my name is hannah rosen. it is lovely to see you here. before i begin with my comments, i want to say how really thrilled i am about this conference. how very grateful i am to beverly and susan and their partners for organizing it. it has been a long time coming, and event -- an event to mark the memphis massacre. thank you for creating this stage for us to think about is important event together and make it for inviting me to be a part of it. early in may, 1866, rebecca and -- ann bloom and her husband peter went to the streets of memphis. they were once enslaved club but they were now free people. although their freedom had been a tremendous victory, things -- it was terrifying times for the blooms and others that were facing daily life or death struggles. several days before the community had been any murderous assault by gangs of white men that roamed south memphis and went into free people's homes, robbing, assaulting and murdering residents and burning houses and churches to the ground, they were heading now to the office of the fre

that's a little less straightforward to explain, but it was something that earlier this morning hannah rosen was talking about when she mentioned how the rapes and sexual assaults and met this allowed white man to sort of an act or reenact these fantasies of superiority that they had over newly free people. on the one hand, participating in what was very public action. like forcing elected republican officials in a parish to march out of their offices at gunpoint, sign resignation papers, and then literally jump on a horse and leave town. --se kinds of their republic very public rituals. as well as the all-out military engagements with the city police force, like we see happening in new orleans. these kind of spectacles and rituals allowed white man to perform their revolutionary heritage and appeal to a broader american sensibility about necessity of fighting to demonstrate your worthiness as a man and as a citizen. that such actions were performed openly, undisguised, in broad daylight demonstrated their legitimacy in the eyes of the people who were performing it. extremether hand, the nat