- Now, a word or two about tonight's activity.
Tonight marks the latest installment of
our first 100 days programming,
an eight part series designed to help us navigate this,
how should I put it, unprecedented political era.
Conversations over the next few weeks
will delve into trade and into inequality, power,
and other timely themes.
All will feature Graduate Center scholars
and other national figures.
I do hope that you can attend.
Now within this set of programming, on the first 100 days,
is a miniseries called Activists of the Past,
What Have We Learned?
The concept was inspired by David Nasaw who is the
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Professor of History
here at The Graduate Center.
As an institution that values and transmits research
and those increasingly old-fashioned things
that we call facts,
we wanted to examine some facts.
we wanted to examine modern political activism
through the lens of history and I say that
as someone who is fortunate to count himself as
a member of our history program.
Who were some of the leaders of past movements
and what can their challenges
and their successes teach us today?
Last month we were fortunate to welcome
Charles Blow in conversation
with legendary author and AIDS activist, Larry Kramer.
Tonight, as you know, we turn to the civil rights movement.
It is of course, a timely issue.
Earlier this month,
over 150 major American civil rights groups
called on the president to more forcefully respond
to an increase in hate-related incidents across the country.
Now, our moderator this evening,
the Emmy award-winning journalist, Carol Jenkins,
has framed the modern movement as
activists and young people,
increasingly disconnected from the old ways of doing things.
She went on to say, an ever-widening chasm
between haves and have-nots in education,
policing, prison reform,
wages, health, religion and the rights of girls and women,
that proves that we need to get to work.
Tonight, Carol will talk with legendary civil rights leaders
whose grassroots activism has shaped modern America
and on behalf of all of us at The Graduate Center,
we thank you for taking part.
Some introductions.
Ruby Nell Sales, a key figure in
the Freedom Summer voter registration drive in 1964
is one of 50 activists from the civil rights movement,
featured in the new
Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture.
A public theologian, historian, social critic and educator,
she describes her work as, quote, a calling.
She is the founder and director of the Spirit House Project
and has won wide acclaim for her tireless efforts
to promote racial justice and equality.
The Reverend Herbert Daughtry is known for
his civil rights activism, spanning more than five decades.
He's been a leader in the fight for school integration,
equal access to jobs and economic opportunity
and served as a special assistant to
the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
An outspoken critic of police violence,
he's traveled the world to advocate for human rights.
Since 1959, he's been the National Presiding Minister of
the House of the Lord Churches.
Our own Clarence Taylor is a professor of history,
whose research interest encompass the modern civil rights
and black power movements, African-American religion
and the modern history of New York City.
He's written extensively about civil rights,
particularly the history and legacy of segregation
in New York City schools.
His books include Reds at the Blackboard:
Communism, Civil Rights and the New York Teacher's Union.
And leading the discussion, as I mentioned,
is writer, producer, community leader,
and media consultant, Carol Jenkins.
Just this month, she was included
in USA Today's list of Women of Color You Should Know.
(audience applauds)
She's perhaps best known for her almost 25 year career
as a reporter and anchor for WNBC
where she covered presidential politics, mayoral election,
and Nelson Mandela's release from prison
among many other milestones.
Today she hosts Black America on QDTV,
a weekly conversation with prominent activists,
scholars and leaders.
Please do join me in welcoming our distinguished speakers
and enjoy the evening.
(audience applauds)
- Of course, it's gonna be the major test of
a former broadcaster to make sure that the microphone
is actually on, you know?
One does get rusty.
It is my pleasure to be here today.
So grateful that you all are here to witness the,
the wonderful words and actions.
I mean, a lot of us have wonderful words
and some fewer of us have wonderful actions
and these are people who can be counted in that category.
I just want to say briefly, as an introduction,
even though I'm a New Yorker, I grew up here,
I was born in Lowndes County Alabama
which will be come interesting when we talk with Ruby.
On a farm in Lowndes County, Alabama in the 1940s,
if you can pictures that scene.
I indeed, was barefoot and one of a huge family.
My immediate family moved to New York City
when I was about three or four
so I really cannot claim,
even though my entire multitudinous family
still lives in Birmingham
and in Montgomery and in Lowndes County,
usually within two or three houses from their mothers.
That's the way the Southern families operate.
And I get to go down there.
Well, so I was brushed though, by the civil rights history
because that farm where I was born,
was actually stop three
on the march from Selma to Montgomery,
the Gardner family farm,
and so, we were able to claim
that we made a contribution.
We gave them wet, soggy grass to sleep on that night,
and then the other brush with history is that
my mother's sister happened to marry A. G. Gaston
who owned many businesses towards the end of it,
including the A. G. Gaston Motel
which was the headquarters for Martin Luther King
when he was desegregating Birmingham in 1963.
And as you may know, one of President Obama's last acts
was to proclaim the Birmingham Civil Rights District
including my uncle's motel, which will be restored,
the 16th Street Baptist Church,
which was the scene of the murder of four young girls,
the park there and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute,
into the Birmingham Civil Rights Monument.
It's now, it's so, if you can imagine, it used to be,
you know, Birmingham is a small town,
if you're ever been there,
but now, it's run by park troopers, you know?
You see them walking around, the rangers in their uniforms,
giving tours and things.
So it is a major step I think,
in preserving the history of the civil rights actions
that took place in Birmingham, Alabama
and for the generations to come.
I would want to turn now to Clarence Taylor.
I've been reading his books forever
and in fact, when we just met,
when we were talking on the phone,
I thought I was talking to the son of the man
who wrote all of those books
and I thought oh no, that's you,
you did all of that.
So Clarence, thank you so much for being with us
and he's gonna give us an overview, a historic overview,
and then we will launch into
the discussion with our activists.
Clarence.
- Well let me just say,
that it's really an honor to be on stage
with legendary Carol Jenkins,
and also Reverend Herbert Daughtry
and Reverend Ruby Sales.
Throughout American history,
people denied their constitutional rights
and deprived of the rights
and opportunities provided to others
have taken part in social protest movements.
Those involved in social protest movements
have adopted strategies to pressure those in power
to end the discriminatory and repressive measures
denying them political and economic justice.
The civil rights movement
was the most important social protest movement
of the 20th century.
The movement helped produce some of the most noted
national leaders of the 20th century,
such as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.,
Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, the Reverend Jesse Jackson,
Andrew Young, the United States congressman, John Lewis,
and of course, social activist, Ruby Sales.
Moreover, countless numbers of people,
people we'd never know the names of,
participated in this movement for social justice
to abolish legal segregation.
The civil rights movement was the most influential
social protest movement of the 20th century
because social protest movements
modeled themselves after the civil rights movement,
including the Chicano Movement,
the Women's Liberation movement,
the gay and lesbian movement
and one of the most central accomplishments
of the civil rights movement was the pivotal role it played
in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act
and the 1965 Voting Rights Act,
two pieces of legislation that helped eliminate
the American apartheid system, you know, legal segregation.
And we should recognize that
the moment was not limited to the south.
A vibrant civil rights campaigns took place
throughout this country, including this city.
We are honored today,
with the presence of Reverend Herbert Daughtry,
one of the pivotal leaders of the New York City struggle.
We celebrate the movement through commemorations,
commercial films, such as Selma,
documentaries including the award-winning Eyes on the Prize
and Stanley Nelson's Freedom Riders
and loads of monographs and textbooks.
But we need to do more than just celebrate
the heroic efforts of past generations.
We need to examine the past
in order to understand the present
and to see if there are lessons for us today
in this fight for social and racial justice.
Now there are a number of people who reject the idea
that the civil rights movement is useful today.
Many writers, scholars,
and even former civil rights activists contend
that the civil rights movement is over
and we are now in a quote, post-civil rights era.
Proponents of the post-civil rights era
contend that the civil rights movement was successful
in its goal of eliminating legal discrimination.
They also agree that black Americans
and people of color are now facing new sets of problems
that have nothing to do with legal discrimination.
Therefore, the civil rights movement
like the one generation earlier,
cannot address the problem that blacks, Latinos,
and other people are facing in this country.
Advocates of the post civil rights
idea fail to see that the struggle for civil rights
has always been a broader political project.
Many involved in that civil rights movement,
consistently spoke about more than just
the eradication of legal discrimination.
The fight for economic justice was key to this movement.
The August 1963 march on Washington,
its title was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
A. Philip Randolph, one of its key organizers,
linked the black struggle to class and economic justice,
he had not only helped to organize and win recognition of
the brotherhood of sleeping car porters,
during the 1920s and the 1930s,
he also spearheaded the 1941 march on Washington movement
that forced President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
to issue Executive Order 8802
creating a Fair Employment Practices Committee
to monitor discrimination and employment federal jobs.
The organizers of that 1963 march
wrote that American faces a crisis,
millions of Negroes are denied freedom,
millions of citizens, black and white,
are unemployed and they demanded
meaningful civil rights laws,
massive federal works programs,
and full and fair employment.
Martin Luther King Jr. not only contended that
the goal of the civil rights movement was
to win the right to vote,
gain equal access to public accommodation
and end school segregation, but to win economic security
for millions who were in poverty.
As early as 1958, a year after
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was organized,
King called for economic justice for black and white workers
quote, "economic insecurity strangles the physical
"and cultural growth of its victims", King declared.
We are, living in interesting times in America.
While we see the political gains of the extreme right,
the growing inequality of wealth, the separation,
excuse me, the suppression of voting rights
and alarming growth of nativist
and racist sentiment throughout this country
and mass incarceration of black and brown people
are what Michelle Alexander calls the new Jim Crow.
We are also seeing the decline of organized labor,
some conventional civil rights organizations
and black ministers and churches,
committed to the social gospel,
many of whom are committed to prosperity gospel
but it is not all gloom and doom.
We are also witnessing the resurgence
of left-leaning and progressive social protests,
including the Fight for 15
which has united workers across the country
in fast food and other low paying industries,
of the 350 movement, that is challenging climate change,
of course, Black Lives Matter,
that's confronting police brutality,
sexism, LGBT, L, sorry, my sight is bad here,
LGBTQ discrimination and institutional racism.
It is what one commentator labeled,
the resurgence of the civil rights movement.
As today's civil rights activists attempt to address
the current social ills, what can they learn
from previous generations of civil rights leaders?
Not only what that generation accomplished,
but also, its failures, also its weaknesses.
It is only through deep interrogation of
the earlier struggles and not romanticizing the past,
can the civil rights movement be meaningful
and useful for today.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)
- Thank you.
Thank you so much.
I'm going to start with Ruby
and Clarence, that was a very good sweep of,
of activities that have taken place.
I notice you didn't go back to 1767 but,
that's okay, we only have an hour tonight, you know?
But I wanted to talk with Ruby.
Today was the first day that we've met,
but I don't know whether you read her
on Facebook or her blog, From My Front Porch,
her musings on things and of course,
today she promised to make a ruckus, right?
That was the thing you were fired up as you often are.
I often can't start my day until I get my instructions.
What do we gotta do?
So what is it exactly
that got you into this ruckus movement today?
You were just fed up, right?
- Well first of all, thank you very much.
Thank you and the CUNY administration and faculty
for envisioning this program
and for inviting me to be a part of a timely conversation
as we try to consider with hindsight, insight and foresight
where do we stand as a nation.
Well I'm fired up a lot of things, as you know,
but I was fired up this morning,
listening to the hearings with the Intelligence Committee,
where they were manipulating the conversation
and wasting our time,
using Donald Trump's tweets
as the talking points for the Republicans,
rather than searching for the real truth.
And so I guess, and using language of liberal democracy,
to hide very insidious and anti-democratic sentiments.
So that keeps me fired up and in addition to that,
looking at the members of the Committee
on the Republican side,
I'm really struck at the presence of white supremacists
in this government.
- Well, that's enough to et you started, right?
(audience laughs)
I want to talk a little bit about,
because we have Lowndes County,
we have Lowndes County, Alabama in our joint history
because that's where your activism started
and Tuskegee student and you were coached out of,
coaxed out of Colossus
to go do activism. - Lowndes County, yes.
- Tell us a little bit about that.
- I was at Tuskegee in the early 1960s
and Tuskegee had been a forerunner
in the Southern Freedom movement,
commonly known as the civil rights movements.
because Dr. Gomillion had gone before the Supreme Court
in the 1950s to question gerrymandering in Tuskegee
and he had actually won the case
and you might, people might want to look up that case,
Gomillion versus the state of Alabama.
And anyway, Tuskegee was a place to be.
And a group of slick, overall-wearing students,
young folk, came to Tuskegee and I was already on fire
because I had discovered James Baldwin
and I was running around saying,
nobody knows my name
and suddenly, Stokely Carmichael came to our English class
and he gave me the words to say my name
and he invited some students to go down into Lowndes County
which was called Bloody Lowndes,
which we, when I first went down into Lowndes County,
Stokely took me to a gully
where you could see the bleached bones
of black people over the years who had been murdered
and lynched in Lowndes County
but I decided I would go to Lowndes County
and I would stay in Lowndes County
despite the first episode that happened.
We went to register people to vote the next day,
after I was there,
and the Sheriff pulled a gun to Stokely Carmichael's head,
who was Stokely Carmichael then, and not Kwame Ture,
and said, "Nigger, tonight you will be in hell."
and Stokely said, "Tonight, Hell will be integrated"
and I was, (audience laughing)
And I was totally amazed.
That somebody would stand up to a gun.
I was just fascinated and intrigued
and some part of that responded to my rebellious nature
and really, a profound search
for trying to define myself
as a Southern African-American youth,
in a very rigidly defined society,
where as Du Bois pointed out, the color line held.
And so, I think it was just a mutual connection
between me and the movement.
- Well, that's quite a start, Ruby.
Not all of us can claim
that kind of impetus to our activism.
But now, but also very early on there,
Jonathan Daniels, who was a white protestor as well,
who came down to work with you all,
saved your life and in doing so, lost his.
- Yes, well quickly, let me just tell the story.
We had,
address, and they would work all year.
And when they went to the country store,
to the man who also owned the plantation,
they never reaped any financial benefits.
They were always in the hole so the young people,
black youth were fired up.
They were very upset
and so they came to SNCC, I was a member of SNCC
and asked us would we go and demonstrate with them
and my first response, I was horrified.
I thought, no, no, I'm not gonna go down there (laughing)
but then we realized that we had to do it
because we could not say to young people,
stand up for your rights, and then when they did,
that we couldn't tell them no you shouldn't do that.
And so Jonathan Daniels had come into the county,
against the wishes of SNCC and young people like myself,
but Stokely Carmichael challenged us on that.
We didn't want him in there because he was white
and Stokely said, the movement is an open space.
It's like a black Baptist church.
Whosoever will, let them come.
And so, we agreed that Jonathan could come into the county.
We were arrested that day,
when we went to Fort Deposit to demonstrate,
vigilantes, white vigilantes were there with baseball bats,
garbage pails, all kinds of weapons,
threatening to kill us.
And the Sheriff came and put us on a garbage truck.
I had never been so happy
to be on a garbage truck in my whole life,
to just to get away from there.
We were in jail
and let's understand, let's not romanticize jails.
It is true the black people turn sites
that were intended to be sights of terror,
into sights of honor
but the jails were still scary places to be,
where for women,
the white jailers threatened to have us raped.
It was very frightening and we were there for five days
when they finally told us that we could go
and we wanted to know why could we go
because no one had posted our bail,
no one had told us we could leave,
but they made us leave and threatened our lives
if we didn't get off the property of the jail
and so we went to that little store.
It was one of those hot summer August days,
where the heat palpitated from the cement
and we were thirsty, we were tired,
and we were hungry
and we went to the corner store to get a soda
and Tom Coleman, who assassinated Jonathan Daniels,
met us at the door.
And within a blink of an eye, he said "Nigger, be,
"I will blow your brains out."
and before I could process the meaning of that threat,
Jonathan Daniels pulled me backwards and I fell
and he was blown up in the sky,
he was blown up with the shotgun blast
and we were also with a priest called Father Morrisroe
who was holding the hands
of another young black woman named Joyce Bailey
and he was running with her and they were running
and Tom Coleman took aim
and shot Father Morrisroe in the back
and he fell
and he let go of Joyce's hands
and he laid in that hot summer on that pavement,
screaming and yelling for water.
Joyce called my name behind the car
and I crawled on my knees to where she was
and we ran across the street, hysterical.
And by the time Stokely Carmichael and other freedom workers
like Silas Norman got back downtown,
they had cleaned up the street free of any blood,
had thrown Father Morrisroe's body, as we later discovered,
as he told us later,
on top of Jonathan Daniel's dead body.
Father Morrisroe lay in the hallway of
the Montgomery Hospital for hours,
where no doctor would touch him
until white General came and decided
he would do surgery which saved his life.
- Some story, quite a story,
thank you so much, Ruby, for sharing that with us.
I mean, the way you tell it,
it's as if we were there, thank you.
The Reverend Herbert Daughtry,
when we saw each other tonight,
I said I spent much of my television career,
news career, chasing him
from one demonstration to the next
and we do want to let you know
that he does have to leave a bit early tonight.
I don't want you to think that
he's walking out on us, you know?
He has a funeral service to conduct
for one of his parishioners, but Reverend Daughtry,
I was saying to you earlier that
your early life is pure testament to the fact that
people can overcome many may things
because you've had 50 years of service of activism,
of saving lives and changing things,
but you started out in a very different way.
Can you tell us about that?
I think your mic should be on, hopefully, yup.
I think we hear you.
- Okay, thank you, thank you.
Let me say I remember words from W. E. B. Du Bois,
a prodigious scholar,
who said upon meeting Alexander Crummell,
a great theologian of another time,
when I met in the room a moment ago,
that I saw Ruby and Taylor and Carol,
I instinctively bowed.
I wish we could have just continued hearing,
Stokely used to, Kwame used to talk all the time,
he would always, we were friends for a long time and,
when you talked about Lowndes County,
he used to talk often
and I don't know that he ever got over Jonathan's death,
it shook him.
Yeah, never,
and it was Lowndes County obviously,
and country with the popular notion
that the Black Panther Party started
and they came in from Oakland
to investigate what you all had done
very successfully, by the way.
But I could sit here and listen
but I reckon I have some responsibility to say something,
you know, to try to make some sense.
- [Carol] Anything. (laughing)
- Yeah, I came from Georgia,
the segregated streets of Georgia.
I was born in Savannah, Georgia, and my dad,
I'm the fourth generation of ministers in our family.
I have two daughters that are the fifth generation.
I have a grandson that is going to be the sixth generation
and I was born in Savannah, Georgia and Augusta, Georgia
and very early on, I don't know why,
even before I must have been six, seven years old,
we lived on the dividing line.
I could stand in the middle of the street, which I did,
and looked southward, which was the white part of town.
Manicured lawns, gleaming white houses, paved streets,
and I turned and looked northward,
which was the black part of the street,
and dilapidated houses,
garbage strewn streets,
always there seem to be gullies,
you know, puddles of water in the street
and I wondered why
and then when we moved to Augusta, Georgia,
I must have been around nine, eight, nine,
and I worked in a grocery store
and I always tried to play Robin Hood
but they didn't honor me
the way they did Robin Hood, you know?
- [Carol] You tried to be Robin Hood,
a little black boy, being Robin Hood, right?
- I just knew that there was something wrong
with the system.
We are people, like people of African ancestry.
Again, we're impoverished, trying to make it
and I just knew there was something wrong with the system
so I would try to even,
the bags of whatever was being sold
and I would add a little something to their bags
and eventually I was caught.
I was caught by a young person
who worked for the store,
which taught me a lesson I shall never forget,
that he worked for the store
and I knew he was watching me
and I knew I would eventually be fired
but I tried to steal everything I could get my hands on.
For the bags, for our people
and trying to balance the books.
- [Carol] The beginning of your activism.
- A bit early on, yes.
So when we moved to Georgia, Brooklyn,
I was about 11 years old, 12.
And the town's a whole different world,
it's completely disorient and not only that,
where in the South, I was the bishop's boy
but in the North, nobody cared who's boy I was.
I know I was, you know, I couldn't talk right,
they made fun of my accent,
are you a 'bama?
Where you from?
You're a 'bama,
what's your real name?
My name a Hubbert.
You mean Herbert, don't you?
And so they laughed at my clothing and,
so it meant you fight back.
You either commit suicide or you fight back
and I wasn't about to take my own life
and so we started fighting back.
And I got good at fighting back
and not only that, but the badder you were,
the more popular you became and so,
my first arrest, 16 years old,
we didn't do anything,
standing at the door of a store, really.
Never touched, never broke anything, touched anything
and next thing we knew the police was descending on us
as though we were public enemy number one.
I was hauled off to jail,
I spent two weeks in old Raymond Street jail.
My dad had to come and get me out.
But you know, when I went to jail,
I knew everybody in jail and so I was a kind of celebrity.
- [Carol] Wait, wait a minute, you knew everybody in jail?
- Practically, I mean, the guys that I'd hung with.
- [Carol] Right, okay, your guys were already there.
- So already there and so I became a celebrity, you know,
when I got to jail.
Hey man, Doc's in jail, yeah and then when I came home,
I really go, I mean, they really laid out
the red carpet for me.
Man, you been to jail?
Yeah, I been to jail, ain't nothing, man.
So they know a lot of people
who think that they're doing something to help society
by toughening the young people to send them away.
They only creating more problem,
they're exacerbating the problem.
So from there, I went from one to the other
and then in 1953,
I was getting ready to do some long time
for armed robbery, assault with a weapon,
for weapon possession,
and for the state and then for the government,
money laundering and so, I had a whole lot of stuff
and I looked at my life--
- You're always, - 23, I was 23.
- Then you were 23 then? - I was 23, that was in
February 1923.
I was born 1931, so I was 22 years old
and I looked at my life, my mother came to see me
and it just blew my mind.
We had lived by a code,
you know, from what's his name book,
live fast, die young, have a good looking corpse
so nobody expected to live long.
So being in jail and I couldn't get out,
there was no bailing me out because I had something,
if your boy bailed me out at one part,
they picked me up from another
so I got on my knees
and I had an overcoat and I pulled the overcoat over my head
and I looked at my life and I said Lord Jesus,
I don't even know if you up there,
and I don't even know if I'm not trying to manipulate you,
now I been cheating and stealing so long,
but if you there, I just want you to take my life
and use me any way you wanna use me.
I'm completely yours.
That was February, 1953.
I went to jail, did some time,
went back to school, and wrote on the wall
and as I was getting ready to come out of Louisburg,
wrote the document, that I call the Louisburg Document,
that I was called to have an impact on the world
and that's something on my jail cell,
that's on my wall, in my office,
and so the rest is history.
You know, my involvement, the immediate involvement.
We came along, by the way,
after the so-called civil rights movement.
I sort of came at the black liberation move,
black power, you know, Black Liberation movement, African,
that part of the struggle,
Afro-centric, pan-Africanist, nationalist,
well I chaired the National Black United Front.
And I have to say, that you are one of the persons
that we absolutely trusted
and that's saying an awful lot.
I was saying a moment ago,
I won a character defamation lawsuit
against one of the television station
because of the way they sought to disparage and destroy me.
I'm married, been married 54 years.
- Woohoo! - I am still married.
My children, my, let me gotta tell you this,
my number, I'd have to say,
I have to be careful how I say this,
the firstborn daughter, you know, made history.
She was the CEO of the 2008 Democratic Convention
which propelled Obama into office.
Mrs. Clinton, Hillary came back and said,
girl I want you to do it again, can you do it again?
She was the CEO of the 2016,
- [Carol] And she did a great job,
that's Leah Daughtry, did a wonderful wonderful job.
- And my second daughter, who had been there with me,
and my third daughter was a principal
who is also a minister and finally, my son,
who is, huh?
Beg pardon?
- Your daughter who's a minister.
- Leah, yeah, Leah did, well, and Dawn,
Dawn is also a minister
and finally my son is, our son is,
you know, your sisters have
a little something to do with it,
brothers have to worry (mumbles)
but anyway, he's the attorney and he decided that
hey dad, I'm just trying to,
all I'm doing is plea bargaining,
I gotta do something preventive,
so he got back into education
and his school was one of the most improved in Brooklyn
then they hired him in a certain city,
large city in Newark,
where he became assistant super to the other schools and,
- [Carol] So it's a success, it's a success story,
you kept your promise, you know?
That you made on your knees.
- Only by the grace of God. - Because of that, you spent
50 years in New York City and elsewhere around the world,
seeking justice for, I was reading,
we tend to think that some of the problems
that people have had,
black people have had with the police department,
started last year or the year before
and in fact,
it was what, the 1975 or 1976,
that this young boy was shot,
point-blank by a police officer in New York City,
- [Herbert] Randy Evans, November 1976
- 1976 and that was your,
one of your first demanding of accounting for his death.
- [Herbert] Shot him in the head, a year later,
- Use your mic 'cause they can,
- A year later, the jury pretty much acquitted him,
said he had psychomotor epileptic seizure.
I said, well just forget it.
If I live to be a thousand
and the jury pretty much acquitted him,
we call for Black Christmas '77,
that shut down New York.
- [Carol] Okay, now Ruby, you wanted to,
- Yes, I wanted to just contextualize
state sanctioned murder
of African-American people by police.
Angela Davis reminds us, that that is a long unbroken thread
in America's history that extends all the way back
to enslavement with slave patrols
as well as different periods in American history.
It is important that we understand
that this is not a new phenomenon,
that part, when you look at the Eyes on the Prize
and you see the police, executing acts of torture
and to put cattle prods on people
to unleash horses and cattle,
and dogs on them,
that is torture.
And so, this history of police violence
and state-sanctioned murder
against African American people is a larger issue
than one bad police or one good police.
It's really a systemic evil that has corrupted
the very heart of criminal justice in this country.
Finally, Cheryl Blankenship and I,
when we heard about Billy Joe Johnson in 2007,
who had been murdered in Lucedale, Mississippi,
we went down to investigate
and that set us on a trajectory or journey
where, by 2014, 2015,
we had traveled around the country
and we had documented
more than 3000 murders of African-American people
by the police, unarmed African-American people
by the police, where some of them,
with someone, with one young woman,
Ariana Jones being as young as 17 years old,
seven years old, who was shot by the police
as she lay sleeping in her grandmother's bed.
So we have to really begin to bring to this conversation,
historical understanding
otherwise we get caught in linguistic traps
about good police or bad police.
- I want to make note that
some of you been given cards
if you'd like to ask questions
and I think we're going to start collecting them
because we'd like to get to that in a little bit
but, I think that, first of all, happy spring.
Today is the first day of spring
and today is the 59th day of the Trump presidency
so we want to make sure
that we get to the 100 days part of our conversation.
What do you think so far?
(audience laughs)
- Well, I think that it's really important
for us to really understand
why this is an unprecedented moment in American history.
Yes, it is true that we've had racist presidents,
white supremacist presidents.
Yes, it is true that members of Congress
have been white supremacists.
Yes, it is true that the Supreme Court,
that white supremacists have sat on the Supreme Court,
but this is the first time in American history,
where avowed card-carrying white supremacists
have captured the three branches of the government
and have set about as its task
to dismantle the federal apparatus.
So we are in a constitutional crisis.
We're in a coup d'etat era
that was accomplished without a military violence
so we have to really pay attention
to the fact that,
the other thing that Trump is not an anomaly.
He didn't just come out of nowhere.
He is the result of 50 or more years
of Republicans stirring the pot, of dog-whistle politics,
and white supremacy in this country,
the dismantling of vote,
section four and five of voting rights,
all kinds of stand your ground legislation,
the militarizing of public school,
where black kids attend schools that are militarized
so we are up against some very powerful forces
in this country and we need to pay attention
and Trump is reiterating
the course that has already been hollowed out.
(audience applauds)
- [Carol] So some of the things that we've seen so far,
oh did you want to answer that - Just one of the questions,
I think, exposes,
what have we learned from the civil rights movement.
I think, that we've learned, hopefully, what they've learned
in the southern Africa struggle,
what they call (foreign phrase),
the struggle continues, and the,
the Trump era, that we are now in some sense,
remind me of the Rutherford B. Hayes election
in 17, 1876, in some sense,
In that in order to become elected,
he had to don the old slave system,
and he polled plantation owners
and so he sold out his,
he agreed to pull his troops from the south,
therefore leaving our people
to the hooded people of the South
and so there was a rollback, about 25 years of terrorism.
You're talking about terror, being scared of a terrorist,
that's what we've been living with all our lives.
We normalize living with terror.
I normalize, I don't know Bin Laden,
yeah, Bin Laden Bilbo, Bill Laden, Fobus in Arkansas,
Bill, Bill, Bin Laden Talmadge of Georgia,
these were terrorists
and the black coals et cetera et cetera
so what had been gained, we thought,
but with the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865
and the Freeman's Bureau
on which W. B. Du Bois spoke so highly,
I guess you might culminate that with
the Supreme Court decision which Plessy versus Ferguson,
in which the Supreme Court at the time,
validated separate but equal.
So these go around as a cycle
and we can never sleep, never think that we have arrived,
we are here.
No, if anything, we have learned,
is the struggle continues.
- It does indeed continue.
Ruby, we're talking about,
I mean, we've mention has been made,
as it's always made, of Black Lives Matter,
of the young people, the next generation.
I wanna know what you think of the women's march,
where what happened was that
they succeeded in getting five million people worldwide
to do the same thing at the same time, which is a,
one would say, a remarkable thing.
You were in a meeting with Congressman John Lewis,
with leaders of Black Lives Matter,
where you apologized to them, in a way,
because you felt that you understood
that they had been abandoned.
If you could talk about that for a bit?
- Well, there was a great misunderstanding
about the meaning of the Southern Freedom movement
and notice I say Southern Freedom movement
and not reductionist civil rights movement
because part of how our civil rights were taken away from us
and maintained our powerlessness,
constitutional powerlessness,
was by terrorism and dehumanization.
So the struggle for civil rights,
the struggle in the south was the struggle for human dignity
as well as the struggle for constitutional and human rights
and it was also a spiritual movement
that rearranged, anytime you talk about justice,
no matter what sacred text you're reading,
it's a spiritual call
that rearranges our relationship with each other,
God and all aspects of human existence.
And so, first and foremost,
when Martin Luther King talked about the mountaintop,
he was talking about the higher level of consciousness,
rather than a specific physical place
and there's something was out of
that higher level of consciousness,
we would reach a world house or a Pentecostal,
Pentecost moment but what happened is that
the movement became, the interpretation of the movement
became holy materialized, and secularized,
and so, we thought that the movement meant
the acquisition of titles,
money, degrees,
and to integrate.
That became the express understanding
of what the movement had been about
when Martin Luther King had made it very clear
that we were not trying to integrate into a burning house,
that the house was on fire.
But nonetheless, we sent young black people
into places that were not safe,
into spaces where they had to fend for themselves
without the necessary protections that they needed
and we felt that we were doing the right thing
because we felt that this was the meaning of the struggle.
But what happened is,
we did them a tremendous injustice because in those spaces,
there were not culture carriers,
there was nobody in those spaces
to decode for them, the meaning of the journey
like my teachers did in the South when they told me
I have to be twice as good as a white person
in order to succeed.
They were there by themselves
and they became an abandoned generation
and we began to see the casualties of that abandonment
in the 1970s when the black community began to wrestle with
crack cocaine, and young people today,
young black people today oftentimes feel a great disconnect
'cause one of the things that the empire does,
is it eradicate intimacy
and under the guise of desegregation,
the continuity that existed
that was essential to black survival,
intergenerational continuity was broken
and 85 percent of the teachers were white
and 38,000 black teachers were fired in 1967
and so there was a lack of intimacy.
There's been a lack of intimacy
between younger and older black people
in the way that I understood and knew the knowing
and young black kids feel abandoned.
They feel that we threw them out
to fend for themselves
and they think that we did not give them,
the protection and the cover that they needed
and they are very, either they are heartbroken,
or they're angry and when I apologized that night,
big adults in Black Lives Matter cried.
And the whole atmosphere went from being anger, angry,
to being young folk in the face of older black people
and something was healed that night.
(audience applauds)
- And yet we find that those leaders,
the new civil rights movement people,
tend to be non-spiritual, non-Democratic,
non, you know,
one person is in charge of everything, you know,
and hierarchical, and none of that,
and are often criticized for seeming to be afloat
and not moving forward because there isn't
the one central Martin Luther King Jr.
to lead them.
Clarence, do you have a thought about that
and Herb too?
- Well yeah, that's when I had meant
when I had mentioned there are lessons for
the sort of new activists
and the civil rights movement.
They should take time to study the social protest movement
'cause it did have a lot of successes.
But on the other hand,
they do note some of its failures and weaknesses
looking at focusing on it charismatically,
by the way, we should note that Ella Baker,
was always critical of the charismatic leader or approaches,
she advocating group-centered leadership, right?
And so I think that's one lesson
that many young people sort of taking away.
- And yet so many of the leaders, the new leaders are women.
The Black Lives Matter, - That's correct.
Another criticism of the earlier movement, right?
That the lack of formal leadership positions
for women in that movement.
- I get nervous
when people reduce strategies to the movement
of the movement to one monolithic approach.
SNCC had an approach to leadership
that said let the people decide
and we did not see ourselves
as circulating around a charismatic leader.
It was raising up leaders out of the body of the people
and so I think that we have to
really begin to nuance the different strategies
that existed during the Southern Freedom movement
and take from each of those strategies,
the culture resources that worked
and throw away the ones that did not work
but I think that in each of those approaches,
we can find things that really worked
and finally, let me just say
something about Black Lives Matter.
That is not a new cry.
From the very point of captivity,
when black people were forcibly brought over to this country
on ships of enslavement and reduced to property,
black people's assertion was that black lives mattered.
So this has been a constant theme
that has been a part of black struggle in this country
to say that black lives matter in the society
that said that black lives did not matter,
in the society that said that we were property,
that we were second class citizens
and that we were third class human beings,
that black people, at the heart of our struggle,
has been this assertion and young people today
must be put within that long trajectory
and that context to see that they are uttering the same cry
that their great great great great grandparents uttered
on sites of terror during the enslavement in the south.
- So I don't want you,
I mean, the applause could go on forever, Ruby,
I don't know, I mean, where are you preaching next?
(audience laughs)
We wanna be there for sure.
I don't want you to move away from the women's march piece
because you do identify yourself as a feminist
and talk a little bit about that
in terms of women,
women activists and women in the movement.
- Well I think that's also
a very long history in American society
and I think that it was very,
this is what I think.
I think I agree with Gloria Steinem,
that this part of the century that we're living in,
we will see the rise of authentic women leadership
who will contest patriarchy, who will contest heterosexism
and I think it was a major feat
as major as the March on Washington was
when black people gathered in the Capitol,
when black people were to be seen and not heard.
We live in an era where women are to be seen and not heard
and that march was very democratized
because it had women, it had lesbians,
it had women from all different social occasions,
now that doesn't mean it was perfect,
but my position is,
is that that was a major moment in American history
against a backdrop of white cultural warriors
who are not only white supremacists,
but they are also misogynists,
heterosexist cultural warriors.
(audience applauds)
- Reverend Daughtry, I want to,
I was just noticing that Carol Anderson's book, White Rage,
won the National Book Critic Circle award last week
and when she talks about the difference between
black rage and white rage,
you know everybody blames it on
all of our troubles on black rage
and what she says about white rage is,
it is not about visible violence
but rather, it works its way through the courts,
the Legislature and a range of government.
It wreaks havoc suddenly, almost imperceptibly.
It's not the Klan, white rage doesn't have or wear sheets
or burn crosses, it works in the halls of power.
So your response to that?
- It is the,
It is significant, I think that
no matter how much we have emphasized blackness,
Black Nationalism, Black Power, Black Liberation Army,
it has never been about denying other people their rights.
It has never been about violence to other people.
It has simply been the quest
to affirm our own worth
within an African centrism
and to struggle for our freedom
and at the same time,
to struggle for the freedom of everybody,
even in the heyday of black power.
Just as Reverend Sales has indicated,
Kwame was as open to anybody,
he used to always say, love the people and organize
and so, we have never been against,
that's not our history.
It is very interesting to me,
that even after the Civil War,
even after slavery supposed to have been ended,
there was no record of black former slaves
setting out to kill the white slave masters.
There's not record of any concerted effort
to hunt down the most brutal slave man, the crackers,
as they were called.
It's not, that's not our history.
No, that's not it.
So never equate white national, whatever that is,
black nationalism, black nationalism was again,
the attempt to affirm our somebody-ness,
African-ness, our worth, our history,
reparation came out of that movement
to affirm that this country, England,
was built on the backs of slave labor
and selling black bodies across the world.
So we were never against white people at all,
I'm talking about a concerted effort.
It might have been some here there and there
but that's not what we were about.
After civil rights movement, so to speak,
is another kind of movement.
It kinda came to a black power, Kwame, that was at '66,
they would scream, Black Power down in Greenwood
and then came, the African Liberation.
We began to look at the world and find ourselves
within the context of an international struggle
and southern Africa in particular, and the Caribbean,
where we began to live out
what Marcus Gravey had said a long time ago.
You know, up, you mighty people.
Up you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will.
So for instance, I even went to Belfast.
I participated and I might have some of my friend made,
Sinclair Bourne and I made a movie, while in Belfast,
The Black and the Green, which we demonstrated
that in the history of black people,
we supported, Fred Douglas way back,
a hundred some years ago, supported the Irish struggle.
So we've been about freedom for everybody
but because we've been robbed of our dignity, our name,
our somebody-ness, our location,
there came a time where it was absolutely necessary
to affirm that yes, we are people of African ancestry,
black and proud, we used to sing,
the things that were rejected about us,
we began to assert
and lo and behold, guess what happened?
Euro-ethnics began to say yeah, yeah, your hair is,
is cornrow as we used to say, yeah, that's a beautiful.
Bo Derek say, oh, let me try to get my hair like that.
You know, lo and behold, guess what happened?
When we began to assert our value,
our artistic genius,
they said yeah, black is beautiful
but white is beautiful too.
You know, they suddenly discovered
that everybody was beautiful
but we, again, just to emphasize,
at the risk of taking too long,
I just need to emphasize it,
that those of us who come out of the Black Power movement
and the black is beautiful and the Afro-centrism,
we coalesce with whoever is struggling
for human rights and self-determination
but you can trust a person more
when they themselves, trust themselves and love themselves.
- [Carol] Thank you.
- Can I just say something about the government
and the world that we're living in today.
I must admit, that I was deeply appalled
and deeply disturbed
at the male patriarchal vilification of Hillary Clinton.
(audience applauds)
The false equivalencies,
that de-feminized her,
dehumanized her, that held her to
a different moral standard than Donald Trump,
and that bothered me, not only from the right,
but also from the progressive left.
It is a deep problem that transcends class in this society
because it appeared to me
that the heart of the progressive struggle
was also the question, the angst about
what does it mean to be white in America today,
when whiteness carries different connotations
and in many instances, does not have the same currency
as it once did
and I think that I saw the rage and the anger
coming not only from the right, but also from the left
and what stunned me was that the rage was directed
principally at the Democratic party
and nothing, no analysis on the 50 year covert
and overt war of the rabid white supremacist Republicans
who want to make America
be a white supremist nation again
and I think that the war on women in this country
has been as insidious in many ways
as the war on people of color
and no, we're not in an opposed gender world
so it's very important that women gathered
to contest the malevolent power of the patriarchy
and to give, to shatter the lie,
that America belongs to white men.
(audience cheers) (audience applauds)
- But what I don't understand,
I'm totally just confused,
when we looked at who voted for whom
and when the statistics say 53% white women
voted for Trump,
I don't know whether those statistics correct or not.
What, 94% black women,
then you wonder, are we really together or,
I don't want to be divisive and I don't,
I'm for everybody's rights, but,
- Well because black people voted for Trump too.
Does that mean like there was not,
that the efficacy of black anti-trump voters doesn't matter?
- Yeah, but that they 90, 94%
voted for Ms. Clinton.
53% white women,
at least that's the statistics that they quoted.
- [Carol] Yeah, I think Gloria Steinem has,
Ruby, do you want to handle that?
I'm gonna let you, okay?
- Well I think that Du Bois raised the question
in the double consciousness of African-American people
when he talked about navigating the terrain
of being black and an American,
to be African and to be American.
I also think that women
navigate the double-consciousness,
especially white women, of being women and being white
and I think the vote expressed that double-consciousness
and I think that black people internalize white supremacy
and I think women internalize patriarchy
and we saw a perfect example of that internalization
being exhibited in the Clinton campaign
but that does not eradicate
the truth of the historical analysis of the dynamics
that were at play with the vilification of Hillary Clinton
in that election season.
- I want to get to a couple questions.
We have to handle these swiftly,
we're running out of time
although I don't want to go, I just want to listen.
As folks who joined the movement in your youth,
young, energetic, fed-up,
what are three cautionary tales
that you have for today's young leaders?
- I didn't hear the question, pardon me.
- [Carol] Do you have a cautionary tale
for the new civil rights leaders of our time,
the movement, something that you learned from
your experience that you would say,
I wouldn't quite do it that way.
Clarence, do you want to start, or anything?
- Well, burnout is extremely important.
Talking to people who were
activists, in both civil rights
and in the Black Power movement.
Folks who gave, essentially their lives,
24/7 to this, and you know, near the end of their activism,
they would just say that
we were extremely exhausted, burnt out.
One lesson is that you gotta take care of yourself,
I think, in this struggle.
You cannot just forego
yourself in the social protest movements.
- Yeah, I would endorse that 100%.
I think that's generally,
I think we lead in all the major diseases and
of course I became vegan about 35 years ago,
it saved my life, otherwise I'd be dead and gone
and so I'm 87 now, and I didn't,
(audience cheering)
I been, 60 years by the way,
I been pastoring the same church 60 years
but I like to think that God said to me,
listen, you gotta change your lifestyle
or you're gonna go the way of your father who died at 56
and so I became vegan
but I think that that is true throughout our lives,
particularly as people of African ancestry
but especially leaders in the movement,
I watch my colleagues,
most of them are gone
or if they are still around, they're incapacitated
and I'm still,
I walked from, for the Million Man March,
I walked from Brooklyn to Washington at 75
and I still play basketball, I'm still,
- [Carol] Alright (laughing)
- Trying to make me feel healthy, you sit.
- I'm still fast as lightning but,
so the point is I think that as,
I think as leaders, they should learn from the past,
their health is so important,
their people need them
and they need to be in the service.
I think again, the respect for elders,
that we learn from our elders, the respect for elders.
I'm not sure if that's extensive today
and again, back to the struggle continue,
for have a goal.
What, when something sometime,
otherwise you're gonna dissipate your energy
and the people are gonna become frustrated
so you're gonna struggle, it seems to me,
you got to deliver something
and know what it is that you're trying to deliver
otherwise you'll just be frustrated after a period of time.
- [Carol] Ruby?
- I think that we have to guard against dis-memory
and we have to approach the struggle
to understand that struggle is continuous
and that we must approach the dynamic struggle
with hindsight, insight and foresight.
And I think it's also important for us to
develop a language that is also dynamic
and the movement was one part of a struggle.
We failed to ask the question
that Dr. Martin Luther King raised
in the Birmingham jail, when he said,
"Where do we go from here?"
We understood where we were moving from
in terms of from Southern apartheid to a land of freedom
but we didn't understand
what would be the sound of our names
as a nation and as a people
in this land of freedom
and so I think that we have to
constantly interrogate our assumptions
and understand that the empire never sleeps,
just as we won a touchdown,
the empires is creating another block run
and so I think that what I would also say, finally,
is that the greatest,
the greatest resistance that we can have against empire,
is intimacy and to understand that
we are up against always,
a system of containment, surveillance,
fragmentation, dehumanization, criminalization,
and all of the white tools that empires,
no matter where they are in the world, use,
in order to contain people and oppress them
and finally, to appreciate and understand
that every people who've contested oppression
has created a counter-culture
and it's the role of scholars,
not to be accountable to the official narrative
but to help decode the meaning of the counter-culture
and the counter-narrative.
- Alright. (audience applauds)
Well, scholar, we're gonna leave that to you
and your students, who are busy working on
the next generations of scholarly works
that explain the civil rights movement and,
alright, thank you Clarence.
Ruby is giving you the challenge.
Ruby Sales, thank you so much for being here tonight.
Your spirit, I'm glad you brought the ruckus with you.
(audience applauds)
And Reverend Daughtry,
I'm gonna do some shadow-boxing with you out,
you know, and laughing afterwards,
- That's damn straight.
- And thank you all for being here.
Our speakers will meet you outside in the lobby
if anybody wants to ask any personal question
or say anything or you know,
get Ruby's phone number for daily advice.
But thank you all so much for being here.
(audience applauds)
- Thank you so much.
- Thank you, thank you.
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