continuing tuesday, july 12, at :00 a.m. eastern. submitting it to delegate. live on c-span, the c-span radio, and he stand.org. >> up next, a panel of historians and scholars hold a panel discussing who is black in america. it is part of a three-day conference calling the future of the african-american pass. it was cohosted by the national smithsonian national museum of african american history and culture and the american historical association. [applause] prof. berlin: thank you very much feared i would like to affirm that i am ira berlin, and this is a discussion over who is black, with the expectation that anybody of african descent has the same opinions, shares the same music, can play and dance

pretty much the same way only to discover that that is not true. we also, of course, have formalized this notion, and it is something called the one drop rule, which we used to distinguish race relations on most of mainland america, or compare race or understanding race on mainland north america from elsewhere in the world, and it of course speaks to the fact that african americans and africans have had a common enemy and have had a shared experience, all of which complicates our understanding of the question of who is black, and those of you who were here last night, when our discussions kind of mobilized and moved notions of identity, the question of exactly what blackness means clearly grew and became on the floor. we know this from a historical perspective, we know people who were dragged across the atlantic started off not as africans but

as congols, and angolans. on that trip, as sidney mintz and richard price tell us, there is something called shipmates that began to arise with people with a common experience. by the time they got to the side of the atlantic, the distinction between those very us africans began to morph into something we call creoles or african americans. some of those people got free. we talked about the difference between free and slave. of course, there were differences between people who lived on plantations and people who lived on farms, people who

lived in urban areas, and of course this is just a beginning of those distinctions, which took place in different forms, not the least of which of wars were distinctions between men and women and distinctions of gender. we are not going to talk about

all of those distinctions today, but we will try to deal with

this question of who is black, and in some way set the table for the rest of the sessions, and during the next two days. my colleagues on the platform, most of you know who they are. their bios are in the program. tiya miles just to the left of me at the university of michigan. as near as i can say, she does just about everything. african american, african culture -- go down the list. it is quite impressive. my colleague at the university of maryland, elsa barkley brown, our lead author of our discussion today. will try to put a frame on what we would like to talk about. dylan penningroth next to elsa, and at the end, cleanup for us there, is deborah gray white. they will appear in that order. according to the instructions that we have been given, that i have been given, according to the instructions i have been given, everybody has 10 minutes or thereabouts. a generous 10 minutes, but not that generous. and we are going to try to leave plenty of time for audience participation in what should be a really interesting session. so thank you all for coming, for getting up early this morning. to be here at 8:00. i take it most of you just stayed up all night. [laughter]

prof. berlin: so that is good. and i will introduce elsa. do you want to talk from there, or would you like to come up here? prof. barkley brown: good morning. who makes up or what makes up black america? i want to discuss it in ways in which my students and i together can push and open up conversations about the composition of african america. i have come, and the last you years, to begin my introductory african american history courses with the explain of lisa

collins' 1998 film "tree shade." in it, savannah mayfield, a high school student, faces an assignment to create the family tree to say who are her people. and sitting at the out only african-american student in the classroom, she was both embarrassed and perhaps terrified as she sketches out who her people are. she follows her female line that three generations to the early 20th century, naming her ancestors, but all that she can put next to each name is the word convict. and the searching any archive for her ancestors, all she might be able to uncover would be their police record, affirming convict. she put together a thing made of dolls, necklaces, all women in

service work with complete stories of their own. all women who -- the domestic service to prison pipeline. in my class, we viewed the 1997 mockumentary "watermelon woman." the conversation is about silences, about ghosts, about archives, and about the silences in archives and also the silences in families. about savannah mayfield's lack of knowledge initially in her family. about the silences in official history that cheryl dunye has shown us that sometimes you have to create your own history. our commerce station our class

is also about desire. i challenge the students and myself to consider what histories we desire, what history we would be ashamed to have come a what histories do they not want me to tell in the classroom, what histories do they not tell in their families. why will those silences exist? some will be because there are no records, some will result from our failure to imagine, but will there be some silences because there are things we do not want to know? history you do not find worthy of learning or ashamed to call out as part of "who is black america?" so what are some of the silences, and how and where are they produced?

in other words, what are the various spaces where we create particular notions of who is black america. the classroom, the archives, public discourse, the family. some of the silences confuse black americans about who they can be. a case in point is the 1920's california club woman, nationally known for her column

in the "oakland tribune," and her club work, including her work in the passage of the anti-lynching bill. most of the time, she was financially destitute and on more than one occasion homeless. the letter to w.e.b. dubois, she that are funds but also said he need not reveal her need for money to other members of the race. other readings in the archives, some may be created and what our own desires are or who we want black america to be. much wonderful recent work reveals the long history of black men and women incarceration, uncovering names and condition under which those imprisoned live. early work has been central here, takes a somewhat different tact in her new work on mary todd, a woman who appears to be

a fairly close -- cold-blooded murderer. i am looking forward to seeing how my students respond to the composition of black america. of course, the silences in our history reflects the public discourse. though we have the beginnings of histories that publicly own black bodies, the relative silence contributes to the relative silence in our public discourse. the concerted effort it takes to keep reminding that in the forefront of black lives matter are women, maya hall, a black transgendered woman killed by police outside baltimore directly before the murder of freddie gray. i am hoping we can discuss silences produced and archives, family memories, and political change, and continue to rewrite the past and reconfigure the voice. my hope in my class is that my students challenged me throughout the semester to fill in some silence, and when i can't, which is also the case, we do not fill in the silence

with something more easily discovered or more power double scale, but rather we take the silence to tell us something about the diverse aspects of black america we still need to fill in. [applause] prof. miles: good morning. i'm going to be about tracing african-american lives in native american spaces. there is no such thing as a new world in reference to the americas in the 1660's, rather, the land that we now know as the

territory of the united states was people to buy hundreds of societies with nations close to 5 million, this explores foreigners, again, uncharted lands, they have to recognize the business communities. this is also the case for the africans who came across the atlantic who had deserted the call of the slave trade. these africans landed not only in the old world proper, and not just in spanish, english, and french colonial settlements or

the u.s., but they also landed in ancient culture and communities of native north america. the social, spatial, political, and cultural formations of these people were complex, long-standing, and tangible. those of african dissent found themselves having to navigate. african-american history in a space that is native america gives new information and deeper understanding about the diversity, dignity, and resilience of black price on this land. across the eastern seaboard in the deep south and even in the west, black and native people met in a series of encounters that became consequential for african american life.

the english colony of virginia and the carolina in the 1600's, black people wore enslaved alongside the native americans, for tobacco, rice, and indigo plantations. enslaved black men were brought onto farms where native women labored as indentured servants. they often coupled. black and native men worked relatively together. in the aftermath of the catastrophic conflict between the british and native people, black and indigenous men were sold in slavery. 100 and slave people from these two -- the sioux, ottawa, and other nations. they traded deer, beaver skins and others. american slavery solidified, and white men pushed further into the interior, cherokee, creek, chickasaws, seminoles, these nations to varying degrees settled plantations of their own. we often refer in shorthand to a configuration called the black community, and black people in the u.s. do share a bold and

dramatic -- however, that we begin to define our areas and look at the fine print, we see that african america is illuminated as a richly, variegated population. sexuality, religion, these are all important. but i would like to add to that group, the black population possesses native roots. by native roots, i am pointing to historical patterns of experience within the native community, ancestral and family ties with native people, and also persistent cultural narratives and mythologies about a and b. i think many of us in this room have heard african americans talk about long, straight hair

as a sign of indian blood, high cheekbones as a sign of indian ancestry, and we may wonder what that claim is about, what that narrative is. in order to reach a finer understanding of the composition of black america, we must see the community and cultural narrative of black people in native spaces and consider the way in which a black-white binary and indeed a red-white binary has often occluded our interpretive vision. it is part of the project of drawing a broader picture of black cultural complexity. it is not to suggest that that lends to be rose-colored. we cannot deny nor should we got the largest populations of native americans and black americans were brought together through colonial forces of

slavery, or that they came to being by injustice and suffering. the 1600's and 1700's, black people were newcomers to north america, and their livelihood depended on native land, on the seizure of native lands. native american southerners owned approximately 5000 black people in 1865. the slave people reveal a catalog of abuse.

they also revealed that native slavery was in some places in time more flexible than what we recognize as american slavery. students at the institute under the direction of booker t. washington in the late 1800's were taught that they start at a higher level of civilization than native american students who were also in school there. and black male soldiers, known as buffalo soldiers, policed the native americans. but despite the wrongs perpetrated and harms endured in this tangled web of exploitation and survival, african americans have recalled experiences in words like those of historian

gilda naylor. who wrote, "born and raised among these people, i do not want to know any others." scholars are beginning to think through the way relationships were distinct from those. for instance, a chickasaw literary scholar has acknowledged in her own nation black enslavement, has said that we need a new word to talk about black people, a word other than settlers, and she has termed the word arrivants. we can trace those lives, everything the at times, and

documented history as well as cultural memories. it has long been the importance in the space of african-american lives. in an article entitled "the relations of negroes," one of the longest unwritten chapters in the history of the united states is that of the negroes and the indians. several articles were written in "the journal of negro history" about this topic. but afterwards, the subject really fell into the footnote, and it was not until very recently, after the year 2000 approximately, that there were several writings on this

subject. these new monographs are dealing not only with just seeing that black people lived in native spaces, not only with recognizing that native people owned black slaves, but also more generally, sexuality, geography, and formal economic networks, kids in the community, racism, migration. native american history scholars are finding their way to see black life into these spaces. it has taken us a bit of time to

fully realize carter g woodson's vision. to continue drafting woodson's unwritten chapter, cubs and consequences, unveiled multiple means of america of the terms "black america." [applause] prof. penningroth: good morning. i'm going to stand up. i talk faster that way. [laughter] if you look at a church history from the early 1900's, you will read about two things, law and property. so many dollars raise in one year, so much money spent to buy the land and raise up a building.

the crowning moment came when crowds of onlookers watched a crowd proudly set the mortgage on fire. these matter because as carter g woodson pointed out in 1930, more african-americans think money into church property than anyone else. legally, in most states then and now, a church is a religious corporation that holds property for the benefit of its members, so when ex-slaves in 1855 point to their local circuit court and filed the paperwork to incorporate or appoint trustees, they took for themselves property rights, taxes and 10, and the standing to sue and be sued as a collective rather than individually. as the georgia supreme court put it, trustees watched over the civil rights of their congregation. believers, a pastor, a deed, and trustees -- these were the pillars of a black church. the church has dealt a lot with courts in the 1800's. they were asking to borrow money against buildings and lands to defend against lawsuits by contractors or unfriendly neighbors. out of necessity, churches also

became tiny schools of business and law, a typical business meeting would open with prayers and bible readings and hymns, and then they moved to the money business, reporting the latest church fundraising, entertaining, buying lumber and tools for a new building, giving a hardware man a deed of trust. if you are lucky enough to be sent to one of your annual conferences, you may hear a quote delivered by a leading black attorney. law was in the everyday life of lack churches from the pulpit to the deacon's office to the pews,

and that legal culture and form how the churches were run, how they handle crises, and to an extent, people's sense of themselves as christians. in the 1950's, as we'll know, african americans attacked jim crow in the streets and in the worker sent segregation and discrimination were in part legal, the attack raised questions about black american''

relationships to law. consider dexter avenue baptist church where martin luther king was first called to the pulpit. dexter was famous at the time as a deacon's church, where ministers got kicked out constantly, unlike more baptist churches where ministers held more of the power. on the first sunday morning, september 5, 1954, king announced that morning, leadership distance from the pulpit to the pew, and it has to be respected and the central figure around which the policies and programs that the church evolved. it was a coup -- i am quoting a scholar on that. [laughter] prof. penningroth: a risky grab of leadership, that is my word. and the kind of thing that sparked thousands of lawsuits in american churches -- and it worked beautifully. dexter worked in a world structured by law.

signed contracts, mortgages with the lenders, and it had it shares of lawsuits and near lawsuits. in 1932, a depression-pinned dexter could not pay its pastor's celery, and only avoided a lawsuit by selling off the church car. nine years before king arrived, the deacons had gone to court to issue out another pastor for abusing his wife. when king took the pulpit in 1954, he addressed the court in the religious life. -- one built not only on the writing of thoreau and gandhi, but about dexter, in also watching his father at ebenezer running a church. the church was governed by rules, just like schools were. the guidelines make it very clear. to critics who felt that they talked too much civil rights in that church, king retorted with an even more bold declaration of ministerial power than he had dared when he took the dexter pulpit. i will quote at length here -- "you called this ebenezer, and you may turn me out of here, but you cannot turn me out of the minister because i got my guidelines and my anointment from god almighty, and anything i want to say, i'm going to say it from this pulpit. it may hurt somebody. i do not know about that. somebody may not agree with it, but when god's speak, who can but prophesize?

the word of god is upon me shut up like fire in my bones, and i have got to tell it all over everywhere, and got had called me to deliver those that were in captivity." know there was no way that dexter or ebenezer or any other church is going to fire martin luther king junior in 1956. get that kind of lingwood was exactly what guy generations of less famous ministers fired or sued. plenty of baptists believe that god had not called her ministers to deliver those who were in captivity, not in the way that king was leaving. one of those baptists, in fact, joseph h jackson, was president of the baptist convention, and any resulting lawsuit would have hinged on exactly the issues that king raised in his sermon. who has the authority to call and dismiss a pastor? what can church members do when the minister had hurt somebody? by the 1950's, church leaders had built of a store of experience with legal tools, like injunction, trustees, corporation, and the role of law in a christian life.

they could now apply those lessons learned in internal church life and an routine church business to the external problem of racial injustice. the most famous example was king's letter, "from a birmingham jail," which laid out civil disobedience in the face of oppression. king wrote, "the injunction has now become the leading instrument in the south to direct action to the civil rights drive." now, if the injunction meant anything to white readers, it probably reminded them of the labor injunction, the killer of unions. but king would be most familiar with injunction, the weapon in a church fight. underneath the references to saint augustine, king's logic proceeded in a prosaic second register. it was moral when it targeted

unjust law, and unjust laws were those that violated "the moral law and the law of god," that a majority group forces on a minority but does not make binding on itself for a law on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, has no part in enacting or devising that law. this is exactly what church law offices had been about ever since bethel ame was incorporated in 1976. opponents of reverend richard h singled in a sued out and used, get ready, a poll tax to strip certain people of their voting rights and ran through his own agenda. poplar springs, 1928, atlanta, 1945, and in america in 1963, and those are just once i got through the state supreme court in 1960 and 1961, king was among

the warring reverends who lobbed injunctions at each other in court in philadelphia, and kansas city, to get control of the national baptist convention away from jackson. i tried to convey a rich engagement of black churches and institutions. right from their founding, black churches were incorporating, buying and selling property, defending what both they and the court called their civil rights. as white supremacy waved down, those were the only rights like people could claim, and claim them the day. the legal culture of black churches begin a bridge between civil rights and property and contracts and the civil rights of desegregation and protection. civil rights in the 1960's was as much about fire insurance as mass-market.

the fire insurance is what made it possible, not just in the practical sense as king put it, "litigation costs money," or that black rights often came from the pulpit or that a major black bar association held its meeting at a church, but because they led from the culture. they stepped in armed with practical knowledge and a pragmatic faith in law's abilities and limits. thank you. [applause]

prof. white: i, too, am going to stand up and talk from this mic. i titled my presentation this morning "from new negro to post black: who is black america?" i would like to start with two imaginary conversations. the first one, while fingering his handwritten copy of poet james weldon johnson's "lift every voice and sing," a sunset strip father, "no more "yes, sir" to whitey and holding my head down, no more sitting in the back of the trolley, no more picking cotton. i am a black man. i am going to get an education, a good job, and a wife who i will protect. i'm going to fight for my rights as a negro american and show the world what the negro race has to offer. yes, i am a new negro." a man of few words, his father

looks at him, his son, and he says "they lynch new negroes the same way they lynched old ones." forward, 90 or 100 years later, the son talks to his father -- the sun's great-grandson talks to his father, and while holding a copy of barack obama's "dreams from my father," says "i do not have to identify as black. i am a man whose politics and opportunity are not raised by my -- i am not afraid to be post black." having inherited the tray of reticence from the men and his family, the harlem-based father says to his son, "cab drivers are still not going to take you to harlem to die. they leave post black sustaining on the corner the same way they leave regular blacks."

[laughter] prof. white: these two imaginary yet realistic conversations demonstrate black identity in the 20th century and some of the generational and gender issues involved. an expression of black modernity is indicative of the new negro movement, which reflected the hope of people who were like other americans and other westerners becoming modern, meaning they were migrating or immigrating to become more urban, more in meshed in the industrial lives, economy, more engaged with financial institutions, more scientific

and more asthma politics here people specifically were moving from rural to urban america, to full citizenship, and from espousing a philosophy of uplift through self-help to an embrace of uplift through civil rights. the second conversation is indicative of the way some young black americans are dealing with post-modernity, a black president, has offered modern blacks a waste to self identify many ways to become black. while they do not reject their blackness, they never the less are expressing a desire to not be circumscribed by a group definition of blackness. they understand their race is one of many in the variables that define them. so i'm going to talk a little bit this morning about what i found at the 1990 mass marches, the million man and woman march, to demonstrate the similarities

and differences between black modernity and post-modernity. if we talk with the early conversation, you know, at the turn of the century, african-americans understood that to be part of the modern world and to take part in what we call modernity, they had to throw off sharecropping, they had to establish rights to the fruits of their labor, they had to be able to move, and they needed the taxes that they paid to government to underwrite their civil, educational, and

housing rights. the attendees of the 1909 national negro conference, for example, took as their starting point the idea that blacks were citizens, entitled to human rights, and they demanded that blacks the given social and political rights as well. they criticized the system of sharecropping, disenfranchisement, they demanded that blacks be given free and complete education that was not restricted to just industrial education. they insisted that every civil rights accorded from the 14 amendment be given to black people. at other times, they demanded that blacks be given the right to intermarry, not because blacks were dying to marry whites, but because marriage is a civil right, and who they were allowed to marry was a denial of the basic right of american citizenship. they were also mindful of the

fact that the laws against intermarriage left black women open to sexual exploitation by white men. most black americans, therefore, wanted to be integral to this american society. though there have always been people who follow the precepts of bishop turner, marcus garvey, going back to africa, but the won where blacks live separately in the country or ones where blacks were back to africa, the precursor of the naacp said any discrimination based on race or color is barbarous. we cannot have it. determination based solely on peculiarities based on color or skin is an unreasonable human

savagery of which the world should be thoroughly ashamed. most black organizations, therefore, worked tirelessly to read america of that barbarous discrimination. they worked tirelessly for black human, civil, social, economic, and political equality. for the most part, when african-americans excepted segregation at all, it was accepted as a measure of self-defense that was necessary to fight oppression and to build a community strong enough to withstand the insults and injury of jim crow and all that went along with it. black people developed "parallel institutions" as a measure of self-defense. black sororities and fraternities, black colleges,

the black church, black professional organizations were founded because we were excluded from white organizations that were part of the modernity project. segregation proves to be the achilles heel of white supremacy. it provided a way to develop a range of distinct institutions that they control. it allowed blacks to defy whites and become modern in a spite of white americans' desire to confine african americans to a primitive, premodern existence. black community was essential to black modernity because group strength was stronger than individual strength. group accomplishment went further than individual accomplishment. it was our exclusion that created "our country, our black community."

at the center of nikhil pal singh's book "black is a country," is the notion of black people not as unimagined country, as benedict aniston would have it, but is it to separating from whites, willing in the 1960 to take their case against the united nations and plead their rights as other nations were doing. stephen hahn trace of this black nation back, a nation under our feet, the title of his magnum opus. looking at the early conversation between father and son, we see a son ready to embrace a black identity, including the song, "lift up your voice and sing," which became the black national anthem, and the courage that he had recently taken on. he was ready to take on the world as the new negro, a new black man, along with him word dark skins, light-skinned, almost all-white people because

of the one drop law passed in the colonial 19th-century would discern anyone with black heritage as black. along with caribbean migrants whose numbers went from 5000 20,000 between 1850 and 1900, and whose numbers increased to approximately 140,000 between 1899 and 1937, along with him were blacks of all social and economic classes because jim crow laws and systemic terror because jim crow laws and systemic terror made lacks second-class citizens, forced to live and play together and forging meaningful existence boys --dubois called their own aesthetic and food come other ways of knowing. let's fast-forward to the second

where the son talks about social construction and he does not want to be limited or find by any preconceived notion of blackness, where the sun wants to express his individuality. if we look at the 1995 million man march and the 1997 million woman march, and look for the answer of who is black america, self-help and self-defense was by the 1990's disintegrated. this is ironic and paradoxical because the variables that drew these people to these marches were black identity, yet the black consciousness, the consensus over who is black that had serves to energize african-americans for most of the 20th century was disappearing. let me give you just an example of what i mean.

the calls for unity at both marches -- if we were so united -- [laughter] if we were so united, then why was there a need to call for unity? it says to me that unity was in short supply. similarly, if black men and women were so together, why did they do two separate marches on two separate national malls? why did black homosexuals have to petition and fight to be a part of both marches? i argue that black america is not what it used to be, that this notion of post-modernity and post blackness is something that people have talked about.

charles s johnson -- can i have one more minute? in 2008, he gave a martin luther king talk, and he called it the "end of the black american narrative." he argued that the african-american narrative of slavery, jim crow, lynching, everything that has dominated is tired. this unique black american narrative which emphasizes the experience of victimization is quietly in the background of every comer station we have about black people, and when it is not fully articulated or expressed, it is our starting point, our agreed-upon summit, are most important deposition for dialogue about black america. what johnson argues is that

african-americans need to bury this narrative because black people today are too complex and multifaceted to be so easily characterized. if we had the numbers of caribbeans, africans, biracial, we begin to see you just what he recognized. i would like to end with another not so imaginary conversation, ok, and this time the father is a white contemporary of the 21st century who, with the help of a large black electorate, was elected mayor of a big american city. he and his bisexual black wife who traces her roots back to her grandmother from barbados has a heartfelt talk with their biracial son. they explained to him what they call the drill.

it is the self-imposed procedure learned by most people of color upon being stopped by the police. "move slowly, keep your hands where the police can see them, explain all of your hand procedures so the cops will know what you are doing. if you are in a car, turn on the light if it is at night. if it is at night, put your hands on the steering wheel and make no sudden moves." the biracial son with caribbean roots is startled by his parents' candor, but he nods his head in the affirmative as he stares at them in disbelief. some of you will recognize that last conversation as that between mayor de blasio of new york city and his son. [applause] prof. berlin: i'm going to give the panel one more shot of

trying to deal with the question of narrative of status within the community, of inheritance, of experience, of circumstance, of things that make black lives what our president called a mongrel people, indeed, the american people, bringing so many parts together, and then we will open up our discussion to the audience. >> do you have questions?

prof. berlin: go ahead. all right, the panel has conceded to the audience. [laughter] prof. berlin: this is not what martin luther king suggested about authority. once you have it, you are not supposed to surrender it. but we have microphones over there, and we have microphones up there, and if anybody wants a question or to make a short statement, they can go up to the microphone. yes, please say who you are. phil: my name is phil dogget, i'm from california. short statement -- this is a great panel, i missed the start because i came late from arlington. i want to speak about the narrative being tired. the narrative informs where we are today, the political conversation that is at the

bedrock of the 2016 election -- what is more fundamental to the campaign than its narrative the trump to campaign than its narrative about african americans being this, that, or the other? i will not go any further, but i think you know where i am going. it is an interesting and important dialogue. i have done work around dubois' idea of consciousness, and we today in 2016 still have to deal with this concept that is a part of our essence, this idea of double consciousness. thank you. marvin: hello, i am marvin jones. i am from a community, a mixed-race community in north carolina that is 270 years old, and i have always been mistaken as white. i have also been mistaken as black, sometimes by myself --

[laughter] marvin: but i grew up in black communities landowning. we always spoke different, but we were always part of the african-american community, and that's one thing i have learned. we help set up black institutions, even though we always look near white or near indian, always living on the edge of what was white, what was african, what was indian, but i have learned that being black is part of a community sometimes and not always even having the gene from africa, a postcolonial gene from africa, and i now yield my time to this person and my neighbor from the neighboring county, arwin smallwood.

bob: thank you very much for yielding your time. my name is bob harris, and i have a question for professor penningroth. as i understand your presentation, you are looking at the black church and your experience gained through use of the law and legal instruments. my question to you is where would you place fraternal orders such as the elks, the masons, and so forth, since in many respects, their use of the law preceded that of the church. i am trying to remember the name of the sociologist, i believe she is a sociologist, at harvard, who has written a book on these fraternal orders -- pardon? thank you so much. i was having a brain freeze.

it happens more frequently than i would like these days. but anyway, she really looked at the development of the legal experience through these fraternal organizations. i just wondered -- where do you place them in your story? prof. penningroth: thank you for that question. i will answer very quickly that the fraternal orders -- they are part of my book. they should be a bigger part of my book. right now, the church is occupying more space than the fraternal orders. i don't -- it is hard for me sitting here on the stage on the fly, but i would say they used law beginning around the same time in the late 1700's. and i do know the work, and i am also -- one of the things that they talk about is this battle that develops and intensifies in the late 1800's over the use of

insignia and rituals, and that is what the court battles are ostensibly about. but they also, i think, point out -- and i think i would emphasize this more -- but the battle was probably just as much over the insurance business, that is to say they are both competing for customers, and the battle intensifies earlier when companies like prudential try to get in. so in essence, the black fraternal orders get out of the insurance business, which had been their lifeblood since going back before the civil war, so that is a huge and important story. that is really worth telling, so thank you for that question. arwin: arwin smallwood, my question is rectitude professor miles and in general, as marvin jones just mentioned, particularly in south carolina,

you have large numbers of mixed-race people who are of native ancestry, and it goes back to the and placement of native people and the mixing with african, and i believe that that is really, that first 200 years of history, late 1500's to the 1600's, before the revolution, is really the formation of what we call african american. how would we get the generation of -- the next generation of young scholars to fully examine that? we talk about the rights, all these other things, but we have not fully examined the relationship between native americans and blacks in the first 200 years of colonial settlement? prof. miles: hello, arwin. thank you for that question. one of the things that we face as a challenge is we have to really go back, as you indicated, and i find that it

can really take some encouragement and enticement to get students to want to look at the 1700's. part of what our job is, i suppose, is to really unveil the nuances, complexities, and really interesting nature of this material in the colonial period so that the students will say i can study that, i can study migration and the same moment. prof. penningroth: just to jump in, to illustrate what tiya said , i have taught both paths of african-american history -- my enrollments are always higher for the second half. it's hard to get students to come with you to the earlier periods.

>> i'm a student at the university of maryland. i'm one of those people that actually does like to look into earlier things. here i am, guys. [laughter] i have a question for ms. miles and miss deborah about identity. i know a lot of people do not like to use the term afro. afro-latino or afro something else did with that context, how do we talk about these interactions between different races and different people and different generations of people, while grappling with this identity and question of putting afro in front of something or not? because some people feel like it takes away their american-ness or their something. prof. miles: thank you for that question.

i'm comfortable with afro. i use afro-native. in part because there is not the term black indian. it's a very general term that collapses various identities. afro-native is more open. all these terms and up driving us into cul-de-sacs because they do not convey the nuances. one thing i wish i could do better that i encourage you to do better is try to invent new language to capture the complexities of the populations we are talking about. >> i would add to that by saying that we are in a moment where i think the whole bi-racial structure of american identity is in a flux.

so, and that it's mostly because we have had such a large influx of hispanics or latinos who either will identify as black or white or mostly will identify as hispanic regardless of what their color is. and i think that with the immigration of so many non-whites, the notion of being black or white, whether it is what you want to check with on the census or now that you can check more than one or two, i think a lot of people see this as a way of just asserting so much, a great, asserting so many more of the variables that make up identity and to be quite honest, i don't think a lot of

americans want to be pigeonholed anymore into the one or the other. and i think when you use afro, which i do not have a problem with, or african, you, that's what exactly you are doing -- you are privileging one aspect of identity over another. and i think that is what particularly millennials and a more a younger generation are trying to get away from. >> good morning. i live and work in new jersey. in newark, new jersey. i have a couple of comments spurred by my sister new jerseyian deborah gray white. professor white mentioned the magic word census. i would like to say a little bit about that looking forward along the lines you mentioned and that

is of increasing ethnicity. when i say i live in new jersey we have a lot of people from the caribbean but voluntary immigrants from the nations of africa. and some of them identify straightforwardly as african-american, and others have very distinct says, more of an immigrant sense of superiority over local black people and so forth. so, there are lots of different ways of being african african-american. and i think that will become more salient in the future. the other comment i'll make, as an expert on white people -- [laughter] and that has to do with the beauty, i think the

protectiveness of the community, the black community. but we do have a sense of a community identity. and i think that has been in some ways part of our persistence, our ability to survive. and i think what you see on the other side is that individualism has probably hurt white people in the sense o f falling rates of longevity, of drug abuse and so forth. much talk about white people dying off or poor white people dying off. and i have not seen a comment about individuality as a factor in morbidity. just two comments. thank you.

>> my name is moses. and i represent the association of african-american life in history. i haven't heard the name of the association very much, so i wanted to say, i have two questions about anti-blackness from two groups with regard to solidarity and grassroots movements. right now, we have problems where young folks who don't identify as black refer to themselves and everyone around them as the n-word. and also have their peers refer to themselves as such. to the point that it alienates our elders at city hall meetings and local community meetings to oppose movements like the black lives matter movement because they feel that it's sort of, not

a respectable movement with regard to what their notions of black this represent. these individuals stand behind police of as a lot of the time. every time i go to a city hall meeting, this is contingency, especially in atlanta and los angeles, there is a contingency of conservative black people who oppose the black lives matter movement, but who expect us to respect them as elders. my question is, how can we encourage our revolutionary elders to hold our more anti-black elders accountable? and how can we get our allies to stop celebrating anti-blackness in their solidarity? >> not easily done. [laughter] prof. gray white: i would go back to something gates said.

it's quoted in "who's afraid of blackness?" there are 40 million ways to be black. there always has been 40 million ways to be black. it is just that, you were compelled to be black in a particular way. before, paradoxically, before the freedom movement. but the success of that, at least in terms of letting loose a black middle class. the immigration of so many people of color. i don't just mean even africans or caribbeans, but south africans, brown people. there are so many ways now and

so much more freedom to be black. and this is despite and in spite of the killing of young black men and women by police. that now that there is this, the ability to express different kinds of blackness, and to act on it, we're beginning to see what always has been. and that is 40 million ways to be black. prof. miles: [inaudible] that -- his paper really exposed some of those internal fissures we always experienced as african-americans in history.

to connect with deborah said with a question about generational tensions, age tensions, linguistic tensions. it is not a new challenge. it is an old challenge. we are continuing every day to try to work on solving it. >> good morning. i'm not an historian or scholar. i just try to read a book every now and then as written by the likes of you all. my question is for professor white. i'm always interested in the discussion of class within the black community. history and current events clearly show that regardless of social economic race has always been our linked fate. so, my question is, it is a discussion of class, a distraction? people like you all and others has written that race has been the linked fate within the black community. prof. white: political scientists have recently noted

and they have statistic-ized it? whatever, however. the linked fate and the idea of linked fate is dissolving. and this is beginning in the 1990's and through the first 16 years of the 20th century -- we're finding, i'm not a political scientists, but they are finding that the feeling of linked fate is declining among black people. and even as late as, i guess in 2007, the notion black people were asked are black people a single race? 37%, rounded off to 40% of black people said no. i am not making this up. this is from the pew research center.

i think it's rather astounding. if not profound. so, the linked fate that black people used to feel is tenuous. >> hello. my name is mary elliott. i am a museum specialist here at the national museum of african american history. i'm culterating the slavery and freedom exhibition. and i really appreciate your acknowledgment of silence. in this experience of putting together the exhibition, we've had people come forward with

objects, documents that, non-african-americans, white people say, i did not know what to do with this. i have held it for so many years. it helps us to have a better understanding of the black experience and america, and it is important these people are coming forward now. in the exhibition, we look at slavery and freedom when we talk about the harsh realities of slavery but the resistance, the resilience and the survival. we have had some experiences along the way, for example, and we took apart a slave cabin we had a young woman who was descended from the enslaved community associated with the cabin. she told me she did not want to talk to another woman who's white who was descended from the slave owning community. she didn't want to talk to her

because she said she keeps telling me that we are related. i don't want to hear it. so, i told her, you should talk with her, because the fact is that this is a shared experience and she is going to have information about your family that she is calling her family as well, just like you might have information for her. i think it is really powerful you have brought this up here. and i would like to know how you will prompt dialogue with your students, because you talked about it and i thought about in the context of african-american students, but this is, it cuts both ways -- black and white. family memory that people don't talk about. then there is some shame on. both sides. so, i'm interested in how you would do that and how you speed this 21st-century museum helping to move that dialogue forward.

prof. brown: yes, my students are a range of people in the classroom. so when we are talking about silences or shame or some -- or what we want to know, we are talking about the range of what different people want black american history to be. and for some people what they think that means, if they are black, what they think that means about their own history. that is a conversation that will always happen in the classroom. i think the main thing that i'm always trying to do is to get us to be able to talk about everything. to not have any things that can't be on the table. to allow there to be conversations that we don't know they are into, that i do not have any idea what the answer is to that. i'm perfectly fine with not knowing what the answer is, as long as we do not take it off the table because i do not notion to answer that question.

and that collectively we try to figure out what could we do that helps us move forward with continuing to have the conversation. i think in general my approach to thinking about african-american history who's black, etc., is that i think most of the time when we see unity what we are looking at is silence. in order to get to unity, a lot of people have been silenced. a lot of people were not in that narrative. so, if we're telling a story about that, that we need to figure out who we want hearing. -- figure out who we aren't hearing. and then, as long as we can put

those voices out there -- we might not be able to resolve how we tell the history -- but my goal is to silence less and less people. and that is what i would hope we're doing in history, which is not necessarily creating -- not trying to create a new narrative. not trying to say we are going to come to another narrative that we are all going to agree on. sorry. just what i hope for the museum is that there is a lot of things that we have been silent about and show up in the museum. and -- in some kind of way, and spaces for people to add other things that they think as silent. because we are all going to create something that has silences in it. but you have a lot of things that have been silent and not to worry about whether, i'm not running the museum, so i can say not worry. not to worry about thethings that people, are going to be upset about that are included etc. [applause]

>> i'm from newark, new jersey. the assumption that i think some of us make is that being black was only a protective device to get us through and beyond jim crow. well, i have a problem with that because there were many of us who thought that blackness or being black had a lot more value. if you reduce it to a protective moment, then you lose that value or you -- it's possible for someone to take it away. so, i use as an example the whole concept of the blues. we are losing the blues. because we won't accept it as part of the black phenomenon, as part of black culture, as part of the essence of not only being black but being american.

we are integrated -- no longer necessary to be black. somebody else has picked it up off the floor and is enjoying her. now we look upon our own culture and we say, yes, it is nice to be apart of something and not to be considered, black, white or anything. there are other people hard at work making sure the extract -- it is like a corporate takeover. you take the whole thing but you rejected that which you don't need, but keep that which is useful. we had better step up and reclaim our identity. >> speak briefly to that and say that those last words, i am going to remember.

we need to step up, reclaim. we talked about beauty and protectiveness in her comments. there is beauty in that history, beauty and that cultural connection. i think we need to focus on that and lift that up as well. i want to just add that i heard a presentation recently by psychologists. i wish i could give you a citation. when parents talk about black pride to their adolescent children, those children do much better, they have fewer incidences of depression. in our day there really is a psychological protective factor to positive blackness.

when it comes to the exchange between parent and child. >> good morning. i am from the university of minnesota. i also wanted to thank you for bringing up the silences in the archive. my question is, in your practice as historians, when you are looking at the history of the formation of african-america in the 1500's, 1600's, even today, when the documents are missing, when they were not collected, when they were destroyed and not valued by institutions, how do you call attention to those silences? how do you document silences when the documents are not there? prof. brown: very carefully. [laughter] prof. berlin: somebody want to? let me just say the documents are never there, at least for ones you want.

and that's true for the 20th century as well as the 17th century. in some ways, i think it is easier in the 17th and 18th century because so much has been destroyed. in the 20th century you have so much you can't know. how do you sort? but the documents you want are, the smoking gun is never is never there, but you can find lots of evidence and put it together in ways that help us understand that story, some of which has been spoken of here. prof. white: i also think you have to begin to read what exists differently. so that we've done, some historians have done really great work with runaway ads that yield very little information.

but it is amazing. i will give you one example. my colleague whose book is about to be published. she had one document from the 1700's of a black woman who ran away from a plantation in bridgetown. one runaway ad. one runaway ad. what the ad said, it said, forget the woman's name, but she's probably headed towards bridgetown. and that was it. also, she had some distinguishing marks. she wrote an entire chapter based on that one runaway ad. what she did is she went back to bridgetown, and she got all the

old maps of bridgetown. so, you know, knowing that she would be coming -- barbados is not a really very large island. so knowing knowing where she would enter the city, what she did was to put herself in the shoes of this runaway person, and then, through those old maps, re-created what this woman was seeing. that's just really, incredibly tedious hard work, but nevertheless, we got a sense of what this woman was going to possibly feel, for example, as somebody who is running away from a rural plantation and is going to an urban center. she passes a whipping post. it does not take too much imagination. but basically what she calls it is reading against the bias grain.

i think that is what we have to do. we have to take what is there, turn it inside out, and look at it from the perspective of the black person. and read very differently than in many ways we have been taught to read. but it can be done. >> i guess i want to say that i think you also have to be willing to leave questions that you can't answer, but leave the questions out there, as opposed to wiping them out because i do not know what the answer is to that. >> one other thing is i run into silences all the time in other projects which is on legacies of slavery in ghana. when i run into those, i often will treat them, or begin to think of them as expressions of power, the residues of power.

a chief is called to testify in a land case. and says nothing or ignores the summons. that is an expression of power, an assertion of his, what he sees as his right to define his boundaries. when someone brings up slave ancestry, that is an expression of power. when someone does not, that tells a lot. i can sort of follow the silences to figure out some things i want to know. >> just one other thing. as historians, that we need to be more interdisciplinary than we are. and that there are ways to borrow some of the skills and techniques and methods of political scientists or literary people, cultural theorists, anthropologists, as ways to read our documents.

>> hello. i'm here wearing three hats. one as a coordinator of the midwest african-american genealogy institute. and this is, we're going into our fourth year. it will be at the allen county public library july 11-13. the second as a member of the afro-american historical and genealogical society. the third, i'm the host and producer of research at the national archives and beyond blog talk radio. what i want to hear more about are the stories. and one of the things that we as genealogists so, we are trying to connect to the dots and tell the stories we find in our family tree or maybe missing

from our family trees. so that when someone has to compose, or put together a family tree, and they find -- what's the story behind finding your family member listed as a convict. let me tiny one of my stories. i began -- let me tell you one of my stories. in my family tree i discovered a great great uncle listed in the newspaper as killing his brother. and there was a governor's order in louisiana for him, and the question i had was, what is the story? there was a long story, but he was a part of my family tree. did i dismiss that? did i go into a silent mode, not share what i needed to know and share that with our family?

so, when we talk about the silences, do we keep those secret scandals away from the rest of the family members, or do we share them? prof. brown: the film i was talking about the begins with the tree of a convict, the film is the young girl learning the full histories of these women. they are, why they killed the people that they did, but also removed from that, what their histories were with their families, what they did, what their occupations were, etc. so, it's learning that. and when i'm using that with my class, i actually want my class not to run away from the word convict, but i want them to

think of all of the people that we are looking at as multidimensional human beings, that there's a lot of different things we can find out about them. and i'm hoping that in asking them about the questions, about what they want to be their family history or what they want to be black history, etc., i'm encouraging them to ask those questions in their own family, not necessarily they are doing it my class but one of the things they are taken from my class is to want to know more fully about their own families as well. >> we have -- 15 minutes. i will ask everybody to be

efficient with their questions and short with their comments. >> over in the garden collection at howard university there is a collection of family histories that professor fraser had his students collect. you would be surprise or maybe not surprised at the number of silences the students encountered in the 1930's when they were asking their parents and grandparents. not new. >> thank you, panel. this question is probably in professor brown's purview but i mean it for the entire panel. we've talked about the wrongful price of unity being silences. when people are caught in the hurly-burly of realpolitik, rigidly in the drivers of mainstream media attention, we lose our grip on history and operating with. historical agency and particularly with

intergenerational work, i am very concerned with this sense of displacement that we have as individual groups and the collectives. and i really -- what i hold in high regard, the academy, and i think your works present us with moving beyond the parameters of the academy. i'm interested in what the panel thinks about what more is to be done. it is one thing to be a lively reader and then practice and observation and evidence or theory. it is another to deal with young people at all people and bring together community members to aggressively attack this wrongful price of unity. thank you. prof. brown: i think there are practices for how to think about working together, using working

together as opposed to unity. practices for how to think about working together without requiring or assuming uniformity, commonality, etc. we can see some of those practices in, i don't know, early mutual benefit societies that made very specific kind of rules about where they m et and about inclusion of wide ranges of people in their spaces in which they would meet for the exact purpose of making sure that everyone's voice would be there, would be able to speak. i'm not mistaking everybody being able to speak for not saying some people, some people clearly have more power than

other people to make decisions. i'm not suggesting that. i think there are practices in byp100. i have been really impressed. barbara is sitting right there. i think i'm right. i have been impressed with the way byp100 has decided to deal with men in the group who have, allegedly have sexually assaulted women in their group. i have been impressed by the way they developed a practice that holds the men accountable and does not put them out of the group. and they really worked on what the practice is and how that's going to work. it being very public about that. i think there are practices people can develop that don't, that aren't assuming unity, but

that are assuming we can find ways to work together to a particular political end. >> hello. i'm a genealogist for the national museum of african american history. comment i wanted to make regarding to her question about evidence. there's this myth that we are missing or lacking an abundance of records on african-americans. it's actually the opposite. it takes quite a bit of time to do the research, but i think every historian up there on the panel has evidence to the contrary of that myth. it's a matter of reading the records different way. instead of just looking of african-americans records, you're looking for evidence of african-americans in those records.

that is the beginning of the country when we were recording records until now. there were silences that about with every group, not just african-americans. what i think we need to do is have some sort of middle ground for genealogists and historians to come together to find the methodologies that use and combine them to tell a better story. i've had an experience when i was looking for evidence of african-americans in the colonial period. and ira berlin's book took me five attempt to get through, " slaves without masters." what happened for me, this telling moment was when i realized you have to understand the psychology of the record keepers to understand how they are recording the information in order to understand how to search through that information to find the people who we think, they have silences.

they may not speak themselves but the record keepers are speaking for them. and so, to navigate through that process, through the records, one must understand the other side of it, both sides of the coin. that is just my comment. prof. brown: the late tom schick used to at meetings, sit people down and say what is it you want to know and let's think about who needed and wanted that information. if we can figure out who needed and wanted that information we can start thinking about how to find it. prof. miles: in my research which focuses on enslaved afro-americans in the cherokee nation, i have really benefited from the smarts and savvy and knowledgeable assistance of

genealogists. i cannot do half of what i did without a genealogists who know how to find things that were really puzzling for me as someone coming into those records anew. and i also want to say to the point about do we have the material, to we not have the material? within the native american history and studies of black people and native communities, there actually is a lot of material. i always figured there is not one i write. it is not the same as writing about thomas jefferson. but still, native people were surveilled to such a high extent by the u.s. government and by colonial powers that there is records there. it is deep. it does not want to think about black people. even when there is a lot of material we have to use some

practices the panel has talked about. practices -- >> we're down to five more minutes. why don't we say three more questions? >> a comment and question. i'm published by the san francisco history museum and more important to the issue of silence and of records, i'm a sound consulting with the library of congress on a division that just completed this wonderful project which will launch in 2017 called #blackvoicesmatter, race, image and message. in sound and film. there is nothing silent and all about blackness, about race consciousness in recorded sound and film. it is amazing. it is a hugely repressed and significant body of dark material that i fortunately have as an archivist this incredible

collection of. if anyone is interested in this idea -- next year, this material is amazing. i mean, absolutely extraordinary in terms of the non-silence of what record companies, sheet music companies were putting out and what was mass produced for consumption for americans across the country between 1880 to 1910. unbelievable. if anyone is interested, see me afterward. >> good morning. my name is elizabeth clarke lewis. as one of the founders of the african-american historical genealogical society, i was young. very young. i'd like to invite people if you're looking at, there are questions about how do you address the silences in the records? i think probably three of the most important articles, or

series of articles that were written, were written in the early years of the journal. james walker did an extensive series on utilizing military records and how you read them, as the panel has said. marcia eisenberg talked about whole series. she did three articles on understanding how to use records and understanding african american history. and she used extensively the records of comparing north carolina, new york and georgia. and it is a brilliant way of looking at the local records different. and lastly, paul -- using cemetery records. he is able in his books but in that first series of articles that talk about how cemeteries really do speak volumes to historians and genealogists. i think as the panel has said brilliantly, there are so many existing records that when utilized in a different way, that they really do help you understand how history resonates, not just in the past

but today. thank you. >> i'm benjamin lawrence. i am an historian at rochester institute of technology. my question is based on yesterday's comment about mythology. a lot of good historical writing is building up or breaking down myths. annette gordon reed as one of the great slayers of sacred cows. there others in the room. so, i'm wondering what are the next sacred cows that are going to be slaughtered? and or who are they? and when you slaughter a sacred cow it can be very provocative and very. unsettling to certain communities when i publish i got into a public spat with some people who didn't like the idea that i felt

quite strongly that -- the return to sierra leone and was involved in slave trading. to be a slave trader was the norm at the time. i'm wondering who is going to be slaughtered next and what will be the consequence of that? prof. berlin: the volunteers for the slaughter can -- line up. [laughter] line up in the rear. i think our session has pretty well -- [laughter] pretty well come to an end. we will have a break. and we will reassemble at 10:35. at that point, we'll talk about slavery and freedom. [applause]

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