is chavez's legacy? miriam: his legacy is a generation of activists who have learned from him and taken that and gone elsewhere and for the farm workers who were empowered by his union, that was experience andus as a figure, a hero for latinos throughout the country and i annk all of that is important legacy. gregg: thank you very much. [applause] [captions performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national 2020]satellite corp. announcer: history bookshelf country's best known american history writers about past decade talking their books. on americanext history tv, we hear from geoff ward about the legacies of racial violence in america and in particular during the jim

crow era. of african andr african american studies at washington university in st. louis. the world war i memorial hosted this event and provided the video. is my pleasure and honor to introduce dr. geoff ward. geoff's research examines racial of social control including dynamics of racial violence, conflict and inequality. he looks at areas of race and youth justice and social movement, labor and policy racial to advance justice. his work appears in numerous journals and anthologies and has been supported by the national foundation, the national institute of justice, the ford mellonion and the foundation. he is the author of "the black democracyrs, racial and juvenile justice," an award

winning book on the rise, fall haunting remnants of jim crow juvenile justice. his current projects examine historical racial violence, its reckonings today. he is also a curator. you might have a chance to see encouragend i would you all to do so, catch the train, go to the other side of to another art museum, kemper art lane museum located on the campus of washington university from february 7 until the end of april, you can catch the art exhibition, truths and reckonings, the art of transformative racial justice. him forou haven't liked all of the other things that i have just said, i recently in aed that he just came day early to watch the st. louis know, i amersus -- i going there -- versus the kansas city royals and friends, who can't love a baseball fan. ladies and gentlemen, please

join me in a very warm welcome dr. geoff ward. [applause] geoff: thank you. that was a wonderful introduction, thank you so much. i want to thank laura vogt and staff andful colleagues in the education department and the people here at the world war i memorial and museum, all the other folks, the folks from masala. brother and i are both historians of the black experience so i'm really excited to learn about the kansas city chapter. recently moved to missouri from southern california. i used to be on the faculty at of california irvine for the past 10 10 years and one brought me tothat missouri and washington university specifically was that you'll learnk about tonight, this struck me as a really ideal environment to

this research and develop this research and teaching and most importantly to me, the engagement that i think is really crucial. justlated to that, i also want to thank this institution for hosting this conversation. see in my remarks, i think it's critical that we talk this past and its continued presence because that work of talking about it, of acknowledging, of remembering, tomemorating, is essential a society.ion as stage, too. i was just thinking about kenny and tnt. smith basketball season is almost here. if i run up to the screen and point out some things, you know that's my inspiration. so i'm going to talk a little about red summer but i

really want to talk -- i want to contextualize red summer. i want to put red summer 1919 in of whatin terms preceded it and also its postscript and to begin, i'll from with this quote burgen evans. i used to talk about this work a few years ago. people toder to get appreciate the problem of the presence of the past. in our political culture this is harder to miss. so i think more of us are coming to an awareness that we have to deal with the presence of this past. just as an example of this, i with you this best selling flag from a company called footwear,2019, selling this online. one of their best sellers. lives mattere

the, translation of confederate flag. i don't want to go too long do blue lives matter a sort of -- in opposition to the black lives matter movement which was not an assertion that nobody else's matter but really was specifically targeting the trivialization of black life within the context of white supremicism and to see this flag emerge as a best seller on their website they say a wonderful to your loveds ones and show that you support as if --hern police, presumably white southern police -- and i don't mean to suggest that all white southern police would welcome this gift. it's telling that this is a best selling cultural artifact the 21st century. it's emblematic of the presence

the past. willat i'll do today is i describe red summer as part of of race related political violence, a larger wave of race related political overnce that swept numerous u.s. cities and red particularlybes a horrific, terroristic moment in u.s. history, the summer of 1919. i'll talk a little bit about those events. stress that these events should not be seen in isolation and rather best appreciated as a bridge between subsequent histories continue terror which to resonate today. we know that this history a growingtoday from body of social science research, conductedich i've with collaborators over the past

showing thato, area history of racial violence including history of enslavement, histories of histories of race related violence help to account for contemporary patterns of racial inequality in the same places today and i'll conclude on a somewhat note by discussing how it lessen the imprint of these histories in our contemporary social relations efforts.emedial there's also, evidence from social science research there is somet promise in what i'll describe as a growing effort to remedy these legacies. so remembering red summer, this photo from chicago 1919 where you see a crowd, predominantly white children,

surrounded by some smiling who are celebrating after set've just bombed and afire, set alight this residence been occupied by a black family in chicago, a family that had been driven out dispossessed. and i start with this image speaks, muchnk it like my image on the beginning of the presentation where the two soldiers are facing off with other and there are some children, a child to the side and in the backdrop, the reallye of children speaks to the carry-forward of way thattories, the these events involved very important moments of racial socialization where people learned what it meant to be, say, american, and the idea of be american was infused with racial meaning. here you see a really display of that

moment.ation just to put red summer in some go through ant to list of really partial list of the many programs that have occurred in u.s. history and red summer was in a sense a program scattered across a number of u.s. cities. intense moments intended to destroy, wreak violently, often populations through mob violence as facilitated or condoned by actors and targeting specific groups defined by ethnicity, race, national identity. earliest on record occurs around the time of the in response to the new york city instituting a draft which -- a draft for union

andiers where whites rioted immediately targeted -- the first target was the black orphan asylum in manhattan. over 1,000 african americans -- besides the number of people and injured, i want to stress the number of people displaced, who became political thesees as a result of attacks. 1869, you have as an example war in florida which was a war to end reconstruction, establishing jackson county, this was the panhandle community in florida, whiteishing it as a supremacist stronghold, resulting in the loss of nearly the entire black population of jackson county, a figure that in the hundreds. memphis in 1892, a lynching and following, displaced 6,000 black residents, monnet, missouri. i want to call your attention to these --several of missouri, 1894.

the entire black population out. driven many of them would settle in city, a nearby community in the southwest corner of again, in 1901, just seven years later, you have pogrom affecting many of the same people who are driven from pierre city. my own family, i should mention, my mother's family is from carolina, wasrth affected by the racial massacre 1898 in wilmington, eventually settling in chicago and i haven't talked to my mother about red summer yet. pierre city's program is another in joplin, missouri, birthplace of langston 300-plusisplacing refugees, many of them fleeing to nearby springfield, missouri, which will come up soon.

missouri,pringfield springfield, illinois, slocum, texas, forsyth county, georgia. east st. louis, 6,000-plus, displaced. so when you think about -- when my newk at things like home of st. louis, missouri, the incredible concentrated generational poverty and disenfranchisement that exists place like st. louis or chicago, probably here in parts city, i want you to incorporate in your reflection on there theng problem of the presence of this past. even gotten to 1919 yet which comes just two yet, which comes two years after east st. louis, the tolls are race riot - - the tulsa race riot -- this is

the black wall street case. and these should be understood as pogroms, not simply riots. they always involve either the active participation of state actors, most notably police, other legal officials, or they are at the essence of the forbearance of racial terror that is brought on the black populations. this is from elaine, relating to the case in elaine, arkansas, one of the red summer sites. newspaper advertisement taken elaine,r the pogrom in arkansas, motivated by farmworkers organizing their labor to demand more just labor practices and a more equitable return on their labor, so following that event, you have

this committee for him that basically tells people in elaine, stop talking. nothing to worry about. everything is back to normal, as long as you don't cause any more problems, nothing untoward will come to you, and the first person signing that notice is the sheriff. of course, things were not ok after that notice when up. still today not ok in elaine, arkansas. the st. louis post-dispatch produced this incredible page-long account of one story 1903,placement in the black how population of west plains, missouri, a southern central -- onri community

wikipedia, i saw it as was called "the gem of the ozarks today." i don't know what that means exactly. [laughter] i don't know if you can read this. i want you to see this, because it identifies a few things. one is how the press is sort of engaged in throwing to the white pipe lists this kind of meat, you know, here is the latest on how black people are being repressed. this is a story telling how the entire black population was driven out. this is the african methodist church. it says "no member of the congregation remained." think about that for a moment. you had over 100 black residents of a small community who had

invested in this constitution, institution, who had probably started businesses, had homes, and were driven out, often told, warned, "leave by violence, or suffered people left with what they could carry on their own. materialg else, the loss, the psychic cost that would be suffered on that population, and that would be carried with them to their next destination. build wealthty to over generations because of this onslaught of racial terror in places like west planes. two anonymous people, they describe many as "anonymous," but they say most prominent businesses, farmers in the community are believed to be members of the mob. they would put anonymous letters

in mailboxes saying "leave or be killed," and they also warned that their children -- this was in 1903 -- they warned that their children would be sold into slavery if they did not warning of these white ppers, what these racial terrorists were often referred to. where were the police? where was law? i will use the term "legal estrangement. " this is when african-americans were taught they could not find protection through the law, where policing either engaged actively in race related political violence or where police withheld their production from race-related political violence. let me show you some other headlines. happenings in missouri.

spectacularen on a happenings, the killings of non-civilians, lynchings and the like, but most of the -- much of the terror involves things like whipping, where the african-american seems or in violation of norm, were violently beaten and worn or whipped and told to leave, as is the case in arette, 25 black families said to have been intimidated into leaving the town following the fayette whippings. these were all in the early 1900's. here, in another case, in edna, and he grew beaten by a mob. here the story reads "skunk

slobbed." the skunk refers to the black person. and at the bottom, you get "good corn, and don't you forget." this is monroe city, "the democrat" paper. this is how the stories proceeded in all of these papers. i am clipping out these relative cases, but in all of them, there was "nothing unusual today. another whipping. another banishment." here in kansas city, there was a court order that a girl, 11-year-old girl be whipped for petty theft, and her mother begged the court to let the mother with the child instead of the court officials. the whipping post in this judge's court is apparently a famous local institution -- i had never heard of it, but i'm just learning of kansas city history.

and until then, the woman had ever been bound to it. whippedirst woman to be on this whipping post in a kansas city court was an 11-year-old black girl. knee grows with and carted off. in howardn wept again county. i can feel the presentation with these kinds of clippings. i have been doing it for a long, long time now, almost 20 years. i will meet students occasionally -- oftentimes, i will meet white students who say , tell me where you are from, "i am from a boring place, it is all white." and i will say, "how did it become all white?" [laughter] and they will look at me like i am crazy. "it is just naturally all

white." they don't say that. but to their credit, we don't have these conversations, and not only their parents, the grandparents, the people who were there when they arrive from some other place and say oh, by the way, we use to be a much more diverse community, like springfield, missouri, which one had a 20% black population, i believe, but the turnover population, intentional loss of collective memory, those places get normalized, naturalized as "white spaces," that are in fact white spaces typically created through violence and dispossession. i want to talk now about theiers, and in particular particular and midi that == -- to blackat attach

soldiers and black police officer. i also want to talk about the resistance, but as you know, the black soldier was, for many, white americans rehearsed in the logic of white supremacism, the black soldier was a grave insult. how could a black person, whose very humanity had been denied and whose standing, politically, had been denied, wear a uniform of the united states military? or how could a black person wear a police badge and have authority, legal authority, over whites? blackmity was such for police that for a long time, the black police officers, as late as 1940's, were not issued uniforms, and had no authorities to arrest whites or to testify against whites in court. if they wanted to engage in a law enforcement action involving a white perpetrator, they had to call a white police officer to the scene to carry out that police action.

but what black soldiers also represent is a moment of awakened and emboldened political consciousness, where these black civic actors refused to tolerate the denial of freedoms that they fought for, their livesve for, they risked their lives for. many of you have probably seen the document he "eyes on the prize." lora isd recently -- very nice, calling me a curator. but recently, "eyes on the prize" had been titled "america that love you madly." i think it is a beautiful title and a powerful example of what i am talking about in terms of the energy that black soldiers

brought to this really contentious history of race in the united states. texas,917, and houston, there was a base called camp logan where black soldiers were stationed, some of them veterans of the indian wars, buffalo soldiers, and so forth, and they, in response to some events in houston where police officers had violently removed a black beatenrom a city bus and her and engaged in these degradation rituals that were routine in the jim crow period, they decided they had enough, and they marched into town armed, and a conflict in city police ensued, resulting in the death of 15 white americans, including five police

and four black soldiers. this riotparently -- involve the highest casualty rate among whites of any of the document it race drives. riots. a series of court-martial's followed. court-martial's. 118 enlisted black soldiers, 110 of them, all but eight found guilty, 19 were executed, more were sentenced to death, but those that sentences were commuted to life sentences. 53 were sentenced to life in prison. 1973, a later, historian wrote an article, "the rendering and execution of these verdicts

of the most try to chapters in american race relations." negroes are gone, houston is quiet. of course, the chapter had not closed. houston did not remain quiet. black people were not gone. in fact, the marker in houston now where camp logan once stood the houstoning mutiny and riot of 1917, it was just recently discovered after the flood in 2017, that vandals paintinged the marker, over and read the section that the valor of the black soldiers who went to fight on behalf of black houstonians subject to racial violence in that community. so i'll just leave it chapter was not close, the story was not

atr, and we are still not 1919. 1919 comes two years later and ofmarked by this explosion racial violence across the united states. you might think, you know, why is missouri not represented here? we just published a paper recently on mississippi, the history of racial violence and mississippi, that found that places in mississippi where the population was so thoroughly repressed already, either by history of racial violence or by extreme economic vulnerability, you had relatively little race-related political violence in the civil rights movement period, compared to other areas where blacks had more economic independence, were economically more competitive and threatening. for one reason perhaps why missouri is not represented in this story of red summer is

because of all of the other events i have already shown you that, and many more that i have not shown you, that occurred , two so thorley repressed the black population there. i want to move on and say a bit more about soldiers, and my colleague, margaret burnham -- she is a law professor at northeastern university, where she runs a clinic called civil rights and restorative justice can where they preserve civil-rights era cold cases, homicides that were not solved, african americans in the south who were subject to lethal violence come in she wrote a special issue on the history of racial violence and legacies, and i would be happy to share with you, get in touch with you. she did a wonderful article called "soldiers in buses," and in it, she shares a number of

quotes at the beginning cared i will share a few of these with you to give you a sense of the violence meted on black soldiers, but also -- and also i want to say a bit about why important stage for race-related political violence. first, a letter from a man named thomas foster to franklin roosevelt, president roosevelt in 1943, where he complains that his sun, sergeant foster, had been murdered by a little rock police officer, and he says, "i am not asking for more for him van i want for any american and essentially he says, "i want you to stand for justice, mr. president, justice for my son, just as that would not come." to give you the sins of the tone among military leadership, we have a quote from major frank from tallahassee, florida, who

says "there is still of course the occasional bribe from black soldiers who compelled to occupy rear seats in city buses, and he talks about the difficulty of integrating black soldiers, many of them from the north, apart from what you had in houston, u.s. soldiers from places like chicago stationed in texas who racial to abide by the norms of the south. a few years later, marine veteran timothy hood, who was killed by a law enforcement, killed in birmingham, alabama, 1946, but before his death, he was quoted as saying, "where i just came from overseas, us coloreds had all the seats we wanted. we can sit anywhere we wanted to." hood was murdered by police -- and i will share his story in a moment, but his grave act was

removing a segregation sign on a city bus. thurgood marshall writing to attorney general tom clock, u.s. attorney general, 1944, complaining that there have been numerous killings of black soldiers by civilians and civilian police, "i am not aware of a single instance of prosecution or steps taken by the government to punish or prevent these occurrences." one of the most infamous cases that was brought to light recently, again, by the "new york times in his reporting by a book on this case involved watered, who was a world war ii veteran riding the bus home through south carolina, i believe he lived in through southg carolina when he got into a conflict with a white bus driver and was pulled off the bus by the local police chief in south carolina, who beat him so

viciously that he was blinded. mank about it, this is a coming home from fighting, fighting in world war ii, survives the war, and is been named by a local police officer, who is offended by his expectations of freedom here in the united states. ofi mentioned this problem white supremacist police think i am going to focus on this, in part, because at the end of my remarks, i'm going to share a bit about what communities are doing now to reckon with this history of race-related political violence involving police. a paperabout this in recently published called living histories of whites premises policing, stressing that the problem is twofold, mutually reinforcing on the one hand, you have police officers who harbor racist sentiments and act on

those sentiments, but you also have a routine denial of protections, from the broader threats of racial terror, and this is something that has come into light recently, and i will allude to that in a moment. but let me share a few examples of what i mean by weiss premises policing, some of which i mean americans -- black i'm sorry come on black soldiers. womana 70-year-old in selma, who was beaten by an off-duty police officer, who beat her over the head with a bottle. a 70-year-old black woman. in court, a man was arrested. in court, his attorney said, ", if we convict this ma brave man, who is upholding the banner of white supremacy," misses is his actions, thenis

we may as well give all our guns to the -- and let them run the black belt." a man in the jim crow south gotten a fight with his bus driver, i think he was shot by a bus driver, please to a nearby house, wounded, the police chief enters the house, fires into her head, and the killing is ruled a "justifiable homicide." shot by aack man white man who claimed he consulted his wife over the telephone. the killer was released. in louisiana, a police officer shot and killed a black for refusing to remove his hat in the presence of white people. 1948, a texas constable killed a black man who came to court to arrange bail for his son, who

had been beaten and imprisoned by the same officer for failing to address them as "sir." i want to mention this, in case it is not familiar to you, this is a petition that was filed in 1950 and the united nations by a group led by the civil rights congress, involve people like paul robison and actually margaret burnham's father. i told you about margaret burnham. her father was one of the signatories on this petition, appealing to the united nations that the united states had engaged in a violation of the genocide conventions and lays out over 500 cases of race-related political violence, half of which directly into k police, all of which directly indicate police -- implicate police, as terms of a perpetrator, all in terms of protection. eleanor roosevelt was founded for stifling the consideration

of the petition to the united nations. but it is a powerful document your diet encourage you to take a look at it if you're interested in studying this issue of racial violence and our failure as a country to address it. the saga of white supremacist policing continues today, if you have not noticed come in the news, i will share a few headlines with you. this is from a story in oregon, where police officers works with this alt-right militia to suppress activists on the left. a former mayor wearing his trunk hat, pardoned in 2017 by president trump after his conviction, federal conviction for civil rights violations. then, as an example of protection byal

our legal authorities. discoveredalifornia, by neo-nazis to pursue antiracist activists. and this is interesting, i am happy to talk about if you would like -- failure to see the threat of white nationalism. given the history we have already reviewed here, it is hard to imagine how any intelligent person in this field could fail to see this threat. alabama cop fired for palling around with white supremacists. these are all from the past few years, these stories, so the presence of the pass in terms of white supremacist policing remains. let me now turn to the research i mentioned showing, empirically, that we remain impacted by these histories of racial violence. in other words, it is not only important for us to address these options from a moral level

, because it is the right thing to do, to acknowledge these histories, to disavow white supremacy is an and is violence, but it is important because we remain impacted in a number of waste or to all of the stories i'm going to show you, i am not going to go into any of difficul details -- i see people falling asleep, and i do not want to put anyone else asleep. history of racial violence relate to this outcome? none of the other factors you would expect to relate to the outcome. and we are finding over and over again that the answer is yes. youfor example, i will show somewhat detail on this first finding in a moment to we know that white political conservatism is higher in communities distinguished by histories of racial violence than it is in

communities that are less so distinguished. that is that whites and communities that are less marked by histories of racial violence conservativee less band community marked by history of her racial violence. the of card-carrying members of .acist organizations are higher . people support for the death crime, height crime law enforcement, hate crime allocated, hate crime law enforcement suppressed in any of these marked by histories of racial violence. black victim homicide rates are higher in communities marked by histories of racial violence. we showed in a recent study that, in fact, lynching is predictive of -- that the power of lynching as it relates to

contemporary black victim homicide is linked to weather these same communities also had inil rights movement era, the 1950's, 1970's, racial violence. so in those places where you have both histories of linkedin, which, generally before the 1940's, and subsequent racial civil rights era violence, think of it as a field where the l is continually cultivated to reap the results of continued racialized violence. it is interesting about the height of the black lives matter movement, you heard a lot of people saying well, if black lives matter so much, why are black people killing each other? a study came out around the same time, and it is a clear illustration of the problem of that false dichotomy. the problem of a black victim homicide, which itself is a representation of the trivialization of black lives,

internalized, is tied directly to the history of race-related byitical violence meted whites on blacks. we show this in that study. distinguished by histories of racial violence. our most recent paper, which is coming out next month in the journal of social problems, found, we did a study of 10 southern states, and we found that the odds of any child in a school in these 10 southern states, where corporal punishment, if you don't know, remains legal in 19 states, corporal punishment at schools, remains legal in 19 states, and we did a study of 10 of those states and found that for every , and childlynching attending schools in that county

is more likely to be corporal punishment it is significant for all kids, but particularly predictive of corporal punishment for black kids today. again, this is after considering other factors like, is this a rural district, is it an urban district, is it a religiously conservative county? we consider the resources of the school, which has to do with disciplinary measures. rates andr area crime all kinds of, dozens of variables. after all that is considered in a strong predictor of whether kids in that school will be beaten today. that has beenrk done in this area -- let me just say, as an example, a little more detailed about the first

outcome i shared with you. i want to share more outcomes, but this is a study that relates to colleagues in the journal of politics published in 2016 called the political legacy of american slavery, the map shows you a percent of the population enslaved in 1860. here in missouri, we have little dixie region and standing out in the blood hill down there. , mississippi. what they found, the darker the saturation, the higher the percentage of the population enslaved, what they found was percent of population enslaved, and of other factors, this is a an incredibly sophisticated study, that lynching rates were higher. the + means that the direction was positive. government support is suppressed in those communities

significantly. and look at this time stamp -- consistently suppressed, from 1850 to 2008. in these communities. support for affirmative action suppressed in those communities. of racial008, levels resentment elevated in those communities. these are white attitudes, white americans' attitudes. racial resentment are things like, you know, how much do you agree with the statement "black people are lazy?" one out of five, would you be accepting of an interracial relationship involving a family member, that kind of thing. overfind consistently generations among white americans and communities, historically dependent on slave-based economies, compared to their white counterparts in neighboring areas -- so this is not comparing southern whites with, say, whites in the north

or, you know, northeast, it is comparing southern whites to each other, and distinguishing them on the basis -- differentiating them on the basis of whether they are living in a community distinguished by reliance on the enslavement of african-americans. so how does this work? i mean, how is it that places remain distinguished by these quiteies that are really a long time passed? researchers are really only beginning to clarify these mechanisms. let me put the flag up here. it is not only for decoration. i am going to allude to it in a moment. someone came in late. "what is he doing?" [laughter] "whose side is he on?" these mechanisms, i'm going to

resist talking at length here, but one of the reasons we believe it is at work here, what i described as extreme racial socialization. if you think of these communities, places where black populations or other nonwhite populations have been vanished, subject to racialized violence and dispossession, explication routinely over generations, that people in those places experience a kind of extreme form of racial socialization, and not just white people. so to go back to our corporal punishment finding, one thing we think is at work is hypervigilance amongst black parents in communities marred by history of racial violence. we know from history of corporal punishment that african-americans are more likely to perceive corporal punishment as legitimate because of its protective benefit. they believe that beating black children will save them from worse fates. death by police, death by

extreme violence, long-term incarceration, this protective among, we speculate, is the white publishing in communities where black lives are more precarious as compared to black residents in other communities. many of these schools require give consent. corporately punish their children. more are places with violent subcultures, where the history of related violence has socialize people to see violence as a legitimate, normal way of resolving disputes. this has been argued, for example, in the homicide case outcome, for example, where you have, for example, the legal estrangement of black residents,

black people who, for generations, have decided they cannot trust police to resolve disputes, so they resort to violence command to do so, partly because they live in a community where violent dispute resolution is more the norm than aberration. legal estrangement refers to the various ways in which populations are pushed away from estranged, from the respect of laws. not in the way that people typically talk about respecting honoring, you know, police, but respect in a sense that believing law, as an institution, relates to them, is relevant to their lives in a kind of protective sense, the sense of the social contract. they do not believe in the social contract, because it has been proven not to exist where their interests are concerned.

law of collective efforts happening in these places, where people are less likely in places to identify together to work to solve issues of common interest. people are more destructible, they are -- to distrustful, they are at odds with each other, and it is not a fact of history of conflict and violence. i have mentioned the material dispossession, you know, families lost everything in many of these incidents, driven from heire places , lost t accumulated not just financial capital but social capital, the network, the relationships that they can build upon to generate wealth and standing in their community, and that will contribute to generational poverty, which we know is somewhat related to some of the outcomes i have mentioned. the transfer of intergenerational trauma, the inherited trauma from on

generation to the next, sustained cycles of racialized violence. so we show that in the homicide paper, that in places where lynching, the era of lynching was not succeeded by an air of race-related civil rights movement period, the predictive power of lynching waned, but where does sustain, predictive power of these histories remain. i put this map appear because it is an example of a number of things. i willt just mention two, though. one is a very explicit assertion that the notion of police lives tied to notions of race in and then taken as a way, so this is an extreme -- this is

an example of the way they have packed history of racial socialization bound up with the confederacy and its cause is imported into the contemporary period through this new cultural artifact, a remixed "blue lives matter" flag. it is also an example of legal estrangement. and signals to the population, particularly nonwhite populations, that "the police are not there to protect you," just as they were in the 20 century, this sign suggests, and i do not mean to say it is true in every case -- some of my best friends are police -- but the messaging in are artifact is that police -- that policing is bound up with the project of white racial dominance. the effort to -- i am

going to turn shortly, wrap up soon, and turn toward intervention, but a lot of our discussion of these histories and their legacies and the reckoning today resolves around the commemorative landscape, the statuary, the place named, the therials that are either confederate monuments, for example, better either provocations themselves, that people want to remove or amend, new -- efforts to erect new sources of public memory, new commemorative objects, to rename places, to acknowledge history, the history of lynching, through the commemorative landscape. and while this is often dismissed by people as sort of symbolic, not going to do anything, what difference does it make? i would argue quite the

contrary, that this is a very important way in which we can today reckon with the presence of the past, and, most importantly, disavow white assertcism and actively a commitment to equal justice. just to give you an example, calhoun, aohn c rabid secessionist, anti-black century,om the 19th hero to the charleston confederacy, so here is his original statue, as seen in 1892. beneath it is a group of african americans. i came across this quote recently, just to illustrate how meaningful this remains. a black cabdriver talked about what it is like driving past this monument routinely and 2017.

he says "it is almost resonant reminiscent of how i would envision a slave would have felt if they were walking on the street and someone spit on them. that is how i feel. it is disgusting." now, people will say, and they are entitled to this, will say "i disagree. i don't think it means that." but what i would argue is we need to hear what our women and men are saying, and if they are saying that they feel spit upon by a work of public art, we should at least be open to a dialogue about how we can advance, how we can change the commemorative landscape in such a way that people are not so aggrieved. that is a conversation that is happening in parts of this reckoning with confederate markers and others. by the way, this is a global phenomenon.

if you look up "roads must follow," for example, the colston andengland, other people whose wealth and stature was born out of their involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, you will see that this is a global movement to reckon with how we collectively remember our past and how we have done so in such a way that the presence of certain populations and also disregards their interests. of communities, including here in missouri, are grappling with this, and i want justicet the equal initiative for being a very important catalyst for this sort of surrogate effort. they did not initiate it, but they have come up with a strategy that is very powerful and compelling and moving to a number of people around the country that revolves around

their national lynching a more, pictured here, and their challenge to local communities to recover the matched pairs. so each of these, says lamar county, mississippi, each of these has a name inscribed with known lynchings in those counties, and they challenge counties to find the matched pair and bring it home to commemorate the history of racial violence in their local community. so here in missouri, this is the map of the product i have been working on, called the racial have beene, where we documenting history of race related political violence. this is not a complete record, by any stretch, but as we do more archival work and work with the state, to identify more of this history, this map will become more complicated. but what it shows you, and i

don't think this story will change the maze the history of race related political violence in this country is concentrated historyreas where the of enslavement as concentrated, little dixie region so-called, so named by white settlers in white states who wanted to re-create a missouri, the the morays, the economy of the deep south, so you have a dixie region, the ozarks, generally come i mention a few of these cases from springfield, pierce city, and joplin. heel.e boot e ofrecently learned, we being the legacy project at washington university, we learned about project underway in a springfield and here in kansas city and franklin county, the town of washington, and in st. louis, where we are working with

communities there, the residents to increase our engagement in this kind of history, the reckoning that might help us redefine our political culture and inequities of racial violence. there is a logic to kind of how this intervention might work, and i mentioned a study recently showing that there is hope. so this is a study i was referring to. it came out in 2017. and basically what they found is that there is some reparative benefit to actively disavowing white supremacism, and i say "actively disavowing it," because i want to say it is not enough to "not be a racist." everyone will tell you that. they are not a racist. what everyone want to tell you

is that they are antiracist, and what the study suggests is that in communities where the population has disavowed white supremacism actively, the predictive power of lynching attenuated, is lessened, so it suggests that in places where, say, we come together as communities, particularly if we actually come together as communities, if it is not just the black community white left of french community and some black people, but if we come together as community, civilians, state actors, folks from the private sector, and join in these efforts to acknowledge and disavow these legacies of historical racial violence, this is what they call resistance. power, thek the predictive power of the past

today. key to us doing that is engaging, confronting these histories of racial violence and the evidence of their continued impact, because facing those histories, those specific histories in a specific places, will enable us to recover a shared history or shared truth, and will allow us to see how differs fromistory s that we hold in our collective conscience, the myths like "slavery was not that bad," or "racial violence is something that happened in the deep havso. it was not happening in missouri. these are just hard-working

people here." those towns that happen to be all white come a just happened that way. those are myths that we hold in conscience, and we juxtapose them with the evidence, we will not be able to address them. so, generally speaking, this requires a more expansive view of the problem historically and today and localize participatory and targeted redress, and i have a picture here of the removal of the property leased at you as an example of how the community came together, now, by no means in a consensual way. people are wearing bulletproof vests as they threatened with violence. so, to conclude, we know from researching traditional justice from all around the world that we can free our political culture, political behavior from the trappings of the past, but only if and when aggressors and

aggrieved -- and we are all their descendents -- face one another, and we can move honestly and earnestly toward reconciliation. if there's only one thing that you will remember from today, i want you to remember this -- we cannot, of course, change the past. people will tell you that all the time. but we can and we should strive to change the meaning of the past in the present. thank you very much. [applause] ms. vogt: now, ladies engine oma, we do not have a lot of time for questions, but we are absolutely open to those questions, and the microphone is yours. >> thank you so much. it was very wonderful and very in-depth. my name is gloria, and i write on race and law and research it. this is the fourth hundred commemoration of the arrival of virginiafricans in the

colonies as well as the 100th anniversary of the red summer command a systematic undermining of black wealth began in the who's with anthony johnson, had property, and the law chased him out. given the fact that we have a congressional black caucus, we have more lawyers than, you know, any other country, for the most part, and are the most litigious country in the world, what is the rule of law, not just the rule of law, because that is an artificial rule that comes and goes. oft do you see as the role law in making change going forward? it seems with eric garner -- i am from new york -- it seems like with eric garner, we had, you know, federal government doing just as he said, the legal estrangement, not allowing, not doing their job. dr. ward: yeah. gloria: so what can we do in making law effective in this restorative process? dr. ward: yeah, thank you for

question. it is a really challenging question, an important question, and i want to say maybe a couple of things about it. that, you know, your question brought to mind the argument of abolitionists, like sonians, who said we cannot address the country to reform slavery, we have to become a new republic, and he says, he argues that the constitution is a compact with , so it is written to it protect an institution like slavery. it is not designed to put in short freedom to all americans, and so that did not happen, and

i am not optimistic. [laughs] anythingd to imagine that transformative happening anytime soon. so that being said, i do think -- and my mother is a lawyer, and i grew up in los angeles, california, routinely harassed by police, subject to police abuse, threats of violence in the 1980's when i was in highs will, and my mother worked as a city attorney in los angeles for a while in the general counsel's office of the lapd, and my brother and i were like, you know, my mother is an african american woman, how can you do this, and her answer to me as well, if it is not me command will be someone else, and she to ourou know, i bring .eetings your stories though it is a conservative

institution, like a slow cooker, it is not a site of radical, rapid change. it is, for better or worse, one twohe few devices we have advanced freedoms. a really concrete example, i lora, i just joined the board of the midwest innocence project, which pursues cases of wrongful conviction in iowa, missouri, nebraska. i had coffee with the director of kansas city -- it is based in kansas city -- after about 10 minutes, her phone rang, and she said "i have got to go. winning.on a case, . a man's freedom. since been in prison 1996. she was actually innocent." and she darted out of this coffee shop to walk this man

out. law is undisputedly important, but it is not enough, of course, as you well know. thank you for your question. ms. vogt: if you have not been to the website, racialviolence it,ive.com, i would suggest as my job, as the curator of education, i did spend some time there in that chapter, and i know that there are some more questions from many of you, and i see that look on your face, but i believe -- well, we actually have a really fast one. this will be the last question of the evening, and it is going to come from my friend brenda. brenda: reparations are often talked about in the context of going back to enslavement, but

as you went through all of the various instances of racial violence the late 1800's, 1900's, etc., why isn't there more discussion about reparations, when you can go back and make a direct connection through families that were displaced by violence and murder, etc.? why don't we hear more about that? dr. ward: yeah. yeah. thank you for your question. i think the general answer -- the main reason for that -- such an important issue -- is that we a society, resisted the acknowledgment of this history. i mentioned before the problem of social turning and the loss of public collective memory and public memory. i don't know. i have been doing this work for many years, and this particular work for about 10 years. i did not know until recently that my family was affected by

the 1898 massacre in wilmington. my mother just kind of let it slip out one day. i was talking to her, "oh, i'm going to give this talk at a law school," "what are you talking about?" "oh, i am talking about racial violence." "oh, that happened to us," in a matter-of-fact way. the main culprit of that was --i say "was" in the past tense, because i think our present moment makes this impossible to sustain, but our main culprit, colorblind racial ideology. the way that the -- the challenge put was by the civil rights movement was reinterpreted, cynically, and repackaged as "don't talk about race." racism."ave resolved with the election of barack obama, you have many people, who just a few years ago, would say "what problem of race in this country? slavery ended a long time ago.

we just elected a black president." you know, colorblind audiology's was that whatever disparities exist today are not attributable to the past but are a product of the dysfunction of black communities and so forth today, you know, single-parent households -- their favorite tropes. so we have sober hearse that narrative that it becomes very difficult to open up the kind of capacious conversation that you are raising that says, well, actually, we need to go back to the very beginning, and even before that, we need to go back to the beginning of white settler colonialism in the united states, do the dispossession of native people, n wase -- where huma defined in race-specific terms. where the notion of manifest destiny reinforced this idea of white entitlement that was carried over and violently

enforce over many, many generations. slavery,ry of child lynchings, jim crow, america's period of apartheid, all of this is part of a much larger history. thankfully, though, i think people are beginning to have that conversation. it is certainly not happening among our political elites, but it is happening, increasingly, you know, i am being challenged increasingly -- which is very encouraging to me -- by my students, who say, you know, where are latinos in this story? where are asian americans in this story? where are native people in your story? do you know about canada's history? pushing this conversation, so i am hopeful that that larger, more inclusive underway, albeit at a snails pace. [laughter] do truly and i

know that there are more questions, and i believe the dr. ward will be willing to take them up in the lobby, and i am going to add to that statement that he ended on, we cannot change the past, but we can and should strive to change its meaning in the present. it is always our honor and our pleasure here at the national world war i museum and the moral to talk about the enduring , and to hosttory you, to be a part of that. thank you also very much for coming out this evening. we look forward to seeing you back. have a good night. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> inlaid april of -- in late the black diamond sank. accident result in the deaths of 87 men. next karen stone, manager of the st. mary's e-zines division

details the events of that night and why this naval disaster is often overshadowed by other events at the time. is the assassination of abraham lincoln and the hunt for his killer john wilkes booth. the national museum of civil war medicine hosted this conversation and provided the video. costelloutes, matthew talks about his book "the property of the nation, george washington's to mount vernon and the memory of the first president." at 8 p.m., stanford university professor jack -- teaches a class about some of the issues debated during the constitutional convention of 1787. program, very excited to share this story. last year ahead the honor to participate in the commemoration black sinking of the diamond at saint clemen'