Mississippi communities counsel. We have anybody from the Advisory Board . Thank you. Also partner who just recently retired from congress from the mississippis third district. Thank you. [applause] our moderator for this session is a visiting professor of english and at the university of mississippi. The former editor of the quarterly review and author of two memoirs. Introduced our distinguished panelists. [applause] thank you all for joining us this afternoon. If i were to retitle this panel, i would call it family memory history and civil rights. Our analyst books all deal with those subjects. I want to quote from one of our panelists books books of history often help us we reach the present by explaining how people solve or failed to solve problems. Thats what all of these books really got is how we solve or fail to solve problems. His personal connection to the books that each of our panelists have they are going to, we will talk about this but first, let me introduce our panelists from the university of kansas is the author of book remembering until right here. His book hattiesburg American City in black and white. Next to him is ted, professor of history at university of mississippi and the dating family problems in the 20th century south. Next to him is rebecca whose books sisterhood, National Council and the black freedom struggle. From the university of southern mississippi. At the end, thinking on freedom, black women and u. S. Finance we are going to start today with professor starkey. Next welcome scott then rebecca followed by ted and ending here. They will do three to five minutes about the books and we will launch into a discussion about this idea of family memory history and civil rights. Thank you. I want to thank you all for your attention to this very important work. July 2 is a big day civil rights history. The birthday of marshall and my grandmother, actually. Its also the day they signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. On that same day in gettysburg, famous mississippi freedom summer. Its an incredible scene. Five black churches all over have these kids sort pouring into churches, they are excited to join the Civil Rights Movement. One of the people who came, and 82yearold man. Elementary school age kids, one of my favorites is one of the churches, they have to cut on off enrollment. The kids seek their friends into the church after being told they cant come. The incredible moment, my book started off as a journey to tell that story until i sat down, i wrote what i thought was a beautiful introduction describing what i just told you and then i said, okay, what is the energy come from parks where the churches come from the provide backspace when the movement is ready to explode, they have a home for those kids . Answering that question ultimately became that book. It now ends with freedom schools in 1964. What ive done here is try to answer the question about where this Movement Comes from. When did it begin . One of the different factors at play here . One of the things thats unique is that it is history, we read so many books about black or white southerners. The destinies of these communities were very closely entwined. The long interplay between the communities. The book is racially segregated. I gulped back and forth with white chapter, black chapter, white chapter and so on. But i do is try to tell the story of the communities. The white chapters are focused on the people, the local businessman from the founder of the town, people like that. The black chapters were more difficult. Writing southern black history and right history is like writing two different genres. The white people didnt store their papers in archives and talk more recently. I found a family into the leaders met community almost 80 years, i tracked the black communities through the eyes of that family. Theres a moment where i walked them out of their front door and went to the neighbor they lived in. I talked about how jim crow changed a great deal. Mississippi was not between them. The history of those communities, how things changed and where the churches came from that housed the Civil Rights Movement. We are told often times as professors and historians that our stuff is not interesting because we are writing about the wrong topics we need to write more about war and diplomacy and great whiteman and i did something i thought about his storytelling. The reason is because they dont have great character. People here are just interesting, they just are. The story of his family, i take them off the plantation. He followed them all the way to the Great Depression, world war ii and etc. Thank you. [applause] italy about the way that black women saved, invested, loaned and looked at money to achieve their vision of economic security. Individually for themselves and their families and also collectively to support communities of institution building. It looks at what was started in 1903, the first and only thank organized by working women and funded by working women from all over the country. Seems churches, cooks, tobacco summers and teachers, working women and it was led by a black woman. The book looks at the challenges that these women face in advancing their vision of economic justice. I acknowledge that vision is essentially american also very distinctive in that it tries to support and highlight the roles of black women, essential Economic Growth as providers in their families and their communities. I always wanted to write about black womens economic justice, activism because i think its really essential part of a political history and of movement about social change because societies and mutual aids in secret societies, their only possible because they have the money to implement the kinds of programs they want at schools and orphanages and build in the community. I was generally shocked near the end of the book that i actually connected more than a decade that i worked in the mortgage Banking Industry with my intellectual interest in these women and banking so i worked for about 12 years in the development and growth of the mortgage industry. Even as a loan officer i spent most of my time working as a Mortgage Loan processor. I thought i was really helping people, especially black women achieve their vision of the American Dream with these innovative mortgage products. It took me a while to realize i was really making other Loan Officers and Mortgage Bankers and other people leak wealthy. I was creating an american nightmare for many people but black women in particular. Resulting in foreclosures and basically widening the economic gap. So the book is kind of a way for me to make amends for that by kind of highlighting the challenges that black women have faced mark before the bubble popped into their engagement with capitalism in particular but looking at the ways in which they were able to rest from advantages out of this. This book is an ultimate story between their great successes and challenges they face in the failures, to that they have to work against. [applause] thank you for being here today. My name is rebecca. When i first began graduate school, i picked up on my love of social justice activism so i became interested in knowing more about womens role in the Civil Rights Movement. As i was doing more research on the role of women in the movement, i read different works that talk about women as organizers as the backbone of the movement. When i realized was that the organizations that were being looked at work male red. As i did more research, i realized there was no single monograph or book that looked at the largest black Womens Organization in the 1960s and 70s. The National Council of negro women. This was founded in 1935 by the great educator, she is also a strong Civil Rights Activists, a race women devoted to racial uplift but activism and she was also a wellconnected politician. But her idea informing the council was to bring together 29th black Womens Organizations to be a collective voice for black women heard to give black women positions of power to have them be in government spaces and in the boardroom so i realized i wanted to write a book that made a black lead, black women Led Organization front and center. What i recognized in doing the study is that civil rights means something different. When you look at a black woman lead, it not only means desegregation but also getting food, housing, childcare and taking care of the core and people who had been incarcerated in children put in jail and the Civil Rights Movement. I also in addition as i was studying for counsel from a modern organization, they are not trying to completely change the u. S. Government, they are interested in reforming from within. I called them a moderate group. I believe some start to overlook this counsel but the moderation is what enabled a lot of amazing activities on the council. They were able to take money from the government. Between 1975 and 1985, the council cap 1. 7 million from the u. S. Agency for international development. The also had a Foundation Grant of 300,000. They also hired Francis Beale who is a black radical woman who wrote an important piece called double jeopardy may shut up in 1970 and the founder of the black womens Third World Womens Alliance and the council had her on staff for ten years. She did this other activism also. The council also purchased the pigs, for counsel who did that. I want to remind everyone that the National Council is a volunteer organization. Women who are members of the council, paid their hard earned money for claims of Civil Rights Activities. Michael here is to eliminate some of the different Civil Rights Activism activities that the council was doing and show how the council was interested in putting black women in positions of power in American Society which is a very important thing they did and finally, continue to exist as a black womens mud, black women organized organization for over 80 years. As this organization they have honored and spoken the names of great black women including their founder, mary and longtime president , dorothy was present from 1958 1998 and one of the things the council did that i talked about in my book is they were the First Organization to raise a statue to a black leader or a woman leader on the National Capital on washington d. C. Property. 1974, they raised all the money on their own. Not a cent of government money was spent. Linkin park was erected in 1974. Decades before Martin Luther king had a statue. Michael here is to bring some of this work to life but hopefully also to inspire other people, especially members of the council to continue to write about the council. Thank you. [applause] thank you all for being here. Thanks for the book festival for putting academic scholars on the panel. Thats a blast. It started as a series of disconnected essays about different topics in family life in the 20th century and i thought it was going to be fine but its about words in our family life and ideas, worries and concerns, a lot of people talk about it, sing about, write about family life so much into the meanings of what they say and write and sing. The interesting thing that happened was as i was writing fees disconnected essays started to connect. I did not plan back and i in some ways feel more like friends in poetry and i have felt before and expected before. Not that it was any fun to read but nonetheless it is more fun than you give it credit. Thank you. Debating family problems, its not really about debating what it is about oppositions, arguments and disagreements. I mentioned three of us from the 50s to 70s to get a sense of what i was talking about. I write quite a bit about the concept of brotherhood and sometimes that is inspired by the significance of the final line of Martin Luther king jr. Sixteen times in brotherhood in the weather, the brotherhood activists turned into religious language, words of sacrifice and commitment, boundaries, cutting across categories and some people that if you truly believe in brotherhood and sisterhood those are used as a trish, deepest meaning of family. Part of why i founded it, its an interesting concept to use, so many people also criticized it. People like to criticize themselves for using not just brotherhood, they were brotherhood plus justice and part of commitment. Certainly people criticized the male emphasis and dorothy was the first founder in sisters and brothers but theres a lot of criticism from other directions that i mentioned, opponents of the Civil Rights Movement will be raised brotherhood ism. The concept of brotherhood has a theology of the segregation became something that the forces can be discount from wealthy, naive, soft language that they thought covered with a defined as radicalism. They said ultimately, we dont need brotherhood and sisterhood but we need more clear definition of parenthood and fatherhood and more clear assertions of authority and value. Theres something close to a debate about brotherhood ism. The popularity of the phrase became a conservative description. The second debate or disagreement of facing our family life with a range of people who thought about the idea of the socalled crisis of africanAmerican Families, they claimed that there was a crisis throughout American Family life and the government should have a plan for africanAmerican Families and that was solved for other problems and was amazed by the degree of opposition and frustration and response. My book hopes to help a little bit with understanding that frustration and anger in the response by saying a lot of the language about family breakdown and irresponsibility, thats what africanamericans have been hearing them say about africanamericans for some generations. To accept the premise of that report wants to go along with what a lot of the opponents were saying, including segregation. It was a sign of active stability and strength and agility and some said as they observed, they saw crisis and White American families. Cap lurched to my third point, in the 70s we see disagreements and uncertainty about a lot of southern groups whether there is a clear definition of family life and whether that is possible or dishonorable. It came in part as part of legislative debates about divorce reform, we are all happy about something we brought into history. Im happy to have brought divorce reform into mainstream southern history. It passed without a great deal of controversy but after it passed, it was widely condemned by a number of religious conservatives for those who described as part of one of several legal political world cultural and family life and became one of the things that were receiving opposition. I also talked about a number of white southerners would release some of the loudest voices in southern culture in the 1970s because they played guitars. They had to sink into microphones and they say that in the early mid 1970s, they cant stay with the same woman, the same house, i hope you understand that i was born free as a bird and i cant change from a court help me. Thats part of that as well. I didnt have a plan for this book saying that ultimately, you can draw a line from the jail, its just a way of making that point in truth i didnt know what was coming. Thank you for listening. [applause] let me add my thanks to the organizers and sponsors and ralph for pulling this group together. For the last five years, ive been working with the commission from tallahassee county to commemorate this. For the most part, its very practical work. Its making signs and creating smart phone apps. This work had an unexpected consequence, and unsettled three things that i thought i already understood. My book, remembering in itself is not actually about the murd murder. Rather, its about the story of murder in the ways the story has changed over time. Its a book about the ever shifting detail until the final night, the people and places who tell stories to make it served its own needs. Its less about trying harder and more about a story 60 years in the making. It suggests it tells stories passed down through generations, its part has been reshaped by racism and the oldfashioned pursuit of money into the distant fact of 1955. In my remaining two minutes and 20 seconds [laughter] let me give you one quick example. 2011, mississippi in that year, money was the beneficiary, to continence historical sites grant. The grant went not to the site, the only place in town was the civil rights history. Rather, it went to the service station 67 seats south because it was crumbling and stay at the grant application, the gas station had become a default lecture site from which tourist gaze at the grocery and learn civil rights history. The application put civil rights dollars like this its very likely the event had transpired were discussed under the front canopy of service station. With nothing more certain than the possibility that the murder was talked about next door, the department of archives and history 200,000 to civil rights and restoration. Renovations completed in 2014, it makes no reference in several rights history of the original gas pumps have been preinstalled from the living quarters in the back had been well appointed. Its not the end of the charming nostalgic. , it only colorblind the day to day life and what it might have looked like had racism not been through every facet of life. The report that the renovation is beautiful but these were not civil rights dollars and it was funded by the memory of the murder the gas station would still be. Making matters even more complex, they are both owned by the same family. This raises an interesting question. Why was the civil rights historical sites grant infected. Peace that obscured the history of race rather than a civil rights historical site especially when its nextdoor, owned by the grant deed selects the answer is not complex. The other children of ray tribble, unrepented juror until trial. The family is unwilling to allow for crumbling store to be turned into a monument and allowing two murderers to walk free. There south of the crumbling grocery. The former building has been beautifully restored and curated but by suggesting 1950 small town life was untouched by race, it makes the murder seemed like an aberration and thereby alters the meaning of the building, the one still in ruins, site. You see whats happening here. The story is achieved not by the facts of 1965 with greed and racism that are very much the present moment, if we can find the stories of 1965, we risk thinking that Racial Injustice is a think of the past. Or that the murder is a thing of the past. My book suggests the opposite. He is 64 years in the making and its not over yet. Its only by the full range of the story that we can appreciate the way that racism structures our ability to remember. [applause] i want our panelists to talk about this, this is the beginning of the panel, but these books do is, they explained how we have solved our failed to solve problems in the past and how sometimes even we are securing them in the present. We also have a very simplistic narrative about the Civil Rights Movement. So many people, after that, everything would change. Much what you see here, this is a much more complex. What is it from each of your books do you think would add to the complexity and richness of a narrative of civil rights in this country . Anyone can start that off. One of the things that is happening in my book is the White Community is undergoing its own struggles, trying to save the town over and over again throughout the Great Depression and world war ii, there are serious consequences that benefits the black Community Whether its resources going in or allowing africanamericans to get out of town, migration is sparked by these workers who arrived to take the lumber jobs so its the way race changed largely due to the larger economic factors. Without having any idea about how they might benefit from a new military base in world war ii. Advocate ties in with your work also, economics and race, what is it about economics race, it kind of changes the whole civil rights narrative or makes us think about different parks. One thing that helped in my book is to consider that africanamericans were economic disadvantage but it did not define or limit their vision of what could be. These women on the other side of capital, it talks about the kind of economic visions that black women have, not just for themselves but also their families so its about the way they raised the money that they tried to build wealth but they also challenge the kind of experiments that white reformers and military officers and even segregationists, White Supremacists had these ideas about the inherent laziness or lack of thrift or inability of africanamericans to handle the responsibility of citizenship so on one hand, these women really focus from art show that africanamericans are more than capable of Building Wealth and participating actively in American Society they are also fighting against people as they become more and more successful, their pushback against them. Theres always this give and take that even as they become acceptable, the stereotypes, there are other barriers put in their place. I also tried to show in the book that some of the assumptions from even that these reformers had about the ways African Americans are using their money, we can see them in a different way. Talk about the bank, they were organized by rights and they had an allwhite trustee board. They had the idea but consistently, putting money into your bank account was the way to instill or show these values of responsibilities but the reality of black womens economic lives, the difficulties they face to cover race and sexism from many women found it was a much more useful strategy to keep a bit of money in the bank and allow it to grow interest so you kind of see on the one hand as reformers are complaining about these women and these men, they dont know how to handle a bank account, people are actually being really strategic about how they grow their wealth and also they are preserving their own network. The book i hope shows away for these attitudes and stereotypes about how africanamericans use and spend and save money, theres a whole other story about how these alternate ways to use money in order to advance their own visions of economic justice. [applause] the changing comparative, the big part of what i think your work, its a narrative of memory. Absolutely. One of the weapons i have learned is that the usefulness of the Civil Rights Movement in the present day is going to turn on our practices of commemoration in the practices of commemoration, the way we go about finding our history and monuments, its not just as important but its very consequential. Thats why she calls this sort of work, memory activism. Using the past for the purposes of justice in the present. I tell my students that commemorative markers other new lunch counters. The 1960s during the movement, sidewalks and swimming pools, those were the places where racial politics are worked out. In our current moment, they are worked out at memory sites. Charlottesville or end times, time and time again, it memory sites that spurs our most intense dialogue about race. I lived on capitol hill for many years, i walked by and assumed i could see myself going past there with a double stroller. Seen that there and thinking about when that was installed in capitalism and 74 where the neighborhood is now, the idea of memory, everyone associates that with that, or was the talk behind that . It was a positive controlled site of memory. They deliberately chose linkin park as a site for that statute because of the Emancipation Group statute there in lincoln park. Its a statue of lincoln over looking at having hit its hand over a newly freed slave who is freeing himself product very patronizing. The idea of the council was to put it in dialogue with lincoln. Originally, lincoln was looking at the Capital Building. He was the only one in the park so he was looking at the Capital Building but when the council was working on getting the site set up, they were able to turn lincoln around so he had to look at it and they were very deliberate in that choice so they wanted to control but in a very moderate, quiet manner. Dorothy was able to have that statute turned around before anyone noticed. [laughter] thats how she worked and often times, counsel was able to get very radical things done. Ted has kind of changed the whole way, when we think about free bird. [laughter] i dont know how much we need to think about that. Timmy was divorced, you use pop culture as a way of talking about these larger historical issues. Talk about that context and culture memory. The title of the book, some of you will note immediately and some of your work. I didnt know where it came from, it was from the rce of mississippi, her first or second hit song but a songwriter who wrote it says, is hurting words, whats going on parks literally like he spelled out profanity or things you dont want the children to hear. The Lawmakers Said pretty much the same thing, we will have divorce reform so people dont, reconcile differences so the people dont have to go into court and say the worst things they have done. It was a writing way of doing things. Its always hard and complicated the question between what does the audience here and in my case, some young surprisingly successful white guitarist and seniors in the 70s but they same for a lot of people and the debates are still going on. Ill mention, i will turn from your questions but connect to the question, one of the ways, i ended the book pricing the debates are still ongoing. Questions of marriage and immigration and the definition of family, what you emphasize, how do you use those definitions for a range of things . The idea of a crisis of American Families recurs almost cyclically comes up with a range of questions but one of my more appealing moments in the book was, you know more about dorothy than anybody but most of us went. She was watching a Tv Documentary by bill, committed liberal journalists and saying all these years, the african American Family is still a crisis. Dorothy said we just cant deal with this anymore. Thats enough. Started the National Family reunion and said africanamericans, we are not a problem people, we are a people with problems. Bring together all sorts of people to talk about different types of families and definitions of families, Multigenerational Families by way of celebrating the national mall. Same kind of counter narrative to that, moral certainty and pity so following up on that but thats another story. I see that family threads through this but its a big part of your book, the narrative of that family, tell us a bit more about them. I think they are the rooflines to the narrative of the black community as opposed to the White Community which has this larger archival resource that you have to draw on. Tell us about that. I just want to add one thing, i work on campus, theyve been ripping us apart for a couple of years now, the people who are upset about that rule dont actually know much about historical nature. The book is a commemoration of the black community that didnt get to have a lock of her voice. I took World History and i was very lucky to have that. One of the sons of the family, i sat for years, i finally realized i could incorporate a black family throughout this and tell the story through the lens of them. By doing that, i get a bit of dialogue or things like that. This is a digital humanity product. Effective durational book. It couldnt have been written 20 years ago because i can now search databases to find them. One of the things i can do is to recreate their social lives. The black community in the early 1900s since updates. The white newspaper didnt put their stories in the newspaper. I can search it, i find what they are doing and going to church and participating in reading groups. Its something very exciting about writing applicant American History we can recover what was erased because they are included in newspapers and archives. Are to open up for questions from the audience. If you do have a question for our panelists, id like you to go to the microphone at the podium. Any questions for our panelists . Is this on parks. Yes. They can hear you with that one. I am patricia, im the legal project director for the mississippi immigrants rights alliance. I have more of a comment than a question. I enjoyed listening to all of you talk about your books. But i didnt talk about the raids last week, 680 migrants here in mississippi, he mentioned immigration. I want to make sure Everybody Knows theres a detention facility in tallahatchie county, its owned by a private immigration detention facility and also one in adams county. Its run by civic. Its run by the agency. I would challenge everybody in this room to understand that immigration is a civil rights issue that i believe we are going through right now and its an american issue. So thank you to all the panelists but i also want everybody in the audience to realize we are going through civil rights issues right now, the issue of migration. Thank you. [applause] i encourage you all to look at cnn. [applause] my name is christian and my question about that memory topic and you all think that some people get caught up in the memory, we are able to face the Current Issues we have right now today . Thats a fantastic question. I dont know the answer totally but it also works the other way around, if we dont have any memory at all, would also be destabilizing. Or debilitating. The trick is to as the monument tell us, we can do memory in a way that will help us handle crises in the presence. Its not about memory, its about doing memory right. Thank you. Im a retired journalist from texas and i now live in clarksdale. Im curious, i was a fascinating story about the refurbishment of the building. They left out any reference which seems like the whole point but what has been the reaction from the family that owns that place to your book that shows the folly of that project . I havent heard. [applause] thats a very short answer. [applause] my question, i was very struck by your introduction. I think there are a lot of people who are wellintentioned who have good intentions but are faced with realization that what they are working toward may have negative consequences or they may not be doing what is actually helpful. It sounded like you had that realization so what does it feel like for you being confronted, thinking you are doing good and then being confronted with the fact that you might not be doing as good as you thought . How does it affect other people to face that realization . It took me a little while to perhaps what i have done, is connected to what was driving me to tell the story. I think being honest about it, i did get a lot of pushback in the introduction of my book, talk about my experiences in the book and work that i used to do the things i saw in the industry, because i worked for a company, the First Company i worked for, there was an fbi investigation that found out ties and the last company i worked for are not the owner said i would make him million or, was smuggling hundreds of thousands of dolla dollars. But it did take me a while to kind of put together the kinds of inequity that i was surrounded by because i was immersed in it so i think being honest about that and thank you see the work and ideas and privilege the voices of people who arent often privileged in the kinds of stories and histories that we talk. I think its important to be honest about what you dont know and the responsibility you hold in advancement and inequalities and work toward listening to the silences. Reading against the grain and trying to recover in an honest way of these people who have been silent for so long. [applause] i work with the museums in jackson mistake history museums. A lot of work i do is what youre talking, family and narrative but the stories that are unsung, with william, i was wondering through your interviews and work with the family, his story in itself is like interracial relations, racial relations, economic wealth with his family but also the pushback to that. Thank you for the question. He was murdered in 1966. He is a product of this community that the primary family helps build. When you encounter them, he joined an organization that they are leading. Its a Voting Rights Organization Image in the 1940s. He was a young buck when he was coming up. This organization run by people who have been working together for decades. He was uncovering these deepseated Community Networks and institutions that allows the Civil Rights Movement to expand the communities in a way that it did in the 60s. Spirit i teach at the university of southern mississippi and they continue to think about memories. They continue to keep that memory alive up until the present. There will be a new statue going up on the Courthouse Lawn on the opposite side of the confederate memorial. When you think about memory [applause] , that is a product of that family. Im curious with respect to christians question, i would like to build on that a bit with respect to the way we view history through the lens of looking back at historical figures. This question is of congestion in the sense that, what do you think about this very moment in time that we are experiencing currently with respect to how you might view that as historians 20 to 30 years from now . What will we say about history . I could say what i hope for. I hope we remember this time as being on the verge of construction, we provide healthcare and education for every single american and we can do something about that. [applause] also related, we have a student right now whos working on these unsolved cold cases and whats really important is that they are looking, they are really working with the families who have been silenced and marginalized. They move on with these narratives we have overcome and that was in the past. Im hoping 20 or 30 years from now we will see theres a new generation of historians that are looking past the traditional sources we use and truly privileging forces of families who have been silenced for generations. Also im hoping for. Are to think this marvelous panel because privileging voices is a great way to close out the panel. I want to thank you all for coming. [applause] [applause]
comparemela.com © 2020. All Rights Reserved.