richard price tells us something called ship mates began to arise with people with a common experience.arise people with a experience. by the time they got to this side of the atlantic, the distinction between those various africans began to morphed into african-americans. there are some of those people that got free. we talked about the difference between free and slave. there were differences between people who lived on plantations and farms. people who lived in urban areas. this is the just the beginning of those distinctions which took place in different forms, not the least of which, of course, distinctions between men and

women and distinctions of gender. we are not guiloing to talk abo all of distinctions today but we'll deal with this question of who's black and some way set the table for the rest of the sessions during the next two days. my colleagues on the platform, most of you know who they are. they a their bios are in the program. miles, just to the left of me at the university of michigan, sheshe does just about everything, african-american culture and native american culture and going down the list -- it is

quite impressive. my colleague at the university of maryland. elsah barkley brown will lead off our discussion today trying to put a frame on what we would like to talk about and the next to elsah and at the end cleaning out for us is debra gray-white. appearing in that order according to the instructions that we have been given -- that i have been given. according to the instructions that i have been given, everybody has ten minutes or they're about to give a generous ten minutes but not that genero generous. we are going to try to leave plenty of time for aud yi

[ inaudibleaudience participation of what to be a really interesting session. so thank you all for coming, for getting up early this morning. to be here at 8:00 and kind of 2k50 dialing back there. i take it that most of you just stayed up all night. [ laughs ] >> that's good. and, elsah, do you want to talk from there or would you like to come up? okay. >> good morning. [ crowd:good morning ] >> what makes us or who makes us black americans. i want to think about that in ways that i do in my introductory graduate classes in african-american history. i hope that my students and i together opening up conversations about the

composition of african-americans. i have come to the last few years to begin my african-american history courses with the 1998 films. this young black girl, savannah may field, faces an assignment to create a family tree to say who are her people. sitting as the only african-american student in her classroom. [ lost of connection ] >> all that she could put next to each name is the word "convict." in searching for any archives for her ancestors, all she's

able to uncover is police records and defamation of convic convicts. savannah posts together small bits of archives made up with scraps of paper and imagination that allows her to flesh out these ancestors with complete stories on their own. all women whose stories fit of what we have called the domestic service to prison pipeline. in my class, we layer on top of -- of the show of 1927, watermelon women. our conversations is about silences and about archives and the silences in archives but

about the silence in families about savannah feeling the knowledge of her family and about the silence of official history that acknowledging the depiction. sometimes you have to create your own history. our conversations in classes are also about desire. i question and challenge the students myself to consider what history we desire and what is in history that we would be ashamed to have. what history do they not want me to tell in the classroom. what history do they not tell in families. why do those silence exists? some are because of no records. some results from our failure to imagine. will there be some silences because there are history that you don't want to know. history that you don't find worthy or ashamed to call out as

well as who is black america. who are some o f the silences and how and where do they produce. in other words, we are in the spaces in which we create and of a notion of who is black america. there is the space of the classrooms of the archives of public displays of the family. some of those silences are created and diffused of black americans about who they can be. 1920, she's nationally known for her column in open tribune and her work including a leading role in california. not so well known but for much of the time of her work, she was

financially stab-- and one or m occasions of homeless. she begged for funds while urging and a need for money to any other members or the race. other silences are created in the archives or in the reading of the archives. much wonderful recent work reveals the treacherous history of black men and women and incarceration and uncovering names and conditions which they imprisoned. a woman who appears to be a murder. i am looking forward to see how my students to respond from having heard the essentials of

our understanding of the composition of black america. of course, the silence is in our histories. though we have the beginning of histories that publicly owned black bodies. the relative silence contributes to the relative silence in our public discourse. in the black lives matter of women, the smaller attention that's paid to the deaths of black transgender women killed by police outside baltimore joining of the murder of freddie gray. i am hoping that we can discuss silence as produced in archives and family memories and in political shame mys. we configure collectivities based on voice. my hope in my class is that my

students challenge me throughout the semester to fill in some silence. and that when i cannot, which is often the case, we don't feel in silence with something going easily discovered or palettable instead but rather we got the silence to tell us something about the diverse prospects of black america that we still need to fill in. [ applause ] >> good morning. i am going to be talking about african-american lives in native american spaces. there is no such thing as a new

world in reference to the america's in the 1550s. the land that we know is a territory of the united states. people by hundreds of business and societies with populations reaching close to 5 million. europe european colonists and explore rs th ers, they are recognized and navigate business abilities. these african-americans landed not just in the old, world and not just spanish or english or french settlements in the u.s. but they also land in ancient cultures and communities of native north america. the social spatial, political

and cultural formation of people were complex and long standing and like all human society is changeable. those african decent found themselves having to navigate multiple communities. african-american history in the base that's native america you have new information and deeper understanding about the diversity, dignity and resilience of black community in life on this land. across the eastern sea board into the deep south and even in the west, a serious encounter has became controversial for african-american lives. in the english colony of south virginia and pennsylvania, established inside the 1600, new

england slave black men were brought into farms as households and native women were labored as servants. >> that would alter the make up of -- black and native men working together further diversifying native community back on land. the after math of the catastrophic between the british -- men were so into slavery on ships across atlantic to the caribbean and europe.

thousands of people entered the south. each nation went to various degrees building a plantation of their own and holding black men and women as slaves. we ought to refer in shorthand to a configuration called the black community of black people in the u.s. do share a bold and dramatic narrative. however, we begin to define the chapters of that narrative and look at the fine prints. we see africa and america, -

america, -- color and sexuality and religion, these are all important themes. >> i would like to add -- given a significant portions of a black population native roots. i am pointing to historical pattern of experience with the native communities and family ties with native people and also persistent cultural narrative and methodology of about a and b. here, i think really -- i think you have heard african-americans talk about long locked hair. we might wonder what that claim is about and what that america is like.

we must see these historical pattern and we must see the culture communities and narratives and black people in native spaces and consider the way of which a black white - white -- children's birth of black and native union came in situations of suffering. the 1600 and 1700 black people were newcomers to north america

and their livelihood dependant on a native land on the seizure of native land narratives of those formally -- [ inaudible ] >> they also reveal that native slavery was in some place in time more flexible than what we recognize as american slavery. under the direction of washington in the 1800 were thought they stood at a high level of civilization. black male soldiers of the u.s. military -- despite the

perpetrators in the entangled web -- born and raised among these people, i don't want to know any other. native american study scholar are getting to think through of the way of relationships do tof colonialism. the native bird acknowledged her own nation of black enslavement. we need a new word to talk about black people other than settlers. she has chosen the word -- today

the sentence of these eye arrar. you can chase those lives. the black history has long been of the importance of african-american lives. this 1920s article titled t"the american shone negros." >> the 20s and 30s, johnson and carter wrote several articles in the history about this topic. afterwards, the subject really fell into the footnote and it

was not until very recently after the year of 2000s that there were several autographs being produced about this subject. it was not only seen of black people living in native spaces but not only recognizing native people owning black slaves. sexually and geography and networks and the community, scientific ra scientific racism and migration. andrea littman's new book in of the contest of the american coast which ends of the word of

an african poet. it takes a bit of time to realize this vision. the one future direction of the black past to continue draft in the unwritten chapter of relations of a negro by explaining the consequences and unveiling multiple meanings of america of the term "black america." [ applause ] >> good morning. [ audience:good morning ] >> i am going to stand up, i talk faster that way. if you were to open up as many of you may have done a church history from the early 1900, you are going to read a lot about two things. law and property. so many dollars raised in one year and so much money spent to

buy the land and raise up a building, the crowning moment of course, came when crowds watched the church's oldest, charter member set the mortgage on fire and these kinds of ceremonies mattered to people. as woods pointed out in the 1930s, rural africans spending more money in their churches than any institution. >> a church holds property for the benefit of its members. when x slaves in 1865 went to the local circuit court and filed the paper work to incorporate or appoint trustees, they took property right and tax exemptions, trustee washed over the civil rights of congregation. believers and a pastor and a deed and trustees, these were the pillars of the black church.

churches dealt a lot with courts in the 1800. they were asking permission to borrow money against buildings and lands to defend against lawsuits and krancontractors an unfriendly neighbors. a typical business meeting with bible readings and hymns, voting to buy lumber and tools for a new building giving a hardware man and trust to make him save for his money. if you were lucky to be sent to your denomination, you might hear a quote before the civil courts. delivered by a leading black attorney. law was in the everyday life of black churches from the fit from the deacon office and the pugh.

people sense themselves as christians. in the 1950s, african-americans attacked gjim crow in the strees and in the court. legal barriers, the attack necessary raised questions about black american relationships to law. >> considered dexter avenue black church. detect dexter was famous at the time. so on his first sunday morning, except 5th, 1954, king announced a breathtaking plan to reorganize every part of the church under his authority. leadership he announced this morning descends from the pugh. so long as the minister was not addict tater, he had to be

respected and accepted as a central figure around the policies and program of the church revolved. it was a cue and i am quoting a scholar on that. [ laughs ] >> that's not my word. it was a kind of thing that sparked count less lawsuits and it worked beautifully. dexter lived in a world structured by law with pastors and mortgages with its lenders and a share of lawsuit and near lawsuits. in 1932 a depression pearced dexter. nine years before king arrived, deacon went to court to shoot out another pastor for eye busibu abusing his wife. king stepped binto an old debat in a black baptist church and of the role of courts in black

religious life. as king became the public face of the civil rights movement, one that built not only in the right of gandhi but also on what he knew from his own experience that dexter and from watching his father atlantic ebenezer. "the guidelines making it clear that god anoited the pastor to sneer his church." i will quote at lengths here. "you call me to ebenezer, anything i want to say, i am going to say it from this, it may hurt somebody.

i don't know about that. somebody may not agree with it but when god speaks, who can prophet. the word of guys is upon me. when god gets upon me, i got to say it and tell it, all over and everywhere. god has called me to deliver those that are in captivity." now, there was no way that dexter or ebenezer or any body is going to fire martin luther king. that are kind of language got him fired or sued. plenty of baptists believe that god had not called their ministers to deliver those that are in captivity. not in the way king was leading. one of those baptists, joseph jackson, was president of the national baptist convention. and any resulting lawsuits would hinge on the issue that king raised in his sermon.

who has the authority to call and dismiss the pastor. what could church members do when ministers have hurt somebody. church leaders built up a storehouse experienced with legal tools like the injunction and corporation and trustees. a set of rule of laws of christian lives. you may begin to apply those lessons and in routine church business for the external problem of racial injustice. the most famous example was king's letter from a birmingham jail lading out justification from civil disobedience. king wrote, the injunction me l method has become the leading of the south to led the drive. it probably reminded themd of e laborering injunction and the

killing of union. king was as preacher. underneath the references to saint augustine, non violent resistance was moral and targeted on unjust law. the moral law for the law of god, a code that a majority group forces on a minority but does not make binding on itself or law inflicted on the minority that as a result of being denied to vote had no part in in acting and dividing that law. this exactly what church lawsuits have been about. king's world was full of them. ten years before he was born from ebenezer church, after he

used, a poll tax to strip ser certain members and then ram through his own agenda. >> injunction cases filled up to the georgia supreme court in atlanta and in america in 1953. those are just the ones that got to the state's supreme court. in 1960 and 1961, king was the reverend from court in philadelphia to get control of the national baptist on vengsco from joseph jackson. right from the founding, black churches were incorporating of negotiations and contracts and defending what they and the court call their civil rights. as a stifling curtain of white pr premise weighing down, those are the only rights that black

people can claim. the legal culture of black churches began to bridge between the civil rights of property and crack, the civil rights of desegregation and equal protection. civil right in the 1960s continue to be as much as bonds for church treasurers as bond for jail of demonstrators as much as fire insurance and mad marches. the fire insurance is part of what made the mad marches possible. not in the practical sense that king puts it and litigation causing money. or, not just in the sense that calls for black rights that came from a bull pen or a major black bar association once held its annual meeting at a church. because they grew out of the same legal culture, so i think when black people stepped into the modern freedom struggle, they stepped in a pragmatic phase in law's possibility and

limits. thank you. [ applause ] >> i, too, going to stand up and talk from this mic. >> my presentation this morning is from negro to post black who's black america. i would like to start with two imaginary conversations. the first one -- his handwritten copy of a poet johnson lifting every voice and sing. son, says to his father. "no more yes, sir and holding my head down. no more sit ng tting in the bac the trolley, no more picking

cott cotton, i am a black man. i am going to get an education and a good job and a wife who i will protect. i am going to fight for my right as a negro american and show the world what a negro race has to offer. yes, i am a new negro" a man of few words. the father looks at him, his son and he says. 90 or 100 years later, the son's great grandson talks to his father while holding a copy of barack obama's dreams from my father said "race is a social construction." i don't have to identify he's black. i am a man of politics and opportunities not bound by my racial identity. i don't need affirmative action

to make it in america. i am not afraid to be post black. having inherited the trait of residen residence from the men of his family. "cab driver still not going to take you to harlem." [ laughs ] >> they leave post blacks sta standing in the corner the same way as they believe regular blacks. [ laughs ] these two conversations demonstrate black identity in the 20th century and some of the generational and gender issues involved. an expression of the first conversation is indicative of the new negro movement reflected of the hope of the people who were like other americans and

other west eaterners. more engaged with financial institutions and more scientific. black people specifically were moving from rural to urban america to full citizenship and from a fiphilosophy of upliftin to an embrace of uplift through civil rights protest. the second conversation is indicative of the way of some black americans are dealing with postmortem -- the economy has offered many american born blacks, alternative ways to self identify. many ways to be black. why they don't reject their blackness, they are never the

less expressing their desire to be circumscribe by a group of their blackness. i am going to talk a little bit this morning about what i found at the 1990 mass marches of the million men and women march to demonstrate the similarities and differences of black identity and post identity. >> in doing so, i hope to begin to answer questions that was before us this morning who is black america. so we start with the early conversation. african-americans understood that to be part of the modern world and take part in what we call identity, they have to become a system of -- they have

to establish their property rights and including the rights of their own bodies and person. they have to establish the rights to the fruits of their labor. they have to be able to move and they needed the taxes that they pay to government to under right their civil education and housing rights. the attendees took the idea of human riepghts. they denounced persecution of organize wod workers and convic labor system. they demanded that blacks be given a free and complete education that was not restricted to just industrial education. they insisted that efvery civil rights to be given to black

people. not because black people were dying to marry white but because marriage is a civil right. do deny, who they desire of a denial of the right of the basic rights of the citizenship. most black americans, therefore, wanted black people to be into this american society. though there has been people who follow the precepts -- the members of the niagara movement said in 1905, "any discrimination based on race or color is barbarous,".

discrimination based in simply and solely on place of birth or color or skin. most black organizations, therefore, work tire lessly. they work tire lessly for black humans and socio economic and equality. for the most part when african-americans accepted segregation at all, it was accepted inside a measure of self defense that was necessary to fight and to build a community strong enough to withstand the in salt and injuries of jim crow. black people developed what my colleague darlene calls parallel

institution as a measure of self defense. black schurches and black professional organizations. it was found because we were excluded from white organizations that were part of the project. segregation moves to be the achilles' heels. and developing a range of institutions that they control. it allows blacks to define whites and be inspired by whites of white americans and african-american to primitive premodern existence. black people realized that groups were stronger than individual strengths. group accomplishments went

further. it was our exclusion that created our country, our black unity and black community. black is a country is the notion of black people, not as the imagine community. as people who have been separated from whites were will ing in the '50s and '60s pleading for their right. steven hahn traces this black nation back to the day before freedom, a nation under our feet is the title. looking at the early conversations between father and son, we see a son ready to embrace black identity and equip with a song, lift up every voice and sing and became the black national anthem and equipped

with courage that he had recently taken on -- he was ready to take on the world as a new negro and a new black man and a long with him wallas blac skin and light skin and making anyone with discernible black pigmentation and along with him were migrants. and whose numbers increasing to approximately 140,000 between 1899 and 1937. along with him were blacks of all social and economic classes because jim crow law and systematic made the second class citizens forced to live and play together and forcing a meaningful existence.

blacks and all blacks developing their own institutions and music and culture and style and food and their ways o f knowing. lets fast forward to the second conversation of social construction and he does not want to be limited or confined by preconceived notion of blackness where the son wants to express his individuality. if we look at the 1,995 million men march and the 1997 women march for answers to the question of who is black america? we find that the tradition of self health and self defense was by the 1990s disentegrating. the consensus of who is bla black -- let me give you just an

example of what i mean. the call for unity at both marches. if we were so united -- [ laughs ] >> if we were so united, why was there a need to call for unity. it says to me that unity was in short supply. simi simil similar, if black members and white members were togethe together -- why did black homo sexuals have to petition to fight to be apart of both marches.

i argue that black america is not what it used to be of this notion of post blackness is something that people like to raise and philosopher charles johnson has talked about. just give me one more minute. >> sure. >> in 2008, he gave a martin luther king talk and he called it the end of the black american narrative. he argued of jim crow lynching and is dominating everything. this unique black american narrative emphasizes the experience of victimizization is in the background of the

conversation we have about black people. when it is not articulated or expressed. it is a stunning point, an agreed upon premise and an important deposition for dialogues of black america. what johnson argues is that black americans need to bury this narrative. if we add the numbers of caribbeans who come here or the number of bi racials, we begin to see just what he's talking about. i would like to end with another not so imaginary conversation. okay, this time the father is a white contemporary of the 21st century who with the help of a black elector was elected. he and his bi sexual black wife

who traces her roots back to her grandmother barbados, they explained to him of what they called the drill. it is the self imposed procedure learned by people upon being stopped by police. "move slowly, keep your hands where police cab see them, explain all procedures so the cop will know what you are doing. if you are in a car, turn on the lights. if it is at night, put your hands in the steering wheel and make no sudden move." the bi racial son is startled by his parents candor but he knocked his head in the affirmative as he steers at them in disbelief. some of you will recognize that last conversation as that

between mayor deblasio and his son. [ applause ] i am going to give the panels with one more shot dealing with narratives and of inheritan inheritance of experience and circumstances of the things that make black lives matter and our president calls a mongrel people, indeed the american people, mongrel people bringing in so many parts together and then we'll open up our

discussion to the audience. >> the panel has con seeded cede audience. this is not what martin luther king suggested about authority. once you have it and not supposed to surrender it. we have microphones over there and we have microphones up there and anybody wants a question or make a short statement, a short statement -- um, can go over to the microphone. please say who you are. >> yes, i am from california,

short statement, this is an awesome panel, i am sorry i missed a little bit of it coming late. i am from arlington. i want to comment on the issue of the narrative being tired. the narrative in forcforms wher are today of the conversations at the bedrock of 2016 election, what is more fundamental to the trump campaign than this narrative of african-american, i won't go further but you know where i am going. i believe i have done work around the voices and idea of double consciousness and we today in 2016 still have to deal with this concept, apart of the our essence, this idea of double consciousness, thank you. >> hello, i am marvin jones.

>> closer to the mic. >> i am from a mixed race community in north carolina that's 270 years old and i have always been mistaken as white, black. sometimes by myself. [ laughs ] but, i grew up on it. my always look different but we are always apart of the african-american community. we help set up black institutions and even though we almost looked near white or indian. it was always living on the edge of what was white and what was african-american but i've learned that being black is part of a community sometimes and not always even having the genes from africa. a post colonial genes from

africa. i now yield my time to this person, my neighbor. >> thank you very much for yielding your time, my name is bob harris, professor of cornell uni university. i have a question. as i understood your presentation, you are looking at the black church and the 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 and masons and knights -- and many respects of their use of the law proceeded of the church.

i am trying to remember the name of the sociologist in harvard who written the book on the these -- >> [ inaudible ] >> thank you very much, i was having a brain freeze, it happens more frequently than i like these days. anyway, she really looks at the development of the league experience through these fraternal organizations. where do you place them in your story >> thank you for that question. i will answer quickly, the fraternal order, they're apart of my book. they should be a bigger part of my book. right now the church is occupying more space in the fraternal order and i don' don't -- it is hard for me to date and sitting right here on stage, i would say they use law beginning around the same time

in the late 1700s. and i do know that scott -- and also by the name leahso, one o the things they talked about was the use of insignia. that's what the court battles are about. the battle was just as much over the insurance business. they are both competing for customers and the battle intensifies later when company like credentials trying to get into business. that is a huge and important story. that's worth telling. thank you for that question.

>> from north carolina university. my question is directed to professor miles. in general, as marvin jones, just mentioned in north carolina and south eastern virginia and south carolina, you have large number of mixed race people of native ancestry and they go back to the enslavement of native people and the mixing of africa africans. i believe that is really that first 200 years of history, the late 1500 or 1600 before the revolution is really the formation of what we consider african-americans. how do we get the next generation of young scholars to fully develop and examine that. we talked about sifcivil rightsd all these other things but we have not examined the native americans of the first 200 years

of colonial settlements. >> thank you for that question. one of the things that's a challenge -- you have to go back centuries as was indicated. i find that it can really take some encouragement and enticement to get to and want to look at the 1700, for instance. part of our job is i suppose is to really unveil nuances and complexities and the interesting nature of the material in the colonial period. t students can say i can study that and migration at the same moment. >> to jump in just to illustrate, i taught both half and my enrollment are all double

in the second half. it is hard to get students to come with you to the earlier appearance. >> hi, my name is gibson, i am at the university of maryland. i am one of those people who like to look at earlier things. here i am, guys. [ laughs ] >> no, i really, i have a question for miss miles and miss debra about identity and talking about the kcaveat of the americn community. i know a lot of people don't like to use the term "afro." how do we talk about these interactions about different race and people and different generations of people while dealing with this identity putting "afro" in front of something or not, some people

feel like it takes away the americanest or something. [ laughs ] >> thank you for that question. i am comfortable of afro. i use afro native. in part, there is a term of black indian that i have used and i have known and comfortable with. i can see a general term that collapses of its identity. afro native is a little more open. all these terms end up trapping us and they don't convey, there is no absence that we. -- need to convey. one thing that i would encourage is try to invent new language that captures the complexities of the population that we are

talking about. >> yeah, i would answer that by saying that we are in a moment where i think this whole bi racial structure of american identity is in a flux. so, in that it is predominantly and mostly because we have had such large influx of hispanics or latinos. who'll either identify as black or white or mostly identify as hispanics regardless of what their color is. they think that with the immigration of so many non white, the notion of being either black or white whether it is of what you want to check with on the census or now you can check more on one or two

or -- i think a lot of people see this as a way of just asserting so asserting so many more of the variables that make up identity, and to be quite honest, i don't think that a lot of americans want to be pigeon holed anymore into being one of the other. and i think when they -- you use afro -- which i don't have a problem with, or african, that's what exactly you're doing, you're privileging one aspect of identity over another and i think that that is what, particularly millenials and a more younger generation, are trying to get away from. >> good morning. i'm nell painter. i live and work in new jersey. in newark, new jersey.

and i have a couple of comments, mostly spurred by my sister new jerseyan, deborah gray-white. professor white mentioned the magic word, census. and i'd like to say a little bit about that looking forward along the lines that you mentioned, and that is of increasing black ethnicity. when i say i live in new jersey, that's pertinent because we have a lot of people not only from the caribbean but voluntary immigrants from the nations of africa. and some of them identify self-straightforwardly as african-american, and others have very distinct sense -- more of an immigrant sense of superiority over local black people and so forth. so there are a lot of different ways of being african african-american, and i think that's going to become more salient in the future.

the other comment i 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. i always tell my students, who is 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 of falling rates of longevity, of drug abuse and so forth.

you know, much talk now 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. so just two comments. thank you. >> hi. my name is moses massenburg. and i represent the association for the study of african-american life and history. carter g. woodson's hundred-year-old organization. i haven't heard the name of the association very much in the name of these spaces. two different 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 half their black

peers refer to themselves as such to the point it alienates our elders at city hall meetings and at local community meetings to oppose movements like the black lives matter movement because they feel that it's sort of a -- it's not a respectable movement with regard to what their idea of notions of blackness ought to represent. and these individuals stand behind police officers a lot of the time. so every time i go to a city hall meeting, there's this con tin genesee, especially in atlanta and los angeles, a contingency of conservative black people who oppose the black lives matter movement who are our elders but who also expect us to respect them as elders. so my question is how can we hold our -- 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 ] >> i would go back to something henry lewis gates said. again, it's quoted in a book called "who's afraid of post-blackness?" there are 40 million ways to be black and always have been 40 million ways to be black. it's just that we had to. we were compelled to be black in a particular way before, ironically and 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. and i just don't mean even africans or caribbeans but south asians, brown people. there are just 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 the 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. >> that billings paper really

exposed some of those internal fissures that we have always experienced in african-american history. it just connects with what deborah said and with the question about generational tensions, age tensions, linguistic tensions. so it is not a new challenge. it's an old challenge. i think we're continuing every day to try to work on solving it. >> good morning. my name is bernard. i'm no historian or scholar. i just try read a book every now and then that's written by the likes of you all. and 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 regardless of socioeconomics, race has always been our linked fate. so my question is, is the discussion of class a

distraction, when as i said, people like you all and others have written that race has always been the linked fate within the black community? thank you. >> political scientists recently have noted and they have statusicized it, whatever that is. it is dissolving. and this is beginning in the 1990s and through the first 16 years of the 20th century, we are finding -- i'm not a political scientist, i'm a historian -- but they are finding that the feeling of linked fate is declining among black people. and even as late as, i guess it

was in the 2007, the notion, you know, black people were asked, are black people a single race? 37%, round it off to say 40% of black people said no. they said no. i'm not making this up. this is from the pew research center. and i -- you know, that, i think, is rather astounding, if not profound. though the linked fate that black people used to feel is tenuous. >> hello. my name is mary elliot, and i am a museum specialist here at the national museum of african-american history and culture. and i am co-cure ratie ico-cure

slavery and freedom exhibition with my colleague, nancy, who is in the audience as well. i really appreciate, elsa barkley-brown, your acknowledgement of silence. and in this experience of putting together the exhibition, we've had people come forward with objects, documents that non african-americans, white people who say, i didn't know what to do with this and i've held it for so many years. right? and it helps us to have a better understanding of the black experience in america, and it's important that these people are coming forward now. in the exhibition, we look at slavery and freedom and talk about the harsh realities of slavery, but the resistance and resilience in the survival. when we took apart the slave cabin, we had a young woman african-american descended from

the enslaved community associated with the cabin, and she told me she didn't want to talk to another woman who's white who was descended from the sla slave-owning community. she didn't want to talk to her because she said she keeps telling me that we're related and 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's going to have information about your family that she's calling her family, as well, just like you might have information for her. so i think it's really powerful that you have brought this up here. and i'd like to know how you will prompt dialogue, move through dialogue with your students, because you talked about it and i thought about it in the context of african-american students, but this is -- it cuts both ways. it's black and it's white. it's family memory that people don't talk about, right?

and anyone there's some shame on both sides. so i'm really interested in how you'll do that. also how you see this 21st century museum helping to move that dialogue forward. >> so, yes. my students are the range of people who are in the classroom. and so when we're talking about silences or shame or what we want to know, we're actually talking about a range of what different people want black american history to be and for some people what they think that means if they aren't black, what they think that then means about their own history. so that's a conversation we're always having 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 anything

that can't be on the table. to allow there to be conversations that we don't know end to, that i don't have any wrd idea of what the answer is to that. i'm perfectly fine not knowing what the answer is to that, as long as we don't take it off the table because i don't know how to answer that question. and that collectively we try to figure out what could we do that helps us to move forward with continuing to have the conversation. i think in general, my approach to thinking about african-american history, who's black, et cetera, is that i think most of the time when we see unity, what we are looking at is silence. that in order to get to unity, a lot of people have been silenced. a lot of people weren't in that narrative. if we are telling a story about that, that we need to figure out who we aren't hearing.

and then as long as we can actually sort of put those voices out there, we might not be able to resolve a kind of "and this is how we tell the history," but my goal is to silence less people. that's what i would hope we're doing in history, which is not necessarily creating -- i'm not trying to create a new narrative. i'm not trying to say if we do that now, we are going to come to another narrative that we're all going to agree on. so i guess what i hope for the museum is that there's a lot of things that we've been silent about that show up in the museum, and in some kind of way and spaces for people to add other things that they think are silent because we're all going to create something that has

silences in it. but to have a lot of things that have been silent and not to worry about whether -- i'm not opening a museum so i can say not to worry, not to worry about the things people are going to be upset about and that are included in there, et cetera. [ applause ] >> my name is junior williams. 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. so if you reduce it to a protective moment, then you lose that value or 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 the back culture, as part of the essence of not only being black but being american. and because we don't see any value to it because we are integrated, now it's no longer necessary to be black, we're beyond that, somebody else has picked it up off the floor and is presently enjoying it. so now we look upon our own culture and we say, yes, it's nice to be a part of something and not have to be considered black, white or whatever it is, we're indifferent to that. there are other people hard at work making sure that they extract -- it's like a corporate takeover, you know what i'm saying? you take the whole thing but you reject that which you don't need, but keep that which is

useful. we better step up and reclaim our identity. >> let me speak just very briefly to that and say that those last words i'm going to remember. we need to step up, reclaim. but also nell painter talked about beauty and protectiveness in her comments. that's also part of what you were expressing. there is beauty in that history, beauty in 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 a psychologist. i wish i could give you the citation, but i cannot. but the presentation focused on when parents talk about black pride to their adolescent

children, those children do much better with issues of self-esteem, have fewer incidents of depression and so on. in our day, there really is a psychological protective factor to positive blackness when exchanged and discussed between parent and child. >> good morning. my name is cecily marcus from the university of minnesota, umbra search african-american history. i also wanted to thank you for bringing up the silences in the archive. and my question is, in your practice as historians, when you're looking at the history of the formation of african-america in the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, even today when the documents are missing, when they weren't collected, when they were destroyed, when they weren't valued by institutions, how do

you call attention to those silences? how do you document silences when the documents aren't there? >> very carefully. [ laughter ] >> somebody want to -- >> i think that -- >> let me just say the documents are never there, at least the ones that you want. and that's true, you know, for the 20th century as well as the 17th century. in some ways, i think it's easier in the 17th and 18th century because so much has been destroyed, whereas in the 20th century you have so much you can't -- how do you sort -- how do you sort through it? but the documents you want are, you know, the smoking gun is never, you know, 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. >> i also think that you have to begin to read what exists differently. so that we've done -- some historians have done great work with, say, runaway ads that yield very little information, but it's amazing. i would just give you one example. my colleague marisa fuentes whose book is almost about to be published, she had one document from the 1700s of a black woman who ran away from a plantation in bridgetown, and it was just one runaway ad. one runaway ad. what the runaway ad said was that -- i forget the woman's name, but she's probably headed

toward bridgetown. and that was it. also she had some distinguishing marks. so she wrote an entire chapter based on that one runaway ad. but what she did was she went back to bridgetown and she got all of the old maps of bridgetown. so, you know, knowing that she'd be coming -- i mean, barbados is really not a very large island. so knowing where she would probably enter the city, what she did was to put herself in the shoes of this runaway person and then through those old maps, recreated what this woman would have seen. now, 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's running away from

her rural plantation and is going to an urban center, and she passes a whipping post. you know, it doesn't take too much imagination. but basically what she calls it is reading against the bias grain. and that's what i think we have to do. we have to take what is there, turn it inside out and look at it, say, 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 just 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 don't know what the answer is to that. >> okay. one other thing is i run into

silences all the time my other project which is on legacies of slavery in ghana. and, you know, when i run into those, i often will treat them as, or i'll begin to think of them as expressions of power, as the residues of power. the chief is called to testify in a land case, comes and says nothing or ignores the summons all together. that's an expression of power. it's an assertion of his -- what he sees as his right to define his boundaries. when someone brings up slave ancestry about another person, that's an expression of power. when someone does not, that tells a lot. i can sort of follow the silences to figure out some things that i want to know. >> just one other thing. i think that as historians that we need to be a little bit 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 theorist, anthropologist, as ways to read our documents. >> yes? >> hello. my name is bernice alexander bennett, and i'm here wearing three hats. one is 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 through the 13th. the second as member of the afro american historical and genealogical society, and i'm host and producer of research at

national archives and beyond blog talk radio. and what i want to hear more about are the stories. and one of the things that we as genealogists do is we're trying to connect the dots and tell the stories that we find that are in our family tree or maybe missing from our family tree. so that when someone has to compose, put together a family tree and they find convict, well what's the story behind finding your family member listed as a convict? so let me just tell you one of my stories. i began to do my research. and 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. the question i had was what's the story? there was a long story, but it

was a part of my family tree. did i dismiss that? did i go into a silent mode and not share what i needed to know and understand as well as share that with our families? so when we talk about the silences, do we keep those secret scandals and lives away from the rest of the family members or do we share them? >> yeah, no. so the film i was talking about that begins with the tree for convict, the film is the young girl learning the full histories of these women. 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, et cetera. 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 the people that we're looking at as multidimensional human beings, that there's a lot of different things we can ask and try to 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, et cetera, that i'm encouraging them to also then ask those questions in their own family, not necessarily that they're doing it in my class, but one of the things they're taking from

my class is to want to know more fully about their own families, as well. >> we have 15 minutes. i'll ask everybody to be efficient with their questions and short with their comments. >> i'll add on one little thing. other in the spring garden collection at howard university, there's a collection of family histories that howard university professor e. franklin frazier had his students go out and collect. you would be surprised -- maybe not surprised, at the number of silences the students encountered in the 1930s when they were asking their parents and grandparents. this is not new. >> good morning, and thank you, panel. thank you all. this question is probably in professor brown's purview but i really sincerely mean it for the entire panel. we've talked about the wrongful price of unity being silences,

and when people are caught in the hurly-burly of real politic particularly in the strong drivers of mainstream media attention, we lose our grip on history and operating with historical agency. and particularly with intergenerational work, i'm very concerned with this kind of sense of displacement that we have as individual groups and che collectives and what i really hold in high regard, the economy. and i think your lives and works present us with moving beyond the mere parameters of the academy. i'm interested in what the panel thinks about what more could be done. it's one thing to be a lively reader and then practice an observation and evidence or a theory. it's another to deal with young people and old people and bring together community members to aggressively attack this wrongful price of unity. thank you.

>> so i think there are actually practices for how to think about working together. i'm using working together as opposed to unity. practices for how to think about working together. without requiring or assuming uniformity, commonality, et cetera. we an scan see some of those practices in societies that made very specific kinds of rules about where they met and aboutc practices in societies that made very specific kinds of rules about where they met and about inclusion of wide ranges of people in the 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 had more power than other people in that to make this decision. i'm not suggesting that. i think there are practices in byp 100. i've been really impressed, i wish barbara was still sitting right there. so i think i'm right about this. i've, really impressed with the way byp 100 has decided to deal with men in the group who have -- who allegedly have sexually assaulted women in their group. and i've been really 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 and being very public about that. so i think there are practices people can develop that don't -- that aren't assuming unity that are assuming we an still find ways to work together toward particular political ends. >> hello, my name is hollis gentry. i'm a genealogist for the national museum of african-american history and culture. comment that i wanted to make in regarding to her question about evidence, it exists in bounds. there's this myth that we're missing or lacking in an abundance of records on african-americans and that'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 where it's a matter of reading the record differently of instead of just looking for african-american records, you're looking for records in the evidence of african-americans within their records. that's from the beginning of this country when we were recording records up until now. there are silences that abound 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 they use and to combine them to tell a better story, a more nuanced story. i had an experience, for example, when i was looking for evidence of african-americans in the colonial period then the early national period, and the book took me five attempts to get through masters -- "slaves without masters" and what happened for me, this telling

moment was when i realized you had to understand the psychology of the record keepers to understand how they're recording the information in order to understand how to search through that information to find the people who we think are -- 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, both sides of the coin. so that's just my commend. >> so the late tom schick used to at meetings of the african-american life and history association sit people down and say what it is that you want to know and let's think about who needed and wanted that information. and if we can figure out who needed and wanted that information, we can start

thinking about how to nifind it >> i want to briefly add to that, in my research which focuses mainly on enslaved afro americans and afro cherokees in the cherokee nation, i have really benefited from the smart and savvy and knowledgeable assistance of genealogists. i could not do half of what i did without genealogists who actually know how to find certain kinds of 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 material, do we not have material, that within native american history and studies of black people and native communities, there actually is a lot of material. i always say that there isn't when i write because it's not the same as writing about thomas jefferson, right, looking at you here. but still, native people were surveilled to such a high extent by the u.s. government and colonial powers that there is a

record there. it is deep. but it doesn't want to think about blackness or black people. so even when there are a lot of materials we still have to tgo back and use the practices the panel has spoken about. >> we're down to five more minutes. why don't we say three more questions and we'll -- >> i have a second actually comment and question. i'm bill. i'll do a better job of introducing myself. i'm a sound archivist associated and published by the san francisco history museum as well, and more importantly to the issue of silence and the record. i'm a sound consultant with the library of congress sound division. it just completed this wonderful project which will launch in 2017 called #blackvoicesmatter, race, image and matter, recorded sound and film. there is nothing silent at all about blackness, about race, race consciousness at the donna recorded sound as well as film. it's amazing. it's a hugely repressed and

significant body of dark material that i fortunately have as an archivist this incredible collection of, but you should -- if anyone's interested in this concept, this idea that will launch what probably once dr. carla hayden is approved as the new librarian of congress 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. and if anyone's interested, just see me afterwards. >> good morning. my name is elizabeth clark-lee w lewis.

i'd like to invite people if you're looking at, or there are questions about how do you address these 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 panelists said, differently. marcia eisenburg talked about a whole series. she did three articles on understanding how to use records to understand african-american history and she used extensively the records of comparing north carolina, new york, and georgia, and it's a brilliant way of looking at the local records differently. lastly, paul sluvey, using cemetery records, he is able in his books but in that first series of articles to talk about how cemeteries really do speak

volumes to historians and genealogists. so i think as the panel ha sas d very brilliantly, there are so many existing records 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. >> hi. my name's benjamin lawrence. i'm a historian -- institute of technology. and my question is built on yesterday's comment about mythology and a lot of good historical writing focuses either on building up or breaking down myths, and, of course, you know, annette gordon reid is one of the great slayers of sacred cows. and there are others in the room. and so i'm wondering what are the next sacred cows in african-american history 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 published something, i got into a very public spat with some people who didn't like the idea that i felt quite strongly that sankay return to sierra leone and was likely involved in slave trading because 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? >> the volunteers for the slaughter can -- [ laughter ] -- line up. line up in the rear. i think -- i think our session has pretty well -- [ laughter ] -- pretty well come to an end. we will reassemble. we'll have a break and

reassemble here hat 10:35, and t that point, we'll talk about slavery and freedom. [ applause ] c span makes it easy for you to keep up with all the latest convention developments with the c-span radio app. available as a free zdownload from the apple app store or google play. get audio coverage from every minute of the conventions, schedule information about important speeches and events. get c-span on the go with the c-span radio app. next on "american history tv," we hear from historians and

activists who reflect on the historical civil rights movement. this discussion part of a three-day conference called "the future of the african-american past." it was co-hosted by the american historical association and the smithsonian national museum of african-american history and culture which opens this september on the national mall. this is an hour 40 minutes. >> this morning i got a call from a reporter who wanted to know why would the museum at a time when it was focused on opening the building, why would a museum help to organize such a conference? the simple answer is we're crazy, but the real answer is that at the smithsonian, at this museum, scholarship is the engine and research is the lifeblood of the institution. without the decades of research and academic scholarship as a foundation, there would be no

national museum of african-american history and culture. so we know that we are tied so much to the work that so many of you do. so much of the intellectual and interpretive agenda of the museum has been shaped by the work of many who are participating in this conference. thanks to this amazing array of scholarship, the museum is able to position itself as an institution that will help all who visit find the rich, complex, and nuanced history of the african-american community. but even more importantly, thanks to your work, this museum will recenter the african-american experience and use african-american history and culture as a lens to understand what it means to be an american. so the audiences who visit will realize how much america's identity and aspirations have been profoundly shaped by this history. by this culturculture.