[Keona Ervin]: I welcome you to the first lecture of the
spring 2017 season of the African American Experience in Missouri Series. We're thrilled
and honored to have Dr. Clarence Lang as our special guest. Allow me to begin by recognizing
and thanking the many people who make the series possible. To Interim President Michael
Middleton and Dr. Julie Middleton, who are both here tonight, Thank you. Interim Chancellor
Dr. Hank Foley, Dr. Kevin McDonald, Interim Vice Chancellor for Inclusion, Diversity,
and Equity, Nora Azizan-Gardner, Assistant Vice Chancellor for the Diversion, Inclusion,
and Equity who is here, too. Mary Ellen Loman, Strategic Communications Manager at the State
Historical Society of Missouri. Missouri event specialist, Ashley Schwab. Melissa Wilkinson
of the State Historical Society. Eric Doyle Wright of MU Diversity. Susan Camren of Academic
Support Center. And all of the staff members of the State Historical Society and the Division
for Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity. Thank you all for your continued Support, and Enthusiasm
for this project. A collaboration of the State Historical Society
of Missouri, the University of Missouri's Division of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity.
The African American Experience in Missouri Lecture Series is designed to offer the community
opportunities to reach a new understanding of present day Missouri by learning about
the history of black Americans in the state. Our series features some of the very best
scholars in the nation. Taken together, their groundbreaking research has firmly established
the importance of Missouri history to national histories of African American life and culture
and the history of race and racial discrimination in the United States. We have had the good
fortune of hearing from Dr. Diane Mute Burke from the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Dr. Martha S. Jones from the University of Michigan. Dr. Walter Johnson from Harvard
University. Mr. Lee Vandervelde from the University of Iowa. Dr. Brian Jack from Southern Illinois
University at Edwardsville. And Dr. Miller from the University of Mississippi. Even with
that long list, we are just getting started. Next month, the series will continue with
a talk by Dr. Sowande Mustakeem, Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Washington
University in St. Louis. She will speak on the role of race and gender in a late 19th
century murder case to explore laws and institutions designed to police working class African Americans.
The event will be held in Stotler Lounge of the University of Missouri's Memorial Student
Union. Save the date of April 4th for the continuation of the spring series but a lecture
by Dr. James W. Endersby, Associate Director of Political Science at the University of
Missouri. He with speak on the story of Lloyd Gaines, an instrumental figure in the eventual
integration of the University of Missouri in 1950.
Tonight we welcome Dr. Clarence Lang who is Dean's Professor of the College of Liberal
arts and Sciences at the University of Kansas and Chair of the Department of African and
African American Studies. He earned his BA in journalism from the University of Missouri
Columbia and his MA in history from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. In 2004,
he earned his PhD in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the
author. Two books: "Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle
in St. Louis, 1936 to 1975." And "Black America in the shadow of the 60s: Notes on
the Civil Rights movement, neoliberalism, and politics."
In addition, Professor Lang is co editor of two books: "Anti Communism in the African
American Freedom Movement, Another Side of the Story" with Robbie Lieberman, and "Reframing
Randolph: Labor, Black Freedom, and the Legacy of A. Phillip Randolph" with Andrew Kirsten.
This work has appeared in such venues as Journal of African American History, Journal of Social
History, Journal of Urban History, The Black Scholar, Race and Society, Journal of Civil
Human Rights, New Politics, The Chronical of Higher Education, American Studies Journal,
Labor Online, and Critical Sociology. He is a distinguished lecturer of the Organization
of American Historians, as well as a member of both the Association For the study of African
American Life and History and The Labor and Working Class History Association.
To my mind, Dr. Clarence Lang's work on Missouri history is groundbreaking, because it defines
in precise and illuminating ways that which makes the history of black freedom struggle
in St. Louis worthy of critical examination. Dr. Lang's work on the history of the border
south and the ways that space and place profoundly shape conditions for movement building. His
identification of St. Louis as an incubator for working class infected black freedom struggle.
And his theoretical contributions to the ways that we understand the temporal geographical
and conceptual dimensions of and distinctions between the Civil Rights movement and the
movement for black power firmly establish his status as one of the most important scholars
of African American history today. Let's become Dr. Lang to the podium.
[Applause] [Dr. Lang]: I hope I can give live up to that
introduction. Good evening. I should give a few thank yous of my own. I want to thank
the State Historical Society of Missouri and the University of Missouri Center for Missouri
Studies for bringing me to speak this evening. More specifically, I want to thank Gary Kremer
and Keona Irvin for extending the invitation to be part of this Lecture Series, which I'm
proud to be part of. I am indebted to Dr. Kremer for his pioneering scholarship on African
Americans in Missouri, which along with the work of Antonio Holland and the great late
Lorenzo Green helped to shape my own work as a graduate student. And I have to say I'm
proud of Dr. Ervin, who I've known since she was a graduate student and who is now an emerging
scholar of her own amazing forthcoming book, which you all must read when it comes out,
and who I embrace as a colleague and a professional. And thank you for Mary Ellen Lohmann who assisted
me with the logistics and arrangements that have allowed me to be here.
While I'm at it, I also want to acknowledge a few other people in the audience. Dr. Ted
Kodeshek, who I got your notes was a former instructor and mentor of mine. Is Wilma King
here? No. Anyhow, leading scholarly voice in the field of African American history.
Dr. Stephanie Shonekan, who is my counterpart in black studies here at MU. Doctors Mike
and Julie Middleton. And of course I thank all of you for being here tonight.
The title of my talk this evening is black history and black lives since Ferguson: Contrary
meanings of the 1960s freedom struggle in St. Louis, Missouri. I want to acknowledge
that this paper, as often occurs, has morphed in ways that honor these themes, but also
depart from them, so bear with me. I want to discuss three things this evening.
One, I want to discuss my work on black social movements in St. Louis, Missouri, during the
20th Century. Second, the current landscape of black protest. And third, what it means
or at least what I'll argue it means at this moment to be a scholar of black activism and/or
a black scholar activist. In the process, though, I also want to give you a sense of
how my time at MU in the early to mid-1990s helped to shape my approach to these themes.
I think the best place to start is to say a bit about how I came to write a book about
black community, class, and social movements in St. Louis in the first place. As Dr. Ervin
mentioned, I was an undergraduate at Mizzou in the early to mid 90's. I earned my degree
here in journalism with a minor in Black Studies. I was a reporter for The Man Eater and later
a columnist. I don't vouch for all of those columns today. I think in some ways I was
fearless in a way that I don't know that I am anymore. I really admire that person I
was at 22. I had my first substantive experiences as
an activist at this university. In April 1992, I participated in a massive March on this
campus following the acquittal of four Los Angeles police officers in the beating of
Rodney King. As it happened, the late African American historian John Hope Franklin was
here for a series of lectures, and while the details are blurry now, you live long enough
and things start to mush, I distinctly remember students, most of whom had just Marched, packing
a room to hear him speak and for me as a journalism student, it was one of those moments where
I was conflicted about whether my role in the situation with his to cover it or was
there another role for me to play? And that moment around the response to that acquittal
in 92 was one of the formative moments that I had here.
Later, in 1994 and 1995, I was part of a small loose coalition of black, brown, Asian American
and black female students to fight for a Black Culture Center and earmark funding for multicultural
programming. This put us into open conflict not only with the Missouri student association,
but also with the Chancellor at the time, Charles Keesler. And I believe the individual
who was his Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, Charles Schroeder. We were part of we staged
two marches, one of them to the Reynolds center. Do you remember this? I don't think I gave
you too much trouble, but you might remember that moment.
In the short term, at least, we lost that fight and I honestly have some conflicted
memories about that period. Tame, I'm deeply grateful for the encounters that I had here,
because that moment of activism altered the course of my life. By the time I graduated,
I had decided I didn't want to pursue a career in journalism, but I did not have a clear
sense of an alternative. Largely on a whim at the invitation of the parting Director
of Black Studies here, I ended up pursuing an M A in history at Southern Illinois University
at Edwardsville, which is located in the St. Louis metropolitan region.
During my time there, I became actively involved where a roots community group, organization
for black struggle, chaired by Jamala Rogers, a founding member of that organization and
the columnist for the St. Louis American and someone who became one of my mentors as I
transitioned from being a student to thinking about what it was to live a life of the mind,
but also to be politically and socially engaged. This was a group that had been formed in 1980
by Veterans of the black power movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. And by the
time I joined this organization around 1996, it had a well known reputation for the work
that its members did around the issue of police violence in the St. Louis black community,
particularly on the City's north side. Through my involvement in this group, I became interested
in knowing more about the longer context of local black activism in which I was engaged
and not only that, but the veteran activists with whom I worked in St. Louis persistently,
but caringly, contributed to the communities of struggle in which I was then emerged.
Consequently, black social movement poly nicks St. Louis became the focus of my MA thesis.
Of as my involvement in this group continued, the focus of my PhD dissertation, which of
course provided the raw material for my book. Over the course of the I guess at this point,
you know, 15 or so years that I lived with this project from thesis to dissertation and
then to book, graduates at the gateway, I came to fully appreciate how St. Louis and
black people's history in that City mattered to more than just my own general curiosity
as a budding historian of the that is to say, initially my scholarly interests grew out
of the convenience of living in the area, but as I continued my studies, I began to
understand how actually St. Louis wasn't just a convenient backdrop, but actuality mattered
to the story. As a project matured over time, I was able
to frame the black social movements of St. Louis as a microcosm of larger historical
dynamics. Here is an argument that I ended up making. Between the 1930s to the late 1960s
and early 1970s, I argued, working class African Americans occupied the center of local black
freedom struggles for fair and full employment, expanded social wages in the form of healthcare
and education, a racially democratic labor movement, meaningful electoral participation
and representation, and equitable urban development policies. And this is where my colleague and
Keona's work makes a difference, because how she's building on it is work that I did and,
frankly, critiquing it, which is a good thing, right? In terms of the work we do is really
talking about how we understand black working women's very central role in that phenomenal
work she's doing. These battles generated both cooperation and
conflict between black working class and middle class activists. I argue, though, that working
class constituencies largely defined and directed the movements' political and economic agendas
during this period. That is to say that even though these movements drew black people across
class lines, the guiding number lease of these movements during this period were laboring,
working class people. I contended, however, and that's from Detroit,
also not St. Louis, but you know, I'm taking some license here, so work with me. I contended
that as a result of automation, industrial decline, the resulting collapse in urban tax
bases and the government sponsored repression of the mom's Radical forties, the strength
of this blacking class inflicted or centered politics declined in the 1970s. The political
vacuum, instead, was filled by a burgeoning post 1960s black middle class that was rooted
in the professions, Business enterprise, and most visibly, electoral politics. Let me pause
to say that's Bill clay. I am not saying he's a bad person. He did very important work,
a founding member of the black Congressional caucus, but I'm saying that he represented
a particular kind of trend of the movement that came to the fore in a forcible kind of
way by the 1970s and certainly by the 1980s, and that, in some ways, became the dominant
trend. So part of what I sought to do in my book
was to better comprehend the simultaneous emergence of a post-Civil Rights black middle
class of which I was a beneficiary. All right? And the expansion of a so called black underclass
witnessed by individuals like myself who came of age in the late 19800s and into the 1990s.
Now, let me say more about this term, the underclass, and especially the dirty work
that this concept has been used to flesh politically. Entering contrary political popular usage
in the 1970s, the underclass became, according to political scientist Adolph Reid, quote,
the central representation of poverty in American society. Employed primarily to describe those
existing at the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, the term has functioned more as an
ideological device than as a real sociological category. Like other social developments in
the 1970s that I mentioned, economically and politically, if further disappeared, black
working class people as political actors by shift ago tension from structural inequalities
of race and class toward a focus on the cultural pathology of the black working poor.
I want to sort of make a point to say that that process was certainly racialized, but
it was also deeply gendered. So to the extent that the underclass, as a racial category,
became the Chief representation of poverty, that representation became commonly the black
welfare mother. So here you have a concept that in its most potent form used race, used
class, used gender, and because it was fixated on sexuality and reproduction, used that as
a way of arguing against the concept or the necessity, the legitimacy of social welfare
reforms across the board. Right? Because as the argument went, the underclass existed
because of its' members criminal deviance, dysfunction, and dependence on government
programs. Accordingly, these were not problems social expenditures could remedy. The argument
was such expenditures only reinforce the indolence, the dysfunction, the pathology of the underclass.
Where I'm heading with this, the discourse of the underclass came with a term we're in
the midst of today, a term from social welfare to punishment, what some scholars have referred
to as the punitive turn in U.S. social policy. This has been particularly devastating, stigmatizing
consequences for working class communities of color. The same working class communities
of color that propelled the major black social movements of the 20th Century. And I want
to put a finer point to say not only the shift from social welfare to punishment had a disproportionate
impact on communities of color, but that those individuals were used as a symbol for arguing
against social welfare itself. One quick example. If we think about the conversation
around Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, which may not be around for much longer. We'll
see. You will remember Glenn Beck, his arguments was that it was simply a tell program of reparations
to black people. Or if we think about public expenditures as independent tax paying individuals
being taxed to support lazy, poor people of color. Right? So it's not that working class
communities were disproportionately affected, but that they were also used discusser I feel
to ledge that shift in ways that have hurt work and go middle cast people across the
board. So I want to be clear about how race is not just simply the way in which people
have been targeted, but how it's been used, how it's been employed. Okay?
A good example of this has been the war on drugs out of which has come harsh mandatory
minimums for drug offenses, specifically crack cocaine, associated with the black working
class poor, racial profiling, attacks on fourth amendment protections against unreasonable
searches and seizures, the militarization of local police and black working class community
spaces, the mass incarceration of what at this point, 2.3 million people, many ever
them for nonviolent drug offenses. A disproportionate number of them people of color, and persuasive
assumptions of black criminality. One quick aside, and I do want to make sure
that I don't get lost in the finer details, but my argument is that you cannot understand
what happened in Sanford, Florida, that is, the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, if we
don't understand it against a backdrop of a broader criminalization of black communities,
bodies, and culture, what have you. All right? This occurred in a gated community. This did
not occur in a so called ghetto. This was a middle class kid who had been in trouble,
to my knowledge and everything I'd read, had not been in trouble with the law, what have
you, but yet the work of this term, the underclass, how that's had an impact on social policy,
how that's contributed to a broader racialized criminalization I think is part of the story
of that particular drama. Needless to say, given my research interests,
given my connections to black activists in St. Louis, given my own background as someone
who had found an identity on this campus, beginning on this campus as an activist in
the context of student struggle, I followed with close interest, as I suspect many of
you, as well did, the long chain of events that began in Ferguson, Missouri, following
the shooting death of 18 year old Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in August
2014. Like many others who were glue today their screens, laptops, and smartphone, I
watched the horrifying spectacle of police are riot gear and military vehicles occupying
the streets of Ferguson after residents stridently responded to Brown's death.
Then in April 2015, civil unrest erupted in Baltimore, Maryland, in response to the death
of another black male this, time 25 year old Freddie Gray following a police arrest. All
of these activities and more, some of them organized, others of them occurring more spontaneously,
have sense cohered under the general manner and discourse of plaque lives the matter.
Now, how does this connect with the social writing that I've been about St. Louis? First,
we have to understand the Brown shooting and the local and county police response to the
vigils, marches, and protests within a social context shaped by the punitive term, that
term again, the punitive turn in social policy, mass incarceration, racial profiling. In Ferguson,
the State of Missouri and nationally. The criminalization of black working class residents
and spaces, and assumptions of black cultural deviance.
Second, we should understand events in Ferguson within the context of a long history of racial
apartheid and speck disparity in the St. Louis metropolitan area. I deal with this in the
book. Historically, St. Louis has been a pioneer in residential segregation. We say Pioneer
and that might be something to be proud of. It's not. St. Louis was a Pioneer. In 1816,
and other scholars have done this work as well, arrests in the nation passed a housing
segregation ordinance through initiative petition and direct vote.
A Supreme Court ruling voided the ordinance, but in the 1920s, St. Louisans were the first
for craft restrictive housing covenants and by the 1940s, voting laws to maintain segregation.
The facts that Ferguson was 730% black and a third of its population living below poverty
is a continuation of that history, I would argue.
At the same time, Ferguson is typical, and I'm going to talk about this in a moment,
tin Cal of a more recent pattern that we're seeing in other cities, certainly in Chicago
where I was born and raised and which racialized poverty and spatial isolation has migrated
from the nation's inner cities to the inner ring suburbs. Ferguson is emblematic of that.
That is, as inner cities and many places have become sites for economic reinvestment, poor
populations have been displace today older suburbs and while white populations and commerce
are leaving these communities, the levers of City governance have remained predominantly
light, which has contributed to racial polarization that we saw in Ferguson and places like it.
Third, we should understand the on vents in Ferguson within the context of an equally
long history of political fragmentation in that urban region. It is boundaries of St.
Louis were locked in 1876, which prohibited cities if annexing around it.
The result is that St. Louis today has 90 municipalities surrounding it. All of them
struggling to attract and maintain revenue streams. As a consequence, Ferguson's government
relied heavily on traffic stops and court fine collection for his 20% of its operating
budget or about 2.5 million. And I suspect many of you read the Department of Justice
report about the Ferguson Police Department. Very damning indictment. But there's a lot
of good work being done by collars like Walter Johnson, who you mentioned earlier, on just
this point as well. Who actually complicates this in some ways
that I won't get into right now, but the point is that the austerity in many of these inner
ring suburbs that are taking in poorer populations lent itself to a continuing problem of racial
profiling with African Americans disproportionately stopped, even though there have been no more
likely to be in possession of contraband than their white counterparts.
In Missouri, as elsewhere, there has been low intensity warfare, I would argue, occurring
between black working class communities they have placed for some time. Ferguson, like
L.A. in 1992 that captured my imagination, just exposed it in a dramatic way to a national
and International viewing audience. Fourth, while Ferguson, and I've started using
Ferguson as find of a metonym. If we understand it as a set of conditions rather than simply
a place, Ferguson could have happened anywhere, but I want to suggest that it's not a fluke
that it occurred there. A key piece of my argument in grassroots at the gateway is that
as part of the border south, a region that encompasses Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee,
Delaware, and with some qualification, West Virginia, Missouri historically has incorporated
regionally diverse modes of U.S. stratification. Scholars from E Franklin Frazier, George C.
Wright, Barbara Gene fields, Tracy leafy have maintained, the border south states were in
a certain mixture of north and south, if you will, in it terms of politics and culture,
a region, according to the black sociologist Charles J. Johnson, were the nation's conflicting
racial views and policies Mets and clashed. Not only have border south territories convinced
the regionally diverse experiences of African Americans, but they often also prefigured
shifts in race relations for the rest of the nation. If we think, for example, about how
Missouri's entry into the union in the 1820s marked the first major national debate about
slavery, if we think about I live in Lawrence, Kansas, so you can't walk across the street
without people talking about bleeding Kansas. That conflict that occurred at the Missouri/Kansas
border which, in the 1850s, which really presaged the Civil War in many respects. If you think
about the Dred Scott Supreme Court ruling and how that further amplified the succession
and crisis in this nation. We can see that playing itself out historically over time.
Missouri and other border south states were the first former slave states to begin as
well dismantling legal racial apartheid in higher education. If we think, for example,
of the 1938 Lloyd gains case that originated on this campus, the historic desegregation
of St. Louis University in the early 1940s, the first such event a former slave state.
If we think about housing, I'm thinking of the landmark 1948 Shelly versus Kremer decision
against racial covenants as being enforceable in a court of law. And employment discrimination.
Green versus McDonald Douglas in 1973 and how that helped to set certain patterns.
From this standpoint, I'm arguing, and this is why I take you through this, because my
suggestion is from that standpoint, it may not be an accident of history that Ferguson
in the St. Louis metropolitan region, followed closely by Baltimore, Maryland, another border
state locale, became ground zero for the wave of black community up risings we have witnessed
around this nation since 2014. Could that argument withstand intense questioning? I
don't know. But given the work that other scholars have done, talking about the significance
of this particular region, I think that argument at least bears some serious consideration.
Like so many others around a nation affected by these developments, I involve myself in
local community vigils mass demonstrations, public forums, and even the 2014 Ferguson
October mobilization in St. Louis. In the midst of this activity, I found myself thinking
a great deal about what scholars do or ought to do when the focus of the scholarship comes
home, so to speak. To pose it as a question, what is a scholar's relationship with and
responsibility to the subject of one's research? To put it yet another way, how does a scholar
inhabit the subject about which she, he, or they write? Especially if that subject concerns
emancipatory struggles for social change. And here's what I mean by this. When I was
a graduate student doing work on the black freedom struggle in St. Louis, often when
I fold people what I was working on, they would say, that sounds like an interesting
topic. Why are you doing St. Louis? And I actually had that issue when I was trying
to get a contract for my book. You will have an easier time. You have had an easier time.
Right? You know what I mean? Respect your elders. You know what I mean?
People were not interested in discussing why St. Louis would matter to anything. Now, that
changed a little bit, and I'm dating myself a little bit here, when the Rams came to St.
Louis and when Nellie's first album came out. I got the question a little less, because
St. Louis became recognizable in this sense. But Ferguson kind of changed that dynamic.
So this question of the scholar's relationship and responsibility to research is an academic
question in some ways, but it's not an academic question.
So on the one hand, my university began to promote me as something of an expert, and
you know, I cringed, because at the campus of the University of Kansas, I became known
as the Ferguson guy 6789 people would call me the Ferguson identify and I hadn't even
been there, you know. And in one sense I felt gratified as a scholar to be able to discuss
my work, especially with nonacademic publics, given the fact that I spent seven on of my
early career sort of defending why St. Louis mattered. So that question was being answered.
On the other hand, I had strong reservations about being put forward as a commentator from
afar and how this lent itself to, frankly, personal careerism on my part and I will also
add an opportunity for my university to further brand itself, even be though KU, like most
public institutions of higher education, had not done very well by black people itself,
to be Frank. I say this on campus, so it's not like I'm talking about my institution
from afar. This tension was resolved in the fall of 2015
when a sustained protest campaign at this university brought Missouri back to the center
of attention as a national Bell weather of race and resistance. I suspect that many of
you here experienced the events of that fall, so you don't need me to recite them to you,
but I will put a finer point on this. Beyond registering concerns that were particular
to black students and faculty and graduate employees across race, the revolt here at
MU was an extension, I would argue, of Ferguson and Black Lives Matter more broadly. Right?
It represents a cumulative development. Similar to Ferguson, too, developments here at Mizzou
inspired a wave of protests that spread to 90 or more other university and college campuses
across the nation, including the institution where I currently am located, the University
of Kansas, where multi racial student demonstrators launched their own protest campaign in November
2015. Consistent with the demands articulated by students elsewhere, they called for greater
recruitment and academic opportunity and success for students of color, better recruitment
and retention of faculty and staff of color, increased attention to diversity and the content
of university curriculum. At some universities, particularly the private ones, I mean, they
were grappling with the very concrete actual legacies of slavery in terms of endowments
and how that manifested itself in monuments on the campus and the Fostering of a safer
and more supportive campus climate for all students, measures such as hiring culturally
competent student services staff. For many of us in higher education, and this
is the part where I'm deep into talking about what are the obligations of the scholar at
this moment, which is an academic question, but not an academic question, but I say that
for many of us in higher education at MU, KU, and elsewhere, the period since then has
been an educative one, I would argue clarifying this juncture between the pretenses of the
university, and I do use that word purposefully, the pretenses of the university as an institution,
as a bastion of liberal inclusion where difference is recognized and celebrated. And its reality
is often a place of structural violence and exclusion. I witnessed students at KU moving
from debates about when or whether to go to Ferguson or at one point whether to come here,
to turning to our own campus in Lawrence and universities in general in talking about how
the university can be an important space to contest for racial justice.
In this came crucible, staff, and lower level administrators had to decide whether we were
fog to respond to this challenge, and I include myself. I'm a department chair, which makes
me a petty administrator. Right? So a lot of folks above me, but you know, but you know,
I have to engage these issues in ways that are different than when, you know, I was a
20 something year old writing these columns in The Man Eater. And I hope nobody goes and
digs them up, because some of them, you know [Laughter]
And probably I'm saying that, I've ensured that somebody will do that. So that's my fault.
But those of us who are faculty, who are staff, who are lower level and upper level administrators
had to decide whether we were going to respond to this challenge by either, for some folks,
heading for cover. Some people did that. Applauding ourselves preliminary say for acknowledging
the many inequities on campus and patting ourselves on the back for having had courageous
conversations, difficult dialogues, or other university sanctioned activities with alliterative
titles or engage a moment and acquire the professional risks that would come from openly
criticizing our Chancellor, our Provost, our deans, our colleagues. All of us in one form
or another had to grapple with the question of whether institutions of higher education
can truly even be vehicles for opportunity, mobility, citizenship, and progressive change
overall. There's a very good essay by a scholar called
Robin Kelly called black study, plaque struggle. One of the questions he takes up in that essay
is can universities be spaces that are free from structural violence? Right? He accepts
the argument that they can be diversified. Right? But can they actually be the spaces
that we claim universities can be? For me personally, this is good timing, because
I'm wrapping up, the past few years, and this is why I sort of put myself in the story a
little bit more than I normally would have, because I have a history of this campus and
a very complicated up with, at least if my mind. These last few years have brought me
full circle back to my political awakening in Mizzou and a coming of age as a scholar
activist or I would like to call myself such in St. Louis. That is, this moment of danger
and rebellion has opened a space to, for example, revisit the role of Black Studies as a discipline,
as well as to consider the ways in which I can connect my campus engagement with larger
community issues. I think, for example, about the stark indicators of racial inequality
in a Lawrence public system, school system where I have a child. I'm a parent now. Right?
Of a 12 year old. The absence of people of color on the school board and in municipal
and county government. Racial profiling by police and other patterns of discrimination
in the local infrastructure of criminal justice. The work conditions and pay of fast food workers
in the Kansas City metropolitan area and around the nation. And the continuing work of making
Black Lives Matter where I reside as a scholar, an educator, a black man, a son, a spouse,
a parent, a concerned taxpayer, a citizen, and a human being. And that ongoing journey,
again, began at MU, and for that I'm grateful and grateful for your time. And with that
I'll stop. Thank you. [Applause]
[Keona Ervin]: We have time, good time for questions and answers. I'm happy to bring
the mic to you. You're welcome to come to the front to take this mic. Are there any
questions? [Dr. Lang]: While she's saying that, I'm an
educator, so I'm compulsive about this. For further reading, you may or may not buy the
book. Its academic publishing, we don't get paid for that anyway. Just for those of you,
just in terms of some of the things that reflect my think and go what you've heard today, there's
a reading list. [Laughter]
We need the mic for recording purposes. This is my student.
[Audience Member]: Hi. Am I supposed to say my name and stuff? Hi, everyone. My name is
Lauren Smith. I'm a senior at Mizzou studying psychology and sociology, prelaw with a minor
in Black Studies. So my question is you kind of didn't really touch on, like, anything
that you found surprising doing your research or something that you didn't know. What is
something, when you started the grassroots at the gateway, something that you were just
like, whoa, and this is stunning? Obviously everyone knows about the war on drugs and,
you know, the welfare queen, but something that just stood out to you about St. Louis
that you were just like, huh, why hasn't this been a part of the narrative from the beginning
and why would I want to uncover it now and let it be known?
[Dr. Lang]: Thank you for that question. The talk was admittedly a hodgepodge. I'm going
through some things right now. It's been happening since November, trying to recalibrate, trying
to figure some things out, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So one of the things that struck me
about St. Louis was just how in many periods from the thirties up until the Seventies that
so many national organizations had remarkably vigorous local chapters in St. Louis. So for
example, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, an organization formed by A. Phillip Randolph,
which was a labor organization, but also a very militant Civil Rights organization. One
of the strongest chapters was in St. Louis, Missouri, and if you know about where St.
Louis is located, as its hub, it's not surprising that at least there was a great deal of contestation,
and it was a very vigorous branch. The NAACP for a period had a very, very strong
branch in St. Louis. And it had a very close relationship with the Teamsters' union. Now,
we think of the Teamsters nationally and we think of Jimmy Hoffa, but in St. Louis, because
the Teamsters were so very decentralized, as long as you didn't get in the way of Hoffa's
money, you kind of let the folks do locally what they wanted to do and there was a gentleman
by the name of Harold Gibbons who was the head of the Teamsters union there who was
a committed working class activist, trade unionist, and anti racist, and the gentleman
who was the President of the local NAACP, a man by the name of Ernest Calloway, who
deserves his own book, by the way, was the President of that branch. And they did some
very remarkable things. So there you have a really clear example of how black people's
labor and Civil Rights activism were really merged in some very powerful ways. And that's
just one of several organizations that had the March on Washington Movement of the 1940s.
There's a good book by a scholar named David Lucander. One of the strongest chapters, one
of the most militant chapters in the nation during that period, and they were the ones
who kept going to A. Phillip Randolph and saying, stop talking about the plans to March.
Let's go ahead and do this thing, you know? So that was something that surprised me, but
also just how significant that region was in terms of, and I don't want to speak too
much longer to make sure we get some more questions in, the dynamics of St. Louis being
a place where so many dynamics converged and how that had an impact on black politics.
So you had protests. You had electoral activism. Very, very complicated kind of politics that
I tried to do some justice to in the book. I hope that's a sufficient enough answer to
the question. [Audience Member]: I'm going to ask a question
about the things you're going through since November. Given that we're probably not going
to see any more Justice Department reports like the one on Ferguson for a long time,
I'm wondering how you think that what kind of shift in protest strategies that suggests
now that the federal government as an ally is kind of off the table for a while
[Dr. Lang]: That's the question right now. Right? And I guess I would say that in some
ways, we might to speak from the work that I've done, we might have to go back to a period
before that high tide of resistance in the 1960s where it became a lot about what people
were doing at the local and at the state levels. So in the State of Kansas, for example, one
good thing, maybe you wouldn't consider it good, but there were moderate republicans
who were brought into office. If you know about the political climate in Kansas, that
was a good thing. Right? Even if you're a Democrat and you wouldn't vote Republican.
And so for my own self, I have sort of thought about, okay, where are the spaces that I occupy?
And that has to be the place where you begin to do some things. Because if we think about
it, the moment that we're in now, a lot of that was incubated at the states. And at a
certain point, it didn't matter who was in the White House. I mean, we saw this through
most of the eight years of the Obama presidency, because once the States became the ground
that was captured, that's where the bench of a number of these folks who have run for
office has come from, have come from the States. So it seems to me that it's the state level,
but it's also the minor grain community level. I don't think of any other way than to, you
know, to start digging where you stand. At least that's the answer that gets me up in
the morning these days. [Audience Member]: Thank you for coming.
[Dr. Lang]: Thank you. [Audience Member]: I would like for you to
talk a little bit more about that space and you inhabited as an activist and the space
that you inhabited as an academic scholar and what did that feel like? How were you
switching back and forth and drawing from that? And I would like for you to talk a little
bit about that being an activist and how you felt about policing.
[Dr. Lang]: You've got a lot of questions happening there.
[Audience Member]: It's going to keep you from [Indiscernible]
[Dr. Lang]: Okay. So this question of sort of what is it, what does it mean to be committed
to a kind of a scholar activist life as a department chair. Right? I mean, you know,
that's right. So part of what I've learned is that there is institutional work that has
to be done. That's not sexy. That's not exciting. But our sort of critical kinds of things.
So there are issues of curriculum that you have to I mean, because the student credit
hours. Right? I mean, you live or die by that. But also, trying to get students to think
about the multiple ways that activism can take. I had a really interesting moment in
November of 2015 where the students an occupied the Chancellor's and the Provost's suite.
And it was a really interesting moment, because I scrolled back and I was there the at one
point in those kind of activities, but also, sort of thinking about the fact that there
are some things that students can do that perhaps faculty ought not to do, that there's
advice that you give, there's comfort that you give, but then it's also getting into
some people's ears. Here is a better way of answering it. In the
context of being the chair of a Black Studies department, I was asked to be a co chair of
a diversity equity and inclusion advisory group. Right? And we were charged with doing
a report and I knew I was in trouble when I saw my face and name in a newspaper and
there wasn't even a Committee yet. Right? So I knew that this was about pacifying. And
so at a certain point, I was lucky. We had a group of folks and we, essentially, went
rogue. And so we actually wrote a report that contextualized how the university had gotten
to the moment it was, because the danger, of course, in that kind of DEI work is that
it becomes happy talk. Right? And it's not critical. And so the acting Provost at the
time made a very big mistake, or at least she learned it was a mistake. She allowed
us to function kind of on our own outside of the purview of the Provost's office, and
needless to say, she wasn't very happy with the report. Which told me that we had done
a good job. I don't mean to sounds cynical or anything like that, so there's that kind
of work. It's not necessarily the protesting in the context of the campus, but it's about
being in spaces to raise it is issues to validate the students, to remind people that the reason
why we're having these conversations that have not occurred on this campus, I'm talking
about KU, literally since 1970, did you hear me? Literally since 1870 is because those
students sort of did what they did, and so we owe them a debt for that, even if, and
I've recognized that I've become I don't know if the word is conservative, but the thing
that I always kept wincing at, these students curse a lot. I try to get as many of them
as I could and say, you don't have to do that. And sort of really feeling kind of as a fogey,
because I curse million dollars some of those Man Eater columns that you might look up.
There's a lot that's kind of napping your question. I don't know that I've done justice
to it. But in some ways, it's recognizing that the role that you play at one phase in
your life is not necessarily the role that you play at another. But I've become a lot
more engaged, a lot more interested in affairs off campus, because what happens is that there
was rebellion on the campus. It spread off campus, so what you have is this kind of insurgency
that's created spaces everywhere in Lawrence from the campus of the community to raise
issues and to view things that the space didn't exist before. And so you find ways to make
a nuisance of yourself, I think, but it's not the same way as maybe students might do.
And certainly staff have certain kinds of limitations and there are things they ought
not to do. So there were other questions, and I'll try
and keep my subsequent responses and probably needing to pack over on that side, too. Yeah?
[Audience Member]: Hi. This is kind of a specific question. In your book, you mentioned the
1969 wrench strike and I was wondering if you ran across any other instances of working
class activism and public housing St. Louis? [Dr. Lang]: You need to read this scholar's
work. Her book when it comes out. Right? Because she's talking about that. As well. Keona,
Joseph Heathcott was doing a book on that. Has that book come out yet?
[Audience Member]: I don't think. [Dr. Lang]: There's a scholar by the name
of Joseph Heathcott, who has been threatening a book on public housing and the politics
of resistance in public housing for a few years. He's done some good work on that. In
my own case, I was most influenced by a really good book by Rhonda White Williams talking
about black women in public housing Baltimore, Maryland. The title of that alludes me right
now. [Audience Member]: The politics of public
housing. [Dr. Lang]: The politics of public housing,
right. I don't know if that officers the question. There's not a whole lot. There's some good
archival material. I didn't make as good of use of it as I could or should have, but I
would say what you need to do when Dr. Ervin's book comes out, you need to, because you do
justice to that, don't you? Okay. A little bit? Okay. All right, all right. So there's
still plenty of work there. Are you a grad Walt student?
[Audience Member]: Yes. [Dr. Lang]: Okay. So that's going to be your
dissertation then. Right? Somebody needs to do that work. Some good documents at Southern
Illinois University Edwardsville, the Lovejoy library. Some really good papers on the rent
strike. Yeah, I think it's the Harold Gibbons papers, I think, there.
[Audience Member]: Hello. As a student activist here on this campus, and I did a little groundwork
in, like, fall 2015, I kind of struggle with, like, documenting what actually happened.
So understanding that movements are made and sustained by, like, more common people, my
question would be what role would you say that scholarship plays in, like, the general
freedom struggle? What role that scholarship plays?
Scholarship specifically plays in, like, freedom struggle?
[Dr. Lang]: I think when it's done conscientiously, it becomes a space to draw lessons, to kind.
See what worked or may not have worked in the past. To talk about questions of theory
and in practice. Certainly the grassroots at the gateway book is deeply inflicted by
some of the experiences that I had in St. Louis, because there are certain kinds of
scholarly questions you don't even think to ask if you've not had even minimal kinds of
political engagements. So the question of what are the internal dynamics in an organization.
Right? You have to have sort of been in some of that sticky stuff to even know to ask a
question like that. But I would say that it's essential, I think, in just a way that I think
scholarship is meaningful beyond just telling interesting stories, and it's a way in which
activism is linked closely with intellectual work, because one of my, I would say, humbly,
and this may not apply here, but certainly some of the experiences that I've had, one
of the things that I've noticed among younger activists, and I'm dating myself and I'm going
to sound fogy, is study groups I think are really, really, really important. I think
particularly at this moment. I think there can be a kind of action orientation that leaves
behind the fact that study is not just simply pontificating, but it's about how you draw
lessons, how you engage in criticism and self criticism. And I think scholarship can play
a part in that process. But let me add to this as well, because I've
said this to the student activists at KU. One of the best pieces of advice that I got
when I was here and my colleagues who were involved is, like, you need to, like, archive
your stuff. Yeah, you shake your head, but that stuff is important, because some of the
abuses that students have had are really abstract until you've documented what happened. And
I think from the standpoint of subsequent scholars being able to come back and document
what occurred, that's a really important point. I was parts of a loose coalition, the coalition
of concerned citizens. We had a couple of names. Right? Our papers are in the university
archives. And I think that all folks who are politically engaged, have to humbly present
it and carve out some time to do that. And in fact, because of social medians I mean,
that can be done electronically in ways that are easier today, but I think that that's
not a side bar. That's essential, I would argue, to activist work, even though everyone
is busy trying to do so many things with so little time.
[Keona Ervin]: We have time for one really quick question.
[Dr. Lang]: Maybe we could do this. There were a couple of hands, if we all ask them
and that will make it easier for me to avoid answering them, because I'll mush them together.
Does that sound like a plan? Does that work? Okay.
[Keona Ervin]: Thank you for being here this evening. I'm a sociologist, pastor's degree
from Lincoln University. And I had the great occasion, it's been many years ago, to speak
with Dr. E.V. Hill, a black master in the inner City where the Rodney King riots made
place, and I'll share it with you and welcome your observation and critique or comment,
that many of the young men who were engaged in the arising really suffered from the lack
of having a father in their home. Would you care to comment on Dr. Hill's observations?
[Dr. Lang]: Okay. So that's one. I'm going to come to that. I'm just jotting them down.
[Audience Member]: My name is Justin Koehler. I'm from Muskegon, Michigan. I thought it
was interesting how you said St. Louis had a history in the red lining of cities. My
City has that as Welch it's not really a matter of a central southern state or northern state.
It can be anywhere. In your opinion, how do we move on and breakthrough those barriers
of having, like, the black neighborhood or the white neighborhood, things like that?
[Dr. Lang]: Okay. These are some stumpers here.
[Audience Member]: Hi. My name is Carol Brown and I'm one of the common people here in Columbia.
I'm curious how you see community activism playing out in Lawrence to deal with community
policing, with racial profiling and policing, and with the school district. You have a 12
year old, your kid is in school. What do you see there?
[Dr. Lang]: Okay. [Keona Ervin]: Last one.
[Audience Member]: I'm interested in shifts that you've seen in Ferguson since unrest,
especially voter registration, voter turnout, how was it in November? Has there been a significant
shift in the make one of the City council and the Police Department? Any word of hope
or is there still discouragement about community taking care of itself?
[Dr. Lang]: Okay. So let me answer these backwards. Your question is the easiest to answer. To
be perfectly honest, I've fallen behind in sort of my keeping up with affairs in Ferguson.
I know that there was election. Someone of color was elected onto I think the City council.
I don't know where things stand and I would not want to be in a situation of speculating
and speaking without knowing, because one of the curious things is, strangely enough,
you will see this happen when your book has been out, you get to a point where you're
trying to put your old work behind and move forward, but like in Michael Corleone, they
draw you back in. There's some reading I need to do about what's napping that region that
I've not done as of late around Ferguson. So a lot of what I've shared with you at this
point, I mean, I think things are probably more dynamic and maybe there are others who
know better than I do. So I'm sorry that I can't give you a fuller answer than that,
but I wouldn't want to be irresponsible to speculate.
And in terms of community activism in Lawrence, Lawrence is a really interesting place in
a sense that it's very culturally liberal and it looks and functions different than
perhaps other parts of the state, but as I tell people, the second you talk about inequality,
people are talking about John Brown, you know, abolitionism and what have you, and sometimes
it's like, I wish I did live in a former slave state, because no one has that arguments and
you can actually get down to brass tacks. But having said that, there are actually some
vigorous activity that's developing. To the other gentleman's question, which is why I'm
sort of saying this idea of working locally I think has become, for me, very, very important.
So there is a group called justice matters that's doing work around police profiling
that's fighting back against an effort to expand the jail rather than provide greater
mental health services. In fact, the argument is, well, we'll expand the jail. We'll give
mental health services, but has to be affixed to an expansion of the jail. There's vigorous,
a lot of activity happening around the inequities that have come to the surface in the school
district. So things are opening up in some promising ways. There is going to be struggle,
but you know, at least when there's a fight, there's a possibility to win something, and
so I've been encouraged by folks who I think are well into their fifties in some cases,
not that there's anything wrong with that, who have not been politically active in their
lives before and are taking their first steps. And to me, that's a very hopeful sign right
now. I take my victories where I can get them, because they're few and far in between.
This issue of housing segregation, I'm afraid I don't have much for you on that, to be perfectly
honest, except sort of the observing the irony that it was easier to get a black family into
the White House than it has been to meaningfully desegregate neighbors. I don't, frankly, I
don't know what we begin with that issue. I just simply don't. I think that we have
to, you know, we have to talk about affordable housing, because I think that these things
are linked, and in Lawrence and in other areas, there's a serious crisis. That it occurring,
and so I think that may be a starting point. To the gentleman's question regarding fatherhood,
I'll be perfectly Frank with you. I think what all children need are loving, caring
individuals in their household, and whether that, you know, is, in my case, I was raised
by a single mom or two parents, if there are two moms or two dads or if there are extended
families, I think the question is how do we give families, however they look, the resources
that they need to be autonomous and to provide for children? And the makeup, in my mind,
you know, is for me becomes secondarily. I go back to Trayvon Martin, because it is question
is where are the fathers? He was living with his father in a gated community, because he
had been in trouble and his mom said, well, you go live with your father. And so to me,
in some ways, that complicates the issue of whether the problem is that simply we just
need to have males in the household. And I think one of the remarkable things about Black
Lives Matter, and I will say for my own self, and I know we have to wrap up, but when I
was here, if you could talk about race and class, you were cutting edge. If you could
talk about race and class and gender, then you were, like, advanced. And now I'm happy
to do catch up, because I'm finding that students are far more agile, and they're talking about
sexuality, and I think one of the sort of amazing things that's occurred is we think
about the tape inning of issues. You cannot, I think, be credible in this kind of work
if you're not mindful of all of these intersecting and simultaneous identities and how we frame
the issues, who leads, who follows, and what the agenda should be. And so I will say that
I have been happy to learn a lot from the students who have walked further than I ever
on some of these questions. So this has been an educative moment for me as well. And one
of the things I learn at Mizzou, and I credit this to the journalism school, is the idea
of being inquisitive, being a perpetual student, being a lifelong learner, and I think that
that has to carry over into how we make social change. And that's probably it. Thank you
all. [Keona Ervin]: Thank you so much.
[Applause] [Keona Ervin]: Thanks for coming. Thank you,
Professor Lang, for a wonderful lecture. Beautiful discussion. We have a book signing to follow
immediately even, you can finish your conversations. [Dr. Lang]: Make my press rich, because I
won't get anything.
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