Transcripts For CSPAN3 Understanding Ferguson Protests 20150124

Reasons. We ask all of you to be active participants in tweeting. In toms place, let me Say Something i think he might have wanted to say about the importance of race and space and the importance of the ways in which policing have defined the spaces propriety of citizenship, in the United States of america. Ferguson brings us here. Ferguson is just a metaphor for an ongoing history that the state forces, that the white citizens that sees white citizens and class as the defining marker for the ways in which race continues to be made in the united dates of america. That said, i want to thank jim grossman from the American Historical Association for encouraging panels like this that link the past, present, and future. We all know as members of this august association that the American Historical Association has not always been responsive to contemporary moments and sometimes has been on the wrong side of history. We want to applaud the leadership in this moment for allowing us to come together and think seriously about how the past informs this moment. The format of todays panel each speaker will spend about 10 minutes speaking. They have been asked to prepare opening statements, which will range, i assume, from very formal to informal. All of whom will be important for shaping the conversation we will have with. They will speak in the following order. Colin gordon is a professor of history at the university of iowa and writes on the history of American Public policy and political economy. He is the author of american inequality. As well as dead on arrival, the politics of health in the 20th century. He has written for the nation in these times, z magazine, and atlanta city. He is a regular contributor and author of st. Louis and the declining and the state of the city. Colin will be followed by myself. I am the director of the schomburg center. I run my mouth a lot of different places and we will keep it moving. I will be speaking on the history of race and policing in a particular context. I will be followed by heather thompson, associate professor of African American studies at temple university. She will be moving to the university of michigan. She writes about race, labor and social move, and the cultural state in 20th century america. She is an author. She is the editor of speaking out protest, and activism in the 1960s and 70s. She just finished blood in the water, the attica prison uprising of 1971, to be published next year. She will be discussing whiteness and reaction to ferguson. Following heather will be jelani cobb, the director of the Africana Studies institute at the university of connecticut. He is a specialist. He is the author of to the break of dawn, a finalist for the award for arts writing. I have known him for 20 years. I am reading toms introduction. He is editor of the essential harold cruz, a reader. His forthcoming book is antidote to revolution. He is a regular contributor to the new yorker. His work has appeared in via the new york times, and other publications. Our panel will be rounded out i by marcia chatelain. She writes about africanamerican migration women, and girls history, and food studies. She is a member of the British Councils transatlantic network, a 2000 Harry S Truman scholar, and honoree. Her first book, southside girl, is coming out this spring. At the beginning of the academic year, she launched a collaborative online project to grapple with the ways to talk to students from Elementary School through college on the ferguson crisis. That work has been featured on National Public radio, in the pages of publications, and is a collaborative online teaching resource. She will be discussing on the teaching of ferguson. With that, i bring to the mic colin gordon. [applause] i just want to set the background by looking at the developmental history of st. Louis and its inner suburbs. This is, in many respects, a familiar story of sustained segregation in american metropolises, sustained by instruments like restrictive deed covenants and racial zoning , by the infamous fha security ratings, and other policies. I think if i were to fit ferguson into this story, i would underscore three thing. First of all, st. Louis is a starkly segregated setting marked by a northsouth divide you can see clearly on the map. Running out from the city, which the locals call the delmar divide, it is a Stark Division between white and black st. Louis. There is also what was commonly termed as a early and wall between the city and the county. What is interesting about this what we see is both the spectacular success and a spectacular failure of local segregation. Ferguson sits at the intersection of that. The second point that i would make in fitting ferguson into the story is that st. Louis like a lot of and western cities, is a remarkably rackmounted metropolitan sending in terms of politics. This fragmentation is designed to sustain that segregation over time, and in terms of the development patterns, the number of local governments in greater st. Louis, a metro area of under 2 million people, 214 municipalities, 100 of them in st. Louis county alone. The third point i would make is that the consequence of this in greater st. Louis and elsewhere is most starkly the gap between black and white wealth. From the survey of consumer finance, the difference between black and white income. The difference between wealth is much starker. Through the civil rights era, we have made some gains on wages and income, but the wealth gap is growing. That is all about housing. When you combine these stark segregation of uneven and fragmented governance and the wealth gap, you generate the story, i think, of an inner suburb like ferguson. What i show here is a pattern of this Uneven Development and annexation and the development and so the red ive just mapped Single Family homes as they are built in greater st. Louis. The yellow are the areas as they are incorporated and here is ferguson, incorporated in 1894. But you can see we get a pattern of private development, really out in the corn fields, that precedes incorporation. So what incorporation is doing is sealing the decisions made by private developers. And what that yields, among other things, in st. Louis county and ferguson is outlined in black and the city is there next to the mississippi, is a pattern by which the older residential footprint in inner suburbs like ferguson is a smaller residential footprint. So there is ferguson and the Square Footage is much smaller than the conventional suburban development. Ferguson incorporated in 1894 as an inner suburb. It is not a suburb in the convention of the word. And what this yields in greater st. Louis, again, combining the Uneven Development and sustained segregation is a pattern of first white flight and then black flight out of the city. And this series of map that go from one census to the next, the black dots increase in black persons and the white an increase in white persons and the decline in red and orange. And what we can see is the city emptying out of the white population. So in 1950 the city of st. Louis had approach legislation approaching 900,000 and now it is approaching 300,000. And what is remarkable, in the orange, you can see the first urban renewal project, the building of the Busch Stadium and clearance of mill creek valley, which expelled much of the black population into the north side of the city and by the time we get into the 1970s across the county line into suburbs like ferguson, the more affordable residential footprint. So what happens in effect, the del mar divide, which runs in this direction, is a hard and fast line of segregation in st. Louis, even today. But the county line is more fragile. And here is the instruments of segregation break down. So as people move out of the city, black and white, they tend to move locally. To africanamericans move out of north st. Louis into the suburbs of north county and whites move into central and south county for the most part. What does this yield . It brings with it a movement of concentrated poverty out of the city and into the north side. The red here are the tracks where income is less than two thirds of the metro average. And you can see concentrated poverty in the city of 1970 but as we scroll, this moves out into the suburbs and the larger outline is the Fluorescent School district and the smaller is the city of ferguson as well. And we can see this in the poverty rate, which is now as stark in north county as in the city itself. We can see it in the patterns of unemployment and especially youth unemployment. But we can see it in the sustained fiscal crisis in these inner suburbs. So here ive mapped the ability of local School Districts that generate revenue per student. And you can see in central county, you have a combination of high revenues per student on a very low tax rate. In north county and in the city, you not only have low revenue per student and high tax rates. It is more expensive to live in ferguson in terms of taxes than in much of central county. And what this fiscal crisis yields in part, which the rest of the panel can fill in the consequences of, is this pattern of what i would characterize as revenue policing in the county and in this recent report of better together, a local group in north st. Louis, shows to the degree that municipalities rely on court fines for a primary source of revenue. It is a bigger source of revenue than the property tax in ferguson. And ill leave it there. [applause] he was just heating up. [laughter] just getting good. [laughter] im getting over bronchitis so the more i talk, the more i cough. So ill mostly read from some things ive written about policing historically, because mostly i think at times we need to really appreciate how rounded a lot of the themes that emerge out of ferguson are. And just as a very quick aside to what colin just ended on, which i think would be a wonderful discussion point later to talk about what emerges in the post south of slavery with regard to profit driven policing and a Correction System designed to save the new south from its debts, from the civil war debts. It goes without saying that this is a long practice of seeing policing as part of a larger political economy. Police in urban black relations out of the south is the most under explored theme in Labor Relations in urban development before the 1960s. In labe and class biased and antipoor and antiimmigrant biases have many authors, more than a generation ago. Until 2009 and 2011, with hicks talk with you like a woman, lanes 1986 work, the roots of violence in black philadelphia was the only work of nonsouthern crime, criminal justice exploration to study americans outside of the south or i refer to here as the north. The urban north. Marilyn john said 2003, a history of Police Violence in new york city is the general policing of history. Given the limited work among historians and i want to emphasize here historians on the topic, the u. S. Riot Commission Report or the kerner Commission Report released in 1968 is the starting point in Public Discourse for untangling poverty and race. The kerner commission, ill remind you, made five recommendations for reforming Police Action in the area and more Police Protection of residents, independent citizen review boards and Citizen Input on new guidelines for aggressive patrol to minimize stop and frisk and five, develop community policing. Based on council before the police represented all of the prejudices of the criminal Justice System. The commission heard complaints of harassment of interracial couples, dispersal of social street gatherings, and the stopping of negroes on foot or in cars without obvious basis. Simply put to many black residents, police acted as agents of repression. Yet 1968 was hardly the first time liberal policy advisors particularly africanamericans had raised such criticism, with the exception of independent review boards, variations of of all the other reforms had been liberated since the migration period. Then in the wake of the harlem right of 1935, the call for harlem Citizens Police review board was issued. The parallels between mayor, the la guardia findings and the commission are striking. Among the findings and recommendations, note the similarity and tone with the current report. One, they show too little regard for fundament rights of citizens. And two, police aggressions weld the people together for mass action against those responsible for their ills. And three it is clearly the responsibility of the police to act in such a way as to win the confidence of the citizens of harlem and to prove the rights and safety of the community rather than enemies and aggressors. Oppressors. There is no reason to interfere with the rights of negroes. Officers who violate the law should be subject to punishment by the Police Department and action should be taken just as vigorously as others who commit crimes. I read all of those from the harlem riot report. Despite such observations, the author, e. Franklin frazier, the leading sociologist, he is known for his black family studies, not his antiracist critiques of policing. It is clear there was little political will to challenge racial Police Practices and policies in the 1930s. According to anthony plat, fraziers first largescale Research Report was undermined by the politics and the innovative and unique conservation to the literature on riots gathered dust on a shelf in city hall. By contrast, frazier Chicago School mentors Robert Parker and henry mckay spoke of broken home social disorganization is accompanied by personal disorganization and demoralization among negro adult and children, wrote shaw prepared for the wicker sham investigation. In a foot note they added the point of view is added by professor franklin frazier, by then using africanamerican experts to make legitimate common perspectives on black pathology. In the postwar period, following the negro family in the United States, published in 39, he studied black research in 1934 in the dilemma and then the tangle of pathology and so on and so forth elevated his research to a whole new level two decades later. Frazier also played a major part in the silence on his work around climb crime and policing. And in neither did he site the la guardia report. In text, sex or race are not listed in the class and culture integration. This is striking because in addition to leaving out the la guardia study his field notes and investigative reports have numerous examples of police corruption, misconduct and violence. Also telling is the fact that in his dissertation on chicago that shaw mckay paraphrases him from, he cited only once the most important study of Race Relations in the 1920s, the Chicago Commission relations entitled the negro study. The negro in chicago. At the heart of that study is a critique of discriminatory policing and its role of chicagos 1919 race riots. The ideas that showed in the kerner report showed ideas in the la guardia study but were increasingly addressed in the wake of the great migration. During the period, africanamerican liberal social scientists made lasting relations policy especially on the topic of policing. A new cohort of local activists began to take a greater role in the policing of white racism within black communities. Moving to the center of this work, the criminal Justice System particularly the most discriminatory orbs of releasing. There was a common trope of black liminality criminality that was defined in the wake of the end of the civil war than this 1922 report entitled the negro in chicago. Was the result of the stoning to death of a black child on a public beach in chicago, leaving 38 people dead and 537 injured of whom 536 were black. To investigate the right of 1919, the riot of 1919, the governor of illinois appointed a 12member commission, led by a black graduate student at the university of chicago. Johnson announced in the first sentence of the report, the crime rate of negroes is so largely controlled by a tangle of predisposing circumstances that it is hard to measure the factors. Discrediting the use of racial Crime Statistics, he said race was unimportant relative to the level of lawlessness, crime, advice in the whole population. Perhaps the most significant factor in a long list of problems is by a testimony of judges and criminal justice authorities were more likely to arrest negroes than whites and to convict them more readily and to give them longer sentences. One Municipal Court judge said he knew about Certain Police going into negro clubs and arresting black people and bringing them into Court Without a bit of any evidence. And another judge questioned why they were arrested for suspicion with regard to black men than a white man. I think they hesitate a little longer, when a white man is involved. Im certain that it is so. A former chief of police agreed, noting the southern migrants naturally attached greater suspicion then one of the white men who had lived longer the district, and could be more easily identified and traced. Rather than arrest the white man , the police would simply observe him, where is with no doubt if they permitted the colored man to pass, they would lose them completely. Such startling testimony coming from within chicagos white criminal Justice Committee was strong evidence of the subjective nature of racial Crime Statistics deeply influenced by the social culture and belittle context in which they were created. Situations created such obvious dangers, the Chicago Commission avoided giving currency to figures that carried clear evidence of their owner their own inaccuracy and misrepresentation. The commission abandoned the attempt to work out crime tables. The stakes of what is happened in ferguson are themselves evident of this history, not sticking over about 100 years ago. But also the ways in which the problem identified has actually grown worse. Moving forward here to get to that quote. In a december 22 cnn interview new york city mayor rough giuliani gave an interview where he generally blamed the diane diein and the black lives matter movements for the murder of nypd officers ramos and liu when he said Police Officers are not racist. The main problem is crime in the black community. The mayor and the attorney general are perpetuating a myth there is systemic Police Brutality. If they would Start Talking about more work in the black community, the responsibilities of fatherhood, maybe ramos and lui should be made heroes of the black community. And the children of black parents in this city are being saved by our Police Officers and during the time i was mayor, and i dont mind saying this, i saved more black lives than any other mayor in the history of this city because i was not afraid to police according to statistics. If i was a black father and i had a son, there is less than a 1 chance my son is going to be harmed by the police. There is a 92 chance my son will be harmed by another black. Giuliani is reading from a centuries old racial script called out by earlier critics, going back to the 1922 chicago Commission Report. Let me move to a conclusion here in the interest of my colleagues who have waited patiently for me to stop. In the late 1940s, the new york and brooklyn naacp made Police Brutality, quote, their top priority and organized vigorous campaigns. In detroit they found survey data from the 1509s showing the the 1950s, showing the Police Community relations is what most encouraged them to participate in the civil right movement. In the 1960s, Detroit Police lit the powder keg of racial conflict that exploded into a full blown urban crisis. Ultimately the interwar evidence leaves little doubt that africanamericans had clearly demonstrated how much Police Reform lay at the heart of transforming Race Relations in the nations biggest cities long before the 1960s. The silence and denial among politicians, the white public and policymakers remain as much a problem as it had in decades. A gallup report in 1965 that 90 35 of men in harlem believed that police retaliated, compared to 7 of white men. They thought the police needlessly pushed people around by comparison to a quarter of white residents. The stark difference in black versus white perceptions of Police Reputation are a stark difference. According to political scientists robert vogelson were not subject to race prejudice. By contrast, quote, most police are prejudice against negroes, he wrote in 1968. Police officers cannot differentiate between ordinary negroes and negro criminals. To them, few negroes are worthy of respect and fewer are free of suspicion, echoing what Jeff Leroy Seward said in the chicago report of 1922. 95 years ago Charles Johnson chicago writer was off to a promising start with two of the nations premier criminologists and fraziers research silenced them and other black criticals. As the late 1960s gave rise to the right in the 90s. Three quarters of a century worth of policy recommendations remained unheeded. The policy prescription in 1968 continued to fall on deaf ears. What is possible to say given the evidence that the negroes reaction to police is justified resentment of the police is in large part justified, and the responsibility for avoiding this rests not only with White Society come about with Police Department particularly. Thank you. Good morning. Thank you yes, thank you for making it out here this early. I want to echo what khalil said, thanking the aha to give us this opportunity to talk about history, but also to talk about a moment where history is very clearly being made, both in ferguson, but also in new york city and boston, and chicago and philadelphia, and every place else the right now is really renting is of all of the fallout from the history that both colin and khalil gave us vital background in. And because i knew we were going to get this deep Historical Context in which to understand ferguson, i decided i would take my remarks in a slightly different direction and put in my two cents, more from the perspective of where does this leave us today and what are the implications of this for us as historians . In part, that is because one of the things that has been, i think him a really exciting about this moment of being a historian and in part that is because one of the things that is that we are finally being asked to weigh in on some of these contemporary events, to make sense of why they are happening to explain to broader public audiences why they matter. And so im going to bring my remarks to you from that context, having written a lot of recent pieces on ferguson and policing in new york city and also having spent some time in ferguson. So i want to make a few remarks about why it is that ferguson matters to us both as citizens but also as historians. And the first thing i want to say is that i think one of the really crucial things that ferguson did, was it brought to the public discussion, something that has been oddly missing from all discussions that weve been having about mass incarceration, which is policing and overcriminalization. In this strange turn of events weve started to talk about the prison crisis and the need to decarserate but we have not talked about the feeder to that crisis which is over criminalization and policing. There is a weird disconnect between those discussions and i think one of the most important things that have happened as a result of ferguson and also events in new york city and in cleveland was that we are now finally beginning to have this discussion in the National Dialogue and have a National Dialogue about the need to reign in excessive, overzealous and unnecessary Police Practices about the problem of over criminalization poor black and brown that are the feeders for mass incarceration. But i think ferguson matters because it changes the National Dialogue but i think it matters because it has reminded us and we always knew this as historians, but it has reminded us as citizens of the really important lessons that we must Pay Attention to from the past if we will have any hope whatsoever of understanding where we are today and what we might do differently in the future. So it isnt just about changing the National Dialogue about today, but it is also about understanding how things unfolded recently in ferguson and why they unfolded the way they did. And weve gotten a lot of that here from both colin and khalil. But what is really interesting to me is how little of those stories and khalil made this point, have made it into the National Media discussions of these events. Politicians, pundits, major Media Outlets have tried to explain what has happened in ferguson or try to explain what happened in new york city. But they are woefully historical ahistorical in doing so. So it is always about bringing up the same old tropes as khalil pointed out. Giuliani is an easy target but giuliani is in some respects far less alarming than just listening to msnbc reporting or regular cnn reporting regular abc reporting about what has happened, which is that we see the same old parenting parr oting of old tropes about protest and violence, and stories that proclaim the bewilderment why black folks in ferguson are so fed up and griefstricken and so angry and filled with anguish and headscratching bewilderment. What is going on . And far worse, i think countless stories that ferguson has been couched within that assume the criminal Justice System is that the grand jury process. The criminal Justice System in general is in fact impartial. In fact, unbiased. So if something went wrong at ferguson or if something went wrong in new york, it really was exceptional. Something went wrong. There was the wrong people on the grand jury or maybe the prosecutor did something wrong or maybe there was some kind of ineptitude or Something Weird or exceptional about this. And so i think that at this moment, particularly poor people particularly for people in the a. H. A. , to really kind of feel the importance, the weight of what it is that we do. Because it is really about reminding the nation as weve already heard this morning about where the ways in which we have indeed been here before and again and again been here before. So that what happened to eric garner or Michael Brown or camminy gray or shawn belle or oscar grant or ricky aboyd or bet smith or tamir rice or i could go on and on, is a deep, deep history that clearly will be forgotten and not brought to bear on contemporary news stories unless historians are reminding again and again of what this story is. So i think that we have an obligation to weigh in on these discussi we have an obligation to remind again the nation that ferguson does not happen in a vacuum. That eric garner that the grand jury decision did not happen in a vacuum. That weve not only been here before, but that in some respects were here worse and i want to talk about that in a moment. There is nothing new about the anguish, there is nothing new about the rebellion and there is nothing new about the origins or the criminalization and the excessive policing that has caused it. Event the recent events in new york city, the incredible hostility to the mayor when the mayor makes even rather benignly critical remarks about policing in new york. Again, not new. Weve seen this in detroit in the 1960s, in many different cities. So ferguson made it clear why we need to continue to show history in its unvarnished and uncomfortable ugliness. And it is also important i want to close with two final points of why i think this is important. Thinking about ferguson historically not only allows us to understand why the past happened or to help other people understand why the past happened or why ferguson went down the way it did, but it makes Crystal Clear what the stakes are now if we seek to make Something Different of history, something to finally turn this kind of historical trajectory around. Yes, we need to recon with the fact that we have come full circle in so many respects. Back to the 1960s, back to the 19teens. But what it really reminds us of how much work needs to be done to undo the ugliness and injustice in this country. And i want to be specific. One of the things that ferguson reminds us about is that racism is not only dead, but this is something that khalil was hinting at or didnt say overtly, but it is more feral and viralulent than ever in this era, this age of alleged post racialism. And so one of the things i want to leave us thinking about is not just that ferguson is important because it shows us the importance of history, not just to remind us we have a job to do in Public Discourse but also, this is an opportunity to really reckon with the damage done of postracialism. It isnt just that we dont have a color blind society. I think what ferguson and recent events in new york have shown us is there has been much, much damage done by the myth that we ever do, by the assumption that we ever did. Because in fact, what it has done is it has made racism so much easier to espouse, to spout and wrap our heads around stories than it has been in decades. And this is complicated. Why . It is not just postracialism or the myth that allows whites to say im not racist, but also the whammy the doublewhammy done by 40 years of a war on crime and mass incarceration and overcriminalization and the cementing of this relationship between blacks and criminality that khalils vitally important work shows us the origins of but 40 years of war and crime has recemented. Aa cemented it. Doubley cemented. And in all of the work ive done in ferguson and policing, the virulence in white hostility to the critique of policing or to the critique of our criminal Justice System is kind of shocking. The social media virulence that i have personal experienced from daring to write about this stuff reminds us of not that we are here again, but that we are in a much worse spot than we might have been had we not had many years of this kind of myth of postracialism. So i want to end by saying, i think ferguson not only reminds us of the things i just said but i think it reminds us that this next this next moment of history, the battleground that the battles that need to be had against overcriminalization and excessive policing and at bottom against White Privilege and power and supremacy. They are going need to need to be waged everywhere. One of the most striking things about ferguson, and i will share with you, about the 1960s. You would fight racism into the rural south because that is where the clan was or in inner city detroit because that is where the Police Brutality was and it was everywhere, but we are really reminded it is everywhere. Because when you go to ferguson, what is so striking is it is so suburban feeling. You are in ferguson and you understand where the National Guard was doing the staging was next to the Payless Shoes an the target. And this startling revelation realization that the next history we are writing about is about tackling that kind of racism and White Privilege ever and real quite privilege everywhere. Quite privilege White Privilege everywhere. In front of the target and the payless and at msnbc and cnn not just with the overtly racist messages of somebody by rudy giuliani. Any way, food for thought. Thank you. [applause] good morning. Good morning. Im happy to be able to participate in this discussion this morning. There are lots of insightful things to be gleaned from what people have said already. Im also very happy to see a good number of my cohorts from Rutgers University as well. [laughter] i teach africanAmerican History at the university of connecticut and im also a contributing writer at the new yorker. And so in that capacity i think of myself as someone who has one foot in the past and also who is chronicling things in the present. And for me personally, i appreciate the way these two things interact. Im able to understand the past better, via the work im doing in the present and then understand the present better as historians must via the work we do in the past. I spent an editor sent me to ferguson in the i think the five days after the shooting on cantfield drive at the heart of the conflict that has gone on now and emerged from that and i made three subsequent trips. I was in ferguson four times in total. And i just want to read a little bit of what i wrote from the dispatches i wrote from there. But before i do that, i want to give you a little bit of context. So what you gain, or what you understood or i understood from being in ferguson was an experience in which it appeared to me that my syllabus had jumped off the page. Because very many of the dynamics that ive been teaching about in my 20th century africanamerican class came to a confluence on the ground in ferguson. And one of the fundamental misunderstanding, when we have the conversation publicly and look at the polling, two thirds of white st. Louis area residents believed that the Police Officer acted justly and correctly in firing upon Michael Brown. About two thirds of the black community thought just the opposite. And the conversation that emerged from this was about what happened between Darren Wilson and Michael Brown on canfield drive on the afternoon of august 9th, 2014. But when you talk to people in that community, that was not how they understood it. They understood and we think of ourselves as historians to provide context and we forget people and are enter a community with context of their own and they were much less likely to talk about what happened between the two individuals and much more likely to talk about the context in which it occurred. And this came up again and again. When governor j. Nixon came to talk the first week to talk to the Community Members on canfield drive, it was shocking at first to see the number of questions they posed to him that had nothing to do with this incident. People were raising questions about why schools were being closed. They were raising questions about why the tax revenue was or why Municipal Revenue was being generated through Parking Enforcement or through traffic fine enforcement and so on. And so they understood the dynamics as being much broadly based and much deeper historically. So the community there, the conversation was people explaining to me the importance of the dred scott decision in missouri and how that connected to what happened in ferguson. The other thing that people talked about was the destruction of the pruitt igo housing project, one of the first projects and urban blight that came out of housing in projects that came at the same time that the suburbanization that we are talking about here took place. So in addition to that, there was another dynamic in which it was kind of what i wrote about this was called chronicle of a riot foretold because it seems to resound with the same sort of themes that we encountered in the marqueznovella. Chronicle of a death foretold, in which everyone knows that a story will turn out in a particular way. The death of the protagonist has been foretold at the beginning of the story, yet no one acts in a way that will prevent this story from playing itself out in the way that it did. Finally contextually, one of the first things that was said to me when i began talking to residents on the white side of town, the two streets, both called fluorescent. South fluorescent street is the commercial district with the Police Headquarters is and where restaurants and middle class and upper middle class weights whites particularly live. West is the community, the street that is adjacent to the community where Michael Brown was killed. So when i began talking to people on south side theres no , need for the media to be there to stir up trouble because quote, our blacks here are happy. I thought that was important. I mean, outside of the kind i thought it was important because it went to the constructive reality between the difference on what people on south fluorescent could understand and what people on west fluorescent were screaming at the top of their lungs. Quickly three dispatches i want to read here and ill sum up with a couple quick points about this. This was from the first night i was there. Nothing that happened in ferguson, missouri, since Michael Brown died at the hands of a Police Officer there dispelled the notion law that this is a place where Law Enforcement was capable of gross overreaction. Just as the sundown on wednesday, local and state officers filled west fluorescent avenue, the main thoroughfare with massive clouds of tear gas. They lobbed flash grenades at protesters gathered there to find answers and at times propelled them down the street. That they ordered the crowd to disperse was not noteworthy, that the order was followed by successive waves of gas hours after the protest ended became an object lesson on the issues that brought people to the street in the first place. What transpired in the streets appeared to be a kind of municipal version of shock and awe. The first wave of flash grenades and tear gas had played as a prelude to the appearance of unusually large Armored Vehicles carrying militarystyle rifles mounted on tripods on top. The message of all this was something beyond mere maintenance of law and order. Its difficult to imagine how armored officers with what and appeared to be a mobile military snipers next could quell the anxieties of a Community Outraged by allegations regarding excessive use of force. It revealed itself quite simply as a matter of raw public intimidation. From the night in november when this when the grand jury decided not to indict Darren Wilson, for 108 days through the suffocating heat that turned the city into a kiln, through the summer thunderstorms and on set of an early winter, through bureaucratic callousness and barbs of cynics who held that the effort was of no use and the prickly fear that they might be right, a community in ferguson , missouri held vigil nightly driven by the need to validate a simple principle black lives matter. On november 24th, 2014, we learned that they do, indeed matter just less than others. Less than the prerogatives of those who wield power here. Less than the cynics might have suspected. Last night the streets of ferguson were congested again with smoke and anger and disillusionment and disbelief and also with batons and the malevolent percussion of gunfire as hundreds of uniformed men brought here to marshall and display force. Just after 8 00 on monday evening after a rambling dissertation by prosecutor Robert Mcculloch has placed blame for the tensions on social media and 24 hour news cycle and ended with the indictment would the announcement that the officer would not be indicted after shooting Michael Brown six times. The crowd at fluorescent road began to swell. The mood was somber at first. But some other sentiment came to the fore and their restraint came unmoored. A handful of men began chanting fuck the police. Officers in riot gear gathered in front of the headquarters. Gunshots, the first i heard that night, cut through the air. 100 people began drifting in the direction of the bullets. One man ripped down a small camera that had been mounted on the telephone pole. A quarter mile a crowd encountered an empty police car and within moments it was aflame. A line of Police Officers in military fatigues and gas masks turned a quarter and began turned a corner and began moving toward the police building. There were 400 protesters and nearly that many police of, one side demanding justice. One side demanding order. Both recognizing that neither of those things was in the offing that night. The final part im going to read is just contextual. When people talk about Michael Brown, the immediate reference that people had in that community when i came there, the immediate reference they had was to Trayvon Martin. It was a kind of tragic irony implicit within this because Trayvon Martins father was from this unity. He grew up in east st. Louis. He was coming to st. Louis proper about a week after Michael Brown was shot as part of a Community Peace festival, a festival held every year to discourage gun violence and encourage peace and have kind of a functioning community. So he was there to recognize this. People saw these immediate kinds of connections between them. But also to the broader things happening outside of just ferguson, missouri. Coming two weeks after nonindictment of officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown, the nonindictment of Daniel Pantaleo in the death of eric garner has a feel of a grim serial filled with redundant plot lines, a production few of us wish to watch but none of us can avoid and a great many of us are complicit in creating. This is not imaginary. Here is the man who aspired to become the first black president counseling calm following the acquittal of five officers who shot and killed sean bell, an unarmed black man on the eve of bells wedding in new york in 2006. Obama says obviously there was a tragedy in new york. I said at the time without benefit of all the facts before me that it looked like a possible case of excessive force. The judge has made his ruling. Were a nation of laws so we respect the verdict that came down. Here is that same man, having now attained that office counseling calm in the wake of George Zimmerman who killed a 17yearold Trayvon Martin another unarmed black man in sanford, florida, in 2012. The death of Trayvon Martin was a tragedy, not just for his family but for any one community in america. I know this case has elicited strong passions. In the wake of a verdict, i know those passions are running even higher. But we are a nation of laws. And a jury has spoken. I now ask that every american respect the call to calm reflection from the two parents who lost their young son. Two weeks ago we saw the president , now in the last years of his second term urge patience following nonindictment of Darren Wilson who shot and killed the 18yearold Michael Brown, who was also unarmed. First and foremost this is obama. First and foremost, were a nation built on the rule of law. We so so we need to accept this decision that we excuse me. We need to accept that the decision was the grand jurys to make. There are americans who agree with it and there are americans who are deeply disappointed, even angry. Its an understandable reaction but i join michaels parents in asking everyone to protest peacefully. So i just want to raise one point theres a kind of imaginary contradiction in this conversation where we believe the rule of law applies to how people respond to the official handling of a death of an unarmed individual. However, the protesters themselves making a statement that there is a rule of law. We are a nation of laws and that no one is above the law, including those who are empowered to enforce it. So weve seen this theme play itself out consistently. The final point i will make here is beyond the issue of voting patterns in ferguson, beyond the issue of the School System which lost its accreditation and the ouster of the only black superintendent in the region art mccoy in ferguson just about eight months before this shooting happened, beyond the discriminatory housing patterns, beyond the fundraising via traffic tickets, what i took away from ferguson was a profound sense that the people in that community, rightfully so, believed theres a great difficulty on the part of Many Americans recognizing their humanity. To the extent that they are correct and to the extent that remains the case, were almost destined to see more circumstances in which some future president will counsel we remain calm in the face of injustice because we are a nation of laws. Thank you. [applause] good morning and thank you for coming to this panel so early in the morning. I appreciate and im really moved by the excitement about this conversation. Just a few things before i talk about my experiences teaching ferguson and engaging people on twitter with ferguson syllabus is that one of the things in my biography im most proud of, im a graduate of the university of missouri. I think my education and desire to enter the profession started there. It started there because i was acutely aware that as an africanamerican student in the early 1990s and 2000s, i was among a small group of students on the campus. I was reflective of a trend that as i grew more politically aware i realized was a problem. I was one of many out of state students who went to the university of missouri on a series of minority scholarships that were available at the time. I always thought it was interesting i let more people i met more people who were educated and raised outside of the state than in the state among students of color and i started to about that. The reason i bring this up after i graduated university of missouri and went on to graduate school, i thought it was really important to try to make a difference. So i taught high school in the summers at the university of missouri campus. During this time is when i got my education in missouri vocabulary. City versus county. I go to a magnet school. I go to a school that had deseg money. Im from kansas city and my school got closed and then it got opened again. This was a very early model of the charter system, pepsi challenge those from missouri. Google it. Its interesting. So i think my experience in missouri heightened me to these dynamics that would not only shape my research but shape my teaching. The second thing that happened in the summer that i think is important in my decision to teach ferguson the way i did, i had a conversation with jim grossman. Any time jim grossman asks me to do something i do it. I dont ask any questions. He said hes really concerned about the way historians were explaining to students why we study history. So theres that annoying thing people say, we study history so we dont repeat it, but no one has ever done that so its not true. How are students going to think historically about problems in front of them in the working world . I went home and changed my syllabus to be more active helping students connect, why we know something and how we solve problems. The third thing to give context, i finished my manuscript, so i spend way too much time on twitter. One of the things that i think is interesting as twitter, as we talk about it as an organizing tool. I think for us in the impression in the profession, its an incredible Networking Tool for junior scholars like myself. I wanted to think of it as a teaching tool. Some scholars have used it to have students talk to each other and do different projects. All of these things were swirling in the back of my mind as i watched ferguson unfold. As i heard from friends on the ground as organizers, as attorneys, people from missouri really grappling with whats happening. So when i asked educators to develop the to devote the first day of class about teaching about ferguson, it was kind of a way to in a sense bully people into talking about this because i was so concerned about what my students were feeling as they were coming into the school year. The other thing that happened, i did the math and i thought, oh im going to talk about ferguson in the context of los angeles in 1992, and then i realized most of them were not born yet. For many of us who have this moment, oh, they dont have context for this, of watching unrest unfold on television all day and all night, so i wanted other people to do it. What happened was other people got really interested in it. So at first i thought i was just talking to the other people who i know on twitter, then people were contacting me directly and saying i teach at a school in utah. We dont have many students of color but i know that this is important, what do you think i talk about . So i started tweeting suggestion for books. Most of them were history books. Thats what i know. When i didnt know something i was asking people to tweet out different ideas. The second thing that happened people said, okay, i have this information. I dont know what to say. I dont know how to start this kind of conversation. One of the things i think is very difficult for me is that i feel like im always having this conversation. Who is not talking about race all the time, at home, at the supermarket, at the gym, at work . This is the world i live in as a scholar of color. I realize everyone lives in a different world. Instead of getting combative or upset about that, i say, okay, what down you have to offer and what do you think you have to offer, and how do we work from that place . What started as a suggestion about things to read turned into how to talk about this turned into scholars talking to each other about talking about ferguson. Just kind of four quick takeaways ive had from that experience. The first one was its an opportunity for those of us constantly talking about race to remove ourselves out of the isolation of that experience. Due to the makeup of a lot of faculties and a lot of institutions across this country, there are very few places where theres a Critical Mass of scholars of color. As a result, as a scholar of color, sometimes you feel youre the only person doing this, and it was nice over this great kind of digital landscape to talk to other people who did this and talk about how it went. The second thing i got from this experience is the amount of time i dont spend in the k through 12 world. Ive had experience teaching high school. Ive had great experience teaching programs with girl scouts particularly their programs for girls who were incarcerated but i dont know a lot of third grade teachers. I dont know a lot about fourth grade teachers. This experience about teaching around ferguson brought me into contact with all these people who their challenges for teaching this stuff is very real. I know we often talk about Academic Freedom being suppressed and there a lot of pressure. When youre a sixth grade teacher and youre saying my kids are crying about ferguson Michael Brown, i want to talk to them but my principal says under no circumstances will do you will you do this. How do i work around this. This is really a civics lesson. How can i talk about ferguson. This is really about civics. Why dont we talk to kids about everyone who is part of the ferguson drama and what their responsibility is. What does it mean when you vote for someone . I was really moved and inspired by k through 12 teachers who really were resisting a lot of pressure. The third thing is that after ferguson syllabus took off and a few of the Media Outlets wrote about it, people asked me these weird questions about isnt this like creating sides in the classroom . Sides of what . I hated that question so much. Or do you think kids with handle this . Handle what, exactly . So i think the thing that was very difficult to articulate is that providing the context to understand ferguson is one of many types of conversations about race. There are a lot of different types of conversations of race one can have. Having content on ferguson is one. Talking about how people are personally affected by race and racism is another so theres many ways to do this. So i think that one of the things that was hardest to communicate is that this is not about creating this kind of contentious, horrible thing. Its about having a series of conversations and modeling to our students what people do in the world, engaged citizens and talk to them about things. The other thing i would say, ive been really moved by the new cast of characters who are having this conversation. People who are looking at the strength of their own field and also moved by interdisciplinary ity. To engage in different ways of teaching. I think we should also pat ourselves on the back. Theres a lot to critique about the way ferguson has been talked about in popular media, but i think that some people have done a really good job. I think they have done a really good job because they have got an great education from a number of people in this room who i know have written great books and do great teaching. These young people go out and they are producers on television. They are reporters and they are writing really insightful things. There are a lot of things that get done poorly. I think the way that the conversation around gender has come up, the way young people are talking about intersectionality and movements, the way the organizers around ferguson are thinking about these things, i think this is the longterm impact of the ideas in the academy. I think theres something to celebrate about the sophistication of some of the conversations. And finally im so excited that we have an opportunity to share what we do with each other. I was contacted a few weeks ago by someone who has purchased the domain name for ferguson syllabus. Org, so well have an opportunity for people to just read about Different Things that have worked and not worked in the classroom, talking about ferguson and the larger conversation about Historical Context, interdisciplinarity and things that make a difference. Im excited about this moment. I think theres a lot of things to be hopeful for and i cant wait to hear the conversation were going to have. Thank you. [applause] so believe it or not, we are actually right on time. Tom did have a little time for himself to engage. But since hes not here and some of the papers went a little longer, which was useful, were right on time. We have 45 minutes remaining for a q a with the audience. Cspan has asked everyone use the microphone to make sure your comments or questions are picked up by television audience. So the floor is open. Im also going to say that the panelists dont have to answer every question. But if you have something you can contribute, by all means. Tony from borough of Manhattan Community college where im elected faculty adviser to Student Government. We have a 100 rating of every president of Student Government in the 10 years ive been there has been stopped and frisked numerous times. One of the issues that has not been raised is that im including the females, i should add. One of the issues that hasnt been raised in the discussion, at least as ive seen it, is the deleterious or destructive effects of this practice upon black students but not upon white students in my school. This issue was never addressed by the people involved in education that ive seen. The other thing that i want to point out that the grand jurys system that we have in this country is unique to the English Speaking world. It is unfortunately embedded in the constitution. And aside from the fact that its white policemen murdering black men in most cases, the fact is also that it is those two grand juries that really accelerated, especially the second one with the youtube millions of hits, accelerated this violence that led unfortunately, to the death of Police Officers. But we can see from the ceremonies its all white, a few asians because one of the officers was asian, it has really created an apartheid system in the criminal Justice System. Lastly, what is salubrious im going to be on the staff come the elections in april, what is salubrious is the marriage of white occupy with black and latino youth in the streets combatting state terrorism, the first level of terrorism, which is the Police Departments. The cry, new cry, which is necessary after 200 or 300 years of this, shut this system down. Being in the streets is important. Thats why i always wear sneakers. Ok . Thank you. Student impact was a useful question to have our panelists respond to, since everyone here teaches. Anyone . The experience of criminalization and Police Repression on africanamerican students. Its real. So i guess a larger question for the audience, then, if someone wants to respond at some point, is there something for administrations to recognize in terms of retention of our students to make sure the tax, lets call it the tax they pay to attend this is schools is not acknowledged. Someone else may chime in on that at some point. Any response to the grand jury system with regard to its uniqueness and calls for reform . Well, very briefly, one thing that was contextual im sorry. One thing that was contextual also in ferguson is the long history of antagonism that africanamericans have had with the county prosecutor bob mcculloch. This was apparent the first week i was there. People were saying these things, that they did not trust him to gain an indictment against the officer. It should also be noted that in about it was less than two weeks prior to the shooting mr. Mcculloch had won a primary against a black female challenger. And you know, the small turnout vote but he won the primary because the county is solidly democratic, winning the primary is effectively winning reelection, these were all dynamics that were at play. So even more than the system itself. Theres a protean nature to these things. We can pass laws that say behaviors are forbidden. Like the chokehold was forbidden in new york but if people dont fundamentally recognize one one persons humanity is equal to someone elses, it doesnt matter. We have a jury nullification that can happen throughout the system. The system and laws i think we learned from this circumstance are only as just as the citizenship, citizenry and those who were empowered to uphold the law. Its a great point. Next question. Yes, im rick pearlstein. Im a historian and political journalist. Ive written about ferguson in the context of history for in these times magazine. The question i found myself asking and unable to answer is how the instructial dispossession of fergusons black population works in the meanest of whole system. People talk about the low voting turnout. Although i understand black public there voted like 70 turnout when they had something to vote for and thought their vote counted in 2012 for barack obama. Theres one africanamerican councilmember hop seems to be conspicuous in his absence from these discussions. I thought about historically what went on in chicago in the 50s where there were six black aldermen and known as the silent six. One white liberal alderman known as the only black alderman in chicago. He was the only one who really supported civil rights. How are black fergusonians kept out of the system . Is there some sort of at large system . What are the processes and what are the functions . The aclu is just following a lawsuit ferguson for school board on the basis of the fact they do use at large system of election, which aclu hopes to demonstrate. It systematically does represent africanamericans, particularly in school board elections. There are pockets of africanamerican leadership through the inner suburbs of north county, normandy wellstone. But in a sense its a microcosm of the situation we saw with first black mayor in 1970s. In 80s that is you achieve power at a moment when fiscal incapacity makes it impact to do anything. Ive im reminded of the comment of the mayor of rochester, william johnson, i think, upon his election who was congratulated. He said congratulations for what . Im mayor of nothing. I think a couple of other things in play here as well. One is at large system. The other is, and youre correct, in 2012, 71 of black voters in ferguson, eligible black voters voted and 72 of eligible white voters voted. So there was a low turnout. A low turnout election across the board in municipal elections. Only about 6 voted but 12 of the white population voted. When i talked to elected officials there about what made that disparity, they said that the larger numbers of poor people meant that you have when you have a national election, you have lots of resources to get out the vote, lots of resources for registering people who may have moved during, you know, the period in between elections. But on the municipal elections they dont have resources. Very often the election takes place without people knowing the election had been held. So theres really no interest for people who are then the other thing about the small remaining white population in ferguson that is disproportionately empowered some of these people are people of good conscious. So there were street signs you may have seen on television that said i love ferguson. There was almost one to one correlation between i love ferguson and i support Darren Wilson. Thats kind of what that was code for. There were people who would kind of alter the signs to say i love all of ferguson. It was kind of subversive to see people doing that. There were large numbers of people in that community who have remained contingent remaining in the community contingent on holding disproportionate political influence and power in that municipality. Im from princeton humanities program. I noticed as a newcomer to campus how much real interest there was among student body about issues were discussing today. Perhaps students not really knowing how to sort of focus this energy in a productive way, so i wondered if the panel had thoughts of how to engage interest about these issues particularly at this moment where you might have a student population who cares about issues of race and space that maybe werent focused on them before. I know changing syllabi is something well work to do. Maybe architecture studios or chemistry laws that dont have the opportunity to talk about it in class. This is great. A lot of people contacted me to say my field does not lend itself to a conversation about race. Actually were always in a conversation about race. Sometimes we just dont know were talking. One of the thing i thought was really creative is that there has been a group of architects for social justice talk about this idea, what does a suburb like ferguson look like. I think one of the things that was really confusing for a lot of people is to understand suburb as having poverty and having this type of unrest. For a number of students that travel to ferguson, they had never traveled to the northwest, which is criminal to me. They cant contextualize places with payless, target residential houses. I think theres great things about space, spatial learning. For chemistry, a lot of chemistry professors, stuff about teargas and why it has been banned. What students have to do is fumble through this process. I think that our roles to provide them resources so we say how do we stand in solidarity. I think that is also part of it. Students do have a lot of energy. Some might have unproductive. As long as its not harmful, this is part of them developing their political consciousness. I just wanted to add to that that one of the things i think students often my students everyone wanted to get on a bus and go to ferguson. Everybody wanted to go to the center of where this all was happening. But of course we all live in cities where this is happening. We all live in campuses where this is happening. What i would say to my students, lets start with our own university. Do we need to ban the box at our own university . Do we need to deal with policing practices on our own campus . Do we need to deal with policing practices in our own city . One of the useful things is to direct our students to literally where they are and first of all do a Little Research whats going on but also take on those much more immediate issues because that is the greatest sense of solidarity happening in ferguson, to take on so this is not ferguson in ann arbor or wherever. One thing, i want to quickly go back to that other thing about voting. Leaving aside ferguson, per se one of the things thats been striking to me about discussion of voting since ferguson is, again, coming back on the black community. Look, if you dont like your Police Practices, dont like your school board, dont like your mayor, dont like your prosecutor, why isnt there more voter participation, more voting . I again want to make a pitch for why, then, historians are very important for drawing out this broader context. The fact of the matter is a 40year war on crime has disenfranchised both through disenfranchisement and prison gerrymandering has undermined voting. We pass the voting act as we start war on crime. The latter undermines the former. I would encourage us with these discussions of voting both to celebrate the fact that voting participation is as high as it is and, in fact, comparable to other communities but also point out that it would be very, very difficult to vote our way out of this problem both because of the sheer dismantling of black voting power and also because of the point unless were dealing with an even Playing Field with understandings of humanity, then it doesnt matter where the law says we need body cameras. Again, back to eric garner, we effectively had body cameras on eric garner. What people saw was not what happened. So anyway, thank you. Thank you. Hi. My name is jim dingman. Im a historian but also a broadcaster. I chair the local Community Advisory board at wbi radio. We put on forums on this event. Were committed to doing this on a monthly basis. What i discovered in doing these forms is that, and im talking about bringing academics in. Im partly an academic. I wear several acts. Were not talking, conducting a Brown Bag Lunch here. We have people coming in. It was extraordinary to me to see people come up and testify about what happened with police in the last years. I want to bring up troubling and interesting comments i heard in these events. First of all, recently there was the person who did black power mix tape did a new film. In that discussion after the film, there was a whole question of, you know, the argument of the use of violence for cleansing and cleansing ones self of the oppressor and raised the question of this i have no doubt, im 65, were going to see unfortunately what happened in brooklyn happen again, i think, before we get to a better place. So i want to ask that question question of the problematics of the counterattack against Police Violence. Secondly, the question of, you know, Police Relations with the community. Im also trained as a political scientist. I want to know what were going to do now to change this situation. What examples do we have in the past that give us sort of models to look at. Lets create and look at what have been good examples of Police Community relations in the past that we can use. Finally the issue the Supreme Court decisions that give police justification to have use force in these situations. The case down in north carolina. What comments or thoughts do you have on the history of that . What can we use that as . I listened to a law professor at Columbia Law School say, well, the people who killed emmett till got off. On the other hand, that doesnt deal with the question we have today. Maybe someone else can ask a question. I want to throw these thips throw those things out. These are things ive heard people say in public forums. A question about retaliatory violence, as well as Community Relations in the past police , Community Relations and police force use of force doctrines. Id like to Say Something about the second, Community Review boards. What structural things happened before that might be useful we could go to again. I want to preface what im about ready to say by again reiterating the point about all the laws in the world and commissions and committees at some level arent going to be effective if we dont deal with this broader question about the value of black life versus white life or including white life. It is true that again History Matters very much. We had in the wake of the rebellions of the 1960s some pretty dramatic checks placed on Police Brutality and on police in general. These range from things like implementation of miranda but also things like civilian Police Review boards, residency requirements making sure Police Officers actually lived in the cities they policed. We could go on. One of the really important historical things that happens is in the wake of those reforms was that then they were undone. So you no longer had to live in many cities across america. You no longer had to live in the city you policed. If you were a private Police Officer, you dont necessarily have to use miranda law but yet can still use fatal force. Weve really kind of been asleep at the wheel in terms of not protests really matter in the it 1960s. Generated a lot of checks and balances on police. Then it got all rolled back. I would both encourage that means we could do it again. We could put important brakes on some of this. The fact it rolled back again is really the historical lesson we have to reckon with. Why did it happen, how did it happen and how does it go to the fundamental questions of humanity . Ill make an observation about the second point about Community Relations. One of the things im interested in is the use of africanamericans to buttress claims for repressive state governments, be they in the form of policing prisons or schools that are essentially confinement spaces. And if you just think back to the decades long debate about stop and frisk in the city but echoed nationally and has been amplified in the wake of the recent ferguson and garner cases is essentially that black people support these kinds of policies. So the idea there is a kind of silent black majority that at the end of the day is not only responsible for supporting punitive policies of criminal justice but actually sees them as the first line resort to the problems of poverty and crime and violence in their community was essentially the underlying argument of the Bloomberg Administration for a decade. We cannot underestimate the significance of that over 40 years. Much of the edifice we call it was predicated on, one, they would be beneficiaries and they themselves were calling for this form of law and order. There are scholars, particularly a few who are producing knowledge around us and they are not entirely wrong. Its only really in the wake of Trayvon Martin, i would argue, perhaps troy davis before, that you could begin to see some of the polling data trend in a more critical way. For example, quinnipiac polled annually africanamericans. Right up to the end you had a tale of two responses. On one hand africanamericans in new york city generally did not support stop and frisk but overwhelmingly supported bloomberg and ray kelly. So how do you split the difference . Partly its because once stop and frisk had been identified after decades of activism around, aclu, civil liberty unions and activist communities as a new kind of jim crow, rhetorically as a form of systemic racial profiling it was hard for africanamericans to go and say stop and frisk was ok. And yet they still didnt have a problem with the leadership of the city. So for kelly defending stop and frisk, i will note that as much even a year ago again, prior to ferguson, a year ago and hes become a National Spokesperson on these issues as a sunday news commentator was essentially saying i could go to any black neighborhood in new york city and stop somebody on the street and they would say that the policies of the Bloomberg Administration made this city safer, made our community safer. So we have to think about the question of Community Relations an this idea of what hasnt happened. Its not just repupiation of white citizenry who stands in judgment of the experiences of black people whether in courts or grand jurys but also the way in which the political currency of a kind of black community that believes in and supports these repressive policies. President obama may be the most articulate spokesperson for this point of view, articulation of the justification for my brothers keeper strictly lives right between Trayvon Martin and the zimmerman acquittal and ferguson. Its interesting because he has staked his political future beyond the presidency on making that Signature Initiative of the contributions hes going to make. At core it is a fundamental responsibility essentially saying its not about policing but about the people. So my two cents on the context of that. We have just a little time, i just want to be very concise in referencing this just to add point. Something small to khalils point about how this operates in new york city prior to the death of officers ramos and liu, their deaths overshadowed something that happened the night before that, which was a rally in which about 100 nypd officers gathered in downtown new york wearing tshirts that say i can breathe. So for people who Pay Attention to these matters, they echoed a protest heard 22 years ago during the administration which some people are familiar with in which nypd officers en masse marched in downtown new york Holding Signs that said that the mayor is a bathroom attendant, the first black mayor of new york is a washroom attendant. They had signs referring to him as the n word. And people carrying watermelons in reference to the mayor. This was the Police Department. When we talk about this, its not just a matter of people perceive there are police who view them in these kinds of ways but this is actually kind of verifiably true. Now, the false dichotomy they have they have, people whose lives are being saved they are , too indignant to be appreciative about it. It is a false dichotomy. One that, were it not for the matter of race, we would recognize immediately whats been told to us by the National Security apparatus of the United States saying we need to comb through your emails, listen to your phone calls, have access to the inner elements of your personal life in order to keep you safe from terrorism. I think the nuance of it is simply people saying, yes. When ive done media around this, it got to be frustrating. People would call, as if a revelation, lots of black People Killed by other black people. Id say, youre talking to a black person. Youre acting as if we dont know this. What were rejecting is the idea saying we know there are terrorists who want to kill americans but that does not give you Carte Blanche to reheat wave Carte Blanche to act in any way you see fit under the guise of keeping us safe. It this is democratic faith there is some balance between these two dynamics. I would just add very briefly theres a particular dynamic in north st. Louis county to these Police Community relations. There is a remarkably evocative testimony in 1970 u. S. Commission on civil rights hearings in st. Louis where the first africanamerican family to move to ferguson, the father is one of the lead witnesses. He says, you know, i moved onto that street, and the streetlights went out one by one. They werent going to get fixed. They stopped picking up my garbage but there were more , police. I dont think the police were there to protect me. This is really from the very first instances of black flight into north county theres a , sense that all thats really left of public goods in those communities is the policing of the black citizens because of the impoverished nature of other services. Second Year Graduate student at Rutgers University. My question is about teaching ferguson. I ask this question, as a grad student, as a father of a 13yearold, as a former teacher, also once t. A. And taught. How do we hold intention Darren Michael scott put out a blog last night that said basically humanity is on the chopping block. Im thinking about James Baldwin arguing we owe our frame of reference to history. How do we hold attention students not taking survey courses, that stem is where the money is and administrations are, from what i understand, moving further and further away from whats going on in the humanities classrooms. How do we hold that attention with that . These are the students that are in elementary and middle schools and College Classrooms. I read some papers over the last two semesters that make me say wtf. That serve on grand juries. How do we hold intention saying at the same time theres a need for teaching ferguson not in the College Classroom but everywhere else with the fact that the work that we do is disrespected and that the guy who wrote the great book the strange career of jim crow and sat on a committee to, from what i understand begin whats happening in texas and begin whats happening in arizona right now in terms of ethnic studies and basically whitewashing and taking out black contributions or latino contributions to this american area. A more distopic view of whats going on in our classrooms. All of this is difficult. For me personally, the only thing i can offer is that i was fortunate to see really great teaching when i was a graduate student. I think the thing that helped me the most is kind of feminist principles of teaching. So we talk. We are community. We work together. The reason i bring that up is one of the things people ask is how do you have this conversation . Well, were always talking about something. That we dont ignore contemporary social issues and its connection to history until ferguson. A white student asked me once, how do i show my support of communities of color . I said dont just show up when bad things happen. Where were you when people are laughing and happy . I say that because for us as historians, where are we . Are we present all the time and are we always engaging students in what is happening in the world in a larger context so ferguson, were not scaring with race talk, not scaring with injustice talk. I think theres something about the constant engagement and constant connection so this is not an interruption. This is the way we do things. I think we all teach in different climates and thats one of the things i recognize and respect about the teachers that have contacted me about teaching ferguson. Were all doing it in different terms. The thing i can help is, what is the context, what is the buzz of where youre teaching and find a way to slip it in. Andy smith taught me about the shadow syllabus. What you say youre teaching and what youre really teaching, i think that has changed my life. We can talk about your shadow syllabus if you like. Just very quickly, i taught for many years at spellman college. To their great shame but later credit they fired howard for encouraging maybe another many people know this story for encouraging his students Allison Walker and Marion Wright, now Marion Wright edelman to participate in the civil rights movement. He was pushed out for that. We should be mindful this is not the first time as historians, we know this this is the not the first time we stood for these questions or raised these questions in climates hostile and people believed sometimes people who would benefit directly, like the people who ran spellman college, who believed it was better to not go along and get along. I just want to say that i i was at indiana for six years. A gigantic his department with a lot of smart people, but i think as kind of a statement of the ways in which the profession has closed ranks around what is its hard to put a precise finger on it. I dont want to call it legitimate history. Twenty years ago when we started graduate school, and jenny here, it was maybe the culmination of a period when campuses were becoming democratized and knowledge was becoming democratized. In some ways what i experienced at graduate school and fulltime faculty member was a step in the wrong direction. So just a quick anecdote, two weeks on campus coming out of a restroom and an africanamerican student passing by and literally stopped dead in his tracks and said, who are you . I said new to campus. I teach in the history department. He said i didnt know black people taught in the history department. I think part of what that says this is 10 years ago consolidation of africanamerican studies, which has happened on many campuses under the cover of building intellectual community, rallying resources in a time of austerity, entrenchment, state legislatures is not just about the money. It has also been about removing from core teaching what is what we should be teaching in the classroom and what those people who have it shadow syllabi will do in spaces less legitimate, delegitimized. I think this problem goes to the top. Its not just our elected officials. I think in a much more cynical way, there is a level of ignorance about race and how it operates. Not just cynicism of post racialism, not just yahoos who write on comment boxes and hate mail many of us receiver because we write publicly. Theres a legitimate sense of been there done that, only in the spaces of people who make a living, speaking and talking in these ways that people can sort of get away with it. So when you Say Something like that, what those people hear this is exactly why we took people like you out of the history department. [laughter] i get emails. I get the mail to back that up. So political challenge around knowledge production i think is even more problematic and difficult today than it was, again, 20 years ago when i started graduate school. Thanks. Laura westhoff, university of missouri, st. Louis. My campus is a mile from ferguson. So my comments and observations are come from being part of that north county st. Louis community and native st. Louisan who grew up far away physically from this kind of recent experience. I was especially appreciative of our last question and your response because i do spend a lot of time working with teachers, working in schools. In my context, in my history classes on campus, we couldnt begin a real conversation about this until the very end of the semester. When my students finally opened this up, i said, ive been wondering all semester when it was going to be safe to have a real conversation. And its in the context of having built a community and sense of trust that we can really talk about these things not from an intellectual perspective. I dont want to discount anything were talking about here in terms of the structural problems around this but rather what my students for whom this experience was really just popping the bottle off of the much larger issue of i dont know how to talk about this. I dont know how to feel. I know i live in a segregated city. I know my racial identity is crucial to my experience but i dont know how to talk across those experiences in any meaningful way. I think the hope i saw in my students is they do want to do this. I think the challenge professionally does go back to what happened in the profession. Its difficult to, i think, accept emotionality and presentism students bring and marry that with intellectual Historical Context we want to teach them. My engagement stayed at the level of here is some context. Dred scott really does matter in our community. That would have lost a very important moment. I find my challenge is, and challenge for k12 teachers is understanding the way we can move into that scary space of talking about emotional issues that affect us and that bring history to the surface but our students dont yet have a historical language to talk about and if we can help them understand that context and understand what they feel visceraly as part of a larger history, then we arm them with an intellectual framework to start to address structural problems. Thank you for the work youre doing. I hope that as a profession we really engage with those teachers to the last gentlemans point. I was teaching freshman and they came from schools where they did not feel they could talk about this. And who knows if theyll have a space in their College Classrooms. But they absolutely have a space in their k12 classrooms to deal with this. So we have to work with those teachers. Thank you. So were down to our last five speakers. And some have just joined. Im going to try to get your voice in, but some have waited patiently. So just to be mindful for all of us. Jenny . Hi, im jenny breyer, the director of general and womens studies at uic. And well have our last shoutout to rutgers about rutgers alum. [laughter] but there is something about what happened at that moment at rutgers. And i wanted to say it was a moment when the history of students who were interested in studying the history of sexuality, the history of gender and africanAmerican History all got in at the same time. And we were we were forced and delighted, and we had many Difficult Conversations in those rooms. But they shaped the way we respond to one another and the respect that we have for each others work. And it meant something. And thats something about what the historical profession needs to be thinking about. Because, you know, this panel is being really beautifully tweeted and then someone pointed out it wasnt going to go in the aha 2015 tweet, you know, stream unless it got connected. And i think that it just suggests something about how far the historical professional has to go to fully embrace intersectionalty and or any sort of model for thinking through these really critical intersections and to that point. I wanted to ask really to hear more folks respond on the question of gender and how the politics of gender function here. I was so struck by the example of fraziers report on pathology being the thing that becomes what hes known for in part because it has such a gendered analysis, i would argue. I dont know about the police report, as well as you do. But im wondering how gender functions in that earlier document and in the stinging critique of the police. And im so struck by the way that, you know, your work on ferguson syllabus, but jessica johnsons work on ferguson fridays has really been about insisting that queer politics and feminist politics have to be central to the way we understand whats going on. And to our historian colleagues who arent in gender and women study departments to know that is the work we do in the classroom. And it doesnt make us like history light. It makes us really able to teach students how to think through critical questions historically. Should we take that few more . Lets take jennys question since she waited patiently. Youre absolutely right. In my own work, the question of what women are not doing with their children is fundamental to africanamerican, what is referred to as demoralization. But fill in the gap. Delinquency, criminalization and this is precisely the history and the array sure e rasure of this discourse around what black women arent doing with their children that frames the politics of my brothers keeper, which weve heard a continue to reinforce this idea that ultimately black women are the cause of the chaos that goes on in too many black homes. So when giuliani is talking about parenting and education its not just absentee fathers, because the discourse on one hand explicitly puts black men on the hook for what they arent doing. But at the same time, presumes that black women are, one, delinquent or incapable of raising their own children. So without belaboring the point, i think youre absolutely right to lift that up. And i think the larger point that in some ways, the clinical detachment that is essentially the Gold Standard for the historical profession is and has always been a form of reinforcing positions of privilege. And i dont want to it seems almost cliche to say the status quo. But there is no not a lot of production that stands separate and apart from some response to power. And the idea that people who are doing intersectionalty somehow are monopolizing a space of emotionalism, that theyre not that their investment in the contemporary or the present makes them somehow doing something that is less historical, less clinically detached is ridiculous. I mean so ill stop. Very quickly. I think that one of the things i saw in being in ferguson, i got to see the first week i was there, people lamenting the lack of Grassroots Organization there, and the lack of kind of local structures to respond to what was happening. Then when i came back maybe two weeks later, you start seeing kind of a Nascent Development of that. And then, you know, in october there were organizations that you could not tell hadnt been in existence, you know, for three or four or five years. And one of the things that was heartening to see is that, from the outset, first of all there was disproportionately organizations founded or organized by women, you know, in ferguson, and from the outset, there was a kind of implicit recognition that they would not have a kind of stereotypical maleled community, community organization. And even when people came up with, you know, kind of the critique of how Michael Brown lost his life, it was tied to other aspects, other problems. We are opposed to this. Were also opposed to domestic violence. We are also opposed to homophobia. We are also opposed to violence against people in the trans community. And people articulating that in a way that sounded atypical if you could be cynical about these things. And even to the point that one point i did an interview right before, the day before the grand jury findings came down. And they said, and i was like, who can i talk to from the organization . Oh, theres a rapper who we can talk to whos been very knowledgeable. And then they said, but you can talk to ashley yates, too. We have a policy of not sending just a man to talk about what is happening here. And i was like, wow. And for people my age, i can say quite simply that would not have happened when i was the age that they are. And so it was heartening to see that people were beginning to articulate this idea about this. And finally, just to underscore the point about my brothers keeper, the regressive ideas and the kind of moynihanesque ideas at the root of my brothers keeper one painfully which , should be an obvious truth which is that both Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown had fathers active in their lives. And that did not save them from, you know, the fates that befell them. And so the idea this being this pathology and matriarchy that upends the black family is blind on the very example they are basing it around. I want to say the young people talk like that because of the work we do. And i dont think we can ignore that. Its amazing. Hi, im matt garcia. I teach at Arizona State university. And im really happy to be entering this conversation right at this moment. Because what was on my mind was the critical work that Kimberly Crenshaw and Kristi Dotson are doing in terms of critiquing my brothers keeper. Its not simply that theres the black father is present. And thats important, right . But part of the critique is the way that our focus fetishization. Once we realize that black men are criminalized, are brutalized, are killed, right . That it makes more invisible black womens similar experiences. So were talking about all of these men that have suffered this. But were not talking about marlene pinnic who was beat on the side of the road by the california highway patrol. Were not talking about ursula orr, a black colleague of mine who was beat by the Campus Police at asu. Right . So what happens the way kimberly and christy and other black feminists are telling it is that the coverage and the lessons of ferguson is that we make more invisible black womens plight and black womens struggles with these kinds of brutal acts of state violence. If we dont, if were not cognizant of the gendered ways in which were telling these stories and talking about it. Great point. Hi, im courtney, i teach at Baylor University in waco, texas. And in my student constituency theres a lot of resistance to this conversation. But i decided to take advantage of the fact that im the professor and theyre not to force the conversation to the foreground. So i teach in the religion department. Scriptures and church history. And so in our scriptures class we did the whole bible in six weeks to get the foundation for the conversation. Wow. I know. I know. But then we went back and looked at texts according to race gender environment, homophobia. I forced them to put the micronarratives in the context of the metanarrative. And it was amazing to see their eyes open and then the first week of class, i just did a poll, how many of you have ever felt nervous to walk back to your car from the library . How many of you have ever felt like someone singled you out or people were staring at you because of something about yourself . And the people who raised their hand for every single question were the women and the africanamerican students. And for them to see themselves proclaim that dynamic was really powerful teaching moment. So i just took advantage of the fact that were in this together for the semester. So i created a culture of safe space and almost an expectation to raise those kinds of questions in class, part of their grade was their participation and willingness to be vulnerable with each other. I found that a powerful teaching exercise. And i think that connection between gender and race is really important, particularly for people who are resistant to talking about race. It gives them a point of relation. They can understand it. And you say, yes, that same thing, but lets go farther and start to see how whether youre going to be an engineer, business person, whatever youre going to be. How can you raise these conversations in your spheres of influence . And one of the things i thought was helpful was bringing in comedy. Jon stewart and stephen colbert. At first they thought it was just comedy and they let themselves be vulnerable. Certain news networks, they shut down. But if i played that, they would listen to it. And then their eyes would start to open. And theyre having conversations with people in their dorm. Its powerful how that happened. Im excited to hear, were not going to be afraid to talk about this. It does matter. And if most of us, why we study what we study is autobiographical in a sense. Lets let that give our teaching so much power. I think our students are drawn. Even if they dont want to take our history classes, theyre drawn to it. And another thing i wanted to say that will help you all look good with your chairs. A lot of universities are putting in firstyear experience courses to help students transition. These are powerful opportunities to engage students on these issues. Most universities will let you organize a topic on whatever you want. You can bring your research into the conversation. You can get them involved in learning how to research these issues. Its a wonderful opportunity for us to put this conversation before first year students from the getgo and let those questions be part of their intellectual formation throughout the college experience. Thank you. Wow. [applause] thank you. So i want to take the last two statements or questions together. Together. First. While i was waiting online, someone handed me another question. Would it be possible depends on how short yours is. Mine will be very short. Ok. First of all, for the university of gent in belgium. And speaking as a historian, i wondered what tactically speaking is the best way to combat this postracial narrative, which is to me the most insidious and problematic thing we have to face. Because when its fair enough to say we have to talk about black history, but when most people talk about it, they refer to this very recognizable narrative of racial progress. And on behalf of stacy patton, i would like to ask weve seen recent reports that the nypd has tamped down arrests for minor crimes. These acts are part of their extended tantrum over the mayors comments on how he has warned his son about how to interact with police. I wonder if any of you can make predictions about stop and frisk policies, broken windows and Municipal Fund raisings. Im russell, i teach africanamerican studies in honolulu, hawaii. And i began the semester by walking into my colleagues classroom and said, hey, man, i dont know about opening up the ferguson question. What do you think . He looked at me and said, are you crazy . You have to. The reason why i was reluctant to do it is because i did not trust myself. I did not want to violate one of my own teaching principles which was i dont want to tell students what to think, i want to teach them how to think. So i opened the discussion. Presented them with material and asked them to talk about it with their families and stuff. And its been a remarkable semester. Frederick douglass 1892 speech on the negro problem took on new meaning. Poetry took on new meaning. I knew the beginning of the semester that todd clifton was going to die in the invisible man for selling sambo dolls and , he was going to be shot by the police. I remembered my role to ask questions and present them with provocative material. The semester again has been very rewarding and very enriching and im glad i did it. There is a postracial narrative, how to end it, and the nypd predictions about the demise of stop and frisk broken windows and the fund raising the revenue generated from such police activity. Well, i just wanted to say as to post racialism both said at , the same time, evidence. You know, tell the history. The history makes clear this is a method, makes clear its not accurate, not true. So without leading anyone to any conclusions, one simply needs to teach the history of the last 40 years. But i would take it a step further and say, again, its not just the its not just that post racialism isnt true or the colorblindness isnt true. Its that itself has had an effect on the way our students understand race and the way our students understand the news we see. So we might also make that point by even having them read contemporary news stories. And i want to, first of all, also shout out to stacy pattons amazing work on this. And this is a great opportunity, i think. I dont know whats going to happen with stop and frisk, but i think this is an Incredible Opportunity for us to really i mean, this may be the worst decision the nypd ever made to engage in this slowdown. The fact of the matter is it gives us an opportunity to really think about what policing looks like on the ground and whats unnecessary about it. So itll be fascinating to see what is made of this slow down. Again, i kind of chuckled when i first saw this as a strategy. I thought, well, you couldnt have done a protest strategy that people wouldve welcomed more if you tried. Just to add one thing about kind of structural issues about post racialism. If your students dont want to join you on that train, you can just ask them questions about their communities. Is anyone from a community where a School Closed . What was that like . Have you were there any foreclosure signs in the community where youre from . Have you ever seen that . Did your friends move because their family couldnt afford their house anymore . Those simple questions. And they dont have to selfidentify. It is something to throw out in the ether. They are the ways they start to say, oh, wait, were in an africanAmerican History class why are we talking about foreclosure . And then you say, well, the funny thing is weve seen this before. So i think that theres a way that there are things out there that are supposed to be the racialized deracialized because of a postracial that , when we infuse them within the context of the history of people of color, i think our students then become really attuned to say, oh, wait a second. This is a different place as it plays out and these are the structures i noticed in the world i inhabit. So i think i found that very effective. Very quickly, i think we should point out the implicit irony of the way this post racial discussion got started which is in 2008 with the election of barack obama. In an election which the white minority voted for a black president ial candidate. And so, in recognizing that white people were prepared to vote for a president , some, were prepared to vote for a president who did not share their racial background, this was heralded as a great moment of racial achievement. In short, white people managed to do the very thing black people have been doing since the 15th amendment. And so, no one, no one heralded that, like, wow, the negros have no problem voting for someone who doesnt look like them for president. This is a marker of great racial progress in the United States. And so, thats the beginning. Thats where this narrative begins. And secondarily, i think the thing that fills me with forboding, not so much about policing, but the context with which the policing occurs is the percentage of white people which is a significant plurality who on polls say that whites are the primary victims of Racial Discrimination in the United States. Thats something we should keep an eye on, especially as whites become a diminishing part of the population here because we know, you know, based on the history in mississippi in south carolina, populations where white people are smaller proportion have far more liberal history tendency than populations where they are a larger proportion of the society at large. Currently, whitesare 63 of the population, hold 90 of the elected offices. And so for the other 30 , 37 of the population, which categorizes people of color broadly construed, actually its 90. 1. 37 of the population shares 9. 9 of the elected political offices. And unless we have actual kind of intentionality around that, what we will have is a gradual demographic south africanization of the american society. And thats something that we should be very mindful of. And the policing attendant with it. My experience, and this is most direct from speaking to st. Louis audiences about this is that the postracial notion notion, i think, is in part, as you say, superficial, its based on this the election of obama, which is obviously evidence of nothing. In some respects. Its in part generational. Students are anxious to say they think differently than their parents did. But its in large part institutional. And i think that its important to point out to people that if youre looking at Something Like housing and wealth in northern cities that it actually runs counter to the civil rights movement. Things get worse. Yeah. Things got worse in terms of segregation. It moderated a little bit, but since the great recession, the foreclosure crisis the collapse in black wealth, thats a very powerful piece of evidence that, you know, in fact, if youre thinking of sort of an institutional story in which everything just gets a little better not as good as we hoped it would get but better than we hoped, its not true. Well, i think weve had a wonderful discussion. I want to thank you for participating in it and bearing with us. And i want to thank the panelists. Thanks for coming out. Youre watching American History t. V. 48 hours of programming on American History every weekend on cspan 3. Follow us on twitter at cspan history for information on our schedule upcoming programs and to keep up with the latest history news. History bookshelf features popular American History writers and airs on American History t. V. Every weekend at this time. The pen and ink caricatures of artist david levine have appeared in time newsweek, the new yorker, and the new york review of books. In 2008, we talked with him at his home in brooklyn. He describes how he became interested in political cartoons and the inspiration for his art over five decades. Levine passed away in december of 2009. This program is about 45 minutes. For many years, you drew many, many thousands of drawings for the new york review of books. How can did that start . Somebody walked into my studio and said they were hoping to see somebody whose work resembled sindak and i didnt understand that at first, but i began very quickly to understand, they were just talking about somebody who worked with a pen and ink, in a small dimension. So i said i would be interested in trying. They were interested in trying in the new publication. It was about two and a half, three weeks old at that point. And i didnt a