Transcripts For CSPAN3 Institutions Addressing Their Slavery Legacies 20171223

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good afternoon. good afternoon. it's great to see the conversation, everyone having a good time. the food was wonderful. we welcome you again to this .unch panel plenary session i'm going to introduce the moderator and the moderator will introduce the panelists. i am happy to introduce our panel moderator. professor mcdowell is the professor of literary studies and the director of the college institute for african-american studies at the university of virginia. she has been a member of the uva her booksnce 1987 and include "studies of fiction by african-american women" as well as numerous articles and in scholarly publications. professor mcdowell has been extensively involved in editorial projects pertaining to african-american literature. me in welcoming professor deborah mcdowell. [applause] >> thank you. thank you. thank you, marcus. thank all of you for your presence. thanks to the organizers for this wonderful event they have , with many more exciting panels to come -- i task, decidedly simple which is simply to listen to stimulating remarks and pose questions that have been posed for me. [laughter] programorganized this are so meticulous -- the people that organize this program are so meticulous, they have even provided me a list of questions. the first order of events is to introduce very briefly the thelists who will speak in order in which they appear in the program. you will find fuller biographies on each at the back of your program. our first speaker is john w. f ranklin, cultural historian and senior manager at the national museum of african american history and culture. our next speaker is the president and chief executive of his or montpelier foundation. taylor -- iii is the vice president of the college of william and mary. own teresa sullivan, from the university of virginia. please join me in welcoming them all. we look forward to their remarks. [applause] >> our ancestors. our ancestors -- [laughter] lived, weur ancestors live. where our ancestors walked, we walk. where they worked in their homes,homes -- owners' we tour. where our ancestors were offloaded on baltimore clippers, we dine. where our ancestors sought justice, we still seek justice. where our ancestors were punished, we are punished. where our ancestors raised their children, we raise ours. where our ancestors walked, we walk. where our ancestors lived, we live. my grandfather -- my great-grandfather -- was enslaved by chickasaw indians and gets to oklahoma after the american indian removal act of 1830, freeing up 7 million acres of land. he runs away and fights on the union forces' side in the civil war and changes his name from david burney to david franklin. so we have only ben franklin since 1860. when i asked about the history on my mother's side of the family, my late cousin said we have been free since 1760, which as we could go. i work in the museum of african american culture and we walk over the history that is there. stone was quarried by martha washington's slaves. the building was built tween 1870 and 1856. solomon northrup wakes up in chains right there at seventh and independent southwest. there were no markers there. foxx, when heony was secretary of transportation, with the evidence and i said for the commuters, for your employees, the tourists, they need to know what happened here. so we now have a sign -- there were no signs about slavery in d.c. and the quote on that sign is from congressman abraham lincoln , who could see these slave pens from his office on capitol hill when he arrived in washington. a quote from solomon northrup, who described waking up in chains in that space, and we have images from the broadside from 1836, from the american anti-slavery society, showing private prisons and public prisons in washington dc in 1836. there are those who think that washington is not a southern city. we tried to reveal its history. now when joseph henry learned -- joseph henry, the first secretary of the smithsonian, learned there was to be a debate on abolition, he said no. earliestw from the --s of the institution joseph henry said that frederick speak here.ld not the national museum was 100 years in the making. it was our civil war veterans who asked for this national negro league memorial to be built, so look how long we had to wait for this story to be told to the nation and the war -- and the world? thank you. [applause] >> we have seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time, the ground for the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man. those are the words of james madison in 1787, and, yeah, things do not change very quickly, do they? , inmontpelier foundation case you do not know, is the home of james madison. it is a young institution. there were a couple of things i wanted to shine a light on. it is a place where people work. the madisons and may their life possible. we have this amazing archaeological record. we are really making what has visible,red invisible but maybe one of the most unique elements of all of this and one i want to call out today because many of the people who have helped us are in this room is the descendent community. since the 1990's, folks i've had the courage -- folks have had to try down and tell a complete story here, you need to listen to us. you need to know about george gilmore who, after emancipation, built a little cabin across the entrance, the freedmen home right there at the entrance to the father of the constitution, and whose great-granddaughter describes herself as being three generations from being enslaved at james madison's montpelier. you also have to know that we have this arc of the american experience, including a jim crow train station. it's kind of like we had gone with the wind, the civil war, and nothing in between, but hello, america, there is a lot of that story in between. up of these pieces added together that the descendent community has been part from the beginning of helping us add up the story. two things i would like to emphasize about that, and it was mentioned in the morning session. we want our ancestors to be shown in their courage, their individuality, their genius. they are not extras who have pitiful lives in the story of progress. the other one was we cannot leave slavery as an artifact of the past. we have to face the fact that is very much in the legacy of our country today. as part of that, on june 4, we launched an exhibition at montpelier called "distinction of color." in the house and will eventually be in six outbuildings where the domestic and field slaves lived. it tells the story of both the fax, but what is humanity? the descendents are often the people telling the story. p on things like , yes, the constitution. we were born in freedom but also born in slavery. our touche and codified things like slavery. we bring up the effect on the world today. what is the responsibility of cultural institutions? i hope we all reflect on how we get people excited to develop this complete american story, our history, and all of its colors. this is really a chance to step up as individuals, a community, and a nation. [applause] >> i am a great believer in following instructions, and i have been instructed not to talk more than 3-5 minutes. [laughter] that is very hard if you are a university president. hope is to stick to my task. carrying african americans arrived in virginia in 1619. they were promptly enslaved. 74 years later from where this seminal event had taken place, william and mary got underway in 1693. from the beginning, slavery was part of the college's life of forest black labor, a vital element of building, construction, daily operations, and generation of revenue. as best we can tell from the fragmentary records that have survived the fires and wires havehave -- wars that consumed william and mary from time to time. time to time, the college owned approximately 85 people. we found the names of 36 of them . this does not include the slaves owned by contractors who worked for william and mary or the slaves owned by student and staff. three of the four oldest still standing university buildings in the united states stand on william and mary's campus. construction began in 1693 and ended in 1699. it is the oldest university building in america. is named for an estate in england, part of the revenues that came to william and mary to , cameevenue for boys online in 1732. it is the third oldest in the , barely older than massachusetts hall at harvard, and our presidents house was completed in 1732, the fourth has been america, and home to all of william and mary's 27 presidents except one. slave labor was instrumental, utterly vital in the construction of each of our historic structures, but we have records to document this reality. we do have records to show that 17 slaves were purchased to work on the large tobacco plantation owned by william and mary in the 18th century. there were surely more that we other than thet 30 who were sold when the quarter itself had to be sold william and mary's periodic financial crises. we don't know the names of any of the enslaved who labored on the quarter, and william and mary also benefited from the labor of slaves in tobacco fields in maryland. during the 19th century, there was an influential group of william and mary faculty and students who questioned slavery, in particular its compatibility with republican society. -- waswith was famous foremost among them. human mary was vital -- william and mary was vital to a school for free end enslaved black children in williamsburg, but slavery went unchallenged at william and mary. indeed, one of our presidents apostle ofading slavery. it's fair to say that for generation after generation, william and mary was a place first of slavery, then of , then of segregation. slavery, secession and segregation took a terrible toll upon those on whom they were inflicted. in civil war, deeply rooted slavery, left william and mary ,ead for all practical purposes and william and mary's slow episodic return to life after was unexpected, bordered on miraculous. it took 200 and 58 years from the college's founding before william and mary admitted our first black student. programed our masters in education in the summer of 1951. the first black graduate of william and mary received his law degree in 1954. the first black undergraduate to live on the campus came in 1967, three young women, and through this academic year, we're celebrating the 50th anniversary of their arrival all year in many different wonderful ways. in spring, 2000 nine, the campus community decided william and mary needed to come to grips with its racial past in a more focused and deeper way than we had ever come close to doing before. we needed to embark on a journey of communal remembrance and repentance. of the board, william and mary heartily embraces a journey of reconciliation that will be a long-term journey involving college faculty, staff, students, as well as members of the greater williamsburg community to better understand, better chronicle, better preserve the history of blacks in the college and the community , and to promote a deeper understanding of the indebtedness of the college to the work and support of its diverse neighbors. lemoned this journey because in 2009 when the journey the william, he was and mary slave about whom we knew the most. though he was legally the property of the college, his relationship with william and complex, somewhat ambiguous. as an enslaved man he neither owned his work nor his person, grew and sold produce to the college, received a .hristmas bonus at least once there is a covenants that he took his welfare into account as he aged. in 1850 he was given an allowance to purchase food. in 1860 the college paid for his medicine. in 1870, the college paid for his coffin when he died. i made the brutal dehumanizing the he maintained -- amid brutal dehumanization of slavery, he maintained his humanity. year of theghth project on his life, a life rich with research, teaching, conferences, symposium. the project has shed light and involved meaningful engagement between william and mary in the black community of williamsburg which had been alienated from william and mary. in february of 2015, i created a task force on race and race relations. most visibly, last fall, we named two of our resident halls in memory of our black heritage, one for lemon, and one for dr. william carol hardy, the first african-american senior administrator, who was a vital force in the early years of diversity. hearty halls now grace our campus. in short, for william and mary, , a slow segregation process of integration, followed by growing diversity and inclusion and by remembrance and repentance. it has been a very long journey , and it's a journey that still has a very long way to go. [applause] >> as most of you know, monticello has been an historic since 1693. i want to talk a little bit since 1963. when slavery was mentioned in --ticello stores or events tors or events or programs, it "s with the euphemistic term serve and." often, they were made invisible. -- servant. often, they were made invisible. their work was not. that outlook carried into the 21st century. but that outlook began to change in the 1980's when archaeological research revealed more information, first about , the main street of a 5000 acre plantation. from those efforts and past research that had been largely unavailable except to scholars, monticello began to confront the reality that our mission of and education encompassed not only in neoclassical house but a series of interconnected plantations where, over 70 years, over 400 enslaved men, women, and children, labored and lived. and over the last 30 years, that effort has grown and expanded. we are working now to uncover and share not just the history of slavery, but also, as cat mentioned earlier, its legacy. that process of revealing has that haved in stories meaning for our visitors, tors -- tours. we do about 19,000 annually, give or take. they are also communicated through interpretation, exhibition panels, wayside exhibits. they are also re-created through surviving narratives and stories online, and through digital means. they are our most important entry point for visitors at monticello to confront slavery and perhaps a way they had not before, to consider jefferson founder a statesman or of the university, but a life loan -- a lifelong slaveholder who was very much involved in and its maintenance, whose will separated families, who employed overseers willing and able to employ violence. reestablish the role of the enslaved men and women back into the nation's founding in this one location. they put them back into the individuals and families who had identities separate from jefferson and were worthy of consideration in their own right, and to reveal those realities of life and begin to reveal the tensions in our founding ideals and our founding reality due to the reality -- brutality of slavery, an institution that existed for more than 250 years within the united states. stories reveal among slaves a determination to maintain familial ties, resistance of oppression of bondage, and an insistence of forming lives independent of the white families who owned, supervised, and attempted to control them. stories provide opportunities to describe their agency however circumscribed within slavery. for jefferson's story we have, of course, an abundance of documents carefully preserved by his family and are still carefully preserved by many archives. history did not afford to the slave population the same opportunity, so are all history's -- oral histories have also become an important part of telling that story. stories don't have as much power without a setting. since 2008 or 2009, we have turned to making slavery more manifest in the landscape. ,s we noted this morning restoring the landscape and placing that within the environment as a critical part of helping visitors to a site like monticello understands slavery. it is an attempt to democratize a landscape that never was democratic in jefferson's lifetime. it reveals the humanity of enslaved people and the reality of jefferson as a master. are two places undergoing restoration that i think will address the legacy of slavery and not just the history. dedicatedis a space to the oral history project. we talked about the importance of descendents. since 1990 three, descendents of enslaved families of monticello have told stories of families, of determination, of education, of resistance, of struggle, and of achievement, and those stories, which have been available at least in part online, will now be part of the landscape. a visitor will be able to see and bear witness to those stories. inumber of those people are the audience today. raise your hand if you are part of that. it takes the story of these families beyond the arc of slavery in the arc of .egregation the other space that will be reinterpreted is the living space of sally hemmings and her children born of jefferson. we have talked about her for many years. much of her story is known, but she has never had a physical space on the plantation where her story can be told. telling her story is an important and long overdue act. it is complex, painful, and and erasuresnces that slavery and jefferson himself imposed. it is a story that demands confronting the fact that jefferson was her owner. her life was his property. her body was his property. interpretrmine how to her life, it can not be done without the reality of her sexual exploitation. be donelso cannot without the accomplishments of her life, including ensuring the freedom of all of her children. stories and this setting are related to the ideals that jefferson articulated in the declaration of independence, which is why, in part, monticello was preserved as an historic shrine. be part ofation must how we as americans and we at the realityonfront of slavery. jefferson refused to consider the possibility of extending citizenship to people of color. he also articulated the idea that human beings are born with inherent dignity. in themarginalized united states and globally have used those ideas from his days two hours to demand equality and justice. so, this is our work where we are now. it is a work in progress. we are still trying to get it right. but it is increasingly clear that americans who come to monticello one to hear that story. the legacy of slavery and confronting it is a port in the work we do. -- is important to the work we do. [applause] >> i am very pleased that this symposium has drawn attendees from 61 colleges and universities. what you hear about at william and mary or uva could also be true at your school. i want to tell you a little bit about what i found when i came to uva in 2010. virginia.rom i could not have attended the university of virginia. it did not admit women when i graduated from high school. when i got here, there was a great willingness to talk about what i will call the history and legacy of desegregation, to hear that ralph bunch was the first person to speak to an integrated , right herevirginia in old cabell hall. to hear about gregory swanson, the first african-american student to enroll in the school of law, to hear about walter ridley, the first african-american student to earn . phd but it wasn't as if that was the beginning of the history of african-americans at the university. there was not even a discussion of the legacy of slavery. there was not even much study of the history of slavery. when the president's commission on slavery at the university began its work, they found there was an effort to literally hide, even to destroy some of what was known about slavery at the university. what was known was often subject to public denial by others. so, id not underestimate in any way the courage and hard work that the commission members undertook to learn more about the actual history of slavery here at the university. believe that although the commission has done much terms of theirin research, the buildings that named for enslaved people, the upcoming memorial that will be constructed, that is very important work. in many ways, i think the most important result is that the history they have learned will become part of the educational program that we carry out at the university. for example, we reopened our rotunda about a year ago after three years of restoration. in the first six weeks, there were 30,000 visitors to the rotunda. to those of you who have not then here before, that's the rotunda at the north end of the lawn. and there at the visitors center , we have a carefully designed exhibit about slave laborers and their role in building the original academic village. we relied heavily on our --tners at monticello -- lon monticello, montpelier, and ash wen to help us because discovered how much good cooperation could help you in telling the story. we developed a walking tour map that is a history of enslaved african-americans superimposed over the map of the university. i believe you all received that in your registration material. we created a course called and its legacy that examines the history of slavery at uva and in virginia. we developed a summer camp for high school students so they some techniques in archaeology and explore for the historyome of of the county and of charlottesville. these are important things and an important result from this commissions were, but i think we will not be finished if that is all that we do. my successor has been named, and i don't want to tell him what he needs to do in his term as president, but i can tell you what i think some of the unfinished work is. end ofation was not the the story. just as ralph bunch's speech was not beginning of the story. after emancipation came the long,tion, and in difficult era of jim crow. it's very important for this part of central virginia, then came massive resistance. and we have done very little to document that. if we want to get the oral histories of massive resistance, we don't have much time left, because those people will not live much longer to be able to tell the story. in a country that prize universal public education, that was a shameful story. an entire generation of children were shut out from education. we know the city of charlottesville was involved in this. the legislature closed schools after they voted to desegregate. what happened then? that's another piece of history i think we need to uncover just as we uncovered the history of slavery. to all of us,ge regardless of what school you come from, is there remains much work to be done. [applause] >> these are all wonderfully stimulating remarks. as it turns out, every last serson addressed the question the organizers formulated for me to ask. i want to share these questions, and then i will improvise others. what are some of your institutions initiatives, successes, challenges, and opportunities? i think we have gotten a thorough account. yourare the next steps institutions, in regards to post-emancipation? how does your work relate to future education? how does your institution or organization recognize enslaved labor contributions, including memorialization, and how do you your constituents, students, faculty, alumni, visitors? all of our panelists have addressed these questions in one way or another, so, with your permission, i would like to begin formulating questions as i jotted remarks. with kerryill begin carrie, because i was intrigued by her remarks, specifically at the end. despite all we have done, and we have done a great deal -- and again, kudos to all who have been engaged in this work and brought this work together and arranged panels to disseminate to you, she is right. .uch remains to be done and one of the hidden stories concerns massive resistance. thinking about that in generalizing from there, how might the rest of you begin to think about the what next of your initiatives? is not to say you have exhausted everything you want to do with slavery, but how do your institutions think about going forward? i want toy begin, remind us all that this is not just a hemispheric issue. this is a world issue. i almost every european country is involved in the history, from the financing, the investment, the trade to africa, every african country is involved in this, and this story is not told in africa, it is not told in .urope we must remember that only 5% of africans brought to the americas come to the united states. 95% go to the rest of the hemisphere. what are those universities canada, inrazil, in mexico? our sisterged with institutions worldwide in this discussion, and we must not to a u.s. or virginia discussion. >> wonderful. thank you. >> one of the things we are continuing to do is landscape restoration. people say if you can see it you understand it. we have hundreds of years of that to do. we are also thinking about founding documents such as the constitution, and how do we use ?he lens of the constitution what else do we need to do as a ?eople to govern ourselves k are looking to engage through the last day you are on this planet. that is the challenge. >> inky. -- thank you. >> can you hear me? yes. , toink we need, initially bring our lemon project, which has been going on since 2009, to thatonclusion in a way findings can be widely disseminated and incorporated in an ongoing regime of teaching and remembrance. withs got to be done sufficient skill that it .ctually happens i think when the lemon project in theeport is ready spring, the first part of that is the board of visitors will receive it and respond to that appropriately by formal action. i am a great believer that in -- seer of slavery, segregation, massive resistance, jim crow, symbols are extremely important. adequate staff to get something done is extremely important on an ongoing basis. meat ine has to be some the sandwich. there has to be some substance. s such ass i mean act naming some buildings on the campus after african-americans who have been important in the life of the school. that is a symbolic act, but i have seen at william and mary that it has great power and great significance. staff -- it's really hard to get things going and keep them going in innovative and production fashions if you don't have enough good people working on it. otherwise, it degenerates into rhetoric. staff are building our within the constraints of our resources. substance can come in an enormous variety of ways. one way i think we are struggling not just at william is howy but everywhere we go these days beyond simple diversity in students, faculty, staff, to meaningful inclusion and welcome. is a lot easier than inclusion. diversity is a matter of effectively recruiting, and that can be a much greater challenge in the faculty dimension than on .he student it's a matter of counting, talking about how many you've got, inclusion, on the other , takes a genuine capacity to reach across racial lines, learn how to talk with one another in a meaningful fashion, that when we say all who comed mary actuallyng here, it is meaningful. i know that's not the way a lot of our older african-american alumni feel yet, but we are working very hard on that. but their experience while on campus was one of diversity, pretty limited diversity at the , but not always one of feeling genuinely wanted and welcome. that is really hard to do, and if we can't figure that out, the rest of this, i think, is going to be much less meaningful. >> at monticello, what is next is continuing the restoration of the landscape and continuing the work of historical research. but more portly for us, it's the work of reaching into the -- more importantly for us, it's the work of reaching into communities of people of color and engaging in dialogue about why and how monticello could mean something to them, and in turn, what their contribution means to us. for example, my colleague who is here has recently become a community engagement officer to build better relationships. that's an important start. a historynk there's of monticello as an institution that has not been told that needs to be told in the era of segregation, about monticello in the era of mass resistance. as some of you know, there were african-american men who were born there who actually served as guides to the house, and their story has never been told publicly. in the 1950's, they were unceremoniously displaced by the white, upper middle class ladies who became the hostesses. so, there is a story there to be told. archives,e descendents of these men who lived here. i think there is an opportunity to tell that story. i also think creating more materials to emphasize -- i heard a lot about k12. kasich team. i liked what you said, until you die. right? are ongoinge partnerships we need to build. think there is a single database in the united states. if there is, please talk to me, but i think there is work in those scenes we can do together to help continue to make progress. [applause] >> i think one of the things we this the great significance of the intergenerational transmission of stories, even when an official history, for whatever reason, could not be written, or would be concealed. our students today have an appreciation of the value of that intergenerational transmission. maybe it is because we teach in such segregated ways. school classrooms are made up of children who are more or less the same age. even when they come to an institution such as this, the majority are traditional college-age. i would like to see us able to find some factors for instruction for our students that are not so h segregated so they can learn some of the value fromat is transmitted older generations even if it is not exactly as it got written down. dealing with that bit of is not a bad intellectual challenge for a young person. i think it teaches them to deal with nuance in a way that maybe not all students today receive instruction in. the other important message i believe our librarians would appreciate us drawing from this is how significant archives are, that waswe didn't know hiding in our archives more or less in plain sight. what if we had never kept those archives? the largest generation in u.s. history is passing into retirement at the rate of 10,000 people a day, and they are throwing stuff away. and we have not given them any guidance on what to keep or what to throw away. we are about to go through another era of losing history because we are not providing the guidance. >> thank you. thank you. [applause] >> and, calorie is making my job carrie is making my job easy by making comments i want to draw out or expand upon. in this case, the notion that nuance is important and archives are important. nuance is particularly important any story, telling but particularly when you are telling the story of slavery. i have been impressed by the extent to which those of you who have talked about having learned about formerly enslaved people at your institution's, that the stories you are now prepared to tell about them are stories, investments of education, againstof resistance oppression, stories of their determination to struggle in the face of that impression -- oh pressure and -- oppression. stories of agency. even as we try to resurrect the stories of the formerly enslaved, we are resurrecting particular stories, right? what if we had to imagine -- and this is not necessarily a question for anyone panelist -- maybe it is for the audience. maybe it is for us all to think about -- what if the stories we tackle included those that did not end in triumph? accountsid -- included not resist thed struggle? we want to get from one place to another place, and that is often ending in triumph, right? we want stories of triumph, but , think if we want full stories we must also seek out those stories that do not end in triumph or wisdom. i think the reason it's so important is that we look to the , weives as providing us think because it is in documents, on papers, on letters, on logs, we assume that these documents are unimpeachable evidence of how things work are, but archives are also partial. interpreting -- our ways of interpreting archives are partial. i think as institutions in the business of disseminating , educational institution, we want to disseminate knowledge now that importantly, to turn to confront our task. we want to resurrect a part of most usableat is for us, and the part of that past that is most usable is the part of that past that those now long gone in ways that we can interpret as their full humanity. i taking a very long time to say fullsometimes that humanity includes people that did not triumph. any responses to that? that's more of a comment than a question. >> when i arrived at stanford in 1969, across was burned on my freshman door lawn. dorm lawn.lawn -- i speak in many arenas and i encourage universities to use the opportunity of their alumni returning for the students to interview alumni about what life was like when they were on campus. we can look back -- i know my father went to his 75th for , -- reunion, and we can use this as an opportunity not just to go into the lives of descendents of slaves, but have you dancing gauge alumni in the various eras of history you need to know about. engagehave students eras ofn the various history you need to know about. use these opportunities of students of many generations coming back to learn the complete story. [applause] >> i think that complete story is part of the thread. so many stories are lost to time. that is one of the things we keep trying to puzzle out. i think who we invite in to tell the stories -- sometimes, we have been very directive. descendent.be a that means you have to be dna connected to the site. but people define family and community in different ways. the much more open. our descendent community is yes, people related to folks enslaved feel they havey connection to the area. i would keep the tent really big. i mentioned the year-long celebration going on at william and mary this year of the 50th anniversary of the arrival of three young african american women who were the first to live .n campus we are taking advantage of that opportunity to gather oral who were at alumni william and mary in that era, what was it like? i am a powerful believer that ,hen you can get good stories whether they are stories of behavior or just getting along, they have a force and the capacity to wrap themselves around people's hearts and minds like nothing else does. oral histories we can get, particularly when they are taken by people who know how to get a good oral history down , they make a big difference. the group that desegregated most that were not historically black are getting pretty long in the tooth now. if we are going to get it out of them, we have to get on the stick. [applause] >> i saw that look on your face, dr. martin. briefly, before i worked at monticello, i worked at colonial williamsburg. i was struck at that particular a lot ofre was emphasis on the skill and ability of its slave people at this particular domestic site. i very enthusiastically embraced that idea. we would talk about this, the manservant of the owner of the literate --illed in and literate. , youhe visitors said people make slavery sound like a lifestyle choice. that was 18 years ago. .hat comment has never left me i think historic sites have to do what you said. you have to tell the stories -- just the estate sale of jefferson's enslaved families is a story of absolutely many people being undone. it's critical. i am in agreement. [applause] >> i was thinking as we heard the black voices choir sang how much interesting history can be encoded in music. and that's something else you don't want to lose. sometimes the music itself has not been written down, or the music and lyrics have not been written down. that's another way in which stories, knowingly or unknowingly, got passed from one group to another, from one generation to another. it represents another modality besides the written word that we can look at. there may also be potential in art and architecture, and other forms of visual expression that we perhaps have not paid enough attention to. donew one thing has been at the university, a lot of because the bricks, bricks were originally slave made. laid in highly intricate and complicated .atterns by skilled people there has been interesting work done just thinking about what brick masons must've been like. we had the opportunity last building dedicate a for patent skip with -- patent skipwith. the academicld village. he subsequently was freed and sent to liberia. from liberia, he sent letters back to his former master. we discovered those letters in the archives in the former masters papers. it painted a picture of what life was like for him and his family when they went to liberia. name.o gave us a so, for the dedication, it was possible to find collateral descendents who had stayed in the united states. we invited them to come to the dedication. what was remarkable was they had not met one another. patterns of naming and the family -- they didn't know the origin. they figured it out. there was a lucy in every generation. of the descendents was a second-year student in our school of engineering. a delightful quite and unexpected journey that we made learning about the family. you is what can happen when start with a clue as humble as a brick and try to see what you can do next. [applause] >> well, we are nearing the end of our time together. and a make a remark question to leave suspended in the air as you go to your next session or whatever comes after this for you. scholarship of credit wilder and so many others -- craig wilder and so many others who have research the question of universities and slavery. if i may close by referring to institutions of higher learning, thanks to wilder and others we theaccept as axiomatic that academy never stood apart from american slavery. that it stood behind church and state -- beside church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage. , weks to wilder and others now accept as axiomatic that slavery was a precondition for the rise of higher education in the americas. many of us have also begun to and many ofiomatic, our panelists have so suggested, that the legacy of slavery is still with us. choosing randomly, we look at the segregation of schools. wages, at depressed underemployment, unemployment, .uestions of labor i could spend the next 15 minutes simply listing these legacies. i would ask us all as we leave this space to think about those legacies that are still with us , and,se institutions wherever we happen to be plying our ground, whether it be in a classroom, in a corporate boardroom, in a legal chamber, think about let us this history. confronting it is yes, a matter of resurrecting it, but it is all so -- also a matter of moving forth to correct. we have seen quite a bit of evidence of activity moving .oward that correction it's so much more remains to be done. much for your time in your presence. have a good afternoon. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] weekend on american history tv on c-span3, tonight at 8:00 eastern on lectures in history, american university professor aaron bell talks about privacy law and federal surveillance of civil rights leaders. was head ofullivan operations. shortly after the march on washington and the famous "i have a dream speech," he wrote "we must mark king now as the most dangerous me grow in the nation." in the nation. >> we learned to limit military war. during the vietnam we learned that as a society, as a culture, you cannot kill an idea with a bullet. americaneekend on history tv, only on c-span3. >> c-span, where history unfolds daily. in 1970 nine, c-span was created as a public service by america's cable companies and is brought to you today by your cable satellite provider. >> monday on american history tv , playwright and actor lin-manuel miranda excepts the u.s. capital historical society for his workaward on the musical "hamilton." here is a preview. >> i learned more than how to play piano and follows stage directions. i learned how to be a leader. i learned how to love collaborating. i nurtured the gift of empathy that really makes art transformational. when you are theater kid, you make friends from different ages and social groups. and just for the sake of making something great, you learn to trust your passion and let it lead the way. without humanities and arts programs, i would not be standing here. without alexander hamilton and the countless immigrants that built this country, it is probable very few of us would be here either. our story includes the hundreds of thousands of young people today who came to this country with their parents and to know no other home. [applause] their parents have no documents, but their kids are getting college degrees, working as first responders during disasters like harvey and arm a, and yes, in the case of my own, irmaare even -- harvey and , and yes, in the case of my own congressman, some are even working as government officials. rich and poor, young and old, urban and rural, immigrants and nativeborn, in every corner of our country. this is what the u.s. historical society does, as do so many other nonprofits throughout the u.s. i am a new yorker. my dad came from where to rico. my mom's parents are from -- puerto rico. my mom's parents are from puerto rico and mexico. areic private partnerships a good thing >> you can watch the entire ceremony at the u.s. capitol's statuary hall monday night at 8:00 p.m. eastern. here on american history tv, only on c-span3. next on history bookshelf, brenda wineapple talks about her book "ecstatic nation, confidence, crisis, and sheromise, 1848-1877." recounts the changing american cultural and political landscape through this time, it's growing borders, debate from slavery, and reconstruction. this was recorded at the corner bookstore in new york city in 2013. it's about one hour. [applause] brenda: thanks to all of you for coming tonight. thanks to the great people at harpercollins who came to give some support and for making such a beautiful book, it is really quite lovely. i'm talking about the physicality, you see the inside on your own. as you said, this book

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