it were not for medgar evers. he told us how to live, how to survive another septima clark fired from her job, a schoolteacher in south carolina for belonging to the naacp. she spends a week preparing rosa parks. how are you going to do this direct action? the first question she asked her is, what do you want to do? and the last question she asked a week, how are you going to do it? the elders have a very important role here. they've been there. they know a lot. so i have one last question. but if you have a question for the panelists, please come to the mic, because we only have just couple of minutes left. my last question is, sometimes in a long struggle or war, it's hard. see societal progress. where are we today and what gives you hope? i'll start with you, peniel. okay. yeah, you know, i make the argument that we're in this third reconstruction, this period of reconstruction. with my hinge points being the election of obama the rise of blm, 1.0 maga and donald trump, and in 2020 blm 2.0 racial, political rec

the assassination of medgar evers in 1963.orkers james chaney, michael schwerner and andrew goodman in 1964. hell, they had to send in 30,000 armed federal agents, national guardsmen, and military police just to enforce federal law allowing a black man to attend state college. a notion that was, shall we say, less than popular here. to be honest, that was about all i had for an image of the state of mississippi. that was all i knew. and it hadn't occurred to me to look further. but i've traveled the world since then, and i've visited and learned to love many places not my own. cultures and beliefs very different from the upper east side of manhattan. why can't i love mississippi? ♪ y'all know the name pyinfamous ♪ ♪ all bets are off i'm through talking ♪ ♪ never gonna fall for my spider move august and september ♪ ♪ block your october so you should be thankful the party's not over ♪ ♪ we won the race 'cause they ran a lame campaign ♪ ♪ i'm over here cooking victory you want a taste? ♪ >> anthony: pyinfamous is a proud son and

. ♪ a bullet from the back of a bush took medgar evers' blood ♪ >> during that time in the '60s as thattion was slowly bubbling and kids were starting to question authority, question what was happening in their country, they're looking for answers. >> bob dylan thought that folk music was poetry. he took beat energy and mixed it with folk culture, and it's more a lyrical intensity than anybody's put to song before. ♪ and the negro's name is used, it is plain ♪ ♪ for the politician's gain as he rises to fame ♪ >> up until the time of bob dylan, there were the songwriters and there were the singers. dylan started writing his own music. >> he says, i am going to comment on the world, i'm going to comment on the nature of this human experience. bob dylan was in this sort of white-hot moment of saying more in the popular song than anyone ever had before. ♪ on a pawn in their game ♪ >> after the revolution of bob dylan, the music world moves west. ♪ go where you want to go and do what you want to do ♪ ♪ wherever you want to do it ♪ >> laurel canyon becomes the epicenter of the rock revolution

i'm writing a book about medgar evers.ican-americans complicit with the idea of segregation and participated in the mississippi sovereignty commission, spying on behalf of the mississippi sovereignty commission. i doubt that would be in the sections of black conservatism because it feels like the college board is complying with the idea that the desantis's of the world want to make more conservatives, not make students smarter. >> and i think that's the tragedy of this. i mean, you know, the college board prides its a.p. courses on seeking to educate and provoke thinking and critical thinking and prepare our students for college. and in college, when they come to college, they're going to read about black feminism. they have to learn about black queer theory. they have to learn about african-american history. they have to learn about history. and this a.p. course isn't truly preparing them for understanding black lives matter, i mean, two years ago, three years ago black lives matter was critical in generating the most --

, where had been major injustices resulting in, for example, the release of the man who killed medgar evers and the release of the man who killed the four girls in birmingham. and the federal government took this on a project. and we thought this something. i was a civil rights worker in mississippi in 1964. and i thought, this is something that we really should explore. it quickly became apparent to us that that federal government was not going to move forward with any kind of robust engagement with this period. and moreover that there was a period of time where the facts were less known and the families had experienced these violent acts of terrorism 1938, 1930 and 1940s had not yet been fully explored. and that's how we got into the project. and the book is a partner with an archive that we've created at our university of 1000 cases as of violent homicides from the jim crow era in the south. from 1930 to 1954. all having occurred in the states of the former confederacy. let me just say one other word, which is. in 1964, a horrific lynching took place in franklin county. mississippi. i wa

you pointed out a year or so ago, he wrote it under the shadow of medgar evers assassination in 1963 is you called that essay a eulogy of sorts. i wonder, would your eulogy today for tyre nichols come to a different conclusion than baldwin did? is the call to action the same? >> wow, would it be different? no. there at the root of it, chris, is this refusal of the country to comes to terms with who and what it is. baldwin not only wrote about police generally but black police but how race shapes the way they inhabit that culture, live that culture. it's interesting that you brought that up. we can talk about the framing from the 1968 safe streets act to the war on crime and to how all of that has increased the mass incarceration, led to the militarization of the police, the way in which communities are over policed and over surveilled and under protected. baldwin was talking about a general framework of a community that had to be contained, a community that wasn't thought to be a kind of critical feature of american life. so the short answer to your question, chris, is that the concl