one of the people he brought on is as he said, directed to the naacp from 1943 to 1946 and she was the second deputy director. so two decades and change after the postponed '41 march, african-american and white women began to organize for themselves to protest the exclusion from positions of power from recognition offish ice of concern to women. now dorothy hyde and her memoirs, recall that the march was the vital awake krening and she and others were shocked when there was no need to include a woman speaker of the march. because quote women were part of the groups and therefore represented the podium. and in hooit hyde's opinion, thank you for inviting me, and
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in hyde's opinion this pronounced that men honestly don't understand or see the patronizing. there is no question as to who headed the household. women were artistic performers and the only foe mail voices were marion anderson aep jesse or joan baez and majara jackson. and to be seen but not heard, and calling other african-american women to protest. and of course it was criticized. support stop including women to take the focus off race. you hear that before? yet as hyde pointed out, though the vast majority of civil right leaders nationally and locally were male, most of the audience were largely comprised of women. ethel payne who goes way back to her association with randolph by
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being a native chicagoan and daughter of a porter herself and member of the chicago mass rally for march on washington movement called randolph out on his sexism. by 1963, she was a distinguished journal for the chicago defender and only the second african-american woman to be admitted to the white house press corps. she publicly chided roon dofl for failing to include a single woman's speaker in her defender column. in light of the role women played in struggle for freedom and in light of the extra burdens they carry and it is incredible that no woman should appear as speaker. she in fact suggested that august 28th be named rosa parks day in honor to recognize parks' contribution to the movement. one of the designated march leaders after all, part of the
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big six group, but urban league had done almost norgt freedom movement. and in the contrast for the members initiated several programs and funded many more including ten educational and rec rec eracingal centers. where all of the public schools were still closed ad and had been closed in the wake of brown versus borg. mother of randolph protege who needed a law professor at yale saw it as another case of jane crow. and she was bitterly for negro women to see little more than token recognition for the smar march on washington. and she too called out randolph especially when he chose to address the national press club, an organization that excluded female journalists including ethel payne in days before the march.
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randolph apparently saw no relationship between being sent to the balcony and sent to the back of the bus. he failed to see the supporting the violation of the very principle for which he was fighting. the human rights are indivisible. and acting like a member of the entrenched power group of women's inequality and for height, what randolph showed was an immovable force. and nothing they say broke the impact to block the anticipation. aep they are working for randolph and pressure politics of her own. and writing a memo to randolph he ignored her. he didn't say anything about it. so she sent it to the other five, other big six leaders and she is writing a memo wopt be enough she went out aep raised $14,000 to pay for it.
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and so they couldn't turn it down because she raised that money app at that point it was then that randolph agreed to conduct what he called the tribute to women and introduced the women platform. the result in 142 words speech, and a tweet, and the tweet version began with praises of truth and harriet tubman in a speech that sounded very similar to the 194. address but randolph to the ladies auxiliary in which they concluded the brotherhood was the boss. i will just remind you. no women gave a speech of their own. and bait, parks, mas, richardson and widow mrs. herbert lee. and from france wearing her medal but when lena horne tried in the interest of television reporter into interviewing rosa parks, someone opt march
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committee saw it and sent horn back to her room in a taxi. >> the day after the march the national council of women league considered the road ahead. hyte thought to focus on the women obscure the problems and focus on discrimination of most effected women. descent housing care, schooling and employment. council quickly went into action and the first program, and one of the first problematic results and what was became known as wednesdays in mississippi. then in october of that year, paula murray spoke at the convention. and spoke about the two decades of the two decades of jane crow treatment by black male leaders. and the march on washington was evidence to assign women to a secondary ornamental or honoree role. she called instead for a
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partnership. partnership that could attack sex discrimination that created the wide disparities between men and women in education, life expectancy and employment and income. she said that these differences made all women subordinate to men and it was crystal year that the fight against discrimination because of sex had to be fought simultaneously with the civil rights struggle. so 50 years later that partnership is still widely unrealized. african-american women who fought against sex discrimination, found they had more success with other women and white women's organization. organizations that we pass for example, and the provision in title 7, the unploimt act that included a prohibition against sex discrimination. now there is a whole story behind that and some of you
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know, but that did happen. and so the practices commission because they never included a sex discrimination part and often however, black women have found that they have not had the massive to engage in pressure politics that against male civil right leaders and in order to force the women's issues the address. and biepders full of women but when black women rally against sexism and call for the inclusion of black girls and presidential initiative or when they ask for the appointment of black women to policy administrative, they are criticized still for being unnecessarily, and african-american men continue to lead civil rights organizations even into the 21st century and
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that glass ceiling that jane crow are in place. thank you. >> and you make it very hard for federal policy. my name is sandra washington. >> okay, great. >> my name is sandra washington. i work for the national park service. as alan said i'm associate regional director in the midwest region and i would rather instead of talking about what i do right now, i'll tell you about what i do -- what i have done in the past. when it came to the national park service, i had worked for a state department of natural resources and i thought that my highest and best career choice could be as either a field ecologist, or as a forester measuring timber. and those are the things that i studied in school and i thought the people were interesting but not essential.
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and it was meant go in that direction and i came to the national park association and the regional planning and you will do community -- you will do a sort of community park service. it does interesting things outside the national parks. and i was challenged to consider things a lot more interesting than i might have thought otherwise and the other part of my job at the beginning was to look at places for their potential to become national parks. so i became a person who, a planner who worked on special resource studies. and had the clahance to get in d learn stories. and foster a great love of history. and the only other time i have been to the association meeting
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was a lifetime in city. and i went and presented a paper on nick deemus, all black western community in kansas and i think i had just finished that study but it was prior to the legislation passing to create a national historic site from that community. and i think my -- the best thing about that meeting is that i met captain anderson, a tus ka gee airman who taught the men to fly. and it was an afternoon with them. it was wonderful. >> i'm talking a little bit about the national parks services and involvement in pullman. and as alan had said, pullman was a community. and it was separate and later brought in to the city of chicago. and the national park service has been involved or interested in pullman.
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and just ahead of that, we authored a nomination form for the entire neighborhood both the residences and industrial core of the factory core as national historic landmark. so it is a historic district, recognized by the national park service and with that designation of nhl, landmark, comes some benefits and some encouragement for preservation. but no absolute preservation mandate by the federal government to step in and to make certain things get preserved. in 1997, national park service undertook a labor theme study and part of that labor theme study talked about looking at pullman as a national park and this is where i had my first introduction to pullman. and also suggested that the nhl nomination advised to expand the themes or ideas that they found nationally significant there. the assessment of the park came
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about just as the clock tower administration building was burning. so we started to look at it, the building burnt down. the south end of the factory was completely demolished. the clock tower, most of it fell on the north factory but not as badly. so i got to see the site once before the burn. the fire. the arson. then a number of times afterwards. but in doing that assessment, we realized they were such a strong core of support at the state level and at the city level, that we didn't see a particular role for the park service the stated just stepped in and said we are going to reconstruct the city was very involved and all of the neighborhood groups were very focused and we only saw one place for us to be and said that one place is fairly small and it is going to be very expensive. we have such a positive group of people here. we're going to step away and let -- we will support them in
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other ways but won't look for designation or work toward them. at the time i had been speaking with a very young congressman who had just gotten elected to office, jackson junior, and i said you know, could you ask us to do a special resource study, a formal special resource study. because we're not allowed do those unless we can do congressional requests through legislation. and at the time he said he didn't want to spend his political clips in that way. because he was very new. and i understand you don't say a national park looks like gravy to some people when there is something much more important probably jobs and economy. so we look that early in late '09s, early 200s and then stepped away.0s and then stepped away. there is a large ground swell of
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interest at pullman. we put out a reconnaissance survey of pullman. we had been asked by a much more senior congressman jackson junior along with two senators, and please do a reconnaissance survey which is small study and not the same intense study to dpor a resource study but we look at the same criteria. the criteria for national significance. we look at whether or not it is a suitable place for a national park and whether or not it is feasible. we put out the reconnaissance survey and we basically confirm that pullman is nationally significant all of the themes and stories of pullman are nationally significant. but we also saw that the original nomination for it was weak and weak in one particular area and that's the story of the pullman porters. and end labor to some degree as well. spent a lot of time talking
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about the urban planning and the design and architecture of the community. we talk a lot about george pullman himself and how he pulled himself up by his boot straps. he is an entrepreneur. very incentive. industrial history. but they don't talk much about labor and they don't talk about the porters. there is a lot of attention on pullman as of late. in january of this past year, senator durbin, durk and kelly, all submitted legislation on the same day for a pullman national historic park. and since then, and there's been more interest in the executive branch of government, the director of the park service, secretary of the ip tierory are both interested. and they are so interested this they said, your reconnaissance survey was never supposed to reach a definitive conclusion on any of the criteria, we don't
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have the money or time do that. but we have the national significance and we said it is suitable but never got in to see because of time constraint and money constraint. we want you to spend some time now with the feasibility of the pullman historic district as a national park. so that's what i've been doing this summer. i spent my summer in chicago. and in libraries and in talking to lots and lots of people. about whether or not this could be feasible. and talking to lots of different organizations, reaching out to different groups of people and saying, well if this were a national park, what would, you know, a lot of those, what if questions, we had -- we took the time in august to do a public meeting in the community of pullman. i know that lleeann will talk about that so i won't steal the
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thunder there. there is a legislative pathway and congresswoman kelly and both senators durbin and kirk have initiate thread and they are very interested and they are trying to put that through congress. congresswoman kelly has done a magnificent job in lining up almost 40 co-sponsor for her bill in the house bipartisan. which is a feat in and of itself. kirk and durbin themselves, one is a republican and so that's a bipartisan effort in the senate. the other way to do it, is by executive action. if the director and secretary support or think it's interesting or valuable to have a national park in a place, they can write a memo. director writes the secretary and secretary can write her boss. and suggest that the president use the antiquities act to confirm or designate a national
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park or national monument. in this case, at pullman. that has not yet happened. so when the director was in chicago. and he told all of the folks of the meeting well we're still working on the feasibility he made a point of looking at it and saying i still had work do. i was nearly done with my assessment and drafted what i thought they should tell the secretary and what the secretary should tell her boss. but it hasn't as of yet but maybe it will. i certainly hope that at some point in the near future, if something happens, and you might ask why is the park service interested in pullman. and why now. and we have a lot of other place tlaes we care for and budget doesn't look so great. we're no different than the rest of the federal government and all of the services it tries to
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provide for the united states. and i'm going to tell you a very short story. i'm going to try and channel the director, director john jagus. he is passionate about the responsibility the park service has about telling the whole story of america. 98 years ago congress created the national park service and we were charged with the responsibility of managing those places that rejuvenate us. natural and cultural and historical artifacts that inspire us and reflect the multiplicity of american heritage. congress said both places should be set aside and preserved for future generations to enjoy and to learn from. four years ago our director, john jarvis challenged us with his call to action as a way to rejuvenate us and to focus on our mission. he charged us to reach back to our initial charge and then reach forward to put that ideal
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into practice for the 21st century. he charged us to look for opportunities to work outside of park boundaries to tackle broad landscape conversation and climate change. he charged us to tell stories and bring neglected histories to the for front. stories and bring neglected histories to the full front. in short he told us to put our heritage into the places and stories that we tell. pullman gives us that opportunity. the pullman palace car company and model town are well preserved. example of 19th century urban planning and architecture. i told you i have a degree in urban planning so i do appreciate that but the company and the workers played large roles in the history of labor and manufacturing in the history of the united states. those too are also important but
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it's the story of the porters which is an important american chapter in our history and civil rights movement that has captured the attention of the director but many of the people who work for the park service and it has captured the attention of the people in the pullman neighborhood and around the country. i want to mimic something or repeat something. you said a. philip randolph had a different spin. he didn't look at -- he didn't take the socialist view but he said that all contribute, all benefit. the national park service looks at our mission that same way that we look at the contributions of all of america and we want to make certain that all of america benefits from those places that we care for. [ applause ]
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>> good afternoon everyone. as alan mentioned i'm with the national parks conservation association midwest regional office and we're in chicago. my name is leaaron foley so only a 90 minute flight if you want to go out so the site that holes such a cultural significance. so i'd like to start out by saying -- as was mentioned earlier on this panel, many african-americans in the early 20th century looked toward congress for its leadership. that leadership was regarding civil rights. it was regarding the protection of african-americans across the country; post slavery and into this jim crow and jane joe scro society that existed. today we continue to look to congress for leadership. this leadership takes the form
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of preserving those stories of the fight for civil rights in this country, for the fights of those protections, for the fight to preserve our own history as a country and that history includes, of course, the african-american story. what we want from congress is for them to take the responsibility to continue taking the responsibility to preserve american's national and cultural heritage and that leadership is needed and increased funding for our national parks so they can stay open as educational institutions as places employment for tens of thousands of park rangers and personnel who are the first people on the ground to answer those questions about what it was like for a. philip randolph to begin organizing the brotherhood of sleeping car porters in the early 20th century. these are the things that we have to continue looking at as we talk about preserving african-american history. as we talk about preserving our
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cultural identities. we look to congress for leadership in a acquiring those properties that tell those stories. we look toward congress to continue being the place where they take the actions to preserve those stories. what we have and what sandra has mentioned are 401 beautiful park sites across the country. for those of you who have those yellow buttons on that says pullman 402. a lot of you ask what does pullman 402 mean? what is the campaign to establish pullman to tell such wonderful stories in the in architecture and industrial revolution to add those to our national park.
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that's why national parks conservation comes in. it is an organization founded in 1919 by the first director of the national park service to become the advocates, the citizen advocates for our national parks. there were some place that's were called national parks before when the national park service was created but there was not a uniformed body that would be able to preserve and protect and tell the stories of those parks until it was created in 1916 by the organic act. the national park service or conservation association has nearly 1 million members an supporters across the country who we engage with to make sure that congress is doing their job in protecting our national parks. that is not an easy task. npca advocates for diversifying our national parks. national parks are not just yellow stone or yosemite or the
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grand canyon. national parks are the statute of liberty national monument. they are civil war battlefields. some of which are scattered across the state of tennessee where we are now. they are martin luther king's neighborhood in atlanta georgia. it's lowell historical park that tells the story of mill girls across central massachusetts. those are the national parks. national parks tell the stories of our natural and cultural heritage. that's what we got to talk about and make sure that we're continuing to diversify our national parks. the next part that npca plays is talking about continuing that conversation about what it means to be an urban national park. so we talk about those great western landscape parks like i mentioned with yellow stone and yosemite and grand canyon but what about those places in the urban community? how do we tell the stories in urban communities and how do we
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generate access to give people their first national park experience without having to travel thousands of miles out west? what happens when there's a national park in someone's very own back yard and they can have their first experience and open their eyes and their world up to the magnificent wonders that exist in this country? pullman is a great example of that. the history of pullman is toll as dr. bynum and sandra have talked about, is that pullman is a place that sort of exemplifies those stories so there's some convergence of the stories of labor, after the pullman strike of 1893 and the economic recession that took place 1893 and 1894. there's the formation of labor day soon after the pullman strikes. less than 40 years later you have the conversation of these
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10,000 men across the country who say what about us? there are large labor groups that have been formed after the pullman strikes that are largely white. largely monolynnithic but you h thousands of former slaves across the country and george pullman and there are a lot of opinions and his role in history about whether he was a good guy or a bad guy. i don't know if we can say that he was a good guy or bad guy. we can say he's an american. he's an industrial. that's his role in history. i will circle back before i continue on the labor history part of this. george pullman in 1879 purchased about 4,000 acres of land about 14 miles south of what's downtown chicago now which is the heart of chicago even then to build his manufacturing down
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for the pullman palace car company. the thousands of sleeping cars that cruised across the country, the vast majority of them were manufactured in chicago. that town was created in a city where less than 30 years later, that upton st. clair would refer to as the jungle for the working conditions of the people in chicago. george pullman said no. i want my company to be a modern company. i want my company to be something that can manufacture the best products in the country and -- and we can take care of our employees at the same time. so he built the pullman town on the south side of chicago in less than a year after acquiring those initial 4,000 acres of land, people were moving in. the workers lived with the managers. the managers lived near the executives. it was one happy place. the happiest town in the world.
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-- for about three years. after that, the nature of george pullman begins to take affect. it had already been there since he built homes for his children at that point in time. it begins to affect people. the economic recession happens. all of a sudden, you have george pullman not doing anything to help the people who live in his town. george pullman is the landlord of the place that you live. pullman is the boss of the place that you work. pullman owns the church in which he want u.s you to worship with other faiths and denominations and faiths and people got fed up really, really quickly and they began to organize. with that organization, you get the formation of the american rail way union right before the
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pullman strike. pullman's stories -- they are the convergence of labor and civil rights. it has a very unique role in american history. that convergence of labor and civil rights also creates a divergence. from the formation of these largely white unions to the question of afric around americaafrica african-americans around the country to say what about us? what are the protections that we have? we work 12 hour days on trains going from chicago to new orleans and stopping in memphis. what about us? soon we begin to have the conversations about what is the role of the african-american in a union. we've learned that it wasn't its earliest supporter. so pullman tells an interesting
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story that's largely untold within the national park system. with sites such as pullman we're presented an opportunity to enhance our national parks. enhancing our national parks means that with those stories being told we can better understand the history of america. we can better understand what's happened. what's gone wrong. we can't shy away from the fact that there's really bad things that are happening in this country. it's important for those stories to be told and including african-american history as sanda mentioned in evaluating what are the potential sites that we have in mind across the country that have the worth, the national significance to be preserved within the national park system. one of the things that i find most interesting especially my job day to day is -- i basically live in puin pullman. though it is not my official
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residence, i travel there everyday. i'm there organizing the community. we've built tremendous support for pullman. there's an understanding though that national parks are not the first thing on people's minds. that's a recognition but at a conference such as asalh, national parks ought to be one of the first things we think about because we're talking about african-american life and history. how can we better preserve and tell -- we just don't want to put the history of afr aaic an americans in a museum. we want these stories to be told and dissect and present them for educational opportunities to be unfolded as history continues to be written. that's one of the values of continuing to diversify national parks. it also means that thenational
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pash ser park service has a presence in communities where they are not normally seen. how many of us daily interacteds with someone wearing green and gray. those are the smiling faces when you walk into a park site. they have the arrow on their shoulder. they are great people and do their jobs very well at the sites where they are located. but in places such as memphis where there are no national park sites, we have a very strong opportunity to be able to tell those stories. that would be almost saying there's nothing national significant in memphis. we know that is not true even after you step off the plane and you enter the area and you see the jazz notes. those are nationally significant. another important part of urban national parks and diversifying th
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them and getting them away from those other parks is the undisputed economic impacts that national parks have across the country. national parks generate about $30 billion in economic activity annually. where does that money go? it goes to the communities where the parks are located. those communities around yellow stone are dependent on that national park. the communities around yosemite are dependent on that national park. for a place like pullman, it presents grand opportunity to have those conversations with children. with new generations who are supposed to be our upcoming advocates for parks to say do you want to be a forester? do you want to go out into places you've never before and
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explore things you've never seen. you've never seen a park ranger walking down the street in washington. i'm sure we will get more as this conversation continues. i will yield. i get very excited talking about pullman. i'm glad to be on this panel. i will yield to alan. thank you. [ applause ] well, thank you for some good presentations there. i appreciate the dialogue and discussion that has been started. just want to take my prerogative as moderator of this panel to ask a few questions if i might of our colleagues. i'm struck by the notion of building blocks when we talk about the american civil rights movement that the march on washington might have been thought up with a very quick time line to make it happen. it was part of a progression of events. there was the idea of washington
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in 1941. there were lawsuits and set backs that set the stage for that sort of thing. i wanted to ask if you could talk us through executive order 802 in terms of launching out through the fair employment practice commission and ultimately other civil rights victories. >> i don't know if i could do that but i might be able to tell a few engaging stories about it. >> for those of you who don't know. what alan is reference in the -- the number is 8802 is the executive order that franklin roosevelt signed that created the fair employment committee. he issued that executive order as a direct result of his concern about the implications of randolph's march on
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washington movement bringing 10,000 african-americans to the nation's capitol, particularly at a time of real international strive. this is the era of the second world war. his concern was about the potential for racial violence in the nation's capitol and feeling compelled to halt the potential protests. he ultimately capitulated to some of randolph's commands. randolph commanded multiple things. one of which was a desegregated military. that happened 15 years later or thereabouts. nonetheless, he does feel compelled to take some course of action to take some protest initiative. there's so many stories to tell about the executive order.
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one of the stories that is commonly discussed in a variety of books on randolph the march on washington in this particular era deals with randolph's particular elo krelocution. as a child he was a shakesphere lover. he was very much into shak shakessphere plays and developed this sort of authoritarian base voice that just had a very precise elocution. i don't do imitations. at one point roosevelt says to
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randolph after a challenging discussion where roosevelt is trying to get him to pull things back and randolph is refusing. he eventually says to randolph when did you graduate from harvard because randolph would draw out his as and rs so this notion that randolph had this very elaborate elocution was needling roosevelt at the time and he decided to call randolph out on it. the building blocks that you're talking about here are really quite important because several things emerge from this executive order. it in fact lays the ground work for a -- certainly, the eoc but also the way in which the u.s. military is desegregated in the very same way by roosevelts
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successor, truman. he desegregates the military on the basis of an executive order in response to pressure politics brought by who, a. philip randolph. so there is an important building block quality here that i think you're quite right to point out and these kiends of lessons are important going forward as i said earlier because they do set the tone for how they begin to see deliberate pressure politics played by african-americans in general but certainly the civil rights movement specifically. >> i wanted to add a couple -- i would take it back not just to 8802 which is the result of this activism but when i teach my course on the civil rights movement, i always start with a call to march on washington issued in 1941. there are four points that randolph articulated in that.
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one was the end of zr discrimination in employment particularly in the military industries. two was military desegregation. three was participation in electoral politics and four was the end of colonialism in the rest of the world. the way that the movement came about or the way that it was actually -- it was also the first time that nonviolent political action was being called for in a very definite gaundian view of what that meant was being used and calling for it so that in fact if you look at that 1941 march call to march on washington, that to me is the outline of the entire civil rights movement that comes afterwards. especially some of the things that we're now finally beginning -- not finally but becoming more and more understood are those calls to end colonialism.
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those calls to think about what electoral politics means to think about all of these other kinds of things. so to me, that call to march, even though the march itself was postponed, the idea was outlined in that call. i think that's actually a better place to start the civil rights -- also i'd also point out that that call does not include anything about school desegregation. so those people who want to say that the civil rights movement began with brown and then focus on education, well, yes. that's true. there's one way of looking at that. of course even brown we know began much earlier than that as well. so there are these different strains. these different threads within the movement. i think randolph definitely had this sort of larger vision of what the platform was going to look like. >> so i have a question about that. >> yes, go ahead. >> you could actually extend
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this decision even further if you look at the various points that mindy points out. when you think about what's been the last great campaign for unfetterred and nondiscriminatory military service? well, first it was gender. >> right. >> it's also become sexuality, orientation. this very same kind of platform we see extended to things like military service but i also think about -- >> employment. >> employment. just the women's movement in general. the whole way in which you say as i said earlier, minority groups looking to operate in the context of intergroup politics. this group that yields this executive order becomes the template for which all groups going forward, regardless of their identity, all groups going forward look to operationalize.
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this is one of the things that's so incredibly potent about this particular moment. it sets the tone for how modern contemporary politics is played. think about how you vote today. how about how we as a nation vote today. you can see the seeds of that kind of electoral counting that every politician does carried out in every particular instance. it's exactly why roosevelt signed the execive order. he was concerned of losing his base support of african-americans in the north and others in groups and cities across the country. these are incredibly potent moments to think about as we've continued to think about the civil rights movement but also how we in fact politically live today. >> so this is my question. if -- if the 1941 march on washington had gone ahead, it would have been smaller but would it have been more radical
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than the 1963 version and what would have been the implications of that for the civil rights movement and for the country? >> i will answer that based on the person who headed up most of the washington organizing of it or was very involved in it from what i know what she wrote and other things. i argued with a lot of people when i was first working on this that people said that they weren't ever really plan on marching. that's often been a charge well, you know they really weren't going -- >> well, if you look through ms. tucker's materials no, she was calling churches for places to live. she was calling -- you know places where people could stay overnight. this was all of that detailed mass organizing work that they were definitely engaged in. i think it's that specific and the level of detail and the white house knew that this was
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going on. they hadn't actually been organizing in the city to receive all of these people. the white house wouldn't have actually responded. so i think you also have that sort of almost counter evidence as well so show how much work was being done. as far as its radicalism. i think the radicalism would have been shown in the fact that this was a march of so many people of color in a highly segregated already overburdened town where there was very little housing because of the war. the radicalism would have been in the presence maybe not in the political agenda but the very fact. even if you had had 50,000 people showing or 20,000 people showing up marching down washington -- marching down pennsylvania avenue, that would have been a show unlike, i think, anybody was prepared to see. especially coming -- granted
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another 15, 16 years after the clan marched down pennsylvania avenue. nonetheless, it was a response -- i think the racial politics that would have come out of that and possible violence i think was what the white house also feared. particularly at a time when u.s. propaganda and we are fighting for a democracy and we believe in democracy and opposing -- to oppose a counter proposal to an aryan nation race war going on not only in europe but also the asian theaters. >> i think that's true in all respects. i hadn't really thought about that kind of hypothetical, you know, what would have happened. what would have been the implications or consequences had the march gone on? it's a little hard play that out because on the one hand, you want to be optimistic about our
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national ability to live up to the best principles of democracy and freedom but you have a long history that shows our shortcomings in that respect. so i struggle to really kind of come up with a concrete answer to that other than to say that i think you can as mindy points out, look at what the roosevelt administration does to forestall it. they go to great lengths to try to dissuade randolph from following through on this threat without in fact making any kind of concessions but they fail to move him. whether you believe the march was just a threat or was in fact something that was in the works, the roosevelt administration
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felt it had to do something to prevent this massive demonstration of people of color in the nation's capitol at a time of war where they were deathly concerned about race war breaking out in the nation's capitol. whether you credit ranndolph's threat or not, the white house was concerned enough about it to do something about it. i'm a historian. i can write some fantasy. some people say i have. depends if you read the critics of my book but i'll stick with the facts that i know and the fact is we do get an executive order issued by the president that does some really important work with respect to economic justice and nondiscrimination. >> uh-huh.
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>> we're going to get to your questions from the audience in just a moment so if you have any, please, you can start maybe to cue up at the microphone. i want to go to sandra washington. from the park service next, the park service is really adapt at tackling tough history, the tough issues. there this potential pullman site we've got some tough history. we've got an 1894 strike that's violently repressed. we have a union that's formed to address issues of inequality that has to struggle for over a decade before they can get collective bargaining agreements. how does the park service get to tell these stories. what's the mission and vision of the agency for telling them correctly so that it's an all inclusive package with that interpretation so to speak. >> very good question. thank you. i would say we're getting much
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better at telling tough history about telling the weaknesses of the country which in some odd way are our strengths. the fact that we can he have conversations about the failure of democracy and still rooer ma remain a democracy is a good thing. the breaking of the pullman factory in 1894 was a call for the national guard, the federal troops came there to break that strike. we also tell a story where the national guard came in to little rock to uphold the rights of the students to attend central high school. that is a national park where we tell those stories. and where we actually have an opportunity to demonstrate the great amount of amount of
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compassion it takes for reconciliation where we have, i don't know if you're very familiar with the photographs that came out of that story, the desegregation of central high school but you have elizabeth eckford at 15, 16 years old, she was the youngest of the students that integrated at the high school, carrying her books. it's the first day. she did not get the message to meet at miss baits home. so she arrives on the public bus and walks down the street to go to school instead of going in the station wagon with the rest of the students. she's heckled and jeered. i'm so sorry. i think her name is ms. fey. i can't remember her last name. there's a white girl behind her just yelling and poking her in the back and almost the spit you can see coming out of her mouth. the two of them on a regular basis come to the visitor center
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there at the national park and have conversations together about their experience of being in that moment. they have that big poster behind them as they talk about being able to reconcile with each other and be very thoughtful and conscience about her apology. the rangers don't tell the story. we facilitate the story being told by the participants who lived it. in the cases of talking about slavery, of course we don't have participate ants but we facilita conversation about slavery. we open the door and invite folks to understand what the realities of slavery were. we try not to gloss over the facts that we know. we try to tell it in the places where it happened and our
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biggest struggle and i think we have had a fair amount of success, maybe even a lot of success and mem raetiorating thh or 150th anniversary of the civil war and not making a celebration out of it but talking about the reality of slavery and talking about that it was the genesis for the civil war and let's not talk about or gloss over the other things but let's talk about the realities of that. we tried to -- within our own agency, it was actually a little bit of a battle to talk about this being not just thoratioe memoration of the civil war but of civil rights an the drid the linkage between the two. so i think we do a pretty good job of tackling the tough things. labor isn't an area that we talk very much about as you said. we don't have many sites where
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we talk about labor. we talk about industry. we have a small site in the up, upper peninsula of the upper peninsula of michigan. it's very far away. the history of copper mining and there is some labor stories there but it really is more about indufrt stry and mining at about labor. we talk about the industry of textiles. it would be an honor should it ever come to pass to talk about labor at pullman. >> thank you. >> you're representing the national parks conservation association but you're also our token millennial unless i'm making assumptions about the age of the other panel members. i wanted to can you, it's part of our mission and vision to protect and enhance america's national park system for current and future generations. as a leader in the millennial generation, what do you think the pullman story and national
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parks generally have for your generation that's so important and so resonant or could be more so? >> well, i think one of the -- well first, thank you for acknowledging the role of the place holder of being the leader of the mill en yennialsmillenni. i hadn't forthally normally accepted that role but as far as our national parks are concerned, the challenge, i believe that skichexists is eng millennials who are the people in the range of 30 or so. folks born in the early 1980s and upward and downward is the fact of how do we make these places interesting? how do we make the history come to life so that millennials will be engaged? does that mean you have a cell
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phone app that tells those stories? is it that you have virtual reality that exists in the doors of the visitor centers. it might be. those are conversations that have to happen. those are conversations that have to take place. one of the debates that i have regularly with folks who i interact with are about cell phone usage in national parks. one side is heavily on one side and the other is sort of present. they have an opinion about it but until you actually get out to the national parks and until you actually have a generation of millennials who are able to have access to the national parks and then they realize oh, my god, my cell phone doesn't work, you might have the ability to have that conversation to say well, it might be important for me as a millennial or as someone who regularly uses it technology
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to be able to use the cell phone when i get to the indiana dunes national lakeshore deep in the woods and document the amount of butterflies that you see. if you're unable to do that you might be missing out on a valuable learning opportunity for many folks who use technology as that learning tool. i think national parks offer opportunities that have yet to be explored for engaging millennials. i think that the most important part of it is going to be making sure that millennials are at the table when those decisions are being made. >> the national park service also managing millions of acres of wilderness. i think we could redefine that for millennials because it is not about going far, far away, it's about going far, far away from cell coverage. >> we tend to stay away from
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those areas right? >> let's see if we've got any questions from audience members. yes, sir, come on up. let's make sure that microphone is on. it looks like we've got a red light there on. >> hi. david luke ander. ranger from 2003 to 2005. very different site from the proposed pullman site. i've been working in land protection ever since so this project is going to be great. i hope it works out. i love that you guys mention cell phones because to a new generation, our students don't have land lines. you know? like they've never seen they're name in a phone book. that was like you made it back in the old days. you know, just not too much older than them. i've never ridden a train other than an amtrak to philadelphia from new york. so that very important part of
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our cultural heritage might be lost so that will be a great effort. i had a question for maybe the biographers. i've been working on an intellectual biography of randolph because unlike a lot of male african-american leaders he didn't leave us with an autobiography because he was busy doing stuff. walter white was writing stuff and he was getting stuff done. i was so troubled because we went over more than 3,000 documents and organized his thoughts on nationalism and world war ii and i sent it out the other day and i don't know anything about randolph. we don't get those moments where m malcolm x describes the color of his mothers dress when she's cooking.
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what about her laugh charmed him? what was his favorite food? was there an expression or a saying? could we put some flesh on these bones of randolph? we know so much about him as a public figure, but as a human, as a man could you share any antidotes that humanizes this iconic figure. >> i will try. i'm actually working on a paper now that i hope will be my last randolph forra before moving onto something else where i'm trying to explain a couple of things. so randolph talks about very early on, being a supporter of women's right to vote and is in fact very engaged with margaret sanger and the birth control movement which is problematic in some ways. but one of the things that comes
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out of this examination that i'm involved with now is a -- thinking about why randolph did not have children, right? what's there? >> i'm sorry. i will have a different answer than you. >> i don't know. you might be surprised. it's not -- there are -- one of the things i speculate on is that either there's some sort of health issue involved but you would expect in such extensive correspondence between husband and wife that there would be some lamenting of that but there isn't. so it leads me to believe that this is sort of a conscious choice made by two people who have very, very active and connected but separate public
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lives. i mean randolph marries a woman who is educated, older, entrepreneur, politically active and perhaps more or better socially connected in harlem than he was. so, you know, she's older, established, a professional in her own right and entrepreneur. she might be making some very modern choices about childbearing and he finds himself in a very different position than many of his peers in the 1920s with respect to those kinds of decisions. i don't know that i can give you any kind of definitive answer because there's nothing in the record beyond as you point out, this affectionate name for each
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other but even that's kind of telling. you're married for 49 years and the best you can say about your wife is buddy. okay, well, whatever. each to his own but there's a lot of room to speculate because there isn't a lot of documentati documentation. i think when you look at the wi in randolph's life are telling. his mother is a preachers wife who finds her own kind of voice both political and sort of public through her husband's role as church pastor but that affords her a great deal of social authority. she's commenting on church finances, church programs, community issues from the
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position of preachers wife which gives her a place outside the home even if she doesn't necessarily grasp it in the way that someone like dorothy height does. but the woman he marries is a very different woman. i mean she has her own sort of political -- public presence but in some ways they are both charismatic, they are both very strong willed women who find place alongside their male companion. you know? i don't really know that i can give you the kind of flesh on the bone that just doesn't exist because there's no record. you know, but i think when you began to kind of piece together elements of randolph's life and look at him through the lens of the women that impacted him so greatly, it maybe paints a different picture of him.
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it's funny that mindy is here because in thinking about this paper, i have a lot of questions that i'm hoping she can help me with because i can't necessarily affectively reconcile the shortcomings that she so cogently points out with respect to randolph and gender with the man who -- the man who is so deeply influenced by these two women. right? it seems a weird kind of thing to say to the women's auxiliary. yeah, we want the money that you raise but we're the boss when his wife carries him financially through so much of his early professional career. when he says in his own records, in his own papers that his mother was the driving force in the household that kept his mother on track professionally and financially. it's a very -- i don't know that
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i have good answer. >> my answer will be a little bit different. first of all i want to point out that of course reading the biography of malcolm x, you're reading the autobiography of malcolm x by alex haley. there are articles of literary license that you have to be concerned about. we really don't know what the actual tapes says versus what haley wrote. okay? i think it's important to remember that some of these autobiographies are not self authorized as a bit of a comparison. the second thing i wanted to say. this is going to be a really short story and i hope not to distract the rest of the panel by it but i was very interested also in luceile green randolph at the time i was writing my dissertation and i asked roger wilkins, who is the nephew of roy wilkins and of course grew
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up with randolph and knew him for many years but particularly later on in the late 1950s and into the 1960s. i was talking to roger one day and obviously this was many years ago and i said, roger, whatrandolph's wife? >> roger said wife? i never knew he was married. i always thought he was gay. there is -- so i'm throwing in a lavender herring if you will but i think it's something to consider. this is not the only person from whom i've heard this story nor is it the only person -- i've also heard other intimations about luceille about randolph's own gender preferences or sexual preferences so that we might want to be a little bit more flexible or less normal in our
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assumptions. i will put it that way. >> i think you're absolutely right. i think it's suggestive is that two people who married for so long chose not to have children without there being any clear discussion of why. >> it's interesting the poly merry calls for the partnership roll and i is this that is exactly what randolph had with lucille. >> we're going to move on. >> sorry. we'll talk. >> thank you so much for this panel. one of my all time favorite movies is "miles of smiles" so i'm really glad i came. a couple years ago i spent the summer in chicago and i don't
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remember how i found out about this but i signed up for a walking tour of the pullman sight and i assumed i would learn about the pullman porters because that's all i knew pullman, right. and so i went to the south side and i went on the tour and it was actually led by one of the guys that lives in one of the houses that you're talking about. and you meet him by the gate and he has an umbrella and he takes you all over. but i was so disappointed because there was nothing, nothing, nothing but the pullman porters and even after the tour we went to the museum, right. and i don't think there was anything there. this is all to say i'm so happy you're working on this because it is such an incredibly -- like
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you said, the architect and slas place is just astounding. and then one other really quick comment. this will make it sound like all i do is watch movies. but i saw this documentary called "the first lady of little rock" about dazy baits and in the movie i learned that daisy bates did speech. >> she gave 142-word speech. >> oh, all right. you mentioned that. i just didn't know if you -- >> yeah i know. so. >> okay. so, because i think lots of people don't know that. >> yeah. >> and it was very short but anyway. all right. >> yeah. >> let's go to the next
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question. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> hello. this question is towards lee and sandra, talking about preserving cultural institutions, what is your thoughts of the rapid -- in black communities where they are tearing down these buildings and making them into starbucks or cvs. so your plans. >> i will leave that for sandra. >> all right. a moment ago i was wishing i
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wore my uniform and i'm glad i didn't. oh, wow. you know, the park service does, we're in a lot of urban areas so we try to tell the story of that urban place. one of the places we're in flight that we're in very quietly is detroit. we don't have a national park in detroit but a lot of community activism we're doing in detroit for preserving green space, working with the city and their parks department as detroit regreens themselves. many of you are probably very familiar that detroit is going through a regreening where they are asking people who live in areas where there is very light -- very light home ownership and asking them how would you like to live over here where more people live, since only 3 them in ai square mile live in this neighborhood maybe you would like to go over here,
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then they will regreen those houses and some put in agriculture fields to grow foods in detroit. so we are working on that. we have a park maybe 20 miles a way and there is a heritage area in detroit. i'm making the context. there's a number of people who said to me i think it would be great if the national park service -- and they fill in the blank with something that makes me shutter. whether the second baptist church of detroit which is a lively congregation and needs no help from a park service that certainly don't need rangers and mo town absolutely needs no park
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rangers. i'm fascinated in detroit in community activism. in new orleans the national park is present at jazz national historical park. and it would be easy for the park service just to tell the story right in the middle of the french quarter but we're trying to tell the story further afield and making sure the homes of the musicians are saved in their context not as the last home standing, of course katrina got in the way of that. >> hello. i thoroughly enjoy each of your presentations. i actually grew up in rosealynn poreman andize bell told me to say i remieg rated. i went to coralsis high school
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at the back of the pullman porter museum however i didn't know that. it wasn't until i graduated from ucla, came back home to organize kids on the south side of chicago that i even knew the museum was tlx. then i got hooked up with lynn hughes the founder of the museum and then incredible what you said, dr. mal indiaependemalindh being sexist and then this woman finds this museum and gives him an opportunity to pay him some attention. but as a young person i didn't know anything about a.phillip randolph. and i'm sure that was because,
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nobody told me to go to the back of my high school and i could get all this knowledge. so when we talk about the national park service i'm so glad y'all are here. when we talk about the national park service and hopefully the future of it, we have to begin talking about seeing our national historic sights in the con2e67 context of young people so they can pay it attention. when we talk about the history and historic land marks in memphis and the ability of of the national park service to come into a place like this and define what is nationally hift yieric in a new way that young people can pay attention to. whether it is from the era of
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the blues or today, like "take me to the river" did, hope y'all seen is that movie. then we can engage the young people and then will want to observe these places in a different way. >> okay. >> and i just want to say quickly. you guys the filled me up. i need to get just a little bit more focused but, the idea is you give us an opportunity to identify new ways of viewing what is a national treasure. and so in chicago, for example, if something is named, the pullman historic sight versus being named george pullman brotherhood sleeping national park, then it sounds excluesive,
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where the sleeping carporters had no significant role. and so do what you can to put them in there. >> right. >> you can't just call it pullman. he was great in a sense of a significant person. once i found out about him i took my children to the pullman museum and to the sleeper carporter museum and that will only become important if both segments of that population are important. thank you. >> thank you. >> thank you. [ cheers and applause ] >> young person. >> i am not a millennial. i'm a generation x i'd rather you refer to me as a philadelphia eagles fan. i have a question in reference to all of the porters.
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it has always been my understanding that moeflt st of were men that may have gone to college and came out and for many reasons they aren't able do anything else. so is it possible that because it is this group of educated men, that many of them are educated men and then are marrying women attempting to asimulate to american society, is it while a reason or is it the reason why they succeed where so many other groups don't succeed. does that play a role in it? >> i would say no. that's not the driving force. -- which leads to the success of the brotherhood. part of it is fortunate timing. i think a big part of it is what
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melinlda's book details in terms what women do to provide the financial resources and structure to make it possible for people like randolph to be kind of out on the edge. you know. he's out there, i was going to say something but i can't say it in this setting, he's able to say and do some of the things he's able to say and do because of the financial support provided by the women's auxiliary. and timing is important. the brotherhood wasn't the first union, there were two others that failed at the turn of the century. and randolph is an important figure because he brings certain insights to organizinorganizing
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no doubt about that. but that's only part of the story of success. you can't really account for the success of the brotherhood without taking into account what melinda's is talking about in her book. >> one last quick question. >> all right. good afternoon. i've enjoyed panel session. i'm joy, i work for the park service. i'm here with three mid level managers for the park service in the corner. i wanted to know what your thought if the sight is not 402nd national park. what are the plans? >> yes, to answer your question joy, i think that is a really good question. the position of the campaign as it has gone over the last two years has been pullman is well
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positioned to be 402nd national park sight. er the status of the campaign, senator who is assistant in the u.s. this senate and senator in the minority has co-sponsored legislation to have this if become a national park. that was first step. congressional route is one way to go if it doesn't work initially you have the second option, that is using president antiquities act created in early
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1900s was designed to help preserve the country, the president can step in and designate federally owned property as a national monument and direct national agencies, such as the national park service to manage that sight. where we are in that process is in regular communication with d.c., with our partners in formulating enough supporters on the ground to say there is 110% local support for pullman being designated as a national park sight. we have well over 15,000 who have pledged their support and labor groups advocating us. that's where we are. that's the take action notice for everyone here, we want pullman to be 402nd national park sight, the people with the
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loudest voice are the ones recognized. and there's plenty of supporters who want it to be 402nd national park sight, chicago's first national park sight and we can makes that come together that pullman should be a national park. >> i would say in addition to that. 402 is a campaign, a brilliant one, but also a parking space. if we have to fight it we will take that too, that's success. i want to thank our panelist. [ cheers and applause ] i think you have copies of your book that will be available at the book signing.
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