>> next, four civil rights activists discuss their experiences as part of the 1960's civil rights movement. as part of the annual conference. >> it is a rare occasion to stand on the shoulders of -- to be in the same room with people who you stand on the shoulders of. occasion to be with people who have created the path so that you can be in that path.

i imagine for me this will be an emotional panel. we are taught in this country to honor our soldiers. country toht in this protect our soldiers. i want to remind the audience that these are our soldiers. [applause] while i grew up reading about each and every one of these movements, be it the black panther party, the black arts movement, i would never have imagined that i would be pointed on a movement such as mine that would call us terrorists. that would make us enemies of the state.

nobody, unless you have had that experience, understands what that does to your spirit, to your body, to the people around you. i have taken the last six years of this iteration of our black liberation movement to go back and either read, listen to y'all's talks, it is more than an honor. it is a historical moment to be on stage with you. i'm going to start with you. mr. sanchez. [applause] oftentimes, people try to put us in a box.

you are only black, you are only woman, you are only artist, you are only activist, but you are all those things and so much more. these are not separate events. the civil rights movement, the black power movement, the black arts movement. you integrated those in your life and i would love for you to tell this audience your own experience and reveal how these movements have overlapped. also talk about why it is necessary that we do not box ourselves. >> i just wanted to say, i didn't know before i came -- [inaudible] >> your mic. >> hello? >> it is on now. >> i just wanted to say that at

some point, we have learned you can't have a conference without the idea of, there must be something that comes out of this conference that will help our young children. i hope you make a statement or try to do something, otherwise we are dislocated. the other thing is, a woman who was a great writer and cultural transition.-- i want to read something i wrote about her, if i may. i want you to see that we are not separated from each other. if you have not read toni morrison, i am going to follow you around. [laughter] and tell you why. this is when i introduced toni on may the 12th.

you said we die. that may be the meaning of life, but we do language. that may be the measure of our lives. my dear sister, toni morrison, how you do this thing called language, which may be the measure of our lives. how you capture our words, untangle this language, send words up. how you open up the sorcery of language, spinning teeth on the wonder of words. recapturing the wings of our most sacred vows. listen, you say. summer is around the bend. and you annoint our eyes with surprise. bring us into the flash of rain and laughter called paradise. the bluest eye, tar baby, beloved, a mercy, god help the child.

we commandeered your words and they become a river, moving against winter sales, repelling icewater ghosts, moving on razor thin knees at confession. our bodies are tattooed forever with your quick silver tongue and we are one, alive, apart from the elasticity of the bed. the day comes, my dear sister, breathing in your eyes of silk and i remember your words. don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. show us belief, wide skirt, as a stitch that unravels fear. i thank you for this prose stage called home, where men and women, shipwrecked, graveyard memories, suddenly on their

feet, walked themselves back home on air as black as their souls. their hearts still searching for a gust of life as they dress their limbs in starched bones. i put on my eyes, my dear sister. the eyelash of your memory. where there is always a small miracle called home. called toni morrison. [applause] i love these sisters who formed this organization. my first encounter with them was in a place called new york city

with a bunch of people who, when they saw me, did not like that i was there, because of my politics. we got off to a bad start, because they asked, who is financing you? everybody in the audience said, whoa. but that is what we did. we had involved ourselves with so many other people and when we find out who was financing people, we had to back out. it wasn't a negative thing i did. it was like, tell me now so i know how to move. then i watched them move here in this country and around the world and i leaned back, and said, mm-hmm, that's good, mm-hmm, they bad. welcome to this arena. called activism. this arena called, how do i save not only america but the world? it is an honor to be here, to understand what people are doing, and clear out things. i just want to say, i forgot what you asked me, by guess you wanted me to say something about what many of us have done.

you know, i said in the interview earlier today that we watch a great deal what people were doing in the south and i was coming out of a place called hunter college when we watched the brothers and sisters who sat in at the counters and we were so moved by that, but we were a group in college that were observing it. then they told me when i got ready to graduate that i did not have all my credits because i had cut classes, on purpose, because you got in, i couldn't see me. i was no place to be seen. i was completely out of my head and they said, you can't graduate. you will have to make up these 28 credits, or you can appeal, and i said, give me the form and they did and they said, the

reasons why what happened, and i wrote down discrimination in red. and they got rid of me. they got me out of hunter college because it was a time of movement at that time. the people who watched us knew that that was moving on up to a place called new york city and, i am here because of that movement. i am here because of the brothers and sisters sitting on the stage. they began to inform us as to what was going on not only in the south, but what was going on, period, and the bravery they inspired us with. we kept saying in the north like, whoa, they are not prepared. we thought we are so hip. they are not prepared to protect themselves, but they had the

protection of being correct. they had the protection of being righteous. they had the protection of women and men who taught them and gave them the shield of information, of what it was and what it meant to go out into the valley is, to go out, to inform and teach and to drive out in the midnight hours in cars with no lights to get away and come home. we saw them as heroes. i tell these young people, you read these comic books about heroes. we need to make comic books about these brothers and sisters. [applause] not pseudo-heroic stuff, but men and women who faced death. they didn't say a little magic word. doing some little thing forever. they were saying the words of truth and progress. we need to teach our children, and i am hoping you will make these books about these brave

men and women, who faced death, looked at it, pushed it back and said, we are here. we ain't leaving. we going to change this bloody south, which will change the rest of the world. and so, we are grateful and indebted because when we north had to do something, we looked at that and understood. it gave us teeth. it gave us the heart to go out into those places we lived and to go up against the police. as they came toward us at some point when we were trying to go and open up the electrical union of new york city. that happened to us in a place called new york city and what that meant. i didn't mean to take up the

time, so i will stop, but i'm just saying, it is a joy to be here and i hope you understand what it means to see the continuation of us. but also to imagine the continuation of you in the same way. somebody asked me recently on the idiot box, a television program, how did you survive? and i said it hit me one day that i had to reimagine myself. this american landscape. you can't keep doing the same things year after year. after 10 years, you have to stop and i had to reimagine me on this american landscape in order to survive, to go and come up with new ideas, or at least to hone the ideas i had before. and that reimagining of yourself

is a saving grace, my brothers and sisters, because it makes you go on and investigate other things, what this is truly about. it makes you learn more. it makes you sit back and take time out. don't say that. many of you know that i would curse people out and think nothing of it. i called it, but we have got some m-f's at some point. you better call them out. [applause] replace them and challenge them, people. call them by their names. and that is one of their names we should call them by. thank you. [laughter] [applause] patrisse: thank you. i will pass it over to you, mr.

bob moses. a lot of folks in the american consciousness, we believe that the movement started in 1954 with brown versus board and ended with the assassination of king. while many of us who have been following this movement, been in it, read about it, studied it, we know that it is much more extensive. i would love to hear you talk about your own personal development and consciousness and the work you have done and continue to do for us. >> hello? can you hear me? >> it is not on. >> it's on. if the sound person just turns it up. >> they are going to fire you! [laughter] be careful. >> how is everybody?

so, i like to think a lot about the movement we were in and what was at the heart of it. i have come to settle on the preamble. because the sit in kids and the freedom riders, and the sharecroppers and the mississippi freedom democratic party crowd, they were all

thinking, not that they were citizens of georgia and alabama and mississippi and louisiana, woe is them. they were thinking that they were citizens of the country and that it actually meant something. that national citizenship actually meant something. so, when the 1787 constitution reached virginia, patrick henry said, who gave them the right to say we the people? he thought they should have said, we the citizens of the several states. but they didn't. and at the heart of it is an issue that is here now in this

day, with ice and rounding up undocumented people. at the heart of his question is, we are documented as citizens of the several states. we the people are undocumented. the people who signed that couldn't document themselves. there was no country. to document themselves. they were a group of on documented people. as soon as they said we the

people, they could have said we the citizens. but that would have led to a very different country. so the question of the preamble and what it means in its original statement, that it was for white men who owned property, and then of course, the problem was article iv, section ii, paragraph 3. the preamble itself outlines a group of constitutional people who own and establish the constitution. article iv, section ii, paragraph 3 delineates a very different group of constitutional people. africans, as constitutional property. the first group of undocumented people. and so, the country goes along for three quarters of a century

and the africans, their job is to document themselves. insurgent runaway slaves. we go to war over this issue of undocumented people, africans. we come out of that and we decide that, african americans now are no longer just african people. but they are not quite citizens. circular 3591. you should google it.

attorney general francis biddle, december 12, 1941, issues a circular. it says that state attorney generals should stop prosecuting poverty as such and prosecute a different form of slavery. indentured servitude. five days before, the country had been invaded. president roosevelt figured out that he needed young black men, and so he ordered his attorney general to stop this process

that had been going on for almost three quarters of a century. you didn't put africans in jail. there was no mass incarceration of slaves. your property was valuable so you didn't park it. after the war, what you did was round them up by the tens of thousands, young african-americans, and put them in the coal mines for the industrialization of the country, then came world war ii, and we realized -- the country realized that it needed young african-american men, so we had that circular. google it sometime. circular 3591.

the war in some sense leads us into the civil rights movement. that movement took place against the backdrop of a planet wide effort by colonial people for political voice. that hit this country after world war ii, and we had a civil rights movement. in a measure, african-americans here got a measure of political importance. i was on the witness stand in the spring of 1963. kennedy is still president.

bobby kennedy is the attorney general. bert marshall is the assistant attorney general. we had been grease-gunned outside of greenwood on our way to greenville. we decided jimmy travis had caught the bullet. there were three of us in the front of the car. snake decided to converge on greenwood in response, be raised money for food, we told people, look, straight up, the reason you don't have your federal commodities is because of politics.

so if you want some of this political food here, you have to go down and register to vote. and so, they arrested the field secretaries and bert filed suit against the city and had our cases removed to the federal district court. we bussed our sharecroppers over to the courthouse in greenville and bert sent john door to be our lawyer in the federal district judge just had one question. he wanted to know, why is snk taking illiterates to vote. sharecropper education was the sharecropper education was the subtext of right to vote.

sharecropper education is education that says you have been reassigned work, so you get the education that is best for the work which you have been assigned. and so, education then -- right now, if it was a planet-wide movement of colonial people that led us into the right to vote, it's the transition on the planet from industrial to information age technology which has led us into education. and the preamble.

and the idea that the preamble should reach right down to every child in the country, as a citizen of the country, right now for purposes of education, we are citizens of the states. we need to establish, just as we did for voting, education as a right, a constitutional right in this country. and so, we need to take on the undocumented. we need to use the preamble as a tool. we held a meeting in washington at the congress just this past july 18.

our first meeting, asking the country to have a direct constitutional federal involvement and investment in education. and we are going to work to develop a 'we the people movement' to make that happen. this transition from industrial to information age technology is not going to last forever. the sharecroppers we were working with where the serfs of the industrial age. we are busy growing serfs of the information age in our cities.

because they have not and in education for the 21st century. what they are getting is a sharecropper education. an education which prepares them for the work of the 20th century. we have to wake up. thank you. [applause] recording this, right? this is our second panel together.

this is a question for you looking at the impact of white supremacy, and not just the white supremacy of the past, but the white supremacy of today. what we are up against, what we are facing. i want to hear your reflections response that the the black power movement had to white supremacy in the past, and what you are seeing is a response to white supremacy now. questions.ew [laughter] hello, everyone. before, patrice and everyone, before i say anything, and i ask something of everyone gathered? that is that you send love to the children as if they were your own. do,t now, just whatever you

however you express love, in the form of a good wish and good ,houghts, a prayer, a blessing anything, can we just take a moment where we are quiet? and as the little girl yesterday said on the news, put your heart there. thank you for doing that.

because they are our children. mothers and fathers and grandmothers and aunties and uncles are in the room? just, you've got children in your life? yeah. so it is heinous what is happening. it goes beyond giving it a name. cruel won't do. words in some describesomewhere to daily, momenting, to moment things. i want to ask that we not normalize it. [applause]

ericka: so any kind of supremacy is based in the notion it is an education. it is, you've been educated to believe that you are the center of the universe. thatanything that contests enemy, andnce is an , iing lived through that , i've comegood way to understand that there are people who raise their children to believe that they are better than, perhaps because of their

skin color. and i say it's just like that. matter it almost doesn't as you travel the globe what the skin color might look like and who might be wearing it, but later and later is always better. something i've had to think .bout a lot not that there is something wrong with the skin color that is iny has, but if it society considered a privilege, why not do good with it? [applause] ericka: why not take that goodness to the people who make a difference, who make the

decisions, and do something about it? say something. as an irate catholic nun once told me, you can write a dam , and she's right. you can do anything with the people you are with, the skin you are in, and the body you've been given. you can, each of us, do something. antidote to normalizing. so that skin color is part of white supremacy or any kind of genderupremacy, and then , and being able-bodied, i like and your this time,

citizenship, your sexual orientation, all of these things. all of these minute things compared to the magnificence of a human heart. profound wisdom of a human .ind the eloquent, lyrical way of those who remind us that weart and poetry are all human, instead of these petty things i race and gender -- petty things like race and gender. so back to white supremacy. i read an article yesterday, and it was an article written, and it had a title, something like

why young white men are so angry. immediately, i smiled when i read the title, but then i recognized it is speaking to the mass killings. and 251, these last two intentional murders of human beings. 2019.d 250 in are white men so angry? that,e they were told regardless of anything else, at least you're better than this one. supremacy is being

undermined by people standing up to say, well, black lives matter. so i grew up at a time when, i was telling some friends earlier by thesegot spit on children when i was a child. who was raising them? who was teaching them? what was the education? i know what education i had to, but what was theirs? to raise any child to believe that they can be death affirming. that's what it comes to.

it comes to life and death right now. when i was watching you on screen, i thought, when i read your book -- have you read her book? it's called, "when they call us a terrorist." when they call you a terrorist. i went back to sitting in a becauseell in solitary i was a terrorist, but that wasn't the name given me. lack panthern the party was the -- the black panther party was the greatest threat to the internal security of the united states. we were median age 19 years old. as i look back and bring some of that forward to this moment, and i look inward, i want a world

which, and it might sound corny, in which all children recognize the humanity in each other. that your little three-year-old aboutt have to worry anything except the natural challenges of navigating the world as a human being. but not that, at age six or seven, you will be jacketed in public school. not that at age 10, he will be value, inhe's not of words and in body language. that he's walking down the street like my 13-year-old nephew and gets rolled up on by a police car and asked if he can be searched because he fits the description of.

of,13 fits the description my little nephew who says, pardon me? it broke my heart once again. our hearts, people, are being broken a lot. are they not? that byave to antidote being active wherever we can. , ithe end of our lives won't be where we worked or how much money we made. it will be how we are with the people right around us. what are we doing that is a good thing that doesn't make the news? right?

you were talking about that earlier. it is just a kindness. it is just a loving thing. and that is what the black panther party was really all about. was bullshit. ut what we were doing was feeding babies, educating children, trying to figure out how to get people educated about single cell anemia -- about sickle cell anemia, running free clinics, and trying to stop police brutality, and the counterintelligence program of the fbi pretty much wiped us out from the inside. but i feel that it is important ,or all of us to be resilient

so we are challenged. so we lose people. i'm not saying so what. i'm saying, what do they say, fall down seven times, get up eight? you just have to keep going. that me speak for myself. i have to keep going. white supremacy is in the fabric , it is in the structure, it is in the intention of the united states. and that is hard to face, but it is the truth. and no one in this room put it in place. don't get me wrong. you had nothing to do with the structures and the systems in place. .ut now you know so that's where i want to stop. [applause]

patrisse: thank you so much for that. this conference is called the roots of revolution, reaching back and pushing forward. as scholars and activists, what do you see the role of african-american museums, cultural centers, and the naming of our past and paving a way forward, especially under 45? these are light questions. [laughter] charles: yes. is, fort answer to that all those institutions, c., the short answer of that is to present the truth of black struggle. that's a huge problem.

i'll tell you one story. i'm a journalist, so all journalists have about 50 stories in each back pocket. [laughter] charles: some years ago, almost 20 years ago, i had done a book with bob moses here. i was bringing it to people who had helped me here in mississippi, one of whom was the principal of a middle school not very far from here, brinkley middle school. and as it happens, brinkley middle school is directly across the street from the fannie lou hamer public library. i'm sitting on the steps of that school with some of the students , i knew some of them, talking. i pointed to the library, and i asked if anyone in the group would like to tell us who mrs. and none of them

could do that. i was waiting for a ride, which came. so when my ride came, i stood up to go to the car and pointed at look.brary, and i said, mrs. hamer was extremely important to the freedom struggle, not just in mississippi come about across the south. in some ways i have a whole little mrs. hamer lecture, which i will spare you. i said, if you are interested, when i come back, i can talk to you about her because i knew her . when i said i knew her, one of these kids, middle schools kids, stared at mefeet, in total amazement, and in words i will not forget, said, mr.

?obb, you was alive back then [laughter] i understood because i am talking about somebody whose name is chiseled into the library, and it is not possible for somebody to tell them about somebody whose name is chiseled on the library that they knew that person. hamelre they place mrs. with frederick douglass, all of those people back then, you know. so it was a kind of jarring reminder about how little of the history of our struggle has reached down to the generation to whom the 21st century would belong to.

in some ways, it changed me as a writer because up until then, i had been a foreign affairs reporter. i switched gears and have been writing increasingly about the south. this whole question, this whole question of our history and our struggle has increasingly occupied my attention, what we call, or some of us call history , from the inside out as opposed to history from the top down. history from the bottom up as opposed to history, you know, the movement of the 1960's, the movement we were part of, is most often seen as a movement of mass protest in public spaces led by charismatic leaders. our missed friend used to say the way the public understands

the movement can be boiled down to one sentence. rosa sat down, martin stood up, and then the white folks saw the light and saved the day. [laughter] charles: so this whole question of how we understand the movement has increasingly occupied my attention. this whole question of how you present the movement from the inside out, the people who

really made this movement and i spent most of my movement life in mississippi. the people who made this movement were not charlie cobb who came down from washington, d.c. or bob moses who came down from harlem, new york. it was made people like hollis watkins, who is sitting right over there. [applause] charles: native mississippians who took on the struggle and influenced people like they had a story. i had no intention of working in mississippi. i was just passing through to a , and one of the people i met of the leaders of jackson, mississippi sit in named lauren ski out -- named lawrence guiott, who would later become chair of the mississippi free democratic party, but then was just a college student. i think he had just graduated

, when i told him i was on the way to a conference in texas guiott leaned over me , with total disdain and he said -- again, you don't forget these moments -- he said, you say you're going to a conference on, civil rights conference in texas? what's the point of doing that when you're standing right here in mississippi? was was awhat it challenge, and it's important to understand that part of the internal dynamic of the movement has to do with the challenges that black people made to one another within the black community. if you travel with mrs. hamer in the mississippi delta as she is

talking to people, organizing people, what she is really doing is challenging because she is saying if i can try to register to vote, you have no excuse, you know. she is challenging them and that really defines a lot of the movement as i understood it and experienced it in the south. i think there are two great lessons in southern freedom movement for the movement that has been unfolding today. i try to interact a lot with people, young people who are part of this movement for black lives that has been unfolding now almost a decade. one of the things i try and get them to see without insulting them, you know, and i will spare my criticism of the black leaders who have insulted the young people who have made up this movement. i can take another hour to talk

about that. one of the things i try to get them to see was at least the lessons that we learned working here in mississippi or southwest georgia or central alabama or the arkansas delta, all of these places in the black belt south that were incredibly violent and incredibly oppressive. what i try to get them to see is fundamental to forging struggle is recognition of the strength that exists in black communities because if there is any single thing i learned in mississippi was there was great strength, until i came to mississippi, mississippi in my mind was wholly defined by the murder of emmett till. this is not an inspiring image. coming to mississippi, when you

c.c. brianlou hamer and amsey moore, i could go on , and on with names that are legendary within the movement, at least legendary within the movement, -- the movement. -- within the movement, at least. hartman turnbull, who vanished from the history, the ones that used their strength, their desire for real freedom and took us in as young 19-year-olds and

20-year-olds and 20-year-olds, bob was the old guy, he was 26. [laughter] charles: you know, this is one of the most important lessons as valuable today as it was yesterday, 50 years ago. and if you look and this is the lesson ella baker taught us. if you look deep into the communities, you will find strengths, not weakness and that strength will enable you to continue struggle. in fact, ms. baker told me once, she says, and they're waiting for you charles, you know, they're waiting for you. you have to go in there and make your way to them and it doesn't take a great deal of effort as it turns out. they made our way to us more than we made our way to them.

it's one of the great, great lessons that is valuable today if you want to talk about movement. you know, the tradition of the movement, i want to say this by way of wrapping up after all, is a tradition of community organizing at the grassroots. that's an old tradition. it's not something that was invented in the 1960's. it was not something that was invented in the post-world war ii era. it goes all the way back to the days when the first africans were offloaded on to american shores into this strange land and sold into slavery. and believe me, they were not marching in protest on the auction blocks, and they were not holding sittins at the plantation manor dining room table seeking a seat at the table. what were they doing? they were organizing struggles, escape, revolt, sabotage, .

-- sabotage assassination. , they were organizing. that tradition of community organizing which we encountered in the 1960's has been handed down from generation to generation, and now we hand it to your generation, patrisse. thank you. [applause] patrisse: thank you all so very much, and thank you all for holding the space. i want to ask that we do one more round of applause for our panelists. [applause] patrisse: i'm going to, if you are able to stand, i'm going to ask you to keep standing and i'm

going to close us in the tradition that we close off everything, a chant from our beloved, it is our duty to fight for our freedom. >> it is our duty to fight for our freedom. patrisse: it is our duty to win. >> it is our duty to win. patrisse: we must love each other and support each other. >> we must love each other and support each other. patrisse: we have nothing to lose but our chains. >> we have nothing to lose but our chains. patrisse: it is our duty to fight for our freedom. >> it is our duty to fight for our freedom. patrisse: it is our duty to win. >> it is our duty to win. patrisse: we must love each other and support each other. >> we must love each other and support each other. patrisse: we have nothing to lose but our chains. >> we have nothing to lose but our chains. patrisse: it is our duty to fight for our freedom. >> it is our duty to fight for our freedom. patrisse: it is our duty to win. >> it is our duty to win. patrisse: we must love each other and support each other. >> we must love each other and support each other. patrisse: we have nothing to lose but our chains. >> we have nothing to lose but our chains.

[applause] ♪ freedomhear believe in

♪ ♪

this weekend -- announcer: this weekend on "the presidency," relief fork that saved millions caught up in the war and its work that-- relief saved millions caught up in the war and its aftermath. >> hoover directed, facilitated, financed, and assisted a multitude of international humanitarian relief efforts without parallel in history. during this nearly 10 year period, the u.s. food administration, the ara, and various other governments and private organizations delivered to nearly 34 million metric tons people to the lands and

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experience-i -- the student experience is really valuable to me. >> it has really helped us grow and learn as people going into our college years. c-span'sst winners of competition, it sparks their interest in documentary production. >> i attend drake university, and i get to be right in the middle of the caucus season, and got to meet semi different candidates. because of c-span, i had the experience in the equipment and knowledge to be able to film some of them. announcer: this year we are asking middle school and high school students to create a short video documentary answering the question, what issue do you most want presidential candidates to address during the campaign? include c-span video and reflect differing points of view. inare awarding $100,000 total cash prizes, including a $5,000 grand prize.

>> be passionate about what you are discussing, to express your view, no matter how large or small using the audience would receive it to be. that in thenow greatest country in the history of your earth, your view does matter. announcer: go to studentcam.org. i tell bernie sanders voters all the time, i defy you to say you care more about poor people than i do because you don't. i defy you to say you care more about access to health care than i do because you don't. i defy you to say you care more about educating poor kids than i do because you don't. but we have very different solutions about how to get there. kay coles k -- career and her

time as president of the heritage foundation. next on the civil war, author owski talks about the 1863 tullahoma campaign. he argues that the struggles between confederate leaders in tennessee resulted in their unpreparedness for battle. this was part of the symposium on forgotten battles of the civil war hosted by the emerging civil war blog. doug: first thing i want to say, if you haven't been to north