women to organizations, voter registration drives, and boycotts. her classes about one hour. >> we are looking at this long quest for freedom and citizenship. getting to the point in the semester where we are talking about the civil rights movement. we have looked at it for a couple of sessions. the interesting thing about teaching the civil rights movement is perhaps the era most americans think they know the most about. we talk a little bit about this. just because folks think they can quote a few sentences from martin luther king in washington and know a little bit about rosa parks civil disobedience on the bus, and have some sense and visual images in our minds of people being brutalized by fire hoses, dogs, there's a visual narrative that comes to all of this. we often think we know a lot about this movement. one of the challenges for those of us learning the movement and connecting it to the longer history of black activism is whichs almost a point at we have to unlearn some stuff before we have to learn stuff. that is what this is today. charles pains to from the trenches is helping us do that. if you have it on your computer, it will be a good idea for us to look at it. one of the main things we will do is look at what charles payne calls the master narrative of the movement. what we're going to do -- it begins to establish and look at what some of the major tropes and issues are in terms of what this narrative is. about whyttle bit this master narrative has endured, and what purpose it serves for us, even 5-6 decades since the height of the civil rights movement. more importantly, we are going to reassemble the narrative, or re-center the narrative, moving away from the master narrative to a narrative that is much more inclusive, a narrative that will center black women in the civil rights movement. before we do that, let's talk about what charles payne calls the master narrative of the movement. what is the master narrative of the movement? what are some components charles payne is getting us to think about about the master narrative and when we think of the civil rights movement? on the focusing mainstream idea that is march in washington, martin luther king, the more popular ideas. payne is asking us to look at the local struggle, specifically more local communities, what they did. >> one major component of this master narrative is a focus on the civil rights narrative from a national perspective, not a local one. any other components? of comes to the conclusion that racism is wrong at the same time. >> there is a sympathetic government. it minimizes the intensity of struggle and the intensity of opposition to the movement. there is a way that through this master narrative of the movement, which has been passed down, in terms of how the movement was remembered, there is a way of erasing the opposition to it. a feelre these images of folks in a particular place, and a few bad police chiefs, but not really understanding that while not everyone out there is with fire hoses and police dogs, there was still opposition to the civil rights movement. what are some other components? he explains how they say it was a march to a protest and activism. >> what does that mean? protest vs activism? those sound very similar to me. betweenthe difference simplifying the master narrative to be about protest, but not activism? >> when the civil rights movement is overly simplified, sometimes in elementary school, it is it the would as people coming together at the right place at the right time, as opposed to a long struggle of that ended up with people getting more rights. >> this idea of protests. a bunch of people who happen to show up in the right place at the right time, as opposed to very strategic planning that went into even the big events. also, the small local grassroots level work. a great deal of strategizing, organizing, it was not as simple as it is seen, where it happened. any other components to the way we understand the civil rights through the master narrative? >> we talked about the mid-50's-60's, not what happened earlier. what had tos -- place -- what happens earlier is just as important. >> a major component of the master narrative of what we think of as the civil rights movement has these very neat bookends. the brown versus board of education case, may be rosa parks act of civil disobedience in montgomery. it ends either at the voting thet act, or certainly with death of martin luther king in 1968. while that is a moment of intensification, in the social movement of what we think of as the civil rights movement, it ignores what we have been learning about a class that has a long history of black activism. that theives a sense issues people were fighting for in the civil rights movement didn't end with the passing of certain legislation, and there is no need for things to go forward. any other things that we missed? all the examples are showing you how deep and pervasive this is. >> people tend to forget the efforts of ordinary people and the struggles local communities went through. >> absolutely paired there's so much of an emphasis on leaders, particularly male leaders. we could even simplify, there's an emphasis on martin luther king and the men that surround him. and the people who are in these marches and pictures become nameless and faceless without really demonstrating the very active role that ordinary citizens, ordinary people in ordinary communities were doing to make things better. >> in the first sentence, it says the relationship between racism was oppressive. it ran to account that things were happening in the north just as bad as the south. thet not only narrows chronology of what we think of as the civil rights movement, but the geography. it becomes just focused on what is happening in the south, as if racial inequality only existed in the south, and as if the kind of fighting against racial inequality is only limited in the south. these are all part of this much bigger narrative, the master narrative of the movement. there is some truth to things in their. there is something important about montgomery. there was something important about martin luther king. if we think about the movement and only remember it in these very narrow terms, we are going to lose more than we actually learn. i want to think about why we think the civil rights movement has been remembered in this way. it's not something i think is a very narrow depiction. if you look recently, we talked about this. the 50th anniversary of martin luther king's assassination was just commemorated in april. thealked about the ways -- memory of that playing into the master narrative, the way policymakers play into it, the way educational institutions play into it. why do you think that is? what do you think of that state in the way we remember the civil rights movement? >> you kind of touched on this before. payne talks about how they look for people to look at the civil rights movement as events, that one police chief did something bad, those people in the south did something bad. they don't really accept the fact of the day today constant piece of life for people. i personally think it stems from a lack of wanting to take responsibility. white people don't want to accept the fact they had a part in it. the responsibility makes -- the lack of responsibility makes the narrative change. >> that point of day today, everyday experiences of racial inequality, but also every day acts of resistance against it. it gets missed out. there is a place for large-scale protest, but we cannot do that at the expense of thinking about how people's lives were impacted by racial inequality and activism on a day to day basis. anybody else on why we think the civil rights narrative has often been depicted in these ways? america has this overall sense of not wanting to seem like the bad guy. just going off of a broad overrepresentation, america was known for being the place of freedom and the american dream. theake responsibility of bad things that happened up until and during the civil rights movement, even today, they always want to look at the positive side of the story it's great. we're celebrating martin luther king. in reality, they don't look at all of the negative sides of what americans did back then and what they are doing now. >> think about the context, this idea of perception becomes important. think about the context in which the emergence of the civil rights movement is happening in the 1950's. what was the larger geopolitical context that made the notion of how americans are being presented become even more dire? war.old the cold war and the way it framed this narrative of good versus evil, where the u.s. was supposed to and wanted to come out looking more positive than the soviet union. that's the question about american perception. is it merely about people wanting to feel good about themselves and the narratives we portray? it also has very real geopolitical and foreign-policy implications. america's perception impacts america's role in being a superpower. that doesn't end with the cold war, it continues. this is part of why the narrative developed the way it does, and why it continues to develop. our key question we want to look at today and begin to examine is how does centering the civil rights activism of black women disrupt and change this master narrative of the civil rights movement? we establish some of the contours of this master narrative, we went through a bit about why the master narrative may have developed the way it does, and the kinds of utility it does and functions for people. if wee want to see -- look at the movement from a different perspective, does it begin to provide insight for us into thinking about the master narrative and thinking about the civil rights movement currently? before we do that, i wanted to think of it -- this is something that will require us to think back over some things we have the thingsme of we have read and talked about in class. ofanted to think about some the unique ways black women both in the north and south, experienced the perils and challenges of segregation and racial discrimination. if we are looking at this moment in the 1950's, even broadening out to this period during segregation. i want us to think about some of the ways that gender and racial discrimination and oppression intersect to give black women, both in the north and south, a different experience of the period of segregation. when i'm trying to get us to think about that, i'm not trying to get us into an oppression olympics, where i say black women had it better or worse, that is not a very useful thing to do. what we can address is they experienced it differently. there were some issues because of the way gender is constructed and experienced. ways that african-american women are experiencing this period of segregation differently than black men are. when we think about these challenges, to not just think about the ways african-american women are experiencing segregation, just vis-a-vis their relationship to whites, but also how internal dynamics within black communities are also constraining black women waysin that perhaps black men are not. think about our readings that we have had. think about the memoir "coming-of-age in mississippi" that we have been reading to think about life in the rural south and civil rights movement. think about the film we saw about the murder of emmett till and the role that made me till plays. think about our discussion about the montgomery bus boycott we had earlier. what are some of the different ways that black women are experiencing segregation than black men are? that will help us think about what kind of activism black women begin to engage in. what are some differences? can we think of anything? you are talking about and moody, her mom was forced to leave the kids at home. she had the pressure to carry on her domestic duties, but also had to leave the family to go work. that vote -- black women are responsible, in many cases particularly about the gender norms of the time, of caring for their homes, children, also having the very real constraints of economic injustice and disenfranchisement that black families have. just being able to negotiate their economic duties with their duties at home for childbearing and childcare does put particular strains on black women in segregation. >> i wanted to add to what we were talking about, how the bus boycott actually started. black women were usually homes.c workers in white adjacent,went really but they were pretty far in distance. they would have to take buses to go over there. they would be mistreated and taunted, just harassed from it. sometimes, they would miss work because the bus driver wouldn't take them. it increased the problems that were going on. >> the very limited economic and labor options black women had, which for the majority of the time of segregation, where black what --black woman working as to what servant in the home of whites. because of what we know of racial segregation patterns, black and white communities were not adjacent to one another, and were often across town. black women were usually the ones within communities using public transportation more. because of that, they were the ones experiencing the brutality, the violence, the indignities of writing these segregated buses and being harassed by bus drivers and other patrons. they are experiencing segregation in their everyday life in a different or more intense way than men on transportation because they are using it more often. >> going off of that, i was thinking about the particular owner ability that -- vulnerability that black women were in. we talk about the sexual violence they face by white men in those homes. because they are so close, it more forms of for harassment. >> these kinds of labor conditions are putting black women in a very vulnerable place. they are working in these intimate environments where the accusations around sexual abuse or sexual assault, because of the power dynamics they will not be taken seriously. it raises a larger point of something we have been talking about this semester, even going back to the period after reconstruction, where we talk about how sexualized violence in the form of rape and sexual assault becomes a tool in the arsenal of violence that whites are using to keep african-americans in fear and intimidated. this extra dimension that -- violence is a part of that, but when we talk about black women's experiences, the threat of sexualized violence becomes more intensified. this is not juggling who had it better or worse, but it's an area we need to think about more explicitly if we are censoring black women with that, and thinking about the civil rights movement as a battle to deal with issues of sexual violence. we think now in our 21st century about the me too movement and the sexual harassment and violence. what we have seen through the life of people is that black women were censoring the issue of sexualized violence during the civil rights movement. it's often very absent from the master narrative, but it is there. we talked about how rosa parks herself was someone going through the deep south getting narratives from black women who had been assaulted and trying to think about ways to mobilize against that. this issue of sexualized violence is important. any other ways black women's experiences may have impacted them? we have the residential pattern, we also can think about the ways black women's behavior was often policed in ways black men's behavior was not. and how that policing of behavior about what it meant to be a proper woman impacted who black communities were willing to rally behind. the example of claudette colden, a young woman who was pregnant and unmarried, who did the very same thing rosa parks did, but because she was seen as someone who had a past that would not look good to a greater public, people do not rally behind her. this is something black women faced in ways that were different. of course, one of the things the master narrative reminds us is just how much male power and leadership was val arrived within the movement in ways that wasn't scared and ignored in the very will work that black women had been doing. mediate tension -- media attention would always be drawn to the men of the movement as they are doing work. it would not necessarily go to women like ella baker, a longtime activist who helped nurture and birth the student movement. or diane nash, who was a leader in the sit in movement and the student nonviolent coordinating committee, who held leadership positions. dorothy height, the head of the women -- national council of the negro league and who wanted to have a voice. the master narrative and the way the men were seen as being the only ones will have something to say in garnering the media attention of secured women from these particular narratives. i think it's important to think about the ways physical violence, sexual violence, black women's roles as mothers in the women' economic and labor constraintss, how all of those things helped propel them towards activism that looked different than much of the activism in the master narrative. what we are going to do now is begin to look at our reading and look at some specific examples of black black -- black women's activism. we are going to look at mooney, and her memoir. we are also going to look at a chapter you all read from my book "beauty shop politics." we will look at chapter five, talking about the civil rights movement. i want to start with a place hwere -- where the work and research i have done intersex with ann moody. i open up the chapter in my book referring to an experience ann moodie had when she was in a sit in. i'll read briefly from an excerpt. it's on page 293 in this edition. in a sitfter she was in that turned violent. she says "before we were taken back to campus, i wanted to get my hair washed. dry mustard,with ketchup, and sugar. a beauty shop across the street from the naacp office. i lost my shoes when i was dragged across the floor at will worth. my stockings were sticking to my legs from the mustard that had dried. the hairdresser took one look at me and said you were in that city in, huh? do you havered, time to wash my hair and style it? right away, she said. there were three other ladies already waiting, but they seemed glad to let me go ahead of them. the hairdresser was nice. she even took off my stockings and washed my legs while my hair was drying. i remember when i was working on this book project, i thought this was such a powerful scene and a powerful moment to get us to think about black women within the civil rights movement. here we have ann moody, whose body is literally embattled. she was on the front lines at a sit in movement trying to get african-americans better access and equal access to a lunch counter. spatets ketchup, mustard, upon, racial epithets thrown at her. the first place she decides to go is a bizarre place, maybe even a foolish place, a beauty shop. she knew she could get her hair washed. we understand that. she literally has stuff in her hair, she didn't even have her shoes because she had to run away from what was happening. i think the way she describes her treatment once she gets in the salon is something that can help us think about black women and black women's roles, and the importance of institutions that are owned by and run by black women in sustaining women like moody, who were on the front lines of the movement. she knew that in the beauty shop it would be a safe place, a refuge for her. a place where she could not only have her hair washed, but the way she talks about the gentle pampering by the beautician. even the way she refers to how the other women who were in the shop let her go ahead of them. it shows it was a place where a many ways she could have her soul restored. that's something we need to think about a lot as we are reading memoirs and seeing film. even when you are watching the old newsreels of people on the front lines of the civil rights movement. we think of them as a nameless, faceless people in a black and white photo, without fully considering the psychological tool and damage that these kind of things are putting, not just on their bodies, but also their mind and spirit. the beauty shop becomes a place of refuge for her. i use that as an introduction to get us to think about how the beauty shop wasn't just place of refugea, but also became a place where activism itself could be planned and enacted. i want us to talk about that a little bit. i thought it might be useful -- you have the weird, and maybe unwelcome opportunity, for the first time this semester, you have the author of one of your pieces in front of you, who is also your professor, that could get weird. we are all cool now. you can ask me anything and feel free to use the strategies of critique that i have been training you with all semester on my own work. nothing would make me happier. i thought it might be useful to talk about how i stumbled into this work on beautician's and the civil rights movement. its sort of an odd thing. it's something i never envisioned doing. it almost doesn't make sense. except once i got into the sources. as a graduate student, i was interested in black women's activism in a general sense. i was reading everything i could get my hands on about the topic. i also began to do archival work learning,ry sources, the process of research. then i began to notice something interesting,t of that many of the women who were mentioned in both primary and secondary sources, particularly those that were sources looking at local and grassroots community organizing and activism, that many of the women had a similar occupation. they were beauticians. o much of it at first, like that was kind of interesting, but i wanted the rea much of it at first, story that seemed more important. then i began to look at it even more and the question about the master narrative, thinking about how it can impact the way we read and understand sources. i was also at the time reading an article called "the age of madam cj walker." as many of you know, madam cj walker was a black beauty pioneer from the early 20th century. company thathis literally employs thousands and thousands of women. she has a factory. she is selling products all over is african diaspora, really one of the pioneers of what we think of as the black beauty industry. the article poses a really interesting question -- why is it that we think of the early 20th century as the age of ooker t. washington? right, and we studied washington and him as an education leader and was considered the top black leader of his day. the article asks what would happen -- this is almost a question very similar to what charles dean is trying to get us to do about rethinking the master narrative of the movement -- what would happen if we centered the experience of madam cj walker in that moment and called it the age of madam cj walker instead of calling it the ge of booker t. washington? what might we learn from doing that? i took that to heart and said if i center the experiences of these black beauticians in the movement, how will that change what we know or what we think we know about the civil rights movement? that is essentially where the project ended up going and where .he research ended up taking me even once i got into it, the among that were happening black beauticians in the 1950's and 1960's were particularly interesting to me, right? everyone, right? all the key people who were part of our master narrative of the civil rights movement, people like martin luther king, talking everyone,about black beauticiag central to the civil rights movement, right? that shows us even when we are following people who are part of the master narrative, when they are saying things and doing things that don't fit into our master narrative, we ignore them, right? i was shocked to find in 1957, king at the beginning of his ascendancy as a black leader is addressing a group of black beauticians on a topic called the role of beauticians in the contemporary struggle for freedom. this is king, right? completely missing from the narrative. we see leaders of the democratic party making statements like if you get a beautician engaged into your candidate's campaign, then you have found a gem because they can make all these things happen. these are people central to our ideas about the movement, but they are talking about women and talking about activism in ways that really are not legible to us, so researchers have often left them out and made them marginalized, so i want us to think about this, right? the article -- the chapter, i should say, has a lot of evidence of the work that black beauticians were doing and what they were doing in beauty shops, and we are going to talk about some of that, but just sort of as you read it, why do you think black beauticians were so effective as activists and grassroots leaders? what was unique about their position and what they had access to that made the kind of activism we will talk about in a possible? >> on page 119 of the reading, you talk about a beautician who the police chief comes to her ways of work and tries to interrogateer or her husband's manager into firing her husband and also its of things, and she is afforded the ability to kind of talk back to him because as a small business owner, she has that economic free will, basically. she does not have to worry about her employer firing her for saying something unsavory. she basically has the freedom to speak our mind, so i think that is powerful. raise,l: the example you right, her and her husband were very active in mississippi, in aa cp, in voter registration movements -- naacp, in voter registration movements. , as a business owner who owned her own business -- think about it, too, not just that she owned her own business, but who were the clients in her business? other black women, right? even her manufacturing, at a time when black women beauty manufacturers who were supplying her product -- there was no one the police chief could go to and say fire her because she owned her own business. she was economically autonomous, served herutician and other beauticians well to take their own risk because they did not have the fear of attribution. women and men would lose their jobs all the time if their civil rights activity was found out. that was definitely a big reason. what are some other reasons? yes? >> you mentioned the aim to mobilize the titian's because they are like missionaries and everyone they come in contact with, they make [inaudible] likelowed them to be missionaries to spread the word and activism. -- you mentioned the aim to mobilize beauticians. dr. gill: particularly those of us who may have a long-term relationship with a particular stylist, there is a certain kind of intimacy and bond that develops between a hairstylist and client and their often develops a kind of trust between had a greatuticians deal of credibility so when they are spreading the good news about voting and voting registration and civil rights activities, their clients are them maybe in ways that if someone else told them, they would not be as receptive. beauticiansys why might be well-suited for this kind of civil rights work? the physical act of, like, sitting in a chair and having something sharp close to your head, you are kind of in a vulnerable position. dr. gill: worse than scissors at your ear, a calm that has been dipped in flames coming at your head -- a comb that has been dipped in flames. >> like you said, there is a form of trust, but also that relationship is important, kind of like this person is taking care of you and in that way makes people feel a lot more , especially in an environment where being comfortable was not something that was common for black women. they were working in homes that were obviously uncomfortable. even when they went home, they had other duties, so this was like a safe space for them to go and be taken care of. they are kind of, like, more inclined to listen, so they have a specific death just a role i think is super interesting, just they have a unique kind of on your shoulder -- dr. gill: yes, and that's why i think that example of moody going to the salon was so important. she knew that was one of the few places she could be cared for, so that also continued to develop trust in that as well. yes yes >> this goes back to what you were saying earlier about how women's behavior toward police sayertain ways, and i would black beauticians were really important to the movement because of the present ability of their clients. dr. king in your chapter said something about look like you are going to church when you are going to participate in these , and themovements beauty parlor is where you go for that. dr. gill: yes, there is a way that self presentation was a really effective strategy within the movement. again, going back to our earlier points about the master narrative and the idea that it was these kind of mass protests and people would just kind of show up and things would happen. they were instructed when showing up at rallies and movements and marches and citizens on the specifics down to how to dress. that instruction about dress neatly and modestly as if you are going to church was about that, right? when we look at images and videos and stills of the civil rights movement and you see how these college students are dressed going to a will worth tonty where they are going leave with their clothes ruined, with their hair a mess -- all of that, but that was a strategy of looking a particular way, and part of that was about getting the media's attention of looking at these very well dressed, well groomed, well behaved black people on the frontlines getting brutalized, and you are absolutely right that part of that process of getting there, at least for women, and at this particular time, was about a particular type of hair grooming that happens in black beauty shops. black beauticians are preparing people for the frontline in that way as well. we talked a bit about beauticians and the role they play that made it very easy for them to become civil rights leaders and activists, but what about the space of the beauty shop? one of the reasons why they also were very effective is that they had ownership, literally, of an institutional space. we cannot underestimate the importance of institutional space. i know you all are my very 21st-century young college students where i think sometimes we don't appreciate how important physical space is because so much of what we do is in this kind of digital world, but the ability to get people a space to get people in the same room can be together and be protected is important, right? what are some of the other ways that a beauty shop in particular, would serve to be a powerful political institution? sponsored safep space for women to discuss issues on civil rights, maybe to discuss more extreme issues -- saveeauty shop sponsored space. it said here and page 103 they did not always agree with administrators or people who were seen in a positive light within the civil rights movement, and they could discuss their discrepancies and problems they had with them and different how to moveews on forward with the civil rights movement. dr. gill: absolutely, right? a black women-owned space where women are -- it was different than the church environment where black women may not have then the ones who were in leadership positions to be able to direct the conversations that were going on there. also, and this is something to think about as well, think about for those who were in opposition to civil rights, churches were very much on their radar, and we know that because they bombed churches. they attacked churches. they firebombed the homes of black ministers and people who were connected to it. visible a very kind of institution, so you are absolutely right that the beauty shop as this kind of alternative space allowed for conversation of a more radical sort about the civil rights movement because they were completely under the radar. one of the things i always say is that for just about every black person or ally who was involved in the civil rights movement, there is an fbi file on them. that is just fact. this is not a radical -- i mean, fbi was monitoring -- i mean, the tapes on martin luther king, topything from leaders of to grassroots leaders. i have not been able to find an fbi file on a beautician even though these beauticians were involved in much of the same work and in some cases, even more radical work than those who were being surveilled. when they were being surveilled, for example, bernie's robinson, her cousin of appeals in the fbi identified in is an article as some unidentified woman. there is a way that because the beauty shop is viewed as frivolous, right? what's happening in their? akronh of women gossiping that is our perception of what happens at the beauty shop. they were able to flourish as political sites because they were perceived as not doing anything important, and they used that disadvantage to their advantage. in the way that churches and other kind of institutions were on the radar, beauty shops were able to slip under them. they were underestimated, and that worked to their advantage. this about them within larger context of the civil rights movement or the black freedom struggle. again, going back to our point , thatthe master narrative if we are focusing on the master narrative, it seems as though the most important thing was about getting laws changed, and getting laws changed is important, but when we look about the activism of black beauticians in particular, we begin to see a much more complex, nuanced story about what the civil rights movement was about to people on the every day. what are some of the issues, some of the concerns that black beauticians tackled from their position as beauticians and from their space as beauty shops? we can look at any of the women in the chapter, bernie's robinson, ruby blackburn. thatare some of the things were important to them, the issues that were? >> voting registration, mainly, especially robinson who offered to take in voter registration cards to her house so the whites in the neighborhood would not know who was registering, and then she became a teacher to try to teach people how to read the paragraphs. dr. gill: there are robinson had this use of salons. i talk about this in the chapter . herof her clients called salon a center for all kinds of subversive activity, which i love. thinking about a beauty salon and some of the things you talked about, that she allowed her home to be a repository for people who wanted, for example, to join them to ship in the the naacpembership in . remember, i talked about how many states made membership in illegal? south carolina was one of them, wanted toblack person , they could be fined or jailed, so many people would have their mail from the naacp sent to bernie's wilson. one of the attacks on black americans was to try to intimidate their employers to fire them if they were known to civil rights activity. for the same reason, she had that economic autonomy that she aboutt have to worry losing her job. and she turned it into a citizenship education school ways she not only taught to try to help african-americans registered to vote, which was always a very tricky and complicated thing, even if you could actually read the paragraph, then the registrar would say you did not read it properly or things like that, but she used that really as a way to educate people in her generally, so she opens up education to teach basic literacy skills, basic math skills, basic accounting skills, things people in her community needed, very practical things. this is something that i think marx the work of black beauticians in the south. while they were interested in things like voting and changing laws, they were bit -- they were also interested in things like basic nutrition and health. she supports building of a tent city for sharecroppers who were convicted off their land for engaging in activism. she wanted to provide not just a home for them but places where they and their family could get nutrition, health care, child care -- very nuts and bolts practical needs. ofruby parks blackburn atlanta who used her position to advocate for getting bus service extended into black neighborhoods, was an early we think aboutt as combating environmental racism, which is this practice of companies and corporations dumping chemicals in communities of color, so she was an early advocate of that. again, thinking about how these onuticians are working dealing with varied nuts and bolts things. when we center their experiences, it disrupts the nuts and bolts because of forces us to think about the civil rights movement beyond the national, forcing us to think about not just the sympathetic response but how african-americans are organizing on grassroots levels to try to make their day to day lives better. rethink the us to goals of the civil rights movement. their emphasis on meeting, pressing, and practical needs -- meeting pressing and practical needs for those that community was actually at the heart of what we call the civil rights movement. laws and all listings are to protect that, but i think the master narrative does not allow us to think about the ways that the goals of the movement were about meeting these pressing and practical needs, particularly for those who are most vulnerable in black communities. also the work of black beauticians disrupts the idea of spontaneous protest because they and creative, innovative, strategic, all things that were very important. it also gets us to rethink the role and the importance of media in the civil rights movement, which is something that was very important. we see organizations and leaders skillfully using the media, but part of what made beauticians so successful was the fact that they flew underneath the radar, that they were not the ones most prominent out there in front of a television screen and recognizable. it was their anonymity that made their activism successful, and they also remind us that there's no real easy win in the black freedom struggle, right? that if you focus on checking off some laws and bills, it is easy to look at this movement as something that there were clear winners and clear losers. the issues they were advocating for are a constant reminder to us that much of what they started is still left unfinished. my hope is as we look at the role of black beauticians and sort of think about them and think about the activism of black women in general as a way of disrupting the master narrative, it will cause us to think about the civil rights movement differently, but i also hope it causes us -- and you know this is always my thing about this class. it is important for us to study the past, absolutely, i'm a historian, but the way we remember the civil rights movement tells us more about ourselves in the 21st century than it does about what was happening in the 21st century. i hope when we look back at people like and moody and women like the black beauticians, that it would inspire us and challenge us to look for new possibilities in the every day to make an impact, right? to look at these personal and community spaces that are often overlooked, and think about how aey could possibly become part of larger struggles to make our world better, so, really, creativity, their willingness to look at their limitations the something we can all aspire to when we think about freedom struggles. any other final questions or comments. what were some of the things you learned or that may have surprised you most about it? i'm sure most of you have never the civil rights text that centers them. was there anything that surprised or shocked you or anything you found encouraging or problematic? yes? >> like how you said there were not any fbi files on the beauticians themselves. i'm wondering how they never caught on especially as people were sending mail, and it was kind of like this open secret. was it just because they were so removed from black life that that's why they just did not see that as happening? dr. gill: think about that. i'm going to post that to everyone else, reading what you read, why do you think they were so successful at flying under the radar when there was so much activity going on the documents it and i was able to find as a researcher 50 years later? it was sort of hidden in plain sight. why did you think that was so effective? >> i think the black woman is typically undervalued and undermined, even within our own community sometimes, so much so that you see a lot of men come to the front when it comes to civil rights activism, and it was rumored that some of those men were misogynist, so i don't know if, you know, like, maybe other people or the majority of viewed ourhat movement and looked at the men at the front and just thought those are probably the people who are advocating, putting these pieces of the puzzle together -- you don't really see too many women in the front of the civil rights movement, with the exception of the black panther movement where you saw them push more women to the front. i think it is also a representation of how some black men and black women viewed each other as well. typically, that is how the public perceived it, women not playing as much of a role as they did. gill: any other thoughts on that? extensive activism was hidden from the public? because some jobs are often ignored when it comes to political activism, so when anyone would hear something's going on in that beauty parlor, they would immediately zone out? dr. gill: i think that is something that we all could learn from, that the spaces that seem the most frivolous can actually have the potential to have some of the most radical potential in it for the very reason. think to a certain extent, not a perfect parallel but a similar one when we think about social media as something we all probably waste way too much of our time on and all of that but also has been used to great effect by organizations like black lives matter, by groups who are rallying like the in in parkland, florida, and students around the country who are rallying on behalf of gun control and other things or the me too hash tagged. i think that is something whenever i think about this research, it constantly kind of challenges me to think about that, that for the things that are important to me that i want to see change, what spaces, even those that may be dismissed might i be able to use to make that change? >> [inaudible] kind of makes me love it even more, that they were so easily dismissed. they kind of, like, took that -- like, they took that opportunity of stepping to make it even more powerful by making a sort of incognito and making this political change, and i think so beneficialike , for blacklevels women to feel safe and kind of in charge in their political climate, but also, like, on a, like, national scale. >> i also think, like, maybe a cultural difference may have, like, contributed a little bit. speaking from my personal experience, i don't think, like, person places,te like, a super high importance on a barbershop. shopss, like, five arbor in my town and i have no allegiance to one barbershop, and i think a lot of people would not necessarily understand , maybe, because as far as i understand, the way that you have to care for your hair and stuff is different, so i think a lot of people who may be did not understand either how much time someone might spend in a barbershop or the importance of, like, your allegiance to a particular barbershop, how that might play a role. dr. gill: i think the cultural differences are very important in this. one, in terms of how much is getting done in a beauty shop. part of why it was so effective was that there was a captive audience that was there for a long time, that the hairstyling would take most of your day or half a day, so people were there for a long time building that, and also i think part of the cultural difference as to why in black communities, barbershops and beauty shops even still to this day have a different kind of currency is about thinking about some of the same things you saw in this article about black space as hidden space. thinking about when you are in a youety and culture where are not dominating, that the places you get to gather our unconventional and take on a greater importance. one of the things to think about is how beauty shop said even --bershops -- the interested the interesting thing about barbershops is they were surveilled and they would go to those spaces and sometimes they would find stuff, but i always say if they had been in beauty shops, they would have had a much better report to write. my hope is when we talked about this today, sort of thinking about the civil rights movement, looking at the real example of black beauticians helps to unravel this narrative and as we continue for the rest of the semester going forward to the contemporary period, we can think about how some of what was started in this period is unfinished and that people continue to take up this battle, but also gets us to think about when we encounter narratives about the civil rights movement in our public spaces, our discourse, public policy, monuments, conversation, that this has equipped us with more tools to be able to try to dismantle or pick away at it. all right? thank you all for a good class. >> you can watch lectures in history every weekend on american history tv. we take you inside college classrooms to learn about topics ranging from the american revolution to 9/11. that is saturday at 8:00 p.m. and mid eastern on c-span3. >> in 1988, 2 women set out to build a museum in new york city that pays homage to america's immigrants. sunday on american history tv, tenement museum cofounder ruth abram tells the story of the building in new york's lower east side. here is the preview. >> when i was a little girl, i was 13 years old. that's all of the friends i had grown up within this little school going to a bigger high school, and when i got to the high school with my poodle skirt and my peter pan collar and my my saddle shoes, i thought i was ready, and all these girls i had grown up with, my friends gathered around me and said, "you cannot come to our parties anymore." i could not go to cotillion. "you see, you are jewish. it's not us. it's our parents." and i was thrown out of the world i had been so part of. what it made me feel is i never want to do that to anyone else. i never want anyone to do that to anyone else, and these two streams, what history could do and the horrible sting of let'sice led me to think see if i could talk about the stranger in the land. let's see if i can find a way to bring people home so that these strangers become people they know, and that led me to the thought of the tenement museum. i had no museum experience, which meant i did not know i was breaking the rules. can watch the entire program on the history of new york's tenement museum sunday at 7:00 p.m. at 11:00 p.m. eastern. all is american history tv weekend, every weekend, on c-span3. >> "new york times" best-selling author jodi pico is our guest on ," ourpth fiction edition live call-in program. -- best-selling author jodi picoult. she has also written five issues of the wonder woman, and book -- comic book series for d.c. comics. watch live sunday, november 4 from noon to 3:00 p.m. eastern, and be sure to watch next month when author brad meltzer will be our guest. >> in 1967, president lyndon johnson established a commission headed by illinois governor otto -- kerner to examine recent outbreaks of violence and to prevent further incidents. the harris talks about impact 50 years of its release. the university of minnesota's hosted thisool event. it is just under an hour. >> good afternoon, everybody. you.good to see that usually takes so much longer when the room is full of students. i have to say that five or six times before i get attention. i'm

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