We are people who are real. We have dealt with this and written about it. Again, i want to thank politics and prose and cspan for thinking enough of this series to continue to cover it. You dont get these kinds of people in this kind of room without this kind of coverage but i want to thank you all for being here tonight for our fifth installment. I want you to feel free, feel welcome, feel at home. Come to the microphone, ask a question, intelligent, civil, and we will answer. Without further ado i want to introduce this great panel. We will get into bullet points on their career and into the discussion. I want to start off with someone who i have such respect for and admiration and love for. Doctor Mary Frances Berry, former head of the u. S. Civil rights commission. She has a list of things she has done. She has been jailed for fighting against apartheid in south africa. The list goes on and on. Awe o she is author of the book 5 and a pork chop sandwich and the corruption of democracy. She has a new book coming out. History teaches us to resist that. [applause] next to her we have ava who is an activist woman and the author of how exceptional j black women lead. Lets give her a round of applause. [applause] next to her we have wesley, the National Editor for the Washington Post and the author of they cant kill us all. Lets give him a round of applause. Ause. [applause] without further ado, we want to introduce the author of race america, obama and Public Policy. She is the author, she is an economist. Thank you for being here with us. We are about to talk about activism. We have to get juliana applause. [applause] these two ladies right here, i remember being a young lady watching them march for us when we didnt have voices. They basically let us know that we count and we matter when many of us are not at the table. I want to start off with something that came to me while we were driving in tonight. Activist, entertainer said right after the election when President Trump became president , he said this is a great time. I said why and i hear little chuckle back there. He said its a great time. He reflected back and said when there is great pain there is radical activism which brings about change. Later i called him to do an interview and i said hows everything going . Im not too happy about what im seeing. I dont see the activism i anticipated. Be he is remembering the 50s and 60s when the greatest m movement in this nation, but whats happening now . We have an author here, a civil rights icon who is writing a book that history teaches us to resist. Talk to us about history. T . My good friend harry is always right. Let me just say, what i talk about in this book is what i think is important about this hour. I didnt plan to write any other books but it was time for this one. What i talk about is all the movements in the past where people have organized to resist president s who took action or were trying to take action that we oppose. Most of the movements that i talk about, in fact we were involved in the case of a lot of them. Its possible to win if you organize properly. Am war things like the anti Vietnam War Movement which we thought we lost but i not only was in the movement as a student at the university of michigan, i pretended i went to vietnam and actually covered the war one summer. We found out later that Richard Nixon stopped the peace process. The point is in there are movements since then. Sometimes friendly president s you have to oppose. We wanted to get him to do something with the treaty and now look what trump has done about it. The point is there has been movement of people who are willing to not just march and come to rallies and put their bodies on the line in several disobedience in other ways in order to get things to change. I dont think we are at that point now. I think the marches are great and every time there is a rally i say terrific, keep up the spirit. E al i go to some of the town halls to watch and listen to people, but we need more than we have had and its not been as radical as one night of thought. The issues are what count, not just trump. What i hate is getting ready the compliance or underfunding or not having the budgets for Environmental Justice and then the Justice Department and all around the government. All of these things that affect people who are poor or j whats happening on healthcare. We just go down the list. Make the policies the center of the moment not just can you get together. Ne are we better off, we are now post obama era. What does that look like to you and what are the issuesalked that doctor mary frances talked about that should be on the table . First of all, thank you. I dont know anybody that i admire more than Mary Frances Berry. Ny i really dont. Thank you for bringing us together and for the work that youve done, not only to continue this series but to speak truth to power. I was going to ask you a question. Ally, wh why doesnt sean spicer. [inaudible] , and go away. The other thing i want to say before i answer your question is congratulations. [applause] i feel like bobby womack sometimes. If you think youre lonely now, just wait. Obama w we are not better off. Barack obama was a tremendous president. He was outstanding and amazing but he was constrained in many ways and when you look at the economic state of the africanamerican people, it did not substantially improve until the last year of his presidency. Much of that was recession andnd was not his fault not on in any case, were not better off and were about to be much worse off. The economic issues, im with m mary frances. And we have spent too much time talking about russia. Its important. I dont know how much ink hasth been wasted on the president and the first lady who dont hold hands, theres a whole lot of other stuff they dont do and we dont want to know. But what we know is that this victory for 45, i dont call his name called. I call him 45. This was a victory for predatory capitalism. People are going to have to struggle whether we had elected mrs. Clinton was not being. What we have is a different kind of struggle. Its trickledown economics. Its worse than that. Ut extra its about expecting every penny of surplus value from people. Ril, you you have very simple regulations of the department of labor requires people advising you to follow certain rules. Now that man says they dont have to follow certain rules. Most americans dont get pensions anymore anyway. You are setting people up toto get ripped off. 10. 10 an if you had a federal contract you must be paid 10. 10. Hour which is higher than the federal minimum wage. That man is reconsidering that. Theres a piece of legislation that was talking about how you get paid overtime. Right now you get overtime, if you make more than 24000 a year you were considered executive employee. If you make 30 grand you are executive employee and you cant get overtime unless its an overtime job. President obama put together regulation that said they were gonna raise that number so you get overtime until you earn 44th or 45000. 00 that man basically saying no, we dont want that. The labor sec secretary says well maybe we should raise it a little bit but not that much. Can you imagine Administrative Assistant who makes 32000 a year being considered an executive employee and not be paid overtime . I would really like us, as mary has said, we can talk about how odious that man is as long as we want too. I used to call th him the orange orangutan until they told me to stop so i dont do that anymore. As odious as he is, thats not the issue. The issue is the way our economy is structured. I know i talk too much but its an occupational hazard. We have a system thats flawed but you have two kinds of capitalism. [inaudible] when you have compassionate capitalism files the teet teeth down to the wolf cant eat it up. In filing the teeth down you do things like provide healthcare and you providein food stamps even know what you should do is raise minimum wage. The dentist sharpens those teeth to make life for people at the bottom even more challenging. Of using about that metaphor and all the regulations being changed, lets not forget education and hb use have been pimped out. You have to understand, when people dont have training and they still let them come to the white house they still dont have training. Thank you for that analogy. I never heard about the dentist in the room but it brings a whole new enlightenment on going to the dentist. Lets talk about this woman who is making 30,000 dollars a year she is low income, correct. Yes. Is she out there marching . We saw a couple people marching the day after the inauguration, women Walking Around in detroit and d. C. And london, is she marching. Yes, we did see a historic day following the inauguration in terms of the womens march, the largest demonstration we kept seeing in history so it was impactful and powerful. But, its also true to say that there has been a bit of a struggle to maintain that momentum in a bold way. When i look at whats goingms on, i can provide some other examples in terms of what walmart has done since hes been in office. We know, in terms of pay inequity. Im a white house correspondent. I respect the office of the presidency. Also known as he who shall not be named. In terms of pay inequity we have this whole thing about equal pay. He changed the regulation that president obama had put in place that required them to open the book and really be able to demonstrate and show how they paid people by race and gender. Thats really how pay inequity slides. What did he do . He got rid of that. That woman was making 30,000 and those were making more now are going to suffer even more. Whats going on . I would say whats going on is there has been a calibration of strategy. I think the strategy has turned to electing more women to office. We have seen in a Record Number of women who are preparing to run for office and i think thats good but i dont think thats enough. I think you need a yang so you need those people who are preparing to infiltrate the system and go in there and change laws when they are elected to do so but i also think we still need thosee people in the streets put the pressure on those were currently in office to do the right thing and stopy destroying this nation to the degree that theyre doing right now. The simple way that splitntp is that protest is an essential ingredient of politics. Absolutely. You cant just vote. Vote for somebody. Its an essential ingredient which we forget. People when they tell you to go vote, everybody wants you to vote for them but you have to make them do what you want them to do when you say activism is a necessity, when you think about this, we saw young people take to the streets, the new activism, the new civil rights when it came to issues of injustice when we saw our black boys and black girls killed on the streets in some of the cities like baltimore and ferguson, north charleston, baton rouge, some of the different places, what is happening now . E we are not seeing the activism we saw. Its only been 100 plus days. We are not seeing that today. Whats going on. There are a few elements to this. E first is its not that the police have stopped killing people. Its not that these were problems that were solved and therefore were not seeing them. The Washington Post we keep a database in realtime of people who were killed by police. The government sometimes fails to track that data accurately. I remember correctly, today we recorded our 390th person shot and killed by police in 2017. On average two and three people are fatally shot by a cop every school day. Thats not as if the factors that have mobilized people sleep longer exist. I get this peopl for people who email me or call me and they say whats going on. Its like a moment that has stretched almost two years and even further back when you think about it. Somewhere mobilized after the death of Travon Martin in 2012 which was coupled with the premier of a movie in the death of oscar grant and 2009. Then George Zimmerman was acquitted and in 2014 you have the death of eric gardner and John Crawford and michael brown. We saw thousands of people in the streets across the country. We had this moment where this was all we could focus on correcting few things have happened. First there is still activism going on. There was activism going on before these moments. There were activists and organizations who have been working on these issues for decades and we havent sometimes paid enough attention to the work they were doing. Whats clear is the attention we were all collectively paying dissipated. It started to do that even prior to the election. In 2016 there hadnt been a name that had gone viral for the first half of the year. There hadnt been a or a shooting story. I remember preparing a piece about where to go, why does nobody care about this anymore. Then as we were going to the Fact Checking of the story i saw this name sterling start trending online and there was a shooting in baton rouge. And then Fernando Castille was killed and then there was a shooting of a dallas officer the next day. The reality is its very likely there will be a day or moment this year wer where our eyes will be back on this issue. That said, a lot of the activists and organizations, as is true across a number of issues, they were unprepared for the reality that they woke up into the morning after the election. Ce i think many people and a lot of spaces, especially on the left were expected to be pressuring a democratic president into doing more of what they consider to be the right thing. They may not have liked Hillary Clinton but they believed they were dealing with somebody who wanted to be seen as their ally and who could keep pushing. Ma. It was a similar strategy during the obama years. There was this idea that there was not an adversarial relationship. Even though many of these young people, some endorsed Bernie Sanders and some said they wouldnt vote, many of them thought they would be dealing with someone who was sympathetic to their causes and ideas. An in reality they woke up into a world where the president and attorney general doesnt necessarily believe the police to permission be investigated. If fundamentally change the need for their tactics and their understanding of how they do what they do. That is why what you just said was very important and ive been watching this going around the country. That is why we have to understand that the best opportunities to do the most in resisting is when you have a president who is outrageous and offensive. In fact, the best moment in the movements that ive been in, and we succeeded is when we went up against, when reagan became president. Some people think hes some great hero but he was awful. He was affable in person. I met him and knew him but the guy was an sop when it came to peoples rights. Thats what he was. The devastation in the Justice Department, a whole bunch of lawyers quit their jobs and walked away when they didnt have anything else to do. [inaudible] we organized and we thought up a different strategy on different days and things to do and we kept data and we won. You feel so much better when you win against somebody where its hard to win than somebody who is friendly, although thats hard too. What has happened with the young people is what you said many of them put all their eggs in a clinical basket. I kept saying you shouldnt put all your eggs in the political basket. Dont be seduced by going to the white house and sitting around talking people. Somebody applaud that because its important. Dont be seduced because you have got to do politics without protest. That is the history. People who want freedom without struggle, you know what he said unless your carrot top. And he still alive. [laughter] [applause] but what is needed is, in every movement ive been involved in the had a crisis where people think well, we cant do anything anymore. If you think about it, all those people who killed the people, they got acquitted. Relating get charged for whatever which is terribly frustrating. I cap telling people way back then theyre not going to get convicted unless you keep the pressure on. Dont go away and say now the Justice Department is going to do something. The fact is, it requires persistent and a lot of time sitting around strategizing about Different Things you can do because the media will follow you if you do something and its different. If your monk and you burn yourself in vietnam like during the war, the first monk burned, everybody said oh my god, the first monk burned himself in the whole world was fixated. After the tenth monk burned himself they said oh hell, another monk burned himself. You have to get, its a movement and they also need new people to come in and they will, young people on the campus is doing other stuff, theyre going home for the summer but theyll be back in the fall. Once we get over this part of we hate trump and all that russia and whatever it is, im more concerned about north korea than i am about russia. Then i think the Movement Needs new energy and it needs some of the young people eczema you out there to get involved with these understandings and strategize and keep it going, because as you point out the killings are going to continue. Its not like theyre going to stop. Racism isnt going away. Sorry. When you think about the south african movement, do they want to make south africa ungovernable. Thats why those of us, people came out it very differently. The work that i did was around divestment. Others were basically protesting being arrested, but there was a proposition in San Francisco 1984, named after me where we divested to the Pension Funds for companies doing business with south africa. It was very impactful. You want to make it economically ungovernable, politically ungovernable, its ungovernable any number of ways. How many people is that we dont have any power because they have the house and the senate and the white house and the court, but there are ways to make this ungovernable. You saw the Texas Legislature and some individual say he was going to call the in