when you hear sarah gremke saying by looking into the rights of slaves, i gained deeper insights into my own rights as a woman. that's a mangled quote but basically the essence of what she said. it is impossible for me to picture america as it is today without picturing african-americans as a political force, without picturing african-americans as a cultural force. where would we be without jazz? what is america without jazz, without its popular music? when you think about these questions that our president is facing right now, why does the majority of republican voters in mississippi regard him as a muslim? i think all of that goes back to the civil war. the difficulty of accepting african-americans as full americans, as full citizens, as full participants in our lecture, i think that causes a great degree of problems that are not even obvious when you talk about putting in place policy that, you know, presumably is for all of america. when you see african-americans at the forefront of it, it sort of distorts it in a way that i don't necessarily think it all would. my answer, not to