It has been a very moving experience, and im sure that will continue with our panel right now, which is a Panel Focused on the radicalization of reconstruction. , will introduce our speakers as others have done all at the beginning here, and then they will come up and give you some more wonderful food for thought. Julie saville is associate professor of history at the university of chicago. She is a specialist in African American and caribbean histories and the author and editor of numerous books, including the work of reconstruction from in southwage labor carolina and she is currently working on a study of popular politics and resistance to reenslavement in the caribbean after the haitian and french revolution. Blackcus will be on mobilization in the aftermath of american emancipation. Carol amberson is associate professor of history at the university of buffalo. Her research focuses on the role of violence and shaping our social, political, and cultural world. She published beyond redemption race, violence, and the American South after the civil war in 2013 and has launched a new study of exslaves historical memories of war and emancipation. Her talk will focus on white peoples often violent responses to mobilization. The sternberg professor of history and chair of department inhistory at rose college memphis specializes in the American South and the constitutional and legal history of the United States. He is author and editor of a number of looks including the tiny court justices, rulings, and legacies. Desk finishingw touches on a new book which is due out next month. His talk today will focus on race, violence, and the reconstruction era. Onstitutional amendments i will turn the podium over to julie. Ms. Saville i had just one image i would like to show. Someone mentioned yesterday i am also pretty oldschool and it comes to having an opportunity to talk. The ability to use digital images as effectively as they had in an hour conversations. I had just one photograph and im not even sure how to load it. Would you just bear with me a minute . Good morning, everyone. I appreciate so very much susan and beverlys invitation to join you at the conclusion of this monthlong series of conversations about the 1866. Assacre in memphis i hope you know that despite the repetitiveness and redundancy, that my gratitude is deep, and probably their legacies will last a long time from the experiences that you have made possible. This is a privilege and also more than a little unnerving. Your effort to record historical injustice as a community is indeed humbling, muchneeded. I consider one of myself one of the beneficiaries of your support and insistence and helping us muster the humanity to face reconstruction and its legacies of the past a past which is not really passed. So i thank the conference ,rganizers, the other panelists and members of the university of memphis campus community, and the larger Memphis Community for the reflective spirit in which together we are trying to see silent chapter of American History a new and perhaps differently. Even more importantly, the civic interaction, the series of frank, public discussions, and the new questions that you have erated from conversations all these just might well become part of an opportunity not only to see history differently, but perhaps to make a different history in america. Deepain, it is my privilege to join you on this occasion. My remarks today take up the question of africanamerican mobilization. Called a black organizing tradition. Not only its legacies after slavery but some of the antecedents in a larger Atlantic World prior to the events that we have been focusing on in memphis. I hope these will provide a kind development and things that we could use to think about processes of getting beyond slavery and a kind of lengthy introduction, i would ine to skip some moments emancipations stony past, viewing them toward the emancipation of other slaves elsewhere in the hemisphere of the americas. Then i want to discuss some elements of this organizing tradition, which you have already talked about in prior conversations as it played out in plantation districts of the deep south after slavery. ,s a third component of my talk if i had a conclusion, it depends on how you answer a question that i would like to put to you. First, slave emancipation as a stony road. Road this phrase a stony a metaphor of road to describe the path away from slavery sums up what, since the 1980s, has become a point of departure in the study of slave emancipation and the americas. Namely, that the path from slavery to freedom is not linear. Increasing attention to processes of emancipation in north america, south america, and the caribbean call to mind thomas polks memorable take on these dynamics in his book the problem of freedom, which looked at slavery and postemancipation politics in jamaica and in the British Empire after slavery. He had a memorable take on how he thought about developments. As people having to, in his words, french freedom from its opposite wrenching freedom from its opposite. He was describing the process of emancipation, not slavery, but wrenching read him him its that a pursuitts of liberation is indeed ongoing. Freedom, if anything, is a moving target, not a destination. It was not in his helpful and important book where i first encountered this dynamic view of liberation, but rather in the sung byf a song, a song me and countless other children in the segregated southern public schools. Probably from Elementary School on. We sang it in tuscaloosa, alabama. We sang it at the beginning of morning assemblies when i was a student at Hamilton High school here in memphis in the 1960s. The song lift every voice and thing written by an africanamerican composer and onetime naacp president around 1900. It was written in observance of Abraham Lincolns birthday for students at his own school in florida where he was teaching to sing in commemoration of lincoln s birthday. By the time the song came around to me, and it was probably in a printed program where i first saw the title because i had ,earned the lyrics long before but when i saw the title of the song in a program, it had become the name that some time after world war ii took on the Negro National anthem. Let me if you will repeat the second verse, and i have to read it because now im at a point where my memory no longer suffices. How the lyrics, particularly in the second verse, invoke liberations winding, brutal path. Stony the road we trod bitter the chasing rod felt in the day that hope unborn had died yet, with a steady beat hath not our weary feet come to the place for which our fathers side we have come over a way that with tears has been watered we have come treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered out from the gloomy past till now we stand at last where the white gleam of our bright star is cast even now the line i do not know if it is true just for me or you also, but the line treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered gives chills. And the verse the line links the traveler with victims who have fallen in a journey in ch life was on the line author top of my head, its hard to think of another more secular anthem with the possible of [inaudible] in which bloodshed mingles so freely towards the pursuit of some kind of higher social order. Struck by the words, i could not help but wonder what experience this might have given shape in johnsons in imagination. Although im still examining the phenomenon, the composition became slightly less mysterious that threads of johnsons Family History run through one of frances slave colonies in the caribbean, which we now know as the modern country of haiti. In fact, thats not enough to say. At the end of the 18th century, it was the premier prize of atlantic colonialism and americas. Its roughly, 500,000 slaves, 2 3 of whom had been born in West Central Africa in the 1780s, primarily in , weres of congo angola producing 2 3 of the sugar consumed in europe, half the 4 5 of the about coffee as well according to historians. Prize was ther independent country of haiti, which johnsons family ties past through. Johnsons family connections share the first of people in haiti, this first country in the american hemisphere to abolish slavery, and i think some of those of peoples in some ways contributed to points of view that come across, especially in the second stanza of the song. In 1802, it turns out, johnsons , aernal greatgrandmother native haitian woman, as he describes her in his autobiography along this way, was they placed upon a vessel down for cuba by the french soldier who had fathered her three children. Perhaps johnsons greatgrandmother was trying to get to cuba because of spiraling rumors that the french government planned to restore slavery in 18 oh two, some eight years after it had been abolished in french law. Hester argo never reached refuge in cuba, where she probably thought to settle among enclaves andree people of color former slaves, but the boat upon which they left haiti was captured by pirates in the bahamas. They turned out to be yet another obstacle in the path to freedom that had been thrown up by slaverys abolition in french , and its colonies ongoing abolition gradually in northern states of the United States set in motion after the American Revolution. You see, these early emancipations had brought bands of sea rovers staked out in the bahamas the prospect of valuable human cargo as kidnapped free people of color. Black people sold southward by owners in northern states that and began to enact laws of gradual abolition in the 1780s and 1800s. This antedates by half a century the events of the film solomon northrup begins to capture. The dates from the 1780s, after the american french and haitian . Volution, what might we see it is a short list. The restoration of slavery in law and in practice in former frenchamerican colonies in the exception,ith the colonies where it had been proclaimed abolished. The kidnapping, longdistance transfer, and sale of people freed by deed or gradual abolition laws in the northern states of the United States 50 years before solomon northrups similar experiences in upstate new york. Simply to list these earlyilities in an 19thcentury Atlantic World in which limited abolition was already under way makes clear, i hope, that whatever else it might be, slave emancipation was no haven. Historically, it was a volatile and reversible state, even , were later in the century encounter the more familiar convulsions and upheavals of slave emancipation and the American South that we had in discussing. But i have not forgotten the song that johnson wrote. Johnsons greatgrandmother was one of the lucky ones. She and her children somehow escaped renewed captivity when her cubabound vessel was seized in the bahamas. Experience itself seems always to have haunted from the margins. In johnsons family and to generational memory, never somehow only uncoupled emancipation from the looming dangers of reenslavement. Johnson writes, when the civil war was raging in the united this is some 60 years after the disrupted escape , listening tor rumors that the colored people in the north would be put in became panic stricken. Taking her daughter with her, she boarded a ship and returned. O nassau the risk of freedom condensed and made visceral in johnsons , whatf the slaughtered is memorably described as terror at the heart of freedom these are among the rocks strewn along freedoms indeed stony road. I know that haiti, cuba, the bahamas might seem a geography that is distant from events in memphis, but the volatility of emancipation informed the circumstances of people who claimed emancipation from slavery and movement that variousthrough the nations, colonies, republics, and even a few empires that had begun to form in the americas over the course of a century of slave emancipation from vermont and massachusetts in the 1770s through brazilian abolition in 1888. The experiences of displacement reconstructive for some of the victims of the massacre in memphis in 1866, we no glimpse how emancipation less than slavery was more a. Ource of displacement it opened its way to unpredictable force transfer. Such experiences gave rise to coordinated efforts to reduce and informf freedom feltrganizing tradition the most fundamental Community Efforts that former slaves took to regulate, control, and , but withto stabilize luck, build on their emancipation. These second part of remarks, i would like to turn to the organizing tradition of former slaves in the United States. The idea that the games, constituencies, and strategies for mobilizing for social justice reflects historically significant conceptions of freedom and historically conditioned patterns of activism grows out of studies of the determinative role of local Freedom Fighters in the civil rights movement. This has been the concept of an organizing tradition that they have used to get at local leaders, sometimes characterized , not the local people nationally known or recognized heads of centralized organizations, and it is my in very different circumstances, the concept of an organizing tradition can also prove useful in exploring africanamerican mobilization for justice after slavery. Among other things, it calls attention to the long history of the myriad forms of social activism that have shaped politicalricans lives. The notion of an organizing tradition, both when it is used as ie 20th entry and also, would like to try to develop it, in remarks for slave emancipation, looks two ways. It seeks to identify and seek redress from external on himints imposed answer the tour projects, so it looks to external sources of subordination, but it also looks internally to the very nature term blacker of the people associate and characterize with each other. The notion of internal Group Politics historian robin kelly has called the intro politics of organizing work. Put simply, making a community is part and parcel of the toward of aiming to move externally imposed constraints. It was in the fall of 1855 a very simple and more direct politicson of intro reached the ears of president andrew johnson. The explained to johnson organizing tradition more and imbly we have, quoting now, for the last four years, they informed johnson, been studying with justice and the best of our ability what steps we should take to become a people very interesting phrase what steps we should take to become a people. On the one hand, this language of becoming a people identifies , a kind ofof slavery an alienation from self and from society that is reminiscent of what historian Orlando Patterson death. Cribed as social at the same time, emancipated slaves also insisted that whatever kinds of atomization and subordination, silence in the face of hours that slavery had enforced had led them to envision freedom as a process where things could be different, where they would become a people. Recognizable in and of themselves to themselves and to others. Of an inospect to finde Community Life freedom in this letter to johnson as a recognized right to belong. Belonging to clubs, to labor groups, extended family associations, marching companies. All of these promised a means by which former slaves saw as able to act together and thereby begin to undo the links of atomization, obligationternalist which under slavery had sought to tie them individually as accountable to their masters and mistresses. It was in texas slave master from georgia who sis singly described this phenomenon and askslaves passion for this process of becoming a people. They are stone crazy for politics, he wrote in the fall of it and five to a Family Member. The assessment was not too far off. In the wake of emancipation, seized upons political mobilization as inseparable from community organization. These kinds of postemancipation freedom summer in the 1860s anticipated the reception,process of initiation, education, and incorporation of newcomers into myriad community groups, processes that form the backbone of Grassroots Community organized in the freedom movements a century later in the 1960s. Awareness of this organizing cost historians to see emancipation with new eyes. As it has been pointed out in a number of panels, these activities were taking place recognition ofed any basis for africanamerican political participation, citizenship, let alone an organized presence in public. Ife formally authorized rights nevertheless certainly made contributions to the achievement of social justice, or they had the potential. Formally authorized to. But as was underscored yesterday, formal political processes are responsive to an interaction with claims that fashioned not in the sunlight but in the shade of political life. They come upon their understanding of those processes by watching, not by being summoned. Thatinds of upstart claims were identified for making a standing in civil society. It fell then to these unauthorized people or not yet authorized people, groups of who brought to emancipation really since the haitian revolution, they say, somehow the conception that they were already free. It spurred them on to give meaning to the opening that legal abolition legitimated and would inevitably mediate that. Ever fulfill indeed, there unauthorized actions bring to mind the contradiction that a political theorist in his simply titled book emancipation that is fundamental to the very ideas of emancipation as a concept, namely that by its nature, emancipation is effective would seem to require the possession of those very qualities that the emancipation is intended to foster. Maybe more simply, you dont get beyond a structure of domination unless you have already crossed its borders, maybe more than a few times. Emancipation did not make slaves men and women. They had become that long before. The challenges of elaborating a social program that would give meaning to a life beyond slavery from anpiration underlying if no just social relationships that these now former slave men and women had developed in captivity. To take a look at some of the general features of this mobilization and because we have talked about them so