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Well, okay. Well, thank you very much again. And thank again. Its an honor to be the kennedy lecture. And here. Is well, good evening, ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of all of us involved with Andrew Jackson hermitage, its my pleasure to welcome you, to our seventh president home. Im Howard Kittell president and ceo of the Andrew Jackson foundation. Today, there are few americans who are not in some way grappling with our nations history of slavery, how it shaped our countrys formation from the colonial era up to the present and how it impacts our lives today, however, its virtually impossible to come to grips with that topic of slavery in america without understanding the laws that both permitted and shaped the practice. Just as we see elements of ourselves in our ancestors. So our legal, economic and social system are rooted in the laws that surround it too, surrounded slavery. And fostered it. Professor sharfstein is the at worksafe. Mr. Page here. Apologies tonight. We are honored to have dr. Daniel sharfstein as our speaker. He will lead us on an explanation of the laws that were shaped by and fostered by racial inequality in america. Professor sharfstein is the and martha langston, chair of law and professor of history at Vanderbilt University. There, dr. Sharpstein teaches american legal history property and federal indian law is the author of two books, thunder in the mountains. Chief joseph oliver, otis howard and the nez perce war and the invisible line a secret history of race in america. Along with numerous articles and papers. Dr. Sharpstein is a research and writing on the legal history of race, citizenship and equality in the United States has received numerous awards, including the j. Anthony lucas book prize for narrative nonfiction, a National Endowment for the humanities fellowship and a guggenheim fellowship. He received his j. D. From the Yale Law School and his a. B. From harvard college. Once dr. Sharpstein concludes his comments. There will be time for your questions and his answers. If you would like to ask a question at that time, please step up to the mic and speak into. But please dont touch it. Ive been advised by many people and also, please put your cell phones on silence. So now please join with me in giving dr. Sharpstein a warm welcome on this cold night. Thank you so much. Thank you, howard. And thank you all. You know, we hardy few coming out on this cold night. Im delighted to be here at at the hermitage. Its a place that contains multitudes and really in my teaching of federal indian law. And when i teach classes on slavery in nashville, its really this this haunting monument for for me and for my students. I am very grateful to jesse lieb for for everything that she did to make this evening possible. And also to howard cattell. I teach at Vanderbilt Law School and i had the occasion to do some research in the papers of a prominent alum named cecil sims sims, graduated first in the vanderbilt class of 1914. He founded nashvilles most prominent, powerful law firm, bass berry and sims. He advised governors through the middle decades of the 20th century. He was a member of just about every board you could serve on in nashville. He was he was the kind of guy who would receive dozens of fruitcakes from his legion of admirers every every christmas. And he often spoke to third year law students at vanderbilt just before their graduate mission. Hed like to talk about a lawyer should aspire to to be, in his words, architects in public affairs. And when i read that, it immediately rang a bell for me. Its not unlike something that the legendary civil rights lawyer, Charles Hamilton houston, used to tell his students at Howard Law School that they should think of themselves as, in houstons phrase, social engineers working the levers of power and policy and and government and the law design in better worlds. The difference is that cecil sims was no civil rights lawyer among the many other things that he was doing, he spent the better part of two decades designing ways Southern States and School Districts to resist and to desegregate nation. So in the late 1940s, when the Supreme Court struck down segregated public graduate education, sims parlayed his seat on meharry medical board of trustees to propose what became known as the meharry plan by which the Southern States would purchase meharry to turn it into a separate but equal regional Public Medical School and then send all black medical applicants to usc and u. T. And georgia, etc. To meharry. The plan as he drafted it never mentioned a thing about race. He got the southern governors approval, but the plan died in part because of opposition from harris faculty, students and alumni. That experience stuck with simms. So several years later, after brown versus board of education was decided, simms went around the south, telling School Administrators and anyone else who would listen that massive resistance was unnecessary surgery. In his view, brown versus board of education didnt require much beyond colorblindness in official policy, and he knew that colorblind policy would barely change the status quo. Simms was a guiding force, became behind what became known as the nashville plan, which nominally desegregate it in one grade a year, starting with kindergarten in 1956 and extending to 12th grade by 1968. And because parents could easily request transfers for their children, the schools remained almost entirely segregated throughout that decade. Plus also at the same time, simms was a major behind the merger of nashville and davidson county, the creation of Metro Government almost, you know, just a little more than 60 years ago was motivated by all kinds of policy rationales. But one thing it did was it functioned to dilute the black vote in. From 40 to 20 . The campaign and favor of merger flagged the prospect of nashville having a black mayor someday unless the merger went through and the merger put nashvilles black community in the back seat through decades of city and county policymaking. So simms knew that the law could create rules and governing designs that would outlive overtly racist policy inequality can operate at levels that are unseen and, axiomatic, almost natural. But its not natural. Its built. Its infrastructural. So sims designed structures, right . He pushed for a gradual change. She pushed for lots of discretionary transfers, colorblind neutrality, a shift to suburban power. And these structures survive. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which basically spelled the end of overtly jim legislation and sims positions even came to define the middle ground. He was the picture of moderation when compared to cruder modes of passive resistance. No, that the end goals were the same with sims designs. There was no need for racists in order for racism to persist. Sims had many models and antics. Students for this kind of infrastructural lawyering have been asked tonight to talk about law and racial inequality in the United States. And i want to devote my remarks to what we could call legal infrastructures of inequality. I say interesting cultures, plural, because racial inequality is rooted in multiple, complex sources of laws. When i was thinking about what to talk about today, i had a lot of options. We could talk about criminal law, sentencing disparities, laws that give tremendous amounts of discretion to police and prosecutors and judges and wind up being applied unequally. Legal doctrines like qualified immunity that that shield police and prosecutors neutral about fines and court fees that shackle poor defendants in debt and inexorably lead to additional jail time and even more debt. We could talk about other topics entirely. Could talk about access to Civil Justice and the procedural hurdles that that courts have imposed for bringing lawsuits relating to civil rights and, employment discrimination, environmental justice, consumer justice, more requirements about who has standing to sue what kinds of information needs to be included in a complaint. All of these neutral or innocuous, often invisible rules. Yet theyre rules that increase the cost of bringing lawsuits and can put the Civil Justice system out of reach of poor people. We could talk about bankruptcy law, right. And how regulate the relationship between debtors and creditors and how Vulnerable People get trapped in debt and then find it incredibly difficult to navigate a system thats supposed to afford them relief and a fresh start. So many these Vulnerable People are sick people people who have Health Crises and our Racial Health disparity is actually deep in our wealth. Despair. These we could talk about public benefits, law commonly known as poverty law, which over the course of the pandemic revealed to millions of americans is what the chronically poor have had to live with. Right. Welfare, unemployment systems that are incompetent by design. Right. Impossible to apply to, impossible to wring benefits of. We could talk about elections law reduced felon disenfranchisement, all kinds of seemingly neutral rules that since the dawn of the jim crow era have functioned in jim crow era explore to screen out black Voters Registration requirements id laws. The the maintenance meaning the periodic purging of voter rolls rolls redistricting rules restricting early voting state legislatures controlling the appointments of county registrars and local election commissioners so that the statewide wide political majority can can control how cities vote that thats those are plays from a very old playbook and these are all neutral rules but when voting becomes harder poor people are the ones screened out of the electorate. We could talk about corporations law, how the courts override emphasis on maximizing value has affected workers and communities. You could talk about Immigration Law and how we regulate the border. We talk about federal indian law, the split of power among, federal, state and tribal authorities. And its a split thats mostly done through very dry and technical jurisdictional rules. But across the 19th century and into the 20th century, these rules plundering tribal land holding manufactured generations of poverty and among other things, have exacerbated an epidemic. Violence against indigenous women. Fortunately, all of us i dont have all day to discuss the many inequalities produced by law. So in the time that we have together, ill focus on one thing thats at the heart of my teaching property. Property is a big deal here in nashville. Its its big civil rights issue as housing becomes increasingly unaffordable. Some of you may noticed and every neighborhood gentrify at once. Every neighborhood in the whole city. A lot of inequality is bound up in issues of property and the laws that govern it. And in my discussion, i think what ill do is ill start in the present and then ill move a little bit back in time and, then move a little bit back further. And my hope is that we can reveal some structures that are not visible to us. So property law at root is the body of law that determines who owns what. And what it means to own something. Its intimately connected to individual dreams and individual aspirations, but its also about how communities form and are sustained, how get along and what happens when they dont get along. And whether and in what circles stances the government can enact that may affect how people use and value their property. Property rights are a core component of our democracy. Thomas jefferson envisioned republic of small freehold landowners as an the ideal of an independent and responsive polity in so many ways. Property sets groundwork for who belongs and who doesnt, who has a voice and who doesnt. Who gets to prosper . Whose children get to prosper . And who doesnt . Property laws at the root of who gets to live in a neighborhood, tall trees and clean thats cooler. In the summer, right . And who lives in a sweltering, treeless neighborhood surrounded by smoke spewing factories and crisscrossed oil and Gas Pipelines . Our racial gap is in part a reflection of who owns property and who does not. According to a recent Brookings Institution report, black homeownership rates are right around 45 , and white homeownership is above 75 . We dont have to look that far back to explain this, 30 differential. Housing remains profoundly segregated in 2023, which means the the. The baseline for for schools, School Districts is profoundly segregated. Right. Without aggressive Government Intervention and thats become less and less possible thanks to the Supreme Court. Right. Which which has demanded colorblindness in public School Districts. Continuing housing makes it easier for black homeowners to be systematically over assessed property tax. So the scholar Bernadette Atuahene has done revelatory work on overtaxation. Detroit just made all the worse aggressive foreclosure practices by wayne county and appeals process that are all but impossible to navigate. Housing segregation made it really easy for banks and Mortgage Brokers to steer black homeowners to subprime mortgages in the years leading up to 2008. And housing segregation means that when black people sell their homes, realtors systems underestimate their worth something that made National Headlines this past fall when two wonderful Johns Hopkins professors, Nathan Connolly and shani mott got a lowball appraisal on their home that affected their ability to refinance. When Interest Rates were at rock bottom during the pandemic. When connolly and mott took down all of their family photos and a white colleague show another appraiser around the house the value of their house miraculous only went from 472000 to 750000. Housing has made it harder. Achieve the American Dream. And for those who do manage to buy in housing segregation makes the American Dream worth less. And ive i have to mention one more thing over the last hundred years, black rural Land Ownership has declined about 90 , in large part because black landowners have seldom had. And when they die, their land has been split among their heirs in an ownership arrangement known as a tenancy in common legal rules relating to tenancy as in common allow anyone with an ownership interest to petition for a Court Ordered sale of the property. So over the course of generations, Land Ownership may be split. 50 or 100 different ways. And all it takes is for one person, maybe thousands of miles away, to ask to cash out. All it takes is for for a developer to find one of those people, make a deal with them, to cash out and when that happens, the property gets sold. When Property Ownership is unstable in that way, you cant get a home equity loan, fix it up. So the homes in the land from lack of investment in their values are depressed and when a court orders a sale, thats not the same thing as an open market sale. Time to get the highest price. So instead, theyre often very few and low bids that that wind up getting accepted. So these land dont help black owners generate wealth and their sales amount to very little. Its a problem known as heirs property. A Boston University professor, thomas mitchell, has done some powerful exploration of this and its a problem that is prevalent in rural areas. But we certainly see situations in places like north nashville where parents built the house. Now its owned by the kids. One may live in the house, but the and the rest may be relieved that someones there to take care of the upkeep. And thats all. Well, good until real estate values skyrocket like they did for nashville and you reach a threshold where each sibling can come away with a big, fat round number. Its very easy for nonresident siblings to force a sale. So these invisible rules about co tenancies are engines for for land loss and gentrification. So how do we get to this frankly grim present . Who created the ground rules or what created the ground rules . You go a little farther back into the 20th century and we can root segregation in racially restrictive housing and mortgage discrimination. So before the 20th century, housing in southern cities, for example, was not exactly segregated in way that would be recognizable to us. So block by black and white families lived proximity. You look at maps of places like washington, d. C. Or even birmingham, alabama and you might find in any given block, white families living along the street while black families lived along the alleys that that ran through the center of the blocks might not exactly together, but not segregated. New suburbs and. Progressive era social policy created segregated neighborhoods. In the decades spanning the of the 19th and the start of the 20th century and while the Supreme Court struck down a world war one era louisville ordinance that kind of resembled african apartheid, specifying who could live where a builders and developers turned to racially restrictive covenants, private covenants to control who could buy into a neighborhood and after years of skepticism about covenants. Courts in 20th century came to accept them as purely private agreements outside the scope of legal review. So thats a key legal move, a neutral move that allowed segregation to take root and thrive. Now, cities were segregating before the great migration and when some 6 million africanamericans left the south for north, the west and the midwest. And once the great was underway in earnest between world war one and world war two, as Richard Rothstein and others have shown, black, aspiring found themselves competing for minuscule supply in redlined neighborhoods where, thanks to new deal policy, banks refused to issue mortgages. As a result, black homebuyers paid outrage just sums, right . And theres high demand, low supply. Block buyers paid outrageous sums. And instead of mortgages, they often had to use exploit to give installment sale where the seller retained the title to the house. And if you missed one payment, then the seller gets to keep the house and you lose all the equity that you put in along the way. The historian beryl satter has brilliantly depicted the effects of all of this in chicago. The book called family properties, including the effects of this, including the density of black neighborhoods, the decline in Housing Stock to pay, the outrageously high install payments. There is no choice but to pack houses with tenants and those high installment fees siphon millions, millions of dollars that otherwise would have been invested into homes and neighborhoods and families. Now, in 1948, the Supreme Court racially restrictive covenants in a case called shelly versus kramer. The court and the acp both thought that this be the death of jim crow. Would be the end of housing segregation. And yet it persists. Decades beyond shelly versus kramer. Decades beyond the 1968 fair housing act. So why is there housing segregation in the absence of racially restrictive covenants . Entire metropolitan areas, right . Cities, suburbs were built around racial segregation. You know, see, for example, atlanta. Right. And whole economic ecosystems developed out of it. Right. From realtors to landlords. And the explicit legally sanctioned racism might go away. But incentives to maintain the status quo are ever present. Right. The Cultural Habits and norms of white homeowners fleeing black neighbors dont go away. Fair housing investigators keep finding realtors who steer black and white buyers to different neighborhoods. Mortgage practices from appraisal ads to credit terms maintain racial inequality. And even people at the bottom of the market are stuck. Financing with installment contracts with few of the usual protections that the law guarantees to mortgage holders. It can be hard to see the Structural Racism of the housing market, but it twists and exploits the dream property. It makes American Dream a dream deferred. So we started at the present. We went back through the 20th century to consider racially restrictive covenants and mortgage. If we go back even more, what do we find . My work focuses largely on the 19th century and, the civil war and its aftermath. And there we see government creating without ever so at the close of the civil war. There were 4 million freed people, people who had been held as slaves. But now were citizens. But what did citizenship mean when writing about the wars immediate aftermath . The history in leon litwack described the key question of that moment as how free is free. We had legal categories free, equal, citizen. But nothing really define them. Not the emancipation proclamation which proclaimed people as free, but didnt define. Not the 13th amendment, which just invalidated slavery and involuntary servitude. Not the 14th amendment which guaranteed equal under law, which established birthright citizenship but didnt define either. So much of the substance of black citizenship depended on what freed people claimed for themselves every day. But our rights, the scope of citizenship also depends crucially on the capacity government. Emancipate haitian was accompanied by the creation the bureau of refugees freedmen and abandoned lands, also known as the Freedmans Bureau. It was the big federal social Welfare Agency in history, like the bureau built hospitals and asylums and orphanages built, entire Court Systems and some of the first Public Schools systems in the south. It was tasked with really an enormous job to make citizenship meaningful for freed people. As part of that mission. The bureau was initially authorized to redistribute hundreds of thousands of acres of confiscated rebel land. And after the war ended, it tried to do just that with a policy that sought, continue and expand land on a wartime order. By sherman that we know as 40 acres and a mule. Land redistribution was an attempt to root black citizenship in. Property rights. So what do i mean by that . With a small plot of land to farm black families would have had the ability to feed and support themselves. They could withdraw from the labor market and not have to depend on getting work from from former slave holders. Or theyd be able to leverage their multiple options and demand money for their labor. Black property would have had the right to keep outside bidders off their land and the right to use their land way they saw fit, including having space for political organize. They would be able sell or finance their land and invest the proceeds they would have had the right to pass their land to the next generations. Property was the basis to survive and thrive. But in the summer of 1865, president Andrew Johnson insisted on giving the land back to the title owners and the head of the freedmens bureau, a former general named Oliver Otis Howard was the namesake for howard university. Howard was not a nimble enough administrator to resist what the president say by seeking allies in the more radical Congress Even land that black freeholders had been farming since early in the war in the South Carolina islands. At davis bend in mississippi, even that land was was returned to former rebel plantation holders at president johnsons insistence. Black citizens would not be rooted in property rights. Instead, it would be rooted in contract. This feels invisible or, at least buried. But by design the freed people were established as a landless hireling class by people who would have to work for wages to survive. They were endowed only in their ability to sell their labor. They were left at the mercy of local labor markets and. The boom and bust cycle of. International commodity markets. And they were forced to work for the people who had claimed them as property. Of the few who are able to acquire the property. Many work easily singled out murdered terror ized, forced to flee and then as my my colleague in the vanderbilt Political Science department, keri russell, has in tennessee, many of them formerly lost their land through a seemingly neutral process this like adverse possession and tax sales. This history is distant, but its enormously consequential. And without knowing it, we live with this history every day. One of the key determinants of wealth for africanamericans is, whether an ancestor owned land hundred years ago. If theres not much of a wealth gap. And if not, the gap. Is enormous. Without a basis in property. The structure of citizenship assures a widespread poverty that only a few can escape. When you dont have property in first place, its all the harder to acquire it. Politics and the economy in the south and then in the north to developed around africanamerican being landless and as a consequence of that, being easily exploited. Workers, people profited from that and had vested interests in keeping it that way. A more abstract lesson we can draw is that perhaps one of the harder legal forces to discern is the connection between our stated right to under law and the capacity and willingness of government to make our rights meaningful. When governments uninterested in enforcing or otherwise enabling our rights claims, or when government is actively working against our interests. Right. Something actually we know pretty well. We could just think freeway building through north nashville. Right. When thats the case, its hard to say that were free or equal. All right. Ill wrap up with one final perspective from history. So there are all kinds of deep structural legal rules that promote inequality throughout African American legal thinkers, whether theyre lawyers like Charles Hamilton houston or Thurgood Marshall or, lay people like ifb, wells understood that that connection between, law and inequality and at the same time they understood something else, that in all kinds of ways, law could be a pathway to equality. The first free people of color in colonial north america were constantly going to the courthouse to record their deeds and to sue over property and contract rights. Getting inside property regime created incredible possibilities for social mobility and uplift across generations. The first black lawyers in mid19th Century America found that admission to the bar meant admission to what the early lawyer, john mercer langston, called an aristocracy of eloquence. He found that courtrooms could be places not just where race didnt matter and where black and white professionals, by necessity, would have to work together. But it was also a place where, as a consequence of that, assumptions underlying race were revealed to be a lie. Similarly, black litigants and witnesses found space sources and platforms where they could speak truth to power and reach national audiences. You could see this in cases where africanamerican abolitionists are testifying about why they violate it the fugitive slave act and liberated people from slave captures. You see this in the nashville sit in trials in the early where people like diane nash were speaking directly to the nation. When Charles Hamilton talked about social engineering. He initially wasnt referring to civil rights lawyering. Actually, the historian kenneth mack discovered that houston was talking about lawyers who would be engaged in nation building by lawyers who could guide black families and businesses to make the most out of their property and contract rights. The law doesnt have to create injustice, but we can devise laws and insist on new infrastructure shares that foster freedom, equality are struck. So as a nation, particularly at this moment, is to think horror about how our laws and legal rules operate and demand something different. Thanks, everybody. So im happy to take questions. Yes, the question confuses me to the g. I. Bill and what that means in my home. Soldiers versus for soldiers. So a great question. So. There are i guess there were a number of programs that essentially are for for people leaving world war one. Im sorry, leaving world war two. Veterans coming out of the service. I you know, there was i a world of suburban tract housing that was opening up for them. And there were all kinds of easy terms. This was, you know, kind of broadly through federal mortgage policy. Lots of easy credit to these homes. And it was a moment when i you know, to to a large degree the white middle class grew massively at that poor white people that that became a much Smaller Group of people right at that moment. It was much, much, much harder for africanamericans to purchase property. After world war two. So the the kind of easy credit that was available to all of white people, veterans or not. I was frankly just not there for for africanamericans. By policy design that and actually integrated neighborhoods were viewed as bad risk for for mortgages under federal law. I and this is Richard Rothsteins book color of law really explores this in much depth that im able to talk about. But in a way to the extent that the federal government intervened with with respect to black housing beyond making the market to purchase homes very small, very expensive, very exploitative, a lot of federal effort was channeled to Building Public housing, right. Housing people, but not letting them develop equity and wealth in in property unlike white people. This process incredibly complex africanamerican people. But how much more is that compounded . Or are there ways in which this was easier for people of asian descent, for Indigenous People . What the Ripple Effect on other racial communities. Yeah, thats a great question. So for i indigenous families families, the from. About 1887, right up the start of the new deal, this was era that was known, the allotment era. So tribal nations had had their own territory. They had you know what we call reservations and i and there was a and they were owned in common by each nation. And in 1887, i there was a an act passed by congress, the general allotment act, also known as the dawes act, and the dawes act had the idea was an idea that was really thought out elaborately by anthropologists that if you break up tribal Land Holdings and give individual all native americans allotments, small farming plots that that would establish as a responsible citizens who are working hard for their farms and. Thered be no need for tribes. It was essentially a kind of policy that followed the logic of i, Richard Henry pratt, who is the founder of the Carlisle Indian training school, who said, kill the indians, save the man. But the idea was to try and completely rest americans away from any kind of form of tribal organization. What happened was these small plots were or carved up in reservations. They didnt take each member and divide the land holding by the number of tribal members. Instead, each got a small plot and then thered be this tremendous surplus left over that was immediately sold out to nonnative people. And then once native americans had their own individual allotments in fee, simple, essentially it as individuals own it the power to sell. There are all kinds of ways that people would be mired in debt and forced to sell, all kinds of ways that people would be assigned as wards to various guardians by courts who then would would sell the land themselves often would buy the land themselves and profit from it. And its one of the reasons why i, you know, landholding during that period. Tribal landholding fell by two thirds. And its why if you look at maps of reservation its today, often they look like checkerboards. If you look at who owns what, where there are all kinds of nonnative People Living in reservation and and its a issue that continues to define what life is like in indian country. So, you know, there are three and for some of the administrators on the federal side including people like Oliver Otis Howard was the Freedmans Bureau administrator who then rejoined the active duty military and and in fought in the nez perce war and and fought other wars to in some allotment was, you know, the kind of land policy that they tried to do for africanamericans during reconstruction were not allowed to do. Its this fantasy of reconstruction that, you know, they couldnt give africanamericans their 40 acres and a mule, but gum, they could do it for native americans. And the results of that were or, you know, pretty disastrous. And and really impoverished and eviscerated tribal nations. You there are plenty of families that still have their allotment of there are ways that tribes have been able to get all kinds of back and there are all kinds of new movements for getting land back. And so in many ways, you know, tribal sovereignty and tribal power is intimately linked with land and how land owned is, is something that is, you know, remains massively important, you know, for for other or other races, depending on where you were, there were, you know, different kinds of discrimination that followed. So you know, for for latino immigrants, there was there are all kinds of laws that resembled jim crow and for many, many years, there were all kinds of fights over these laws about whether they were racially discriminatory or whether it was about nationality or language or something else. You know, for i if look at i mean, really in in the west in texas. Right. You see those kind of discriminations and. There are, you know, in many ways for every i i immigrant group are a key to establishing a foothold in the country. And and, you know, being able, you know, establishing a foothold in apollo and really belonging. So much revolves around landowning. So actually, there is a theres a way a wonderful scholar named eleanor who has done really, really fascinating work relating to jamaican immigrants, to the United States. And he describes she describes them as she has an article, the blacks who got their 40 acres and describes how i their i i immigration practice involved doing all kinds things to as you know as a community to try and acquire land as much as possible as quickly as possible and how that was a key to just social mobility for for them as as immigrants. Yeah. When you talk about inequality. In property, you mostly talk about homeowner with private landowners, but that you spend more on how businesses work because and how black and white businesses were and are still affected by this important. Yeah, thats a thats a great question. So, you know, one way we see in nashville, for example, i think free Way Construction and the exercise of the Eminent Domain by the government has had an and mass effect on businesses. So you know you think about the construction i40 through the kind of a fisk Tennessee State corridor and that was a neighborhood where there are tremendous numbers of black businesses that were displaced, bought out, run out of business. And, you know, were not able to you know, some were able to reestablish themselves, but but many are not right for the ones that are left behind. Its a neighborhood thats torn in two by property values, diminished by the freeway. And it becomes very very hard to sustain a business. Theres a great book by Rachel Martin Vanderbilt University press called hot, hot chicken, which is about hot chicken in nashville. And the prince family are princes hot shack. And what i found really striking by her, by her narrative is about her narrative is the way that the princess kept having to move and how their neighborhoods were, you know, at various moments, know they they establish themselves in the neighborhood and the neighborhood would be destroyed in some ways. You know, you could go around. I, i downtown nashville. Right. Go to the state house. And if you look out the if you go to the back side of the hill that the state house sits on and look down, its kind of this empty expanse land that goes down to the Farmers Market and bicentennial plaza and and there museums and and this was a very dense africanamerican neighborhood called hells half acre. And it was all just wiped off the map. And that was, you know, urban renewal funds and there are all kinds of other places. I think whenever you see a plaque that says, you know, this important africanamerican church was here and its a government parking lot now. Then, you know, you have a sense of of how urban renewal. And i it freeWay Construction other exercise of Eminent Domain i get wielded like a weapon i you know its its a you know its something is really tough because you know governments need certain kinds of tools to to promote development. But for decades and decades decades i it had a remarkably surgical effect on africanamerican businesses and africanamerican wealth. And even today, when, you know, government is trying to figure out, you know, what land do we condemn to make something work . I mean, its very hard not to say, lets eat, lets find the the place where land is cheapest and where people have the hardest time fighting back. Right. People are all working really hard or theyre renting. You. Theyre there. And so, you know, thats something that is. You know, its history but its also our our present. Being real programs for hundreds of these ones that move that are in one place, which, you know, is going to be a bigger issue. Climate change, how you ensure that things are given the history of televising being the. I think thats a great question. You know there and its a question i wish i knew the answer for in in some ways i think, you know, you know, we would like our government to be. Theres a lot of controversy about what government can take into account and what it cant take into account. Right. But it seems like in areas that have been largely affected and shaped by Racial Discrimination and in areas where government conduct has traditionally, you know, for for decades in general and operated in a racially discriminatory way, you would government to be able to have the ability to think deliberately about what the effects. You know there are all kinds of cost benefit that governments do and it seems like, you know, a a i a cost benefit too to figure out, you know, what, what the equality costs are is is in order, you know, with with climate, with covid. Right. With all these crises that that, you know, keep kind of sweeping through, you know, one wave after another. We really see again and again and again the the disparate impact of of these crises. And in how well government responds for people right to extent people can say, our government is working us, you know, it seems like thats something that you know you would like to think i in an ideal world when when we need government you know we should be able to say, all right, we can count on our government to do something right. But instead it seems like, you know, so many of our rights are are and so many of our expectations about, you know, what government can do for what government is here to do. Whats purpose is. You know, in so many ways, thats you know, we we have this legacy that kind of makes it contingent. Right. Makes it, you know, as you know, when we talk about our rights. Right. That means Different Things to to, you know, different people. And unfortunately, you know, one of those i you know, one of those fractures. Right. Is about race. I think we have time for one more quick question. Anyone. Who if not, i want to thank you so very much and thank you for your wonderfully questions. I mean, i was so excited to hear the questions and the answers. So lets give dr. Church a round of applause. Hello and welcome. My name is daughter. Im so happy to see you all here. Weve been planning this event for a while and had to postpone it. And so im extra glad to have a full house

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