Transcripts For CSPAN3 American History TV 20141101 : compar

panelists explore the role of a. phillip randolph, the labor and civil rights leader who organized the union, as well as the struggles of female members. they also described the national parks service -- this was hosted by the association for the study of african-american life and history. it's about two hours. thanks, everybody. for coming here, we have got a great panel here, a. phillip randolph and the brotherhood of sleeping car porters. my name is allan spears. npca has served as the leading voice of the american people on behalf of their national parks since we were founded in 1919. and it's our mission to protect an enhance america's national parks for current and future generations and we are a very, very proud partner of aslh, the association and it's a partnership that i take great pleasure in and i'm grateful to the association for hosting their 99th annual conference and look forward to working with them on their centennial next year, that's quite a thing to look forward to. we have a couple of objectives today, we're going to take about two hours to chat with you, about some very important topics, a. phillip randolph, the brotherhood of sleeping car porters and an ongoing campaign to commemorate that legacy by adding a unit to the national parks system on chicago's south side that will commemorate george pullman, the industrialist, capital iistcapi model town, the labor -- and the emerge negligennce of sleep porters. so we have got two interconnected topics we'll talk to you about today. before question get started, if people could make sure if you've got a cell phone, please place it on silent or vibrate or turn it off. just so we don't somewhere birds chirping and portions of moat start -- pullman was a hard working entrepreneur. and as a businessman, he had traveled on sleeping cars in the decade prior to the civil war, the antebellum period, and he had found them to be mostly cramped and mostly uncomfortable. so after a couple of other business ventures that were successful, he decided he would launch himself into creating these luxurious sleeping cars that would allow them to travel by rail and do so in luxury. he was successful from the start just before the american civil war. one of the things that happened to sort of expedite the fame and fortune of the pullman company was unfortunately linked to the assassination of president abraham lincoln, when lincoln's body was sent back to springfield, illinois, the train that took lincoln or bore his body back to his hometown had a couple of pullman cars attached to it. and at every stop the reporters would lament on the untimely death of the president but they would also comment on the lucks your ous nature of those cars and they became an overnight sensation in that regard. so the business got a boom from the tragedy of the assassination of the president. after the civil war, pullman did decide that maybe some of the best workforce for porters working on his luxurious sleeping cars would be formerly enslaved african-americans, the reasons is that these people would know how to work in close with white clientele but not get in the way. and pullman went on to be one of the largest employers of african-americans in the united states. and that led to the emergence of the brotherhood of sleeping car porters and ultimately a. phillip randolph as the leader of that union. we're going to get to the other aspects of pullman's industrial struggles, the union and we'll have our panel of experts talk about that. and i want to introduce the folks that will be sharing this information with you today. we have got dr. cornelius bynum. sandra washington, who's the associate regional director for the national parks service and my colleague, the senior outreach coordinator. what we're going to do is have presentations from each of our panelists that will run about 15 minutes or so. we'll have follow-up questions and then we'll use the last half hour of the session for interaction with the audience with questions and answers from people out there. so if you have questions, be prepared to ask them, we have got the mike right up here in front. if you don't want to move down and use the mike, use your loud outdoor voice when you shout out your questions. i would like to turn it over now to dr. bynum. >> good afternoon, thank you for being here. i will give you just a brief background on myself because i think it's an important way of coming to understand my journey with randolph as a research topic. i'm originally from louisville, kentucky and went to school at university of virginia where i did my undergraduate work and my graduate work and it was during those years between sort of 19 and 21, something like that where i really kind of came to an epiphany about history and my life that led me to randolph as a topic. my freshman year--it got me to thinking about my own kind of personal narrative and i went home over the winter break and began quizzing older relatives about the 40s and the war and that kind of thing and came to found out that some of my relatives, including my father, but my father fought in the second world war. i have thought that my father was the original rolling stone. but that's not important for this segment buchlt the important thing here is that my father's cousin, my father was stationed in europe, and he was stationed in the pacific, shared with me letters that my father had written from europe back home, had pictures of my father in uniform. and this really kind of sparked my imagination about the narrative of the black experience in the 20th century. and this began my journey toward graduate school, a doctorate and ultimately a book on randolph. i sort of give that biography as a way to kind of understand how i see randolph and the struggle that he leads to pursue an agenda of economic justice, a social justice that in fact bridges the, i don't know, i don't want to say the divide between civil rights and economic justice, but in some ways those two things haven't always been paired, but at least randolph in my mind is central to link that connects these kind of reform agendas. and so i began my dissertation with the title fighting for identity, a. phillip randolph's reconciliation of race and class, and that sounded like a great title to me as a graduate student. not so great now. but ultimately it became the basis of my book, a. phillip randolph and the struggle for civil rights. in that book i try to detail four key things that i think are essential to randolph and his role in the modern civil rights movement that struggle for associate justice that really begins to take shape. in the first or second decade of the 20th century, and really runs through the end of the 20th century, some people might argue that it continues today in maybe a different form, a different shape. but the four points u i really try to lay out with randolph in my study of his career really between, say, 1915, and 1955, are four fold. first, i look at randolph's effort to engineer a program of mass action. and when i say mass action, i mean mass action in the traditional form, where you're gathering a group of people to take some sort of concerted initiative to reform social processes, social circumstances, that are oppressive to them. and that's how i sort of imagined mass action and the way i sort of write about it. and randolph really is at the forefront of this kind of social reform initiative, beginning with his march on washington movement that ultimately led to the creation of the fepc, the fair employment practices commission and the first letting -- or i'm sorry, first administrative effort to implement a kind of equal employment policy by the government, this is a really important kind of innovation for the civil rights movement. it really becomes the basis for other mass action campaigns to follow, certainly in the 1960s. now i don't want to suggest that randolph was the initiator of mass action, certainly you had things like the don't buy, where you can't work campaigns that go all the way to the 1920s in new york. the pittsburgh courier's double mass cam pain existed as a mass strategy. but what i do think randolph does in a really important eway is take those kind of campaigns that, while very coherent in their articulation, and are maybe les coherent in their application and bring them together with a particular c constituent group and this becomes one of the innovations that i see randolph pushing forward when it comes to mass action campaigns, linking a specific program with a specific group to lead it, as opposed to the couriers call for a double v campaign but not really targeting a specific group to lead that cam pain or local organizations organizing these economic boycotts of stores that don't have black employees, but aren't particularly focused on mobilizing a constituent group to lead that effort. randolph in my view is innovate tiff in that respect, taking a concept mass action and really giving it a kind of concrete form in ways that hadn't existed before, and really kind of lay the ground work for what will come later in the 50s and 60s. secondly, i try the point out that randolph is particularly astute in how he understands the way in which minority groups can man nooufr effectively in the interest of group politics, before anyone else, randolph understood that when possessing limited political leverage, the most effective place to apply that leverage is not the congress, it's not the legislative body, with multiple politicians all with their own agenda, but rather the executive branch, where one person controls policy. whether it be the governor or the president. and this becomes an incredibly important vehicle for political annal social change moving forward. prior to ran dolphin's march on washington movement, which led to hiss pressuring of roosevelt and the creation of the fepc, most civil rights groups, particularly the naacp looked to congress for leadership, this was certainly true with the anti-lynching campaign that was pursued through the '20s and '30s that came to nothing, where you could always have a block of southern congressmen that would stall any potential legislation that they deemed sort of annan them ma to the racial poll sicks. but in the aftermath of the great depression and the new deal, when the political landscapes shifts for democrats in particular. where you have this political coalition of urban dwellers, people who moved to cities, the emerging -- i shouldn't say emerging labor movement, but a more coherent labor movement. democrats from the north are certainly much more responsive to the kind of -- the kind of political demands that someone like randolph begins making in the late '30s and '40s. so understanding how limited political leverage could be best applied to greatest effect is a really important thing, and randolph understands before anyone else that in those circumstances, african-americans had the best chance of affecting public policy by pressuring the executive branch and not the legislative branch. and of course this becomes the model that we see going forward. king certainly has relationships with various members of congress, but the most celebrated political relationship that king has is with the kennedy brothers, right? the executive branch, whether it's the president or the attorney general, and this becomes an important kind of model for civil rights activism moving forward from randolph in the '40s and on ward. thirdly, randolph, i think understands better than anyone else that the notion of social justice, of genuine social justice isn't something tied to necessarily to race or class, but rather to the degree to which an individual is prepared to be a faithful citizen, if someone is prepared to, for instance, serve in the military, that person should be able to operate freely as a full citizen of -- a full partner in a civil society. and so for randolph, civil rights should be based on the degree to which any person, man, woman, black, white or other is prepared to fulfill the duties and accept the responsibilities of faithful full citizenship. and so this becomes his conception of social justice, which is somewhat different than sort of the socialist conception that really kind of focuses on sort of a labor theory of value, meaning that workers are the ones who produce and therefore are the ones who should benefit from those products, if that makes any sense, but rather to say that citizenship isn't bread by class, citizenship isn't bread by race, isn't bred by gender. it's bred by fulfilling the duties of citizenship. there's this great mind where he says that all men of great people have contributed to civilization's progress, all should benefit from that progress. and this is hiss conception of civil rights, of what constitutes general social justice, it's an eequal tarn humanism than this is a kind of straight forward, either left progressive orientation around identity, whether it be class, race or gender, and something much more expansive. and then lastly, randolph really has this important realization about the nature of what genuine civil rights looks like, it's not simply the right to vote or the right to serve in a desegregated military, but it's also economic opportunity, the right to earn a living wage that the federal government should be in the business of securing not only civil rights, but economic opportunity, this was the full measure of what civil rights meant to randolph. and of course, this becomes part of what he will propose to linden johnson in the 1960s, afternoon his freedom budget which is a $15 billion that sounds relatively small in today's currency, but $15 billion budget initiative to combat poverty, right? but this is no different than really king's poor people's program, right, poor people's movement, in the late 1960s and so in all of these ways, i argue that randolph really tries -- or really does in fact provide important philosophical organizational and sort of actionable leadership. for the civil rights movement that's to come. now we can talk a little bit more about what those -- about some of the implications of those ideas are for contemporary labor, race and gender politics. i won't present randolph has a grand progressive, because as mindy will point out, he's a man with flaws -- i'm sorry, i didn't mean to put that onus on you. >> he's a bad guy. >> what i meant -- my intent here is to say, as i teach my students, the great thing about history is that it shows us that even flawed people can do great things. whether it be randolph, abraham lincoln, king himself, john kennedy, all of these people have their particular flaws, and in an odd way, they're linked around the way in which gender plays out socially, although lincoln perhaps not so much. but nonetheless, you can have flaws and still have tremendous impact on not only your immediate social circumstances, but also on the way people live in the future. so that's what i try to teach my students and that's why someone like randolph or king or others that we would talk about particularly here in memphis are so important. and so i guess with that, i'll probably pass the baton on to someone who can speak more coherently than i perhaps, and then we can maybe come back to some of these issues as we go forward with our discussion. >> i'll take this one. good afternoon. i really don't mind being the critic, but i -- i do feel a little bit odd about that, but i do want to thank you about some of the things you said, because i don't think i can actually tell you a story as to how i got to a. phillip randolph, i can, i will do that. when i was a graduate student at howard university, i actually met rosina car rruthercarruther get over to her house and then got to know her for a few years before she passed, and then when she passed, i was given the responsibility to go and clean out her house, because we were donating the house. she left everything to the leadership conference to civil rights. so i got to go clean out her house and of course within that i found her auto biography, i found boxes of auxiliary materials, i found all of the papers from her first husband, carruthers, who was as you may know a harlan renaissance post and activist, including unpublishedmanuscripts and all sorts of thing. when she died she was 106 years old and yet she still didn't slow down when someone would try to walk her from place to place in her house, all persons shuffle thinking ---if you're going to go that slow, let me go by myself and that was always the way that she sort of approached, i think, life. and another quick story about her, which think people may appreciate. i use this actually as a title of another paper which i'm not going to talk about here. but she had a fondness, a true liking, i would even say a love for a red dress. and she wanted to be buried in a red dress and she was very clear about that despite the fact that members of her presbyterian church thought this might not be the most appropriate thing for an elderly woman to be buried in, but she got her way, of course. so that's how i camestart working on the brotherhood of sleeping car porters and thinking about some of the things that mrs. tucker had talked about, and some of the things i also knew from other research that i had done. so what -- one of the things that i focused -- i actually have a more formal paper and i may not read all of it and i probably won't, just in the interest of time. but one of the things that led to doing this work on, the book is marching together, women of the brotherhood of sleeping car porters, is to think about the sexism with which randolph has been accused on more than one occasion by many people. i think that sometimes, and i haven't actually voiced it this way, but i think this is the way this actually works, what we now see in hindsight as sexism is not considered sexism in a prejudicial way at the time he was operating. i think that's -- at least in most of the many years after wrsds. but in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, up through the 50s and up through the march on washington, the kind of sexism that he practiced or he believed in, i think stemmed from his view about what i call manhood rights, what he called manhood rights. and that is the view that the notion of equality, which was measure how equal black men were to white men. it was a different model of working on different issues. yes, of course, it stunted women's potential for leadership, particularly as leaders of men. that would have been something that was and ana them ma to everyone in that movement at that time. but there's also another part of that and that's where it gets into what i call the politics of respectability. and i have been calling it that for quite a while. to have women act in a role or to do things that seem to defy the societied accepted role of women, junkundermined claims fo civil rights. if black women had to go out to work, but white women did not, then what you are doing is you're creating a situation of inequality of black women, vis-a-vis white women. and this politics of respectability was not even, i just talked about work, but that's not so much where it is, it had a lot to do with public behaviors, it had a lot to do with roseanna carruthers tucker too. when we talk about political representation in that time, i think the other way to think about this in terms of randolph, and i think you said it too very well cornellous, is that i know you can call randolph all sorts of things based on his political outlook, his goals, his beliefs, but i like to think of him as an organizerer, and i think approaching him as someone who was in some ways the consummate political organizers, that this gives us a different view of the way he organized movements, the way he approached the participation of women in those movements and basically the ways that women themselves viewed him and their role in those movements. what he thought was, in other words, that despite all these ---he had these many victories, and of course he had a few spectacular failures and i think we have to not forget those. but he -- you know, as i said, failed to recognize women, and he refused to support efforts that would abolish sex discrimination in the workplace. he did not support the equal rights amendment. and then of course most of the labor movement did not. he did not support equal pay for women. but again, most people in the labor movement did not. these are some of the things you could criticize him from hiss political or policy stances, but i think there's another way of looking at what he in fact did. i think that what you look at is just think about the ways that he deployed women in these movements. and basically he had three roles, and i associate this in the article that it has in the chapter of cornelius work that we're doing. women were either mothers, teachers or they were wives. but those three roles for randolph were the most important ones. and this meant -- this is the kind of sexism, but it did not mean that women couldn't participation in these social justice movements or in trade union organizing. women could and more importantly they did raise money, they made enter destructions, they gave randolph for ray into various kmichbts they could nlts otherwise get involved in. they got together, those grass roots supporters. they pushed through all of that office grunt work and one of those things that people tend to forget about with organizing, everybody here has been in a campaign know that there is a labor intensive part to doing that. but anybody who knows that getting out the vote means going from door to door, it also means and think about this this was before computers, sometimes before him mow graph machines practically where you are typing all those letters, you are making telephone calls, you are sending telegrams and sometimes you're literally doing the door to door stuff. so that kind of organizing and in fact sometimes outorganizing the opposition, doesn't depend on charismatic men, i mean it does, but it doesn't. what it depends on is a mass of volunteers and these were largely women. in fact i would say almost all women who performed those tacts, who actually produced the mochbster rallies in the march on washington movement. who produced all these mass organizing, the pressure politics and mass action that cornelius refers to. and this is not something of course that was exclusive to randolph, i think that what we now call civic engagement was in fact at the time mostly women's work. and if you think about it, that's a different way of looking at what we think of as civic engagement in the mid 20th century, but there's a habit of refusing to acknowledge women's participation that tends to re-enforce the political biases of modern political activityism, and also american citizenship. one of the ways that this comes out then, is to think aboutal the ways that what happens when that kind of sexism comes to the fore. polly murray, the reverend, the lawyer, the great activist was also one of randolph's pro toe jays and she coined the term jane crow to describe sex segregation. allan baker, murray, other women including anna arnold hedgeman who i'll talk about a little bit more later, all privately questioned the sexism that went on in the 1940s, in organizing the national march on washington movement. but it was not really until the march on washington, until 1963 that the debate about male privilege became a public one. it was then that jane crow had to go. it was then that the pink tees, the notion of having women deck raid the room, make the coffee, type the memos and run the him mow graph machines was questioned. and we can see this kind of deployment of wife as teacher, as mother, when we look at the lady's auction rilly and the -- we're really talking about the wives of pullman workers who were there putting together, and they had this role of not just bringing together other women, but also to teach their men how important mass organization was. there was a later, a little emphasis on teaching children, but for the most part, this was seen as a ball washing, randall reck no -- but, the gender division of labor, despite randolph's belief in it, he also clearly rejected the notion from other black leaders that women's public activism would take away from their respectability. so he did challenge sexism in the sense that he didn't say you have to stay home, he said you can do these things, please come down to the office and help us make these phone calls, make the coffee and all of the rest of it. this is fine work for you to do, whereas in other movements, other campaigns, there was i think later on a very decided effort that women didn't need to be there. so this is something to think about in terms of the way that he challenged it in, despite keeping and giving women this opportunity to do it. and because of that, there were women who had full-time, though temporary movement jobs. er there were times when few people did. and this provided training for later leadership roles that they had. there's at least a dozen african-american women who worked for him, who became powerful social justice advocates in their own rite. as i mentioned, allan baker was someone he work worked with in the 1930s. there was polly murray. who organized a mass protest against the execution of sharecropper odell waller, and helped to found the national organization for women. dorothy heights, the president of the national counsel on the league of women. the executive secretary of the committee for the council for a permanent fepc and later part of the cabinet of new york city mayor robert walker. there was e. pauline myers, the secretary of the march on washington movement based in harlem in new york and rose sena carruthers tucker. who was on so those are are the kinds of things that by being able to participate, women did learn this leadership, did become activists in their own rites. and that led, i mean so then of course we get to the march on washington, the march for jobs, and freedom. i keep thinking, i was at this 83 mark. so i always add peace in there and i know that's not right for the '63 march. if you think about the marches that were originally conceived. who decided that in december of 1962, they would mark the -- they wanted to mark the emancipation proclamation, but the momentum for that and the endorsements and support for that march, that would come in august '63, burst into overtime in the fateful events of that summer. the children's march in birmingham, alabama in june that ended with police dogs and fire hosings and the assassination in mississippi, that same night of med gar evers, if you think about this, there's a lot of things going on, president kennedy of course had to respond to these events and famously held a nationally televised address in which he announced his intention to send a civil rights bill to the congress and king in turn responded, calling for a massive militant, monumental sit ins on congress that would ensure it's passage. but king's call for massive acts of civil disobedience in washington, turned into an orderly, celebratory, peaceful march on washington. and this is the civil rights movement narrative of the march on washington that we know. but there's a subplot that i want to bring attention to in this story. and this agains again, i'll go back to kennedy, kennedy, of course, at the beginning of his administration actually showed more interest in women's issues than he did on issues of racial discrimination, he established a federal commission on the status of women to which he appointed eleanor roosevelt as chair. dorothy hite was one of the members in that commission as well. she was the only african-american on that commission. the charge of the commission was not merely to issue a statement supporting equality of opportunity, but instead to suggest affirmative steps to see that the doors are really opening for training, selection advancement and equal way for women. of course, as i mention, equal pay legislation was controversial. and randolph, as i said, did not support it because he thoughts, like other labor leaders, that if women were given equal pay, that would allow employers to drop the wages of men. that was overcome and the act prevailed and kennedy signed that bill into law on june 10, 1963. the next day, yuan clean o'connor released those dogs and -- as a result, and the result that came out of this is this uneasy coalition of the big six civil rights groups, who had now less than eight weeks to bring 100,000 people, 2,000 full busses as well as plains, trains and automobiles to the district of columbia for a single day. this was not going to be an all night all kind of thing, this was going to be one day in and out. at the march headquarters in harlem, he assigned jobs to volunteers, interestingly not as sex segregated as one would imagine that had been in use in earlier campaigns, one of the people that he also brought on was anna arnold hedgeman who of cour course, she was the second deputy director. so two decades and change after the postponed 41 march, african-american and white women had begun to organize for themselves, to protest their exclusions from positions of power, from recognition of issues of concern to women. know dorothy hite in her memoir recalled that the march was the awakening of the women's movement. she and others were shock when rust had said there was no need to include women speakers because women were represented at the podium. in hite's opinion, this pronouncement made clear that, quote, men honestly don't understand or see their position as patriarchal or patronizing, they were happy to include women in the human family, but there was no question as to who headed the household. for the organizers, women were artistic performers, the only female voices they wanted to feel were marion anderson, joan baez, actress lena horn was to be seen but not heard. angered by this exclusion, hide most of the audience were largely comprised of women. ethyl payne, who goes way back to her association with randolph, by being a native chicagoan, the daughter of a pullman porter herself and a member of the chicago mass rally for the march on washington movement, called randolph out on his sexism. by 1963, she was a distinguished journalist for "the chicago defender" and only the second african-american woman to be admitted to the white house press corps. she publicly chided randolph for failure to include a single woman speaker in her defender college. hedgeman wrote that in light of the -- especially in light of the extra burdens that they have carried, it is incredible that no woman should appear as a speaker. she in fact suggested that august 28th be named rosa parks day in order to recognize parks' contribution to the movement. hedgeman also thought that a woman should be one of the lead evers, one ofd designated march leaders, after all, whitney young was part of this big six group but the urban league had done almost nothing for the southern freedom movement. in con -- including 10 educational and reck nation al -this vision, she thought wud deliberate, she too called out randol randolph, especially when she chose to address the national press club, an organization that excluded et -- randolph apparently saw no relationship between being sent to the balcony and being sent to the back of the bus. he failed to see that he was supporting the violation of the very principal for which he was fighting, the human rights are indivisible. to witness randolph acting like a member of the entrenched power group is a harsh reminder nothing that equipment sid or -- when she wrote a memo to randolph asking that women be included, he of course ignored it. he didn't say anything about it. so then she sent it to the other five, big six leaders, she also went out -- to pay for it. now they couldn't turn it down because she had raised that money. at that point, it was then that randolph agreed to conduct what he called a tribute to women. and to introduce the women plat form guests. the resulting 142 word speech is, very long. i say that's -- you know, that's a tweet -- i'll just remind you, so then on that august day, no woman gave a speech of her own. the platform had rosa parks, diane nash, diane -- baker arrived from -- but when lena horn tried to interest a television reporter into interviewing rosa parks, someone on the march committee saw it and sent horn back to her room in a taxi. the day after the march, the national counsel of negro women convened in washington to consider the road ahead. hite thought to focus on discrimination that most affected women, decent housing, child care, schooling and employment. the counsel quickly went into action. one of their first problematic results. was what became known as wednesday in mississippi. then in october of that year, pauly murray went and spoke at the convention and spoke about the two decades of jane crow treatment by black male leaders. women to a secondary, ornamental or honorary role, she called instead for a partnership, a partnership that could attack sex discrimination it was crystal clear that the fight against discrimination, because of sex had to be fought simultaneously with the civil rights struggleal. so 50 years later, that partnership is still largely unrealized. murray, hite and other african-american women who fought against sex discrimination, found that they had more success working with other -- white women's organizations. there's a whole story behind that and some of know it. but that did happen, and that actually extended before the fair amendment practices commission. they never included a sex discrimination part, sex was not included in that. but more often in that, however, black women have found that they have not had the masses to engage in the pressure politics, against male civil rights leaders, in order to force that women's issues be addressed. leaders may claim to have binders full of women, but when black women, rally against sexism and call for the inclusion of black girls and presidentialal initiatives or when they ask for the appointment of black women to policy making and admin strax positions, they are criticized still for being unnecessary divisive. african-american men continue to lead civil rights organizations even through the 21st century. that glass ceiling, that jane crow, remains firmly in place, thank you. >> they make it very hard for a federal policy. my name is sondra washington. i work for the national parks service. as allan said, i'm associate regional director of the midwest region, and instead of talking about what i do right now, i'll tell you a little bit about what i have done in the past. when it came to the national parks service, i had worked for a state department of natural resources, and i thought that my highest and best career choice could be as either a field ecologist, counting endangers seg -- or as a forester measuring timber. those are the things i studied in school. i thought the people were interesting but not essential. al it's not unusual for a science geek to go in that direction. but i came to the national parks service and i also had a degree in regional planning, they said you're going to do the community outreach arm for the national parks service. we have an arm that does interesting things outside of national parks. and i was challenged to consider people a lot move interesting that i might have thought otherwise. and the other part of my job at the beginning was to look at places for their potential to become national parks. this is a lifetime ago in kansas city, and i went and i presented a paper on nicodemus and all community in western kansas. i think i had just finished that study but it was prior to the legislation passing to create a national historic site from that community. i think my -- the best thing about that meeting was that i met captain anderson. a tuskegee air man who actually taught the men to fly. i got to spend an afternoon with him. that was wonderful. well, i'm going to talk a little bit about the national park services involvement in pullman. as alan had said, pullman is a community. it was a town on the south side of chicago. it was separate. later it was brought into the city of chicago. the national park service has been involved or interested in pullman since 1971 just ahead of that, we authored a nomination form for the entire neighborhood both the residences and the industrial core, the factory core as a national historic landmark. it's a historic district recognized by the national park service. with that designation of nhl, national historic landmark comes some benefits and some encouragement for preservation but no absolute preservation mann mandate by the federal government to step in and make certain things get preserved. in 1997, the national park service undertook a labor theme study. part of that labor theme study talked about looking at pullman was a potential national park. this is where i had my first introduction to pullman. also suggested that the nhl nomination for pullman be revised to expand the themes or ideas that they found significant there. the assessment of the park came about just as the clock tower administration building was burning. so we started to look at it. the building burnt down. the south end of the factory was completely demolished. the clock tower not north factor wing not as badly. i got to see the site once before the fire, the arson and a number of times afterwards but in doing that assessment, we realized that there was such a strong core of support at the state level and at the city level that we didn't see a particular role for the park service, the state had just stepped in and said we're going to reconstruct. the city was very involved. all the neighborhood groups were very focused. we only saw one place for us to be. said that one place is fairly small. it's going to be very expensive. we have such a positive group of people here. we're going to step away and let -- we'll support them in other ways but we won't look for designation or work toward that. at the time i had been speaking with a very young congressman who had just gotten elected to office, jackson jr. i said you could ask us to do a formal special resource study. we're not allowed to do those unless we get congressional requests through legislation. at the time he said he didn't want to spend his political chits in that way. he was very knew. i understand that you don't walk in and say a national park that looks like gravy to some people is a major issue when there's probably other things very important like jobs and the economy. so we looked at that in the early 90s and early 2000s and stepped away. there's been a ground swell interest in pullman. in 2013, we put out a recognizance survey. we've been asked by a much more senior along with two other senators from illinois in we would do a small study. the criteria for national significance or whether or not it would be a suitable place for a national park and whether or not it's feasible. we put out the recognizance survey and we basically confirmed that pullman is national significant. all of the themes and stories of pullman are national significant but we also saw that the original nomination form for it was weak. it's weak in one particular area. that's the story of the pullman porters. they end labor to some degree as well. they spend a lot of time talking about the urban planning and the design. the architecture of the community. they talk a lot about george pullman himself and how he pulled himself up by his boot straps. he's a entrepreneur. he's very inventive in industrial history but they don't talk much about labor and not at all about the pullman porters. there's been a lot of attention on pullman of late. in january of this past year, senator durban, kurk and congresswoman kelly all submitted legislation on the same day to create a pullman historical park. since then there's been more interest in the executive branch of government. the director of park service, the secretary of the interior are both interested. they are so interested that they said your recognizance survey was never supposed to reach a definitive conclusion on any of the criteria. we don't have the money or time to do that. you did confirm its national significance and said it was suitable but never got into feasibility because of time constraints and money constra t constrain constraints. we want you to spend sometime assessing the feasibility of the pullman district as a national park. so that's what i've been doing. i have spent my summer in chicago and in libraries and talking to lots of people about whether or not this could be feasible and talking to lots of different organizations, reaching out to different groups of people and saying well, if this were a national park, what would, you know -- so a lot of those what if questions. we had a -- we took the time in august to do a public meeting in the community of pullman. i know that leaaron will talk a little bit about that so i won't steal his thunder. i can tell you there are two path ways to becoming a park. there's the legislative path way. both congressman have initiated that. congresswoman kelly has done a magnificent job of lining up 40 sponsors in the house which is bipartisan and feat in and of itself. kurk and durbon one in the house and senate. >> another way to do it is by executive action. the director writes the secretary and the secretary can write her boss and suggest that the president use the antiquities act to confirm or designate a national park or national monument in this case at pullman. that has not yet happened. when the director on my chicago told all the folks at the meeting that we're still working athe feasibility he made a point of me looking at my staff to understand that i still had work to do. i am nearly done with my assessment in what the director should tell the secretary and what the secretary should tell her boss but it hasn't of yet done anything but maybe it will. i certainly hope that at some point in the near future something happens. you might ask why is the park service interested in pullman and why now? because we have a lot of other places that we already manage and care for and budget doesn't look so great. we're no different than the rest of the federal government and all of the services that it tries to provide for the united states. i'm going to tell you a very short story. i'm going to try and channel the director, director john jarvis. he's very passionate about the responsibility the park service has to telling the whole story of america. 98 years ago, congress created the national park service and we were charged with the responsibility of managing those places that rejuvenate us, the national, cultural and h historical artifacts that inspire us and reflect our heritage. congress shed those places should be set aside for future generations to enjoy and learn from. >> a few years ago our director challenged us with his call to action as a way to rejuvenate us and focus on our mission. he charged us to reach back to our initial charge and then reach forward to put that ideal into practice for the 21st century. he charged us to look for opportunities to work outside of park boundaries to tackle broad conservation, climate change. he charged us to tell untold stories and bring neglected histories to the full front. in short he told us to put our heritage into the places and stories that we tell. pullman gives us that opportunity. the pullman palace car company and model town are well preserved. example of 19th century urban planning and architecture. i told you i have a degree in urban planning so i do appreciate that but the company and the workers played large roles in the history of labor and manufacturing in the history of the united states. those too are also important but it's the story of the porters which is an important american chapter in our history and civil rights movement that has captured the attention of the director but many of the people who work for the park service and it has captured the attention of the people in the pullman neighborhood and around the country. i want to mimic something or repeat something. you said a. philip randolph had a different spin. he didn't look at -- he didn't take the socialist view but he said that all contribute, all benefit. the national park service looks at our mission that same way that we look at the contributions of all of america and we want to make certain that all of america benefits from those places that we care for. [ applause ] >> good afternoon everyone. as alan mentioned i'm with the national parks conservation association midwest regional office and we're in chicago. my name is leaaron foley so only a 90 minute flight if you want to go out so the site that holes such a cultural significance. so i'd like to start out by saying -- as was mentioned earlier on this panel, many african-americans in the early 20th century looked toward congress for its leadership. that leadership was regarding civil rights. it was regarding the protection of african-americans across the country; post slavery and into this jim crow and jane joe scro society that existed. today we continue to look to congress for leadership. this leadership takes the form of preserving those stories of the fight for civil rights in this country, for the fights of those protections, for the fight to preserve our own history as a country and that history includes, of course, the african-american story. what we want from congress is for them to take the responsibility to continue taking the responsibility to preserve american's national and cultural heritage and that leadership is needed and increased funding for our national parks so they can stay open as educational institutions as places employment for tens of thousands of park rangers and personnel who are the first people on the ground to answer those questions about what it was like for a. philip randolph to begin organizing the brotherhood of sleeping car porters in the early 20th century. these are the things that we have to continue looking at as we talk about preserving african-american history. as we talk about preserving our cultural identities. we look to congress for leadership in a acquiring those properties that tell those stories. we look toward congress to continue being the place where they take the actions to preserve those stories. what we have and what sandra has mentioned are 401 beautiful park sites across the country. for those of you who have those yellow buttons on that says pullman 402. a lot of you ask what does pullman 402 mean? what is the campaign to establish pullman to tell such wonderful stories in the in architecture and industrial revolution to add those to our national park. that's why national parks conservation comes in. it is an organization founded in 1919 by the first director of the national park service to become the advocates, the citizen advocates for our national parks. there were some place that's were called national parks before when the national park service was created but there was not a uniformed body that would be able to preserve and protect and tell the stories of those parks until it was created in 1916 by the organic act. the national park service or conservation association has nearly 1 million members an supporters across the country who we engage with to make sure that congress is doing their job in protecting our national parks. that is not an easy task. npca advocates for diversifying our national parks. national parks are not just yellow stone or yosemite or the grand canyon. national parks are the statute of liberty national monument. they are civil war battlefields. some of which are scattered across the state of tennessee where we are now. they are martin luther king's neighborhood in atlanta georgia. it's lowell historical park that tells the story of mill girls across central massachusetts. those are the national parks. national parks tell the stories of our natural and cultural heritage. that's what we got to talk about and make sure that we're continuing to diversify our national parks. the next part that npca plays is talking about continuing that conversation about what it means to be an urban national park. so we talk about those great western landscape parks like i mentioned with yellow stone and yosemite and grand canyon but what about those places in the urban community? how do we tell the stories in urban communities and how do we generate access to give people their first national park experience without having to travel thousands of miles out west? what happens when there's a national park in someone's very own back yard and they can have their first experience and open their eyes and their world up to the magnificent wonders that exist in this country? pullman is a great example of that. the history of pullman is toll as dr. bynum and sandra have talked about, is that pullman is a place that sort of exemplifies those stories so there's some convergence of the stories of labor, after the pullman strike of 1893 and the economic recession that took place 1893 and 1894. there's the formation of labor day soon after the pullman strikes. less than 40 years later you have the conversation of these 10,000 men across the country who say what about us? there are large labor groups that have been formed after the pullman strikes that are largely white. largely monolynnithic but you h thousands of former slaves across the country and george pullman and there are a lot of opinions and his role in history about whether he was a good guy or a bad guy. i don't know if we can say that he was a good guy or bad guy. we can say he's an american. he's an industrial. that's his role in history. i will circle back before i continue on the labor history part of this. george pullman in 1879 purchased about 4,000 acres of land about 14 miles south of what's downtown chicago now which is the heart of chicago even then to build his manufacturing down for the pullman palace car company. the thousands of sleeping cars that cruised across the country, the vast majority of them were manufactured in chicago. that town was created in a city where less than 30 years later, that upton st. clair would refer to as the jungle for the working conditions of the people in chicago. george pullman said no. i want my company to be a modern company. i want my company to be something that can manufacture the best products in the country and -- and we can take care of our employees at the same time. so he built the pullman town on the south side of chicago in less than a year after acquiring those initial 4,000 acres of land, people were moving in. the workers lived with the managers. the managers lived near the executives. it was one happy place. the happiest town in the world. -- for about three years. after that, the nature of george pullman begins to take affect. it had already been there since he built homes for his children at that point in time. it begins to affect people. the economic recession happens. all of a sudden, you have george pullman not doing anything to help the people who live in his town. george pullman is the landlord of the place that you live. pullman is the boss of the place that you work. pullman owns the church in which he want u.s you to worship with other faiths and denominations and faiths and people got fed up really, really quickly and they began to organize. with that organization, you get the formation of the american rail way union right before the pullman strike. pullman's stories -- they are the convergence of labor and civil rights. it has a very unique role in american history. that convergence of labor and civil rights also creates a divergence. from the formation of these largely white unions to the question of afric around americaafrica african-americans around the country to say what about us? what are the protections that we have? we work 12 hour days on trains going from chicago to new orleans and stopping in memphis. what about us? soon we begin to have the conversations about what is the role of the african-american in a union. we've learned that it wasn't its earliest supporter. so pullman tells an interesting story that's largely untold within the national park system. with sites such as pullman we're presented an opportunity to enhance our national parks. enhancing our national parks means that with those stories being told we can better understand the history of america. we can better understand what's happened. what's gone wrong. we can't shy away from the fact that there's really bad things that are happening in this country. it's important for those stories to be told and including african-american history as sanda mentioned in evaluating what are the potential sites that we have in mind across the country that have the worth, the national significance to be preserved within the national park system. one of the things that i find most interesting especially my job day to day is -- i basically live in puin pullman. though it is not my official residence, i travel there everyday. i'm there organizing the community. we've built tremendous support for pullman. there's an understanding though that national parks are not the first thing on people's minds. that's a recognition but at a conference such as asalh, national parks ought to be one of the first things we think about because we're talking about african-american life and history. how can we better preserve and tell -- we just don't want to put the history of afr aaic an americans in a museum. we want these stories to be told and dissect and present them for educational opportunities to be unfolded as history continues to be written. that's one of the values of continuing to diversify national parks. it also means that thenational pash ser park service has a presence in communities where they are not normally seen. how many of us daily interacteds with someone wearing green and gray. those are the smiling faces when you walk into a park site. they have the arrow on their shoulder. they are great people and do their jobs very well at the sites where they are located. but in places such as memphis where there are no national park sites, we have a very strong opportunity to be able to tell those stories. that would be almost saying there's nothing national significant in memphis. we know that is not true even after you step off the plane and you enter the area and you see the jazz notes. those are nationally significant. another important part of urban national parks and diversifying th them and getting them away from those other parks is the undisputed economic impacts that national parks have across the country. national parks generate about $30 billion in economic activity annually. where does that money go? it goes to the communities where the parks are located. those communities around yellow stone are dependent on that national park. the communities around yosemite are dependent on that national park. for a place like pullman, it presents grand opportunity to have those conversations with children. with new generations who are supposed to be our upcoming advocates for parks to say do you want to be a forester? do you want to go out into places you've never before and explore things you've never seen. you've never seen a park ranger walking down the street in washington. i'm sure we will get more as this conversation continues. i will yield. i get very excited talking about pullman. i'm glad to be on this panel. i will yield to alan. thank you. [ applause ] well, thank you for some good presentations there. i appreciate the dialogue and discussion that has been started. just want to take my prerogative as moderator of this panel to ask a few questions if i might of our colleagues. i'm struck by the notion of building blocks when we talk about the american civil rights movement that the march on washington might have been thought up with a very quick time line to make it happen. it was part of a progression of events. there was the idea of washington in 1941. there were lawsuits and set backs that set the stage for that sort of thing. i wanted to ask if you could talk us through executive order 802 in terms of launching out through the fair employment practice commission and ultimately other civil rights victories. >> i don't know if i could do that but i might be able to tell a few engaging stories about it. >> for those of you who don't know. what alan is reference in the -- the number is 8802 is the executive order that franklin roosevelt signed that created the fair employment committee. he issued that executive order as a direct result of his concern about the implications of randolph's march on washington movement bringing 10,000 african-americans to the nation's capitol, particularly at a time of real international strive. this is the era of the second world war. his concern was about the potential for racial violence in the nation's capitol and feeling compelled to halt the potential protests. he ultimately capitulated to some of randolph's commands. randolph commanded multiple things. one of which was a desegregated military. that happened 15 years later or thereabouts. nonetheless, he does feel compelled to take some course of action to take some protest initiative. there's so many stories to tell about the executive order. one of the stories that is commonly discussed in a variety of books on randolph the march on washington in this particular era deals with randolph's particular elo krelocution. as a child he was a shakesphere lover. he was very much into shak shakessphere plays and developed this sort of authoritarian base voice that just had a very precise elocution. i don't do imitations. at one point roosevelt says to randolph after a challenging discussion where roosevelt is trying to get him to pull things back and randolph is refusing. he eventually says to randolph when did you graduate from harvard because randolph would draw out his as and rs so this notion that randolph had this very elaborate elocution was needling roosevelt at the time and he decided to call randolph out on it. the building blocks that you're talking about here are really quite important because several things emerge from this executive order. it in fact lays the ground work for a -- certainly, the eoc but also the way in which the u.s. military is desegregated in the very same way by roosevelts successor, truman. he desegregates the military on the basis of an executive order in response to pressure politics brought by who, a. philip randolph. so there is an important building block quality here that i think you're quite right to point out and these kiends of lessons are important going forward as i said earlier because they do set the tone for how they begin to see deliberate pressure politics played by african-americans in general but certainly the civil rights movement specifically. >> i wanted to add a couple -- i would take it back not just to 8802 which is the result of this activism but when i teach my course on the civil rights movement, i always start with a call to march on washington issued in 1941. there are four points that randolph articulated in that. one was the end of zr discrimination in employment particularly in the military industries. two was military desegregation. three was participation in electoral politics and four was the end of colonialism in the rest of the world. the way that the movement came about or the way that it was actually -- it was also the first time that nonviolent political action was being called for in a very definite gaundian view of what that meant was being used and calling for it so that in fact if you look at that 1941 march call to march on washington, that to me is the outline of the entire civil rights movement that comes afterwards. especially some of the things that we're now finally beginning -- not finally but becoming more and more understood are those calls to end colonialism. those calls to think about what electoral politics means to think about all of these other kinds of things. so to me, that call to march, even though the march itself was postponed, the idea was outlined in that call. i think that's actually a better place to start the civil rights -- also i'd also point out that that call does not include anything about school desegregation. so those people who want to say that the civil rights movement began with brown and then focus on education, well, yes. that's true. there's one way of looking at that. of course even brown we know began much earlier than that as well. so there are these different strains. these different threads within the movement. i think randolph definitely had this sort of larger vision of what the platform was going to look like. >> so i have a question about that. >> yes, go ahead. >> you could actually extend this decision even further if you look at the various points that mindy points out. when you think about what's been the last great campaign for unfetterred and nondiscriminatory military service? well, first it was gender. >> right. >> it's also become sexuality, orientation. this very same kind of platform we see extended to things like military service but i also think about -- >> employment. >> employment. just the women's movement in general. the whole way in which you say as i said earlier, minority groups looking to operate in the context of intergroup politics. this group that yields this executive order becomes the template for which all groups going forward, regardless of their identity, all groups going forward look to operationalize. this is one of the things that's so incredibly potent about this particular moment. it sets the tone for how modern contemporary politics is played. think about how you vote today. how about how we as a nation vote today. you can see the seeds of that kind of electoral counting that every politician does carried out in every particular instance. it's exactly why roosevelt signed the execive order. he was concerned of losing his base support of african-americans in the north and others in groups and cities across the country. these are incredibly potent moments to think about as we've continued to think about the civil rights movement but also how we in fact politically live today. >> so this is my question. if -- if the 1941 march on washington had gone ahead, it would have been smaller but would it have been more radical than the 1963 version and what would have been the implications of that for the civil rights movement and for the country? >> i will answer that based on the person who headed up most of the washington organizing of it or was very involved in it from what i know what she wrote and other things. i argued with a lot of people when i was first working on this that people said that they weren't ever really plan on marching. that's often been a charge well, you know they really weren't going -- >> well, if you look through ms. tucker's materials no, she was calling churches for places to live. she was calling -- you know places where people could stay overnight. this was all of that detailed mass organizing work that they were definitely engaged in. i think it's that specific and the level of detail and the white house knew that this was going on. they hadn't actually been organizing in the city to receive all of these people. the white house wouldn't have actually responded. so i think you also have that sort of almost counter evidence as well so show how much work was being done. as far as its radicalism. i think the radicalism would have been shown in the fact that this was a march of so many people of color in a highly segregated already overburdened town where there was very little housing because of the war. the radicalism would have been in the presence maybe not in the political agenda but the very fact. even if you had had 50,000 people showing or 20,000 people showing up marching down washington -- marching down pennsylvania avenue, that would have been a show unlike, i think, anybody was prepared to see. especially coming -- granted another 15, 16 years after the clan marched down pennsylvania avenue. nonetheless, it was a response -- i think the racial politics that would have come out of that and possible violence i think was what the white house also feared. particularly at a time when u.s. propaganda and we are fighting for a democracy and we believe in democracy and opposing -- to oppose a counter proposal to an aryan nation race war going on not only in europe but also the asian theaters. >> i think that's true in all respects. i hadn't really thought about that kind of hypothetical, you know, what would have happened. what would have been the implications or consequences had the march gone on? it's a little hard play that out because on the one hand, you want to be optimistic about our national ability to live up to the best principles of democracy and freedom but you have a long history that shows our shortcomings in that respect. so i struggle to really kind of come up with a concrete answer to that other than to say that i think you can as mindy points out, look at what the roosevelt administration does to forestall it. they go to great lengths to try to dissuade randolph from following through on this threat without in fact making any kind of concessions but they fail to move him. whether you believe the march was just a threat or was in fact something that was in the works, the roosevelt administration felt it had to do something to prevent this massive demonstration of people of color in the nation's capitol at a time of war where they were deathly concerned about race war breaking out in the nation's capitol. whether you credit ranndolph's threat or not, the white house was concerned enough about it to do something about it. i'm a historian. i can write some fantasy. some people say i have. depends if you read the critics of my book but i'll stick with the facts that i know and the fact is we do get an executive order issued by the president that does some really important work with respect to economic justice and nondiscrimination. >> uh-huh. >> we're going to get to your questions from the audience in just a moment so if you have any, please, you can start maybe to cue up at the microphone. i want to go to sandra washington. from the park service next, the park service is really adapt at tackling tough history, the tough issues. there this potential pullman site we've got some tough history. we've got an 1894 strike that's violently repressed. we have a union that's formed to address issues of inequality that has to struggle for over a decade before they can get collective bargaining agreements. how does the park service get to tell these stories. what's the mission and vision of the agency for telling them correctly so that it's an all inclusive package with that interpretation so to speak. >> very good question. thank you. i would say we're getting much better at telling tough history about telling the weaknesses of the country which in some odd way are our strengths. the fact that we can he have conversations about the failure of democracy and still rooer ma remain a democracy is a good thing. the breaking of the pullman factory in 1894 was a call for the national guard, the federal troops came there to break that strike. we also tell a story where the national guard came in to little rock to uphold the rights of the students to attend central high school. that is a national park where we tell those stories. and where we actually have an opportunity to demonstrate the great amount of amount of compassion it takes for reconciliation where we have, i don't know if you're very familiar with the photographs that came out of that story, the desegregation of central high school but you have elizabeth eckford at 15, 16 years old, she was the youngest of the students that integrated at the high school, carrying her books. it's the first day. she did not get the message to meet at miss baits home. so she arrives on the public bus and walks down the street to go to school instead of going in the station wagon with the rest of the students. she's heckled and jeered. i'm so sorry. i think her name is ms. fey. i can't remember her last name. there's a white girl behind her just yelling and poking her in the back and almost the spit you can see coming out of her mouth. the two of them on a regular basis come to the visitor center there at the national park and have conversations together about their experience of being in that moment. they have that big poster behind them as they talk about being able to reconcile with each other and be very thoughtful and conscience about her apology. the rangers don't tell the story. we facilitate the story being told by the participants who lived it. in the cases of talking about slavery, of course we don't have participate ants but we facilita conversation about slavery. we open the door and invite folks to understand what the realities of slavery were. we try not to gloss over the facts that we know. we try to tell it in the places where it happened and our biggest struggle and i think we have had a fair amount of success, maybe even a lot of success and mem raetiorating thh or 150th anniversary of the civil war and not making a celebration out of it but talking about the reality of slavery and talking about that it was the genesis for the civil war and let's not talk about or gloss over the other things but let's talk about the realities of that. we tried to -- within our own agency, it was actually a little bit of a battle to talk about this being not just thoratioe memoration of the civil war but of civil rights an the drid the linkage between the two. so i think we do a pretty good job of tackling the tough things. labor isn't an area that we talk very much about as you said. we don't have many sites where we talk about labor. we talk about industry. we have a small site in the up, upper peninsula of the upper peninsula of michigan. it's very far away. the history of copper mining and there is some labor stories there but it really is more about indufrt stry and mining at about labor. we talk about the industry of textiles. it would be an honor should it ever come to pass to talk about labor at pullman. >> thank you. >> you're representing the national parks conservation association but you're also our token millennial unless i'm making assumptions about the age of the other panel members. i wanted to can you, it's part of our mission and vision to protect and enhance america's national park system for current and future generations. as a leader in the millennial generation, what do you think the pullman story and national parks generally have for your generation that's so important and so resonant or could be more so? >> well, i think one of the -- well first, thank you for acknowledging the role of the place holder of being the leader of the mill en yennialsmillenni. i hadn't forthally normally accepted that role but as far as our national parks are concerned, the challenge, i believe that skichexists is eng millennials who are the people in the range of 30 or so. folks born in the early 1980s and upward and downward is the fact of how do we make these places interesting? how do we make the history come to life so that millennials will be engaged? does that mean you have a cell phone app that tells those stories? is it that you have virtual reality that exists in the doors of the visitor centers. it might be. those are conversations that have to happen. those are conversations that have to take place. one of the debates that i have regularly with folks who i interact with are about cell phone usage in national parks. one side is heavily on one side and the other is sort of present. they have an opinion about it but until you actually get out to the national parks and until you actually have a generation of millennials who are able to have access to the national parks and then they realize oh, my god, my cell phone doesn't work, you might have the ability to have that conversation to say well, it might be important for me as a millennial or as someone who regularly uses it technology to be able to use the cell phone when i get to the indiana dunes national lakeshore deep in the woods and document the amount of butterflies that you see. if you're unable to do that you might be missing out on a valuable learning opportunity for many folks who use technology as that learning tool. i think national parks offer opportunities that have yet to be explored for engaging millennials. i think that the most important part of it is going to be making sure that millennials are at the table when those decisions are being made. >> the national park service also managing millions of acres of wilderness. i think we could redefine that for millennials because it is not about going far, far away, it's about going far, far away from cell coverage. >> we tend to stay away from those areas right? >> let's see if we've got any questions from audience members. yes, sir, come on up. let's make sure that microphone is on. it looks like we've got a red light there on. >> hi. david luke ander. ranger from 2003 to 2005. very different site from the proposed pullman site. i've been working in land protection ever since so this project is going to be great. i hope it works out. i love that you guys mention cell phones because to a new generation, our students don't have land lines. you know? like they've never seen they're name in a phone book. that was like you made it back in the old days. you know, just not too much older than them. i've never ridden a train other than an amtrak to philadelphia from new york. so that very important part of our cultural heritage might be lost so that will be a great effort. i had a question for maybe the biographers. i've been working on an intellectual biography of randolph because unlike a lot of male african-american leaders he didn't leave us with an autobiography because he was busy doing stuff. walter white was writing stuff and he was getting stuff done. i was so troubled because we went over more than 3,000 documents and organized his thoughts on nationalism and world war ii and i sent it out the other day and i don't know anything about randolph. we don't get those moments where m malcolm x describes the color of his mothers dress when she's cooking. what about her laugh charmed him? what was his favorite food? was there an expression or a saying? could we put some flesh on these bones of randolph? we know so much about him as a public figure, but as a human, as a man could you share any antidotes that humanizes this iconic figure. >> i will try. i'm actually working on a paper now that i hope will be my last randolph forra before moving onto something else where i'm trying to explain a couple of things. so randolph talks about very early on, being a supporter of women's right to vote and is in fact very engaged with margaret sanger and the birth control movement which is problematic in some ways. but one of the things that comes out of this examination that i'm involved with now is a -- thinking about why randolph did not have children, right? what's there? >> i'm sorry. i will have a different answer than you. >> i don't know. you might be surprised. it's not -- there are -- one of the things i speculate on is that either there's some sort of health issue involved but you would expect in such extensive correspondence between husband and wife that there would be some lamenting of that but there isn't. so it leads me to believe that this is sort of a conscious choice made by two people who have very, very active and connected but separate public lives. i mean randolph marries a woman who is educated, older, entrepreneur, politically active and perhaps more or better socially connected in harlem than he was. so, you know, she's older, established, a professional in her own right and entrepreneur. she might be making some very modern choices about childbearing and he finds himself in a very different position than many of his peers in the 1920s with respect to those kinds of decisions. i don't know that i can give you any kind of definitive answer because there's nothing in the record beyond as you point out, this affectionate name for each other but even that's kind of telling. you're married for 49 years and the best you can say about your wife is buddy. okay, well, whatever. each to his own but there's a lot of room to speculate because there isn't a lot of documentati documentation. i think when you look at the wi in randolph's life are telling. his mother is a preachers wife who finds her own kind of voice both political and sort of public through her husband's role as church pastor but that affords her a great deal of social authority. she's commenting on church finances, church programs, community issues from the position of preachers wife which gives her a place outside the home even if she doesn't necessarily grasp it in the way that someone like dorothy height does. but the woman he marries is a very different woman. i mean she has her own sort of political -- public presence but in some ways they are both charismatic, they are both very strong willed women who find place alongside their male companion. you know? i don't really know that i can give you the kind of flesh on the bone that just doesn't exist because there's no record. you know, but i think when you began to kind of piece together elements of randolph's life and look at him through the lens of the women that impacted him so greatly, it maybe paints a different picture of him. it's funny that mindy is here because in thinking about this paper, i have a lot of questions that i'm hoping she can help me with because i can't necessarily affectively reconcile the shortcomings that she so cogently points out with respect to randolph and gender with the man who -- the man who is so deeply influenced by these two women. right? it seems a weird kind of thing to say to the women's auxiliary. yeah, we want the money that you raise but we're the boss when his wife carries him financially through so much of his early professional career. when he says in his own records, in his own papers that his mother was the driving force in the household that kept his mother on track professionally and financially. it's a very -- i don't know that i have good answer. >> my answer will be a little bit different. first of all i want to point out that of course reading the biography of malcolm x, you're reading the autobiography of malcolm x by alex haley. there are articles of literary license that you have to be concerned about. we really don't know what the actual tapes says versus what haley wrote. okay? i think it's important to remember that some of these autobiographies are not self authorized as a bit of a comparison. the second thing i wanted to say. this is going to be a really short story and i hope not to distract the rest of the panel by it but i was very interested also in luceile green randolph at the time i was writing my dissertation and i asked roger wilkins, who is the nephew of roy wilkins and of course grew up with randolph and knew him for many years but particularly later on in the late 1950s and into the 1960s. i was talking to roger one day and obviously this was many years ago and i said, roger, whatrandolph's wife? >> roger said wife? i never knew he was married. i always thought he was gay. there is -- so i'm throwing in a lavender herring if you will but i think it's something to consider. this is not the only person from whom i've heard this story nor is it the only person -- i've also heard other intimations about luceille about randolph's own gender preferences or sexual preferences so that we might want to be a little bit more flexible or less normal in our assumptions. i will put it that way. >> i think you're absolutely right. i think it's suggestive is that two people who married for so long chose not to have children without there being any clear discussion of why. >> it's interesting the poly merry calls for the partnership roll and i is this that is exactly what randolph had with lucille. >> we're going to move on. >> sorry. we'll talk. >> thank you so much for this panel. one of my all time favorite movies is "miles of smiles" so i'm really glad i came. a couple years ago i spent the summer in chicago and i don't remember how i found out about this but i signed up for a walking tour of the pullman sight and i assumed i would learn about the pullman porters because that's all i knew pullman, right. and so i went to the south side and i went on the tour and it was actually led by one of the guys that lives in one of the houses that you're talking about. and you meet him by the gate and he has an umbrella and he takes you all over. but i was so disappointed because there was nothing, nothing, nothing but the pullman porters and even after the tour we went to the museum, right. and i don't think there was anything there. this is all to say i'm so happy you're working on this because it is such an incredibly -- like you said, the architect and slas place is just astounding. and then one other really quick comment. this will make it sound like all i do is watch movies. but i saw this documentary called "the first lady of little rock" about dazy baits and in the movie i learned that daisy bates did speech. >> she gave 142-word speech. >> oh, all right. you mentioned that. i just didn't know if you -- >> yeah i know. so. >> okay. so, because i think lots of people don't know that. >> yeah. >> and it was very short but anyway. all right. >> yeah. >> let's go to the next question. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> hello. this question is towards lee and sandra, talking about preserving cultural institutions, what is your thoughts of the rapid -- in black communities where they are tearing down these buildings and making them into starbucks or cvs. so your plans. >> i will leave that for sandra. >> all right. a moment ago i was wishing i wore my uniform and i'm glad i didn't. oh, wow. you know, the park service does, we're in a lot of urban areas so we try to tell the story of that urban place. one of the places we're in flight that we're in very quietly is detroit. we don't have a national park in detroit but a lot of community activism we're doing in detroit for preserving green space, working with the city and their parks department as detroit regreens themselves. many of you are probably very familiar that detroit is going through a regreening where they are asking people who live in areas where there is very light -- very light home ownership and asking them how would you like to live over here where more people live, since only 3 them in ai square mile live in this neighborhood maybe you would like to go over here, then they will regreen those houses and some put in agriculture fields to grow foods in detroit. so we are working on that. we have a park maybe 20 miles a way and there is a heritage area in detroit. i'm making the context. there's a number of people who said to me i think it would be great if the national park service -- and they fill in the blank with something that makes me shutter. whether the second baptist church of detroit which is a lively congregation and needs no help from a park service that certainly don't need rangers and mo town absolutely needs no park rangers. i'm fascinated in detroit in community activism. in new orleans the national park is present at jazz national historical park. and it would be easy for the park service just to tell the story right in the middle of the french quarter but we're trying to tell the story further afield and making sure the homes of the musicians are saved in their context not as the last home standing, of course katrina got in the way of that. >> hello. i thoroughly enjoy each of your presentations. i actually grew up in rosealynn poreman andize bell told me to say i remieg rated. i went to coralsis high school at the back of the pullman porter museum however i didn't know that. it wasn't until i graduated from ucla, came back home to organize kids on the south side of chicago that i even knew the museum was tlx. then i got hooked up with lynn hughes the founder of the museum and then incredible what you said, dr. mal indiaependemalindh being sexist and then this woman finds this museum and gives him an opportunity to pay him some attention. but as a young person i didn't know anything about a.phillip randolph. and i'm sure that was because, nobody told me to go to the back of my high school and i could get all this knowledge. so when we talk about the national park service i'm so glad y'all are here. when we talk about the national park service and hopefully the future of it, we have to begin talking about seeing our national historic sights in the con2e67 context of young people so they can pay it attention. when we talk about the history and historic land marks in memphis and the ability of of the national park service to come into a place like this and define what is nationally hift yieric in a new way that young people can pay attention to. whether it is from the era of the blues or today, like "take me to the river" did, hope y'all seen is that movie. then we can engage the young people and then will want to observe these places in a different way. >> okay. >> and i just want to say quickly. you guys the filled me up. i need to get just a little bit more focused but, the idea is you give us an opportunity to identify new ways of viewing what is a national treasure. and so in chicago, for example, if something is named, the pullman historic sight versus being named george pullman brotherhood sleeping national park, then it sounds excluesive, where the sleeping carporters had no significant role. and so do what you can to put them in there. >> right. >> you can't just call it pullman. he was great in a sense of a significant person. once i found out about him i took my children to the pullman museum and to the sleeper carporter museum and that will only become important if both segments of that population are important. thank you. >> thank you. >> thank you. [ cheers and applause ] >> young person. >> i am not a millennial. i'm a generation x i'd rather you refer to me as a philadelphia eagles fan. i have a question in reference to all of the porters. it has always been my understanding that moeflt st of were men that may have gone to college and came out and for many reasons they aren't able do anything else. so is it possible that because it is this group of educated men, that many of them are educated men and then are marrying women attempting to asimulate to american society, is it while a reason or is it the reason why they succeed where so many other groups don't succeed. does that play a role in it? >> i would say no. that's not the driving force. -- which leads to the success of the brotherhood. part of it is fortunate timing. i think a big part of it is what melinlda's book details in terms what women do to provide the financial resources and structure to make it possible for people like randolph to be kind of out on the edge. you know. he's out there, i was going to say something but i can't say it in this setting, he's able to say and do some of the things he's able to say and do because of the financial support provided by the women's auxiliary. and timing is important. the brotherhood wasn't the first union, there were two others that failed at the turn of the century. and randolph is an important figure because he brings certain insights to organizinorganizing no doubt about that. but that's only part of the story of success. you can't really account for the success of the brotherhood without taking into account what melinda's is talking about in her book. >> one last quick question. >> all right. good afternoon. i've enjoyed panel session. i'm joy, i work for the park service. i'm here with three mid level managers for the park service in the corner. i wanted to know what your thought if the sight is not 402nd national park. what are the plans? >> yes, to answer your question joy, i think that is a really good question. the position of the campaign as it has gone over the last two years has been pullman is well positioned to be 402nd national park sight. er the status of the campaign, senator who is assistant in the u.s. this senate and senator in the minority has co-sponsored legislation to have this if become a national park. that was first step. congressional route is one way to go if it doesn't work initially you have the second option, that is using president antiquities act created in early 1900s was designed to help preserve the country, the president can step in and designate federally owned property as a national monument and direct national agencies, such as the national park service to manage that sight. where we are in that process is in regular communication with d.c., with our partners in formulating enough supporters on the ground to say there is 110% local support for pullman being designated as a national park sight. we have well over 15,000 who have pledged their support and labor groups advocating us. that's where we are. that's the take action notice for everyone here, we want pullman to be 402nd national park sight, the people with the loudest voice are the ones recognized. and there's plenty of supporters who want it to be 402nd national park sight, chicago's first national park sight and we can makes that come together that pullman should be a national park. >> i would say in addition to that. 402 is a campaign, a brilliant one, but also a parking space. if we have to fight it we will take that too, that's success. i want to thank our panelist. [ cheers and applause ] i think you have copies of your book that will be available at the book signing. or at least in the book area. we have two great authors here who have done great work on biographies, two good books you should pick up, both are available in the vendor area. once again i'm from the national parks association, i have several coloraleagues that will here, raise your hand, that's us. if you have any questions about us who we are, what we do stop by and visit us and pick up our brochure. this ends the opening 99th annual conference. i look forward to being back next year for the 100th. thank you all. >> tl . >> good friday. today we're going to be discussing two separate conflicts that took place in north america. we talked about the french indiana wars and queen anne's war. today we will talk about two separate conflicts. one is not actually the french indian war. but actually the war between british colonies in the south and spain. and the war that occurs just before the french indiana war. these are words i put up for spelling. often times i will mention these and students like to get the right spellings. other spellings will be on the slide. we will part here with the peace that ended the previous war, queen anne's war and war of the spanish succession and it ushered in peace both in europe and the colonies but war again rerupted in late 1739 when britain declared war on spain. the nominal reason for that declaration was de gradation for british commerce. this listing

Related Keywords

New York , United States , Alabama , Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , Kentucky , Illinois , Indiana , Upton , Massachusetts , Virginia , Georgia , Kansas City , Kansas , Michigan , Washington , District Of Columbia , Mississippi , United Kingdom , Presbyterian Church , Yosemite , Limpopo , South Africa , Springfield , Tennessee , Durban , Kwazulu Natal , Detroit , Memphis , King George , France , Spain , Chicago , Americans , America , Britain , French , Spanish , British , American , Phillip Randolph , Pullman Porter , Amarion Anderson , Pauline Myers , George Pullman , Elena Horn , Randolph , Lynn Hughes , Linden Johnson , Randolph Abraham Lincoln , Philip Randolph , Odell Waller , Allan Baker , Joan Baez , Robert Walker , Polly Murray , Martin Luther King , Anna Arnold , Queen Anne , Sena Carruthers Tucker , Margaret Sanger , Roger Wilkins , Diane Nash Baker , Carruthers Tucker , Roy Wilkins , Abraham Lincoln , Daisy Bates , Cornelius Bynum , Alex Haley , Pauly Murray , John Kennedy , Jane Joe , John Jarvis , David Luke , Franklin Roosevelt ,