Drive going on its running a book drive to raise money to help rebuild the libraries affected by hurricane harvey. A donation of 15 and the foundation will match the foundation. In one book therefore equals three. By being here today your investment can go a very long way to find books and helping our other mission. I like to introduce our authors this morning i live and breathe education of the great equalizer and its really a humbling and honoring experience to spend time with two womens who have clearly demonstrated their lives. The station has that professor of history. Today, we have her own icon. Angela j davis. Angela is a scholar and a phenomenal woman in her own right. A professor of law at American UniversityWashington College of law and an expert in criminal law. With a purse specific a davis served as director of Public Service where she began as a staff attorney representing indigenous juvenile and adults. The power of the american prosecutor and editor of what we are highlighting today, policing the black man. She is a graduate of another historically by College Howard university and a jay d. From Howard School of law. We have carol anderson. After anderson is the professor of africanamerican studies at Emery University in atlanta, georgia appeared to assert Andersons Research teaching on Public Policy intersecting with race justice and equality niceties. She is the author of the joao radicals naacp and the struggle for colonial liberation and today we are listing her most week recent work white rage the unspoken truth of our nations as i pray shes a twotime graduate of Miami University in the my alma mater ohio state university. [applause] professor sanderson and davis have too many awards and recognition for their writings teachings of scholarships. Today want to talk about your books. Both of these books were emotionally taxing for me. They are like a visit to the National Museum of africanamericanin history where someone is sad and a little bit hopeful when stretched from your cumbers on. White rage came out of an oped that was the most shared with the washington postut and 2014. Thats a lot of sharing. Im going to quote you. Everyone was so focused that you lift the kindling in the policies and those policies are times are to mine to undermine undercut and rollback africanamerican achievement of citizen a rights. Each major advanced for black people which is tracked in your book historically from the end of the civil war to the election of barack obama results and what you are calling white rage cool systematic calculated policies meant to protect democracy and keeping our nation safe. Can you share with us what motivated you into turning an oped into a novel and how you manage the detail in your book . Thank you. And thank you for being here and for loving books. I cant tell you how wonderful this is. What prompted me was a since when i was listening to the pundits talk about ferguson and ferguson is burning up and they were talking about it in the moment, and that now as a ferguson had no history and if black people in the United States did not have any history except that moment right then, right there. If we dont understand history than we absolutely do not understand how we got here. As a historian i set out to craft a piece that would help frame how we got here historically so that was the first piece. The second piece was we are in an era where in discussions about race that had become so polemical, so accusatory, so fabricated that it was essential for me to write a piece that was absolutely grounded in evidence, in fact so that we could begin to have the kind of National Conversation we t must have, one that is rooted in actual history and not f so that we really understand how we got here. So that made it that was the drive but what made it difficult is that is a hard, hard history. Because one of the things that became clear to me was that in each of these key moments of blackhe advancements massive policies would emanate coming out of the Supreme Court, coming out of congress, coming out of state legislatures that would undermine and undercut that advancement and that would flow against the narrative of the land of opportunity for all you have to do is work hard, go to school and keep your nose clean pick yourself up by your bootstraps and you too can have the American Dream and im seeing africanamericans generation after generation fighting for that American Dream getting close to it and then watching the policies like Voter Suppression come through to absolutely undercutun them. You describe black success as the white mans bogeyman. Did i say back . [laughter] and you call it a quiet truth and until the truth was shattered with the Obama Presidency white race seems to have reared times reared up in ways that we havent seen in decades. Has that truth shattered once again in your aspiration that provides protection for black people . Absolutely. Its so clear that in multiple ways the Obama Presidency just shattered so many of the ceilings and the narratives that we have in america and there is a moment in november 2008, oh so long ago. And there was this kind of euphoria you saw coursing through the land about we have finally w crossed the racial rubicon. But if you look underneath, no we havent. You saw although obama received a higher percentage of the white vote than john carrie did in 2004 since 1964 and the passage of the Civil Rights Act the one where the federal government is now putting its power behind saying that africanamericans are actually citizens of the Uniteded States and therefore he rights, since 1964 and youll note democrat and lbj, since 1964 no democrat has won a majority of the white vote in any president ial election since 1964 and that includes barack obama. So we are seeing where we are right now is the backlash, is the white rage that has led to the regime that is in power now. Because of massive, massive Voter Suppression like we saw North Carolina where the Fourth Circuit said they targeted africanamericans with nearly surgical precision. So thats where we are right now. Challenges and inequities in School Funding continue to plague various states including texas. You touched on two examples in your book that are close to home and that would be the edgewood neighborhood and san antonio and in texas the war on drugs. Can you share those . I will talk a little bit about texas because im in texas. Remember we had brown 1964, brown 1965 and then you had massive resistance in the south that dug in and were like over my dead body. We are still fighting to implement brown by the time we get into the early 1970s. There were two landmark decisions in their early 1970s have absolutely other brown. One of them was the rodrigues decision. Coming out of San Antonio Texas you have the neighborhood, the edgewood district that was 96 mexicanamerican and africanamerican. And they taxed to their i propey at the highest level possible, the highest level possible and because of that what they were able to do was to generate 21 per student in terms of funding. 21 by taxing themselves at the highest level for the property because as we know schools are funded via the property tax and what we also know is the way Public Policy has a lot to do with the value of our property. Where the city chooses to put a landfill, where the city chooses to put, to have certain kinds of zoning so you have certain kinds of businesses and where you cant have certain kinds of his misses. That kind of Public Policy has a lot to do with property values. Meanwhile, in Alamo Heights which was a predominantly white neighborhood that was wealthy they did not tax themselves at the highest level and they managed to generate 307 per student so the highest level 21 level 21, not nearly anywhere near the highest level, 307. Appearance and edgewood screamed foul and it went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled that there was no right to education and the disparity in funding did not necessarily mean that there was going to be disparity in education. Im just going to say these are learning journeys because you and i both know they would not have their child in the School District that could only generate 21 percapita. We know that there is a fundamental disparity there but the Supreme Court ruled that you did not need to have equitable funding in order to not breach the 14th amendment which dealt with due process and equality equal protection under the law. The rodrigues decision was absolutely stunning for what it meant for the gains of around because of systematically undercut around a generation later. The other piece and i think this segues beautifully is the war on drugs. The war on drugs started coming into being during the nixon years which toward the end of the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. In the Civil Rights Movement we have the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and we have the Voting Rights act of 1965. Richard nixon started talking law and order in the wore a on drugs and then it came with the virulence and power during the reagan years. Whenau he launched the war on drugs they are in fact was a decline in the use of drugs in america so he needs to be really clear about the motivation here. The war on drugs was targeted at black people who actually statistically used drugs at least in many of the categories of drug usage. In texas the war on drugs went crazy. July 23, 1999, 46 of the towns population was arrested. 46 of the towns black population was arrested for dealing drugs to this one officer named outstanding lawman of the year. 38 of the people were convicted with prison sentences from 99 years for having i think it was two ounces of cocaine to 434 years for having an ounce. Just horrific prison sentences because one of the ways the war and drugs work with punitive drug sentences. Then it started coming out that some of the people that he had used of selling him drugs couldnt have done it because they were like 300 miles away at a bank cashing a check at the very moment when he said the drugs were being purchased and they had video proof of that. As all of this started coming out it was case after case after case, then it turned out there was absolutely no proof whatsoever. There were no fingerprints on the bags of drugs except his. There were no wires worn. There were no witnesses. There was no cash in the homes of the people who have been locked up. There was no drug paraphernalia. There were no weapons. There was just nothing that spoke of drug kingpins for the people spending 400 years in prison. Then he said i did have evidence. Every time i had a drug purchase i wrote it down on my leg. [laughter] lord, you cant make this stuff up. Over m an 18 month investigation you wrote down each drug purchase on your leg and you just happen to wash it off when you are showered for 18 months . Houston, we have our problem. It was on the basis of his words that 50 of the adult male black population in texas had been incarcerated. 50 of all adult black males in tulia texas thrown under the jail and tulia became known as the the way it works is when you have a felony conviction you are stripped of so many of your rights coming out of the Civil Rights Act in terms of housing and in terms of a education. You are also stripped of your Voting Rights so in florida 25 of all africanamericans are unable ton vote in florida because of permanent felony disenfranchisement. This is what the war on drugs has done coming in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Before we move to angela j. Davis for policing the black man raises such a difficult and complex topic. In my travels of reading the book i saw people look at me because i was holding a book called white rage. I wanted to know what has been their reaction to your book as you have traveled around the nation. Some of the reaction has been vitriolic as you can imagine and somebody telling me to put my pipe down. I might . Why cant i via matt . [laughter] and i had another saying, we need to lock you need grow criminals away from us the way they did in apartheid south africa but on the other hand and thats the hand i like i have had so many people write to me saying im a 70yearold white man in st. Louis. I knew something was wrong. I just didnt know what it was. Thank you. I had a man say im a Police Officer in new york. I knew something wasnt quite right. I read white rage and now i understand, thank you. That has been the response. The other people who are really hungry to know how do they make this nation better, how do we create a just and Humane Society . They are reading the book because now its giving them the facts because its evidencebased and its giving them the language. Thank you. Angela. [applause] Angela Carroll contextualizes the institution of slavery and lynchings and vote times buck and then comes the horrific phenomena of the killings of michael brown, Eric Gardiner tamir rice walter scott etc. , etc. Some of the names of the unarmed boys and men killed by Police Officers. This is not a new narrative as detailed in white rage. Your book has been described as relentlessly informing and disturbing. Can you tell us what was your trigger to write the book of what inspired you . So first of all again thank you to the texas book festival and thank you to all of you for being here. When i was approached about an anthology that would attempt to conceptualize many horrible awful killings and you mention just some ofbl them i jumped at the opportunity because really theres no issue that is more important to me than the end there treat than the black and brown people in the criminal Justice System in this country and every step of the process through sentencing. Im eager to take on the project. I reached out to the people in the country who io know are the thinkers, writers, authors, educators, agitators who are out here writing and teachingho abot the issues and in many instances living this issue and i was so fortunate that so many of them said yes. What we have to do in this book is to talk about this in a broader sense. The killings of all of these black men and boys that served as the catalyst for the book but then we begin to think about the issue in a broader sense about how black men are treated in process allf the the way from arrest through sentencing and its important to highlight a point that you mentioned. And that is although i think the intention of the country to focus on when Trayvon Martin died in 2012 and thats fond of black lives Matter Movement which by the way is the most important social Justice Movement of the day. [applause] kids out there on social media plain . No, this is an important social Justice Movement that should be taken seriously byha everyone. And i will say if you look throughout history when some of these killings have taken place so the Trayvon Martin killing started the black lives Matter Movement but after maker evers was killed and after Martin Luther king was killed you saw this resurgence of the social Justice Movement. I will say that these killings did not start with Trayvon Martin. The killing started from the time that we were brought here and enslaved in 1519 and they have consistently from 16192 today from slavery to the lynchings of the 23rd century to the present day. We have Law Enforcement officers and vigilantes who have taken the lawn there on hands killing black men and boys and not being held accountable in any meaningful way. Also the difference however is that today we are seeing it with their own eyes. Technology, social media, cell phone cameras now have allowed us to actually witness these killings with their own eyes immediately. We saw eric garner being choked to death on staten island. We saw walter scott being shot in the back like an animal as he ran away from that cop. We sought 12yearold tamir rice playing in the park being murdered by that Police Officer and not one of those Police Officers to date has been held accountable. Many of them were never even charged. Eric garners killer and tamir rices killer were never charged. Terrance cruncher had his heirs heirs had his hands up in the air. We sought to cameras at dash cam and a helicopter we saw his hands up and the officer shot him down and killed him. She was charged as she was found not guilty. Not one has been held accountable so these killings served as a catalyst that they began began to think of how our Hoar Blackmon treated in the criminal