but he has his shoes on. so both these figures are sort of utilizing a false religion for a political purpose. so it just proves that once again i am an equal opportunity offender. >> sunday night at 8:00 eastern and pacific on c-span's "q&a." originally built in the late 1750s, the whitney plantation, located about an hour west of new orleans, has been renovated as a museum of slavery. up next on american history tv, owner and museum founder john cummings, who spent well over ten years and $8 million of his own money on the project, tells the story of the whitney plantation. mr. cummings appears in a conversation with history professor william cobb. and the museum's director of research, ibrahim sek. this two-hour event is hosted by the brooklyn historical society.

>> hi. good evening, everybody. thank you for your patience. new york city subways have tripped us up, and we are waiting for our moderator. but we're going to begin, because i know that he is on the way. and we're eager to start. so thank you, thank you all for being here. my name is marsha eli. i'm the vice president of programs and external affairs here at the brooklyn historical society. and on behalf of our president, deborah schwartz, and our board of trustees, some of whom are here, and thank you so much for what you do, i am so pleased to

welcome you to the brooklyn historical society for this program tonight. i will just say that we are a place of -- hello! yay! [ applause ] >> if you start, that's when they come, right? we're a place of learning. we're a museum and education center. we're a place of exhibitions and extraordinary library and collections, a site of wide-ranging public programs. we really are especially proud to offer programs that tackle issues of social justice, and give voice to history that is all too often unheard. and that's one of the reasons we're especially excited and honored to have our guests tonight. last february, the new york times sunday magazine featured a cover article by david amsten, titled "building the first

museum of slavery." it told the story of a louisiana lawyer, john cummings, who took his own money and spent well over a decade transforming a plantation 35 miles west of new orleans into the first museum of slavery, the whitney plantation. he describes his impression of the whitney plantation, and i quote, "located on land where slaves worked for more than a century in a state where the sight of a confederate flag is not uncommon. the results are both educational and visceral." he goes on to describe its founder. "stocky and bespeckled, john cummings was as much a topic of conversation among those gathered as the whitney itself. for reasons almost everyone was at a loss to explain, he had spent the last 15 years and more than 8 million of his own

personal fortune on a museum that he had no obvious qualifications to assemble." so tonight we are very honored to welcome john cummings to the brooklyn historical society. he's joined by dr. ibrahim sek, the scholar who early on became the research and scholarly backbone of the whitney project. we're also especially grateful and privileged that jilani cobb, associate professor of history and director of the institute of african-american studies, who is well-known to many of us for his insightful articles in "the new yorker" and the author of many books such as "barack obama: the paradox of progress."

in a moment they will all come to the stage. but first, to give you a taste of the origins and inspirations for the whitney plantation, here is a brief film that serves as an introduction for the visitors to that site. ♪

♪ >> in 1855, a man named john little who had escaped slavery and fled to canada was reported to have said, it is he who has endured who can tell you what slavery is. only those who have endured slavery can answer the question. what does it feel like to be someone else's property? the opportunity to learn from thousands of people who endured slavery in the united states was almost lost. in the 1930s, president franklin roosevelt created the works

progress administration. >> my most immediate concern is in carrying out the purposes of the great work program just enacted by the congress. >> a network of hundreds of agencies designed to put to work the millions of americans who had lost their jobs in the great depression. one of these agencies was the federal writers project. it employed writers, editors, historians, and researchers. more than 6600 in number, led by folklorist john lomax. they were sent across the country to record the experiences of americans. the fwp had an active african-american unit who took it upon themselves to interview former slaves they sent these interviews to the washington office for comment in 1937. john lomax immediately realized the importance of preserving the

story of slavery as expressed by its survivors. the former collection of slave narratives in this country began in 1937 and ended in the spring of 1939. at that time almost 74 years had passed since the end of the civil war in april 9th, 1865. the majority of the former slaves that the fpw interviewed in the 1930s were children at the time of emancipation. for the most part their stories recall their time spent in slavery as children and teenagers. these stories provide us a glimpse of the heroic efforts of millions of individuals held at property in the united states for hundreds of years. their voices reveal the strength, spirit, and endurance of the people who were enslaved and forced to provide the free labor that built the foundations of this country. the statues you see around you represent these former slaves as they were at the time of their

emancipation. children. whitney presents the stories of these children as told in their own words. read them on the wall of honor, which records the names of 350 enslaved individuals held in bondage on this very property. read their words in the memorial field that names and honors over 100,000 individuals held in slavery in louisiana before 1820. remember them in the field of angels, which records in public for the first time the existence of over 2200 children born into slavery in st. john the baptist parish. the tour that will introduce you to this is the story of the lives of enslaved workers based on the recollections of those who endured and shared the stories of their lives as children in slavery. the children will tell you their own story. their words will help us all understand the strength, spirit, and hardships of those who endured slavery. welcome to the whitney.

[ applause ] >> i heard we were going to have a big time moderator but i had no idea. i better behave. >> good evening. can you all hear me? my apologies for keeping you waiting. i wasn't trying to make a grant entrance. i'm coming from new orleans, actually. >> i hope the sheriff isn't after you. >> i know. so one, we've had a kind of previous conversation about some of these things. it's really kind of fascinating. i just wanted to talk to, you know, both dr. sek and yourself about the genesis of this idea.

before we get to that, there's something that you said when we talked about that when people said, why don't people say why don't we get over it, why don't african-americans just get over slavery, and you said something really insightful about that. >> first of all, i'm honored to be here. i thank you for inviting us. and welcome to the whitney. i want everybody to come to the whitney. i want you to all get involved. we need all of you. we're not experts. we've only been open since december. we're still in diapers. and we need all of your help. we have room for everybody. i'm just the cheerleader. sometimes many early on african-americans would ask me, what is a while the boy doing here dealing with the slave business? and i reminded them, they shouldn't be surprised because

there's a whole bunch of rich white boys that started it in the beginning. but what i was telling the moderator was a common experience that i have. whenever there's a policy issue, whether it be opening schools, closing swimming pools, taking down the confederate statues in my city, we have blacks on one side and whites on the other. and blacks are screaming at the whites that they're racists, bigots. they're usually right. and the whites are hollering back, why can't you people just get over it? not knowing what the "it" is. and slavery is only part of it. and this is one of the things

that we hope to do at the whitney. we hope to be able to take -- to educate as many people as we can. incidentally, we've been open for eight months, nine months, and we already have 30,000 people who have come. tonight i've counted ten people in the audience who have been there. and there's an irish girl back here in law school. she was there with her parents, misbehaving, but she's here tonight. and everyone is telling us what the reaction is there. the raw facts of slavery have been hidden from all of us. from all of us. [ applause ] >> i should be donald trump. >> no, no.

[ laughter ] >> i'll tell you this quickly. i'm from queens. donald trump is also from queens. i travel a lot. every time island somepla land say, "i'm sorry." [ laughter ] >> we don't know really if we're doing it right. and no one can tell us about slavery except those who have endured. and that's why when you go there to the whitney, you won't be the same when you leave. you won't. you will read the words of ex-slaves, testimony that they gave after they were free. and you will feel very strange as you read them.

and of a sudden you'll feel as though you're talking to a slave, and they're telling you what happened. so when you have this great divide, and this has never really worked well for us in america, screaming and hollering, put up a confederate flag, take down that flag, don't use the "n" word. and people spend millions of hours writing and writing and writing. and so what we would like to do, with your help, we would like to figure a way that we can abolish quite a bit of racism. and one thing is to educate primarily people with this color

skin so that people will know what happened. we don't care about what happened in africa, if tribal chiefs were involved. we want to know what happened when the africans were first forced to our shores, and what we did and didn't do during that period. and that's why we are in the endless search to define the "it." slavery was only part of it. and in the south, in the south -- i have a different audience here today, my wife reminded me. she told me not to tell jokes. but you can see that the civil

war is still being fought. why can't you people just get over it? and i think that's interesting. they talk about freedom and equal opportunities and how everybody was freed in 1865. you know, the gates were open in '65, but there was a first attempt at education in 1965, when lyndon johnson signed so many important acts. and from there we still have serious problems. in louisiana, in new orleans, we judge everything and report everything not bc and ad, but before and after katrina.

before katrina we had african-american high schools were only 35% of the class graduated, and the balance, where did they go? i'll tell you where they went. they went into the cemeteries and they're going into the penitentiaries. we can't change history but we can right some of the wrongs of history, with education. so i was talking on the phone yesterday -- incidentally, my employees have business cards with two words on them, "stop talking." and they walk around with signs that say it so i can see. tell me, what "it" do you know? no one has to explain to an african-american about oppression, about ridicule, but

humiliation, about pain. but do you believe me when i tell you that caucasians don't know what the "it" is? they don't know that. that's what we have to do. we think if we can combine the raw facts of what happened to certain realizations, we'll start on the 3,000 mile journey. we'll start. [ applause ] >> dr. sek, we also talked, and you kind of gave a really interesting narrative about how it is you came to be involved in this project. and, you know, what it is that you're really hoping to do with your scholarly skills as it relates to the whitney plantation. >> if i tell you how i met john

cummin cummings, we say things don't just happen by chance. i was leading a delegation, i was the mayor had the your deceased friend. we were invited to the african-american museum in southwest louisiana. i was a consultant for the african-american museum. for the first time in 2000, they were allowed to have an african-american museum. even in that african-american museum, the todcajuns have a pi

of that museum. but anyway, they have a portion of the building for it. and i was a consultant. we spent about three nights. on our way back to new orleans, we were introduced to john cummings. he came to me at tulane university. he said, i would like to show you something. we didn't know what something was. he took us to a very old plantation. it was really scary, weeds all over the place. this was an 18th century, old plantation, and he said, i want to turn it into a museum of slavery. and he told me, abraham, young man -- i was young at the time, and beautiful -- can you join me on this, you know, adventure, because he knew that i just came

from the university of dakar, teaching for 20 years in high school. i said, why not? and he told me, are you coming back soon to louisiana? i told him i come to louisiana, i travel to louisiana every summer for my own research. because thanks to a professor who is not here tonight but who i will meet tomorrow in tennessee, she published in 1992 a book. she traveled to senegal. that's where i met her. she gave that wonderful lecture about louisiana, about slavery in louisiana and how africans and in particular people from senegal contributed to the making of the creole culture of

louisiana and how africans influenced the culture of the whole united states. because i was one of the people taught in high school that the culture of america, this country, is anglo-saxon. we were never taught about the contribution of the africans. i said, yes, i will do it. you hired me right away. >> i didn't realize we had a person in common. you said gwendolyn hall? from rutgers. we'll talk after. >> so i will travel back to louisiana the next summer. i met him in the spring. and in the summer, he hired me to be the director of research of the future whitney museum. i was not -- and i'm still not the best-qualified person to do

the job. the only qualification is almost overwhelmingly it is in french, and i'm from a former french colony, i'm from senegal. maybe more french then the french themselves. that's how i met john cummings. a wonderful video. do you know who put it together overnight? it was donna cummings, she is in this room. you're in trouble, you did not tell that. >> she's right back here. >> this is donna cummings. [ applause ] >> they didn't see you. you should stand up again. they didn't see you. she doesn't like it. she speaks french, italian. and he's very happy to have this woman on his side. we are very happy to have her behind us because she's the one

who makes us behave and makes sure that things are done on time. thank you. >> so i want to make sure that we have time to cover -- like to have audience participation. there are a few things i wanted to talk about prior to that, which is that, one, what were the obstacles that you all encountered in doing this? this took a great deal of resources, it's taken a kind of steep learning curve. i wonder if you could talk about this. it's still staggering to think about the minuscule amount of cultural resources that we've devoted to something that created the american economy, the modern american economy, basically. if you read, half the stories have never been told, he talked clearly about the way that

slavery was foundational to american capitalism, a system that is deeply implicated even outside of the south, you know, when we talk about louisiana and sugar and cotton in the deep south, mississippi, you know, and tobacco, but cotton is really king. i teach at the university of connecticut, and sometimes people have a sense of superiority about what happened in the south. they say, they grew all this cotton in mississippi. where do you think they sent it? these textile mills that we have in new england, where do you think they were getting the cotton they were using to turn into fabric? so it was this national system, but we've devoted very little of our cultural attention and resources to chronicling it. so i'm wondering, this is kind of a two-part question, what is the logistical thing, the most difficult things to create this, and two, kind of the emotional and psychological resistance

that people have to grappling with slavery. >> when we first came, the county of the parish there is about 90% african-american. and there was quite a bit of skepticism. and so before we really started, i visited all of the african-american churches. although they were looking at me like that, i told them what i was planning to do. they asked to participate. slowly i was received by the community. i want to tell you, on opening day we had 942 people, and more than half were african-americans. and african-americans don't go to plantations. but they came. we wanted to do something very different. and this is what we struggle with. i don't want to -- i've been to

plantations. my wife is -- has joint citizenship with italy. her name was scarella. she's from calabria, the tip of the boot of italy that's kicking sicily. and she's not only my life partner, my law partner, and my business partner, she checks the books all the time, but when she came back with her passport, and it's brown, ours of course is blue, and she was drinking a glass of red wine, and she was looking at it and showing me how her name was on that passport, and the husband's name is on the third page on the bottom. and calabria is the center of the mafia in italy. and i got a little worried. we were about to go to italy, here she is an italian. i looked at her and said, look, your people are from calabria, the mafia.

i said, do i have anything to worry about? she took that glass of wine, took a little sip, put it down, she said, fuggetaboutit. [ laughter ] >> but we are interested in doing something that means something. i would never write a story where there was a complaint. i will never tell you about a problem and how bad it is a problem. i don't have to do that with slavery, do i? nobody has to say that. what we have to do -- >> actually, before you even say that, is that exactly true? >> what's that? >> that you don't have to tell people that? there's actually a body of information in popular culture that's deeply entrenched that will tell you that slavery was a kind of familial system, that it was wrong --

>> zip-a-dee-doo-dah. and that's true. when we walk through the plantation and you see this, i don't tell you if it's right or wrong. if your symptom doesn't tell you when you finish vomiting that it's wrong, then something's wrong with you. we have an obligation as a nation to understand that most people know that slavery was here. they don't have the facts of slavery. how do you get people who use "n" words, come with confederate flag shirts, how do you get them to suspend, to suspend their beliefs and their prejudices just long enough that you can get something in between those ears? and how do you get it in between there? well, i'll tell you. we were told, best way to do it, slave children. don't put big slaves up with

chains. forget about the awakening, coming out of the ground. and so we did that. we met this wonderful artist, and they're friends with them, woodrow nash in ohio, he created about 60 slave children statues for us. and they're beautiful. and you fall in love with them. many of them are in the church. and if i am taking a special group around, people that should be impressed, mayors, people like that, they'll look at them. and we encourage them to take as many pictures as they would like. beautiful children. little girls and little boys. and then you ask rhetorical questions. how could we have allowed these children to become beasts of

burden and breeders? and here, there's a little girl, you saw her in the film. and her mother had 16 children from 15 different men she was forced to live with. and so we asked those questions. how could this have been? how could our religions have betrayed us? who knew that in -- i didn't, and i'm not the dumbest man on earth. second to dumbest. but i'm not the dumbest man on earth. in 1452, nicholas v gave to the king of portugal the right to

reduce africans to perpetual slavery. what? you would think the pope would read the bible every once in a while, wouldn't you? even if it's just bathroom reading. >> ouch. >> but if you look at exodus -- i speak in short sleeve english. if you read exodus, you'll see a man who kid naps another man to sell, three words, "shall be killed." no one ever asked, i wonder what was meant by that? "shall be killed." yet popes owned slaves. everybody owned slaves. how did that happen? can it happen again? can it happen again in another form? so we wanted to educate so that you could see what was there.

and that's one of the things that we did. we have a tour that i wanted to have with the slaves' story for an hour and 20 minutes. and you go through that beautiful house in seven to nine minutes. and the whole time that you're going through there, at every venue we have beautiful bronze bells. and you go through the slave section first. and you're encouraged to toll that bell in bondage with the slaves. so as you can through this house that my wife handled, beautiful antiques, you hear the bells. and you've already been there. and you know, you're reminded who built that beautiful house. and it's the last venue on the tour. and when you approach it, you approach from the rear, from the

slave quarters, like the slaves did. and so we are taking things as they come, as we are advised. we take them when there is a racial class that we cannot feel, because we're not african-americans. for example, in the church, where we have those beautiful children, we had a statue that woodrow created for us of nicholas v. it's a bust of him. and i thought it would be that you would see these beautiful children and part of the tour in this church would be this pope who did this terrible thing. then i was advised and know now, that was the wrong thing to do, because the african-americans who came saw it a different way.

they saw a white man, religious white man, overseeing these poor slave children. so nicholas got pulled out of there the next day. he's now in the welcoming center. we have 11 popes who were involved in slavery. nicholas wrote a paper bull, it's called, dom de versa. that means until further notice, where he gave portugal the right to reduce africans to slaves. incidentally, it's never been realized, so notice has not been given. when people see those little children, they just sit with them. they hold them. some of them are worn on the shoulders where people, everybody wants to identify with them. we want them to identify with

the history of those children. and it's working. it's working. in our welcoming center -- i'm almost finished. [ laughter ] >> you see my wife back there like this. >> he's going to make me work for my supper today, i see. >> i think that answers your question. >> so, dr. sek, i had kind of a different version of this question for you, which is that when you deal with the history of this, it also co-exists not just with absence of knowledge but a presence of mythology. so, you know, we might say that african-americans don't go to plantations. but lots of white people do. there are plantation weddings. there's an apartment complex in

atlanta, it's called "the plantation." as a quick aside, i once met a realtor, i swear this is the truth, a realtor whose name is jim crow. you can google it. a white man named jim crow. no more tragic instance of being unaware of african-american history. how do you kind of get to this point where people not only see the narrative that you're telling, which is difficult and emotionally wrenching, and it exists right alongside this idea that the plantation is romantic, that people want to go to have weddings, have tours, kind of i idealized versions of the american past. >> yes, thank you very much for asking that question. and i hope that everybody understands my english.

like two or three weeks ago we had a big group»9le more than 1 people. it was only white people. and i'm sorry to use that word, you know, white, black. but maybe we'll end with that. white, black, that's what you see. but what you really see is not what you see. there is something deeper in us that takes all of us back to africa. we are just being miseducated about our origins, about our real history.

shianti wrote about the african origin of civilization. we all came from africa. so these people came to the plantation, more than 100 peo e people. and i was there to give a lecture to all of them before they took them to the grounds to see the memorials and the buildings, from the slave cabins to the big house. and also, forgive me, for people who don't like the name, s-l-a-v-e, every time we say "slave," just put it in quotes, okay? so i did what i thought was the best lecture of my life. at the end i asked them, told them to ask questions.

if you have any questions, please ask me. and they asked questions. and at the end, someone didn't ask any question. it was a lady. and her husband. they came to me, and the lady told me, don't you think those africans were better off here in america than staying in africa and being mistreated? >> a common perception. >> and i didn't know what to tell them. i was so confused. and i thought about, we have three memorials on the whitney plantation. the first is dedicated to all the people who were enslaved on the whitney plantation. real names which we found in our files. nobody can deny it. the second memorial is dedicated to all the people enslaved in louisiana, from the louisiana

database. and the third is dedicated, like you said, to children who died as slaves on plantations in louisiana. in matter of 40 years, 2,200 children died on the plantations of louisiana. only the documented ones, we know the majority will only be found in the records of the catholic church, because their parents were baptized. those who were not baptized were just buried somewhere on the plantation. the fourth memorial, and i told john we have to build it, we experimented. the 1811 slave revolt in louisiana. the largest one in the history of the united states, of the history of slavery in the united states. when hundreds of people walked

down to take the city, liberate all the people there and maybe capture enough to sell to haiti or mexico, where slavery was outlaou outlawed in 1810. many were killed in action. those who survived were taken to cou court. and some of them were able to reach new orleans. they were taken to court to be tried. the sentence was every slave who was convicted had to be executed in front of -- on the plantation where they belonged. and their heads posted on poles to allow men to see, women saw it, children saw it.

it was very graphic. real things. and today, people come to us and say, you cannot do that because it's too graphic. i said, john, we have to do it, ceramic heads. it was real heads in the past, in 1811, we have to do it. i said, if we had that memorial on the ground, i would say, here, madam, is it better off here than in africa? but even in africa, you know, black people went through jim crow. we went through at the same time, in 100 years of what they call colonialism. it was slavery under another name. after 400 years, if those companies, when i say companies, i want to avoid to put all the

white people in the same boat, because white people were enslaved too in the u.s. south. the so-called indentured servants were slaves. it was a very tricky and dangerous business. but they wanted to have stability in europe. and africa had to pay for the stability of europe. that's why black people came here and were enslaved, okay? 400 years, people of africa being deported as slaves to brazil, to all of latin america, to the caribbean, to the united states, to canada, before it was outlawed. and then one day they said, this should stop. and they came back to africa as saviors, you know, we came back to stop all this barbarism which

they studied, and they said, now we are coming here to bring you religion, we are coming to bring you science, to bring to you, you know, development, whatever. it was 100 years of slavery under another name. and africans who were enslaved on their own lands, they didn't call it slavery, they called it forced labor. what is the difference between forced labor and slavery? it is the same thing. and also there were books, when they talked about slaves, they didn't call them slaves, they called them laborers or whatever, workers or whatever. in africa too. when i went to school, i studied

with the same books maybe they used to have over here. i was taught when i was in the school that -- [ speaking french ] >> slavery or the fact of selling people is a bad habit that only existed in africa, and french, the white people came to africa to save africans from this bad habit. you know, this is just miseducation. and we know that this is why, just to make it short. >> short? >> yes. >> i've become the bad guy here. >> so this is not a black and white issue. it is about some people, some companies trying to build big

money. and they have to justify it. they have to justify it. and they use religion. before the europeans, africans were deported as slaves to the sahara desert and the indian ocean. and the indian ocean. to the middle east, to india, indonesia. and in fact, all the sugar that was consumed in europe came from the middle east. the muslims, this is where sugar came, and sugar, processing sugar, they took it back to the countries in the middle east, and they also produced a plantation system that was gradually transferred to the west. when they conquered spain, and spain became a muslim colony, that's what they call moore-ish spain, sugar was purchased

there, in islands surrounding spain. then someone discovered america. and the system was transferred to the western hemisphere. and it became a big business, you know. unlimited land taken from the natives. africans paid the price for the stability and the wealth of europe. so we need to be educated about this. but, you know, we have the best knowledge of slavery in this country, including those sitting here today. since the 1920s, 1930s, especially after the 1970s, there's so much known in the history departments in this country. but with that knowledge, in

visitations, in fine books, but did it get to the people? now they have -- they talk about public history. and all our people to learn about it. what about history? what is the usefulness of history if it does not get to the people? if you don't talk to the people about the past? [ applause ] we all need to be educated about it. so. >> so i want to raise two questions and i want to get them in before we open up for the audience. either of you can answer either question. one, i'm interested in the extent to which people have come forward and said "i want to help you do this work." have there been people who've come out and said, you know, we want to contribute resources or the state of louisiana, have they said this needs to be commemorated or recognized or

just outlets in general? i want to know how the reaction to that has been. and the other thing is this. here's another dynamic. i talked about widespread reluctance among white people in the united states to confront slavery and what it was and what its implications were, but people who teach this know very commonly among black people we don't want to go there, either. like, when i teach african-american history, i know this, like there will be students who will take those classes and there are students who attach so much shame and sense of humiliation and a sense of kind of fear of what they're going to see that they don't want to engage with that at all. and i wonder if there's a -- if you've encountered that as well. how you've dealt with that. so the two things we say, the way -- have people reached out to assist in the work that you're doing and have you encountered that same kind of reluctance for different reasons

among african-americans? >> yeah, i know it is not easy. probably gives them very painful memories and [ speaking french ] you don't talk about the rope in the house of someone where they had someone who were hanged, you know? if you bring back those painful memories, even in africa, we talk about collective amnesia in africa. people don't want to talk about slavery or whatever. and i know why. but there is a way to do it. you have to always start somewhere, somehow. [ someone sneezes ] >> god bless you.

this means i'm not like. in africa if you speak and someone sneezes, that means the person is telling the truth. [ laughter ] he taught me to be a joker. when i was a student, i went to ghana, nigeria, all over the place, everywhere's the same. people are just not taught about this mess. but we have to do it anyhow. and there's a way to do it. i have learned to do it. i do not -- i mean, being a teacher in senegal in high school and then at the university of dakar, for more than ten years in teaching american students involved in the study abroad programs. they always hired me to do a

regular class on the atlantic slave trade, a class which is designed to be not only the history of deportation. if you teach the history of slavery to be only the history of deportation where things start from islands, luongo, rwanda, you miss a lot of things. the history of the black people in this country did not start with the middle passage. you have to start way beyond the middle passage. and to know that the people who

background. different civilizations, maybe some of them were built thousands of years ago. you have to know all that backgrou background. and you get to the periods like when you talk about the transsaharan slave trade, how the atlantic slave trade was built upon that transsaharan slave trade and then you go through the middle passage, you go to the plantations, you talk and indigo, but so after that you have the contribution to these people to the building of american culture. there were wonderful contributions, you know? american culture is so -- everybody now wants to come to this country.

and i swear that -- i'm going say what makes it very attractive was partly built by africans. everybody in the world knows loves jazz, blues, rock and roll, zydeco, the way of talk, the way of walking, whatever. there's so many things involving africans in american culture and civilization. and it was rooted in the country of those people who were deported here. it is not only the history of people being mistreated on the plantations. you have to teach about, that but you have also to teach about the contribution of the people, of these people in terms of culture and that's why people will be willing to sit down and learn. most of my students in senegal, american students in senegal, are white students. i don't know why african

americans are not involved. maybe it's a matter of money, too. >> are you talking about study abroad? >> yes. study abroad, it's female and white. even among the white people you have a large majority of female. and maybe you have two or three boys. but i'm telling you, at the end of the program they are all transformed. they become different people. and i know about many of them who went back to africa, to senegal, some of them to get married, some of them to learn more about the culture or whatever. the problem of this world is the problem of education. someone, somewhere, somehow is trying to blind us, not to let us know the reality. and we need to take that thing away and really learn about real things, history of all mankind.

and this is the only thing that can save the world. all the mess that is going on now in the middle east or somewhere else is rooted on a way that, you know, people know in the past. and if you keep shying away from those problems, it always pops up in the future. if you don't solve it, it will come back again and again and again. it is not a matter of black and white. it is a matter of fixing this world. there are so many mistakes that will be made in the past, we need to fix it and one of the problems is the problem of slavery. >> thank you. [ applause ] >> i wonder if you could talk about the extent to which people have reached out to participate, to help or the extent to which they haven't. >> well, we usually can brag and

complain in talks like this and i'm ready to brag. we have over 3,000 people who have signed on to get involved in the whitney plantation. i've yet to talk to any visitor without inviting them to participate and if they wanted to there's a separate roster where you write your name and your e-mail and your zip code and we'll be in touch with you. and we stole something from new york, from the -- for the museum of the slaves who were found under a construction site. >> oh, yeah. yeah. the burial grounds. >> my wife is the best buyer in the world and she'll come back

with a thousand things we can steal from different places. look, we're still in diapers, we're only nine months old so we can do that. but you had a wall there where you were dodd -- here in new york you would write your view of the tour or of the presentation and you'd stick it on the wall. so we have a wall that's about 20 feet long and about eight feet tall and we have two desks that are set up there with stick 'ems and pens. and sometimes -- i mean it's loaded. we have to peel off and store. and when i remove those -- and i'm the primary mover because i read every one of them as they come off, sometimes i cry.

when i hear people say that their lives have been changed they had no idea, thank you for educating us. we must not let this happen again, things like that. thousands of them. ? everything goes well, we'll probably have close to 40,000 and 50,000 people who will come there for the first year that's unheard of. and we did nothing i can september sent the message, made the message so that it was -- could be received and had never been received by anyone who came in. on the way out of the plantation there's a sign that's hidden from you when you drive in.

it simply says "freedom, educati education, family. pass it on." we can not continue on this path that we have here in america. it hasn't worked for any of us. and reading this man's work has helped us with additional ideas. we have to find a way, and it's always evolving. as i told you. we don't follow ready, aim, fire, because it didn't work. we have ready, fire, and then aim. see what you did, see if it's right. all of us have been v to be leaders in changing. if we just change one person

we've done more than we did in all of our lives. if we can just change one person's attitude, if we can just get whites and blacks to talk. don't talk about racism. just talk. if you see a family -- if you're black and you see a white family, man and a woman and a baby, stop and comment on their baby. if you're white and you see a black couple and a baby, stop and congratulate that family. talk. talk. start that talk. now. we did have one complaint that i can remember and it was by an eight-year-old african-american school kid who came there with his school and one of my employees says there's a complaint. i looked at it, here's the

complaint. "before i went on the tour they had plenty snicker bars. when i came back they was all gone, no snicker bars." underlined. [ laughter ] so i sent out to get a case of snicker bars and get them there. but you have people who really can help because they have different views. they know more than you do. and even children when they come, the child standing on the shoulders of a giant can see farther than the giant. you have to be open to that. you have to say thank you. thank you. >> so i have many many questions. i think i want to make sure people here have a chance to engage as well. so there's a microphone going around. the doctor was about to say something so you can make your comment while we are getting to the person with this microphone.

>> i just want to make sure that everybody understands me today. i'm looking at you. i don't see your color. let me talk to you about my background as a senegalese. someone from senegal, west africa. we are 95% muslim, 5% christian and 100% african. our first president was darker than me. his wife was white and he was a christian. for a country that is 95% muslim. so we have different experiences over there. there there's something about color that's really different in this country and we have to find a way to get together and see how we can fight tonight and find people on both sides. one thing i want to say about

religion -- and i tell it to my students all the time. do you think that jesus or mohammed stood over there and said "it is right to enslave people"? it's all about politics, about something else. people be k use every tool. they can have a hand on to justify the unjustifiable. you cannot find any justification of it anywhere. if you speak to real people who know the books, there's no justification about slavery and one thing that really is heartbreaking for me that some people you cannot talk to them. think think they are already cooked. you cannot turn them back into being raw vegetable. one thing i remember is about t

the flour delise. flur delease. i didn't know there was a controversy about that. when the shooting happened in charleston and people were talking about taking down the confederate flags, the southern generals there was a meeting that i was invited to and but anyone there was smomething tha someone said the fleur de lise should be taken down. i didn't know anything about it and they interviewed me about the history and i told them this was the symbol on the french flag before the revolution and i

know it was also used to brand black people. the french say if you run away for a first time, they cut you, you have to be branded with ifleur-de-lis on one shoulder. then they cropped your ears. second offense they brand you with the fleur de lis and cut your hamstring. the third offense would be the death penalty if you can still run or crawl away. that's what i told them. and when they told me should we remove it from the landscape of louisiana, i said that would be a very big challenge because i see black people coming to the plantation, to the museum, with a tattoo of of the fleur de lis. some said they understood and put it as a reminder. others don't know, they say it's beautiful and they put it on the back. how can yes remove it now.

i said i don't think it was a good idea but it's a good thing to remind people what is the history and those are the challenges we find. >> we have a question over here. wait, before we do this. we have a little bit of ground rules. so we want to make sure as many people get to ask their questions and interact as possible so we would like everyone to keep their question within a question form and also -- or your comment in the comment form but succinctly so if everybody can think about 30 seconds then we can respond and get the maximum amount of participation from everyone. >> so that's going to be hard but i just want to thank all of you for coming. i was at a late presentation but it's so sad to hear you say, doctor, that your students -- >> can you speak up a little

bit? >> that you students, you feel they're ashamed still, black students, to even take classes and that's so sad because i'm, like, 60 plus, eni wwhen i was young girl i was sort of ashamed and you talk about people talking about it, not talking about it. i was raised in los angeles, california, and it wasn't until i moved east that i heard more about the struggle. you speak of people not wanting to talk about slavery, well, there's that book "my parents didn't want me to talk about slavery." but my parents didn't talk about it. i didn't realize until much longer or until i had a child that people going west to l.a., maybe they were hoping they would escape that. when my parents got to los angeles, when my mother got to

los angeles at 11 it was segregated. my father was born in los angeles but i just wanted to say your sign that says "freedom, family, education" should also say truth. truth because you ask about how we're going to get over this. it's truth. people are not telling the truth. there is no truth in the education. there is no trickle down of the knowledge. and that's the sad part. the books are there. it's written down but also with the atlantic slave trade -- >> do you have a question? >> i'm just -- i'm just -- i'm just happy to see you and to hear things finally of the mythologies and lies created to legitimize the atlantic slave trade. those things need to be attacked, addressed and the truth really needs to come out. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> we have a question up here in the front.

>> hi, mr. cummings, thank you so much for opening your museum, i it this's long overdue and that every plantation museum in america should also be a slavery museum. the question i have is there's been a long mythology in u.s. history for not just slave owners and not just people in the slave trade but in america overall for people to infantalize slaves and treat them as if they're children and often times needing guidance of their owners and to treat them like children and/or animals and i wonder if you worry at all about that by presenting slaves primarily as children in your museum? >> the question was because there's a long tradition of infantalizing people who were enslaved, the mythology about black people is that they were like children so she was asking if you were worried about that

being echoed in depicting the enslaved children at whitney. >> i understand the question at the very beginning and we always have questions like that at the plantation. and they put it in some textbooks, i think that -- or maybe it's a myth conveyed all over the place and the problem you have is people, black people sometimes will think the same way. you know, in new orleans maybe this is unique to new orleans where people very early in the history of slavery people who were enslaved on plantation had the right to buy themselves out of slavery. or you as the master, you can free a slave. as early as the 1720s people

were being freed and became free people of color. that's the way they called them. and later they go on to own slaves. black slaves, freed slaves owning slaves in new orleans, in louisiana. and finally there was some kind of class between the owners and the slave and they called themselves creoles. and those ideas are still going around, this is a book. this is a -- from this family, her family, the -- she's the great granddaughter of victor heidel. her family came out of a plantation built by a german immigrant in the 18th century. this family gave to new orleans

its first black mayors. the first black mayors of new orleans came from this family, the black hydels. but i have a problem with one of the hydels. she wrote about the history of the hydels and although all the documentation says that she were enslaved on whitney plantation, victor hydel was born on the plantation a slave in 1835. his mother was anna, she was deported as a slave from virginia. earlier and she came -- she remembered being on a boat with her mother and two siblings. and she remember the mother falling asleep on the boat and the slave traders threw the body into the water. she made it to new orleans with her brothers, they were sold from her never to be seen again and she was brought to the hydel

plantation. but some of the memoirs of the family just to the k not accept that victor hydel, the ancestor, was a slave owner plantation. he was a sleeve, his mother was a slave but someone who called himself the historian of the family said that there was special people, they were not mistreated, there was special -- as a matter of fact they were born on the plantation from white fathers and they were privileged. i say in the last i would tell him, victor hydel and his mother anna were the last two names on the -- listed on the plantation. anna was described as being six years old, maladive, which means she was sickly. and she cost $100.

vict victor hydel, $800. what a problem as a human being just being like a horse or mule and they have a price on your neck, this is a real problem and we have to acknowledge it and we have this kind of problem also on the place, the way the people talk about slavery and trying to water it down to make it acceptable. at whitney plantation i think our trade l, what we believe in is to fight against those ideas. >> thank you, on the business of the children do we think that by having those children of whitney, does that in any way suggest that the slaves were child loike and is that a distraction: and the answer to

that is no, any more than the field of angels where we have the napes of the 2,200 slave children from that parish who died before their third birthday, those names engraved in granite surrounding a large bronze african angel carrying one of those dead children, making 22 trips to heaven. what it does, it talks to everybody about children. you can be intimidated by a large slave with chains and you don't tell a story, what you have to do is assume responsibility at least through colors for allowing those children to grow, to be beast of burdens and breeders to provide us with a steady supply of

slaves. and most people receive it the way it is intended. >> there's a question back here, then i think we have another in the corner over there. >> hello, my name is ronald lewis. i was fascinated by the presentation, that mentioned the federal writers' project. >> speak up a little bit? >> i was fascinated on the presentation that mentioned the federal writers' project but i was wondering since slavery lasted so long and you are telling a story of a plantation and it was so many plantations with many different stories how do you plan to encompass the story of so many people over so many -- so long a time and do you plan to get -- like the federal writers' project, do you plan to get more information,

like maybe going to the county courthouses and getting information from the people -- the lives of the people who lived during that time period? to get information to bring more information out so that people can hear these stories of what life was like. >> so your question is about the generations of people and about going into the courthouses and getting additional information about those lives? >> yes. more information and being -- and also how about putting a documentary up? >> and also what about a documentary? >> about doing a documentary. >> let me tell you, this man here who talks too much -- [ laughter ] -- and i just gave the moderator a card that says "stop talking." >> i have this -- i have someone in mind for it, actually.

let me tell you about our oral histories. i they have we have over 2,000, maybe 2,400 of them. and when you come there, if you're from mississippi we have the oral histories from mississippi. we encourage you to get that, take it home and read it. we have the oral histories of all of the slave states and in so far as louisiana is concerned and what slaves in louisiana, when he was a younger man, he worked with gwendolynne hall who came to louisiana and this man has been to every courthouse in the state of louisiana and gwendolynne's magnificent book on slavery in colonial louisiana was based on his shoe leather and his group, magnificent job

and then we find other slave information and when we do we get the engraving what sheen. we have our own engraving station there and we put another slab and print it up and then put it up. it's the most powerful presentation that you can make, we have found. we talked recently to the editor of the dallas newspaper who had been writing stories about the need for texas to have a slave museum and citing us and they wanted to raise $30 million and they were pointing out that it would have so many tourists and what not. and so they e-mailed us and we e-mailed them back and told them

to come. bring the take holder, the people who really were interested and you didn't need many, you just needed a couple of people who had passions to come. don't talk about $30 million. don't talk about tourism, come and build it for the right reaso reasons. and if you do, and if you move people and go the right thing and you have enough may ya cuean it, the money will come and bull praised for doing something and moving that along. we're working with texas. we're going to work with virginia. we're going to work with governor terry mcauliffe, we hope. what we have to do is to get in a position where we can understand what happened from

the people that it happened to and we can do that, thank god. it's the only thing that's worked so far for us. >> just a quick point. we mentioned her a couple times, dr. hall -- >> i didn't have a question i wanted you to see you can get this on amazon. i'll ask my question later. >> doctor, tell them what the name of the book means? >> the title of the book and then you have a -- in smaller font "the history of the slave community of the hyder whitney plantation." [ speaking french ] it is a creole proverb from

louisiana. bookie is the name of the hyena who survived in folk tales in. the uncle remus stories his name is not bookie anymore, it's brer fox and b'rer rabbit. they made it all the way to hollywood. that became bugs bunny and i think bookie became the wile, coyote. there's a lot to learn about. it's about the master and slave relationship. bookie makes the gumbo and the rabbit eats everything. the rabbit is the trickster. that's the master and slave relation sh relationship the author who put together this dictionary of creole proverbs, he didn't understand the real meaning of it. if you see the interpretation,

he did not understand. it is about the master and slave relationship and even in senegal we have another proverb that sa says "the monkey makes all the crops and the gorilla eats everything." it's master and slave relationship. that's the title of the book and all the story of the hyder plantation is woven around that proverb. >> so there's a person over here waiting patiently on the left side. my left. there was a person over there who was waiting patiently and unfortunately this is a very important event for me to be to so i came here directly from the airport from new orleans and i have to run out shortly so i think this is the last question but you all can continue the conversation. >> we'll be glad to. [ laughter ] >> so we're going to -- i'm going to call him and trade insults for a while after this

is all done but we have a question over here. >> when i worked at the 9/11 memorial museum that opened in 2014 you might recall there was a lot of controversy about the museum gift shop so i'm curious about the kinds of conversations you might have had about retail at your site. did you decide it was totally insfloept did you decide you should open a museum store? did you have conversations about the kinds of things that you might sell. when you were talking about the fleur de lis it made me think about how completely different interpretations people can have about the stories and objects that go with slavery so it made me curious about this question of retail. >> your question i know is -- i'm 78 and a brand new set of ear horns on, but i understand your question to be about the

visitor center and the retail. and there was a controversy. >> say dog you have a gift shop and was it thought to be inappropriate to have a gift shop or retail in the context of what it is you're mem rating at the museum? >> not at all. in fact we have deliberately researched items that we would move through there. we have items made in africa. fair trade items. we have african dress and head items. we have a bookstore we have every major book that we have been able to find on slavery and

we continue to build the bookstore we are very interested in our visitors reading the bookstore reading the books in the bookstore if they would like to. we direct them to books that we have found helpful. for example i was talking to you about the it and slavery is just part of the it. and a very dear friend of ours who was a first lady of new orleans, sybil hadell. this is sybil when she was a young lady, a beautiful, beautiful lady, and we're going to donate this book to your institution here because it's called "witness to change" and she without any rancor describes

her life in new orleans. the rejection. to be accepted at tulane university only to be told several days later that they discovered that she was a negro and under the law of louisiana she could not attend to lain and when that happened she called her fewian s ifiance who was thd he said "loyola university is next door. go apply." and she did. and she was told she could not come to the school because she was a negro. and she used to ride on her bikes and all of the kids would get together in her gang and would tear into the city parks, it's a thousand acre park there and the park rangers would run them down and run them out because they were negroes.

there were no big restaurants that they could eat at. there just weren't, no hotels for their visitors to stay in so they had a family and big meals and everybody would be called upon by their friends to house a few of the other family's friends while they were in new orleans and once they tried to go to the museum in city park and they were excluded by the police. so this courageous lady -- and i urge you, i'm not selling her book but i'm telling you it's wonderful because she presents history and she's not angry because she knows it's changing and she and this wonderful man she married would compare notes and although it would appear as though they had suffered a defeat it really meant that they had moved ahead.

and this is part of the it. this is part of the it. we're going to sell this book. this is one of the sellers and we will bring people to tell them exactly what i told you. when we're looking for the it, sybil's explained quite a bit of it. we don't sell balloons and things like that, you know? some of the plantations you can get jesus christ on velvet, you know? elvis what we sell is directly related to our message. clementine hunter, the great artist, primitive artist there. we sell her work, we sell the pictures of the -- we have platters with her paintings impressed in there where we have the slaves working or going to

church and that's what we do. we make sure that there is nothing there that detracts from our message. [ applause ] >> someone came to the plantation -- >> i know jelani is going to leave but i think we can take a few more questions. thank you, jelani. >> i want to add -- you have to leave? [ applause ] >> someone came to the plantation and said if we could like sell, you know, we have children of whitney and someone said if you can make a small children of whitney and sell them. it sounded really weird to us and we said no, we can not do that. >> we actually told them that the whitney plantation no longer

sold slave children. [ laughter and applause ] >> we have a question right here. >> someone asked a question about the narratives. it was very hard to make a selection of narratives and engrave them on granite. we have every narrative from mississippi to oklahoma to virginia, maryland, louisiana, it was really hard. all of them really heartbreaking. although many of the people who were interviewed in the 1930s who lived in slavery when they were children, some of them, you know, maybe were kind of intimidated, they would tell you they had plenty to eat. you would think it was nice to be a slave. no. you have also to put those into the context. to know who interviewed them, what kind of questions they were asked. but you have very well spoken out people who say what they

endured in slavery and we made a good selection of those stories and you can find them on those granite slap slabs at the plan. but also in the houses you don't have only inventories. inventories are really -- you don't learn too much about inventory. you may see real names, where they came from, the price, the skills, but you have also trials, people who registered slavery, people who were runaway slaves. and they were asked questions and they responded why they did it and you also have real narratives over there. those are things you can learn at the whitney plantation i think it's really important. >> can i ask a question. ? thank you. i visited oak alley plantation

several years ago and i remember learning there somebody who gave us a tour said cote noir was not as rough a type of slavery in new orleans. >> will you say that again? >> code noir, the kind of slavery that went on in new orleans and it was a little less rough than other parts of the country. is that -- is there any truth to that? >> you should invoke the doctrine of "uh-huh." [ laughter ] that's one place where you can get elvis on velvet. >> they try to compare different natio nations. slavery is slavery. you are not free and if you try to resist wherever you are it is the same, they make you suffer in your flesh. the code noir or the black code may have some very nice articles

about, you know, food and clothing and all that, but do you know they do it just out of philanthropy? every smart master would treat his slaves well, make sure they eat well because they are property, value property, they would work better for him. slavery is all the same all over the world, in africa or asia. you are a slave, you are a slave. you are not free and someone owns you. >> hi. >> hi. >> sorry, i have a sore throat. thank you for coming to new york. thank you for your museum and personally thank you for being you. you're both extraordinary people. it's great to watch you. i was wondering, are you talking to the group in rhode island at the we miepiscopal church who's making the museum of slavery in the north? >> isn't that an undertaking? and the descendant of that family is there supervising it and i've talked to one of the --

i call them stakeholders, those are people who don't have an interest, but that's as far as it's gone. we still very much in bricks and mortar and i've talked to dallas and i want to do something there. whatever they do is good. raise $30 million if you want but it's important that the. us will then would have to focus on that. they have to focus on slavery and what they did. and same with the virginia. there was an attempt to build one there and all the money was abscondedened it went bankrupt. no, i'm serious, i'm serious. everybody got contracts and millions of dollars disappeared. >> every time you say dallas i

remember that i'm hearing recently that texas is taking out the word "slave" and changing it to "worker." >> yeah. she's saying texas, they are taking the word "slave" for "worker." this is a conversation going on on facebook everywhere and it's wrong to say these people were just workers. just like if they came here willingly. no, they came in the hulls of -- with shackles, in slave ships, they were slaves, they were not free. they're going to take it out. >> if dallas is talking to you, would you please tell them it's unacceptable? >> well, they don't talk to southern democrats too much. [ laughter ] they would have a slave display

that would discount obamacare. you know, that unfortunately is what you're facing. but anything that they do to open that door is good. it's good. they have to call them slaves, of course. but we went to thomas jefferson's plantation one time and there were no slave quarters but we had the foundations were there and we were told that's where the servants lived. they now call them slaves. they used to call them servants. >> [ inaudible question ] >> we have time for one more question. >> i think the most important thing we can do when we come to see you in november is to write better curriculum.

i think you all know if you've had kids in school that you don't see this. we do a kind of monolithic job of talking about cotton in georgia with britain. the interesting thing for us, i think, will be to particularize this story. because this is the story of people belonging to german immigrants who live in louisiana who make sugar. what i would like to snow -- now, i've talk for years how you make cotton. how did these slaves produce sugar? >> how did they produce it? well, they -- you know what the sugar cane looks like and it has a bunch of joints, looks like a piece of -- looks like a piece of bamboo. it has joints on it like that and you take those and you dry them out for a while and you plant them about four inches deep and where every joint is, a

new sugar cane plant will grow. and then there's harvest time, right now it's starting and the plants are cut -- they used to be cut with machetes, it's a now cut by machine and that is taken to a refinery, and each plantation, big plantation, had a sugarhouse and they would take the sugar cane and it would be -- you can just imagine who two wheels and a machine like that that turn in opposite directions like this and in the middle you would feed the sugar cane and the juice would be squeezed out of it. sometimes you would have a slave with a mule walking the mule around just to turn these wheels and the justice then is put through a procedure where it's

heated and it goes to -- it turns into sugar, to molasses, syrups, and the -- when the sugar was made, when the sugar was made it was poured into cones like this, just -- they looked like when you put them -- when you sold them about this round and they would come up like a christmas tree and it was poured, it would dry and those would be sold and you had little tools and you would just break a piece like that to put in your coffee or if you're making something that's how the sugar was. and then a black man discovered a way that you could granulate sugar so that was that it was like the sand you see today.

that was put into barrels that were called hog's heads and it was about 500 pounds of sugar in the barrels. so from our plantation we would move those barrels to the mississippi river, which is right there, and roll them on to barges that would be taken down to new orleans off loaded into warehouses and that sugar was sold around the world. >> if you go to louisiana now, the grinding season has just started just like in the old days. it started in mid-october or the first of november. it lasted from that time to christmas very hard time for people who were enslaved. because some of them had to work, the sugar mill worked 24 hours a day and of course they could not work 24 hours, they have shifts, you know.

sugar cane was planted in january and it came to maturation in october and then it was cut from the field and taken to the sugar mill. usually a sugar mill has two rows of kettles, open kettles, you know, hidden by firewood underneath and those kettle wood connected to the grinder which is ground just like he explained and slaves -- enslaved people moved the hot liquid from kettle to kettle, four of them, until it got to the last one. it was very dangerous. they had explosions, people burned to death and it was demanding. and each row of kettle needed like 76 people behind it. when i say 76, you have 20 -- what they call 20 knives.

20 slaves cutting the cane into the field and 20 slaves to roll the cane into bundles and put them on carts and you have is cart drivers who took the kuan to the sugar mill. they have slaves feeding the grind ere and the justice was put to boil from kettle to kettle until it granulates. you have an engineer for the engine and firemen who make sure that they have enough wood and fire under the kettles. it was a very dangerous process. the main crop was indigo, less demanding. it was really less demanding in labor, whatever, but the sugar industry was so much demanding and the death rate was really high. it's not surprising that in 1811

the largest happened in louisiana and connected to the revolution in haiti which happened. two decades of revolt from 1791 to 1804 when haiti became an independent state and the first governor of louisiana, american governor, used to put ships at the mouth of the mississippi river to make sure that the troublesome haitian people would not come into the country. they were labelled trouble spl. but i wrote in the book that the governor was wrong. instead of monitoring haiti he would have look eed under his feet. right there there was a big problem. people days en masse and he would have done a better job making sure that the sugar industry was not too harsh on the people. but in 1811 they had the largest

slave revolt in the united states happened over there. >> and we will display that. and it will be horrific. woodrow gnash hnash has delivers 60 abstract skulls and they will be there with their names, where they came from and the whole transcript of the trial. before we leave, i'd like to say we thank you, we're honored to be here and it's interesting. it's interesting to always talk and to attempt to persuade people to adopt whatever it is that you're selling. we sincerely invite everybody here to get involved and together we can change the world. we really can. and there's a message that i

just thought of and i'm now delivering it. you know, like i said, we're still in diapers and you learn everyday: we all came from afri africa. our ancestors left early but we have to care for the ones who left later. we're all african-americans and thank you. [ applause ] >> thank you all so much for coming. i know there are other questions and i'm sure that john and the doctor would be very happy to talk for the hallway. thanks for being a great audience. you're watching american history tv. 48 hours of programming on american history every weekend on c-span 3. follow us on twitter at c-span

history for information on our schedule and to keep up with the latest history news. the george washington book prize is awarded annually to a which advances public understanding of george washington and america's founding era. this year's prize went to lin-manuel miranda for his broadway musical "hamilton" which is based on the life ofha. next the award ceremony. and we'll see a performance from the play. this is about an hour and 15 minutes. if eveningood evening. thank you.