- Good evening everyone.
I'm Catherine Epstein, Provost
and Dean of the faculty
and the Winkley Professor of
History at Amherst college.
It's an honor and a privilege
to sponsor the inaugural provost
lecture series and seminar.
This inaugural series
is titled "The History of
Anti-Black Racism in America."
Right now it's hard to think
of a more compelling or important topic.
COVID-19 has glaringly
brought to the floor
the systemic racism
that is so prevalent in the United States.
The virus has taken a far greater toll
on our black and brown
communities than on others.
This is due to the systemic racism present
in all aspects of our society.
In healthcare education,
housing, the workplace,
the criminal justice
system, to name just a few,
but systemic racism and
particularly anti-black racism
is nothing new.
The premise of this series
is that history is a
powerful and necessary tool
for helping us deepen our understanding
of racism in America today.
As James Baldwin, once wrote,
"The great force of history
comes from the fact that
we carry it within us,
are unconsciously controlled by it.
History is literally
present in all that we do."
As a historian,
I believe our college community
needs to know much more
about the history of anti-black racism.
Without that knowledge
grounded in fact and learning,
we cannot understand our society today.
As an educational institution,
we are and should be focused on learning.
We pride ourselves on
being a diverse community,
and we repeatedly state
that bringing together a diverse faculty,
staff and student body
enhances learning for everyone.
It is enormously important
that we learn from each other
and from the personal
experiences that we all embody.
Interpersonal interactions allow us
to understand the way that
racism shapes the lives
of individuals in our community.
But even more is necessary.
We also need to take an academic
scholarly approach as well,
so that we can understand
the structural racism
underpinning our society.
For students tuning in.
I hope that you are taking one
of the many courses offered
on race and racism in the
United States this semester.
And if not this semester,
I hope you'll take such
a course next semester.
For faculty and staff,
I hope that you are
using this lecture series
as a way to deepen your knowledge
of the African American experience,
but especially of the
history of anti-black racism
in the United States.
And that's true for alumni too.
I greatly look forward to my own learning
around the issues that
our distinguished speakers
will address this fall.
Reparations, the struggle for the ballot,
the idea of black criminality
and the expansion of our prison
system in recent decades.
Now for some thank yous.
First, the lecture series
is supported by a grant
from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation
to support the cultivation
of public scholarship
in the humanities at Amherst college.
Next I want to thank Jen Manion,
associate professor of history,
for organizing and facilitating
this lecture series
and the accompanying seminar.
This was Jen's brainchild,
and she's done a terrific job
of envisioning this series
inviting the speakers,
and making this more than
just a lecture series.
It also includes a non-credit seminar.
Individuals can sign up
for discussion groups
of up to 12 persons.
Each of the discussion
groups will meet for an hour
in the days following each lecture
and discuss the lecture
as well as some accompanying
readings and videos.
The syllabus for the series
will allow you to explore more fully,
the issues discussed by
each of our speakers.
You can sign up for the discussion groups,
wherever this lecture
series is advertised,
and you will see the link
at the end of this lecture as well.
Before I hand this over
to Professor Manion
to introduce our first speaker,
Professor Mary Frances Berry,
I want to extend my personal
thanks to Professor Berry
for agreeing to give the inaugural lecture
in the inaugural provost lecture series.
In the prologue to her
wonderful book on Callie House,
Professor Barry, it relates an
anecdote about how at age 12,
she became "An outlaw, a
transgressor of racial boundaries."
She had the nerve to
listen to some records
while she was doing the
ironing for a white family.
The mother of the white family,
when she realized that the child,
who would later become a professor,
she exploded, telling
her, you had no business
touching those records,
and you shouldn't be
listening to such music
in the first place.
This episode had several ramifications.
One Professor Berry's aunt worried
that Mary Frances would
become a troublemaker.
Meanwhile, and perhaps more tellingly,
the episode ruined
Professor Berry's pleasure
in listening to music, such as
Beethoven's "Ninth Symphony."
Professor Berry grew
up in South Nashville,
just a few blocks from where
Callie House once lived.
As she wrote in that prologue,
she and Callie House both
became troublemakers.
In the spirit of the
recently deceased John Lewis,
both professor Berry and Callie House
got into what he called and
encouraged, good trouble.
We are enormously lucky to be
in the presence of a historian
who made and makes good trouble.
Not least good trouble has
allowed the academy and us
to learn the extraordinarily important
and absolutely fascinating history
of the African American
experience in the United States.
Professor Berry, thank
you so much for being here
and for sharing your
insights with our community.
And now Professor Manion
will formally introduce Professor Berry.
- Thank you very much.
- Thank you.
- Thank you Provost Epstein
for your support of this series
and welcome to everyone watching at home.
I'm Jen Manion, associate
professor of history
here at Amherst college.
And it is my great honor to
introduce tonight's speaker.
Dr. Mary Frances Berry is a pioneering
and prolific legal historian
who has been the Geraldine
R. Segal professor
of American Social Thought
and professor of history
at the University of
Pennsylvania since 1987.
She received her bachelor's
and master's degrees
from Howard University
and went on to the University of Michigan,
where she earned both a PhD and a J.D.
She is author of 13 books
spanning five decades.
The first one, "Black
Resistance, White Law."
A history of constitutional
racism in America,
charts the ways government
officials use the law
to suppress black protest,
but refuse to use the
law to protect blacks
from assaults by whites.
Her most recent book, "History
Teaches Us To Resist,"
shows the important role
that public protest played
in key moments throughout US history.
Arguing that nonviolent protest
is a necessary ingredient
of American democracy.
For her accomplishments as a scholar,
Dr. Berry has been recognized
as a Fellow of the Society
of American Historians
and the American Society
for Legal History.
She served as president
of the organization of
American Historians in 1990.
An impressive career by any measure,
her accomplishments as a historian
are simply a fraction of
Dr. Berry's life work.
She has had an equally
distinguished career
in public service.
From 1977 to 1980,
Dr. Berry served as assistant
secretary for education
in the department of health
education and welfare.
From 1980 to 2004,
she was a member of the US
Commission on Civil Rights.
President Bill Clinton named
her chair of the commission
in 1993, a position she held until 2004.
She has fought against many things;
apartheid in South Africa, war in Vietnam,
voting fraud, felon
disenfranchisement, police violence,
educational disparities,
housing and economic discrimination,
and the destruction of black
churches across the South,
to list only a few.
All in the name of racial
justice and equality.
A New York Times profile
noted Dr. Berry is well known
for her tenacity and sense of outrage
at the condition of
minorities and poor people.
She is a tireless advocate,
both on the front lines
and behind the scenes
for which she has been recognized
with 35 honorary doctoral
degrees and awards.
25 years ago,
I walked into Dr. Berry's
office in College Hall
at the University of Pennsylvania,
where she held her undergraduate seminar
on the history of law and social policy.
The room itself was an
archive of the subject
filled with photos of Dr.
Berry and world leaders,
newspaper clippings,
awards, and other momentos
of a lifetime of advocacy
for racial justice.
I learned about the life and legacy
of one of Amherst's most notable alumni,
the famed civil rights lawyer,
Charles Hamilton Houston
when we read and discussed his biography.
Week after week, we read
books, argued with each other
and listen to Dr. Berry.
I learned that knowledge about the past
was an invaluable tool
for those of us working
for justice in the present.
A lesson I carry with me to this day,
and that has shaped the
vision for this series.
Tonight. Dr. Berry will talk
with us about Callie House
and the struggle for ex slave reparations.
Please join me in welcoming
Dr. Mary Frances Berry.
- Thank you very much, Jen.
I didn't realize it had been 25 years.
Wow! It seems like yesterday. (laughing)
And I'm so pleased that I was invited
to give this inaugural lecture
and I wanna thank the
Provost and Dean of faculty,
Professor Epstein, and
all the people at Amherst
who made this possible, and
the donors and everybody else.
If I miss somebody, I hope I didn't.
I'm bringing you this from New Orleans,
where I am now, while we
are awaiting a hurricane.
Let's hope it doesn't
come by here too much.
Well, what I plan to do,
is to tell you why I
wrote about Callie House
and the pension movement,
reparations movement,
and what it did in general,
and what that has to do
with what we're doing now
and what we might do in the future
as we try to achieve racial justice.
I come to you at a very sad time
when George Floyd was killed.
I was on BBC one night
and they said to me,
"Well, do you think
that these kinds of
killings will happen again,
or is this the end of it?"
And I said, I think that's
a ridiculous question.
Until we get rid of white supremacy
and the role of the
police in enforcing it,
it's been happening, so
it's likely to happen again.
Unfortunately, that is the case.
So we had a little back
and forth on the show.
But unfortunately since that time
we have had several episodes.
And this one with Jacob
Blake is heart-rending
because apparently I guess
the police intended to see
that he was killed, but he wasn't.
So he's paralyzed as far as we know.
And other unpleasant and
tragic things have happened
in the wake.
I wrote about this book
because I heard about Callie House first
when I was a graduate student at Michigan,
and I was at a reception
for a distinguished visiting
professor in Detroit.
And all of us had driven
over there to this reception
to hear this great man speak.
And we got there and was standing around
and a man walked up to
me and started chatting
and said, "I hear you from Nashville.
And there was a woman from
there named Callie House,
I'm told, that had something to do
with doing something
about the old ex-slaves."
And he started telling
me all these stories
that he had heard from
some other guy in his union
on the assembly line.
And that he had tried to
find out something about it,
but he wasn't a historian or anything.
He didn't know how to do research.
He was even told to go
to the National Archives,
but he went and they told
him they didn't know anything
about what he was talking about.
So I went away from that thinking, wow.
And then I asked the only black woman
who was a curator at
the National Archives,
and who had been there
when I was an undergraduate
and introduced me to
working in the archives.
Did she know anything about it?
And she pointed to some materials
over in the corner, down in the basement
where she took me and said,
"That's about that subject."
So I read the stuff
and I wrote an article,
which I had published.
And I assumed in the article,
that Callie House was
somehow a mail factor.
She was some kind of criminal or something
because the federal
government had charged her
with using the mails to defraud.
And in those days when
I was a young scholar,
I thought that if the police
charged you with something,
it meant that you did it.
And so I didn't know any better.
So I in fact wrote this article,
It didn't really say what she did,
but I talked about what she had done.
I went away from the
discussion for years after that
and wrote about a whole
lot of other things.
And then the subject of
reparation surfaced again,
when Japanese community
was trying to get reparations
for their internment
during the World War II,
and a lot of activity
took place at that time,
including the introduction of H.R. 40,
which is the house bill
John Conyers introduced
to try to get a reparation
study commission,
which he tried to do for years and years.
And last year it was introduced again,
and yet has not been done.
So I decided to go back
and actually thoroughly
research Callie House
and found out what she did,
because reparations
was, again, a hot topic.
And when I did it,
I found out that not only
was she not a criminal,
but that all she was trying to do,
was to get pensions for the old ex-slaves.
She was born probably in
1861, she died in 1928.
And in the period up to 1918,
she was very much active
in organizing a movement
to try to get some kind of pensions.
Remember that we didn't
have social security then.
So there were all these old
people who had been slaves.
She had been a slave
and the elders among them
had nobody to support them.
And they were poor.
And some of them were
working for the same people
they had worked for when they were slaves
and were still working, even
though they were elderly.
One woman, I recall looking in the record,
she was 90-something,
and she was still working
as the help, cleaning
the house for this family
she'd worked for as a slave.
So Callie House heard from a pamphlet
that was being circulated by a white guy
who wanted pensions
so that the ex slaves would
get them, his rationale.
And they would spend them in the South
where most of them still were,
and it would help the white
families to redevelop the South.
He saw it as an indirect
way to get some money
for the people who were in the South.
Well, when this pamphlet was circulated,
some people bought it,
other people let other people read it.
People read it to each
other, if they couldn't read.
And it circulated rather widely.
And Callie House was in Tennessee,
and she heard about it at church.
And she said, "Well, I don't understand
why we couldn't organize
something like that for ourselves.
Why do we need this man
to do something for the
white people in the South,
all over the South, by getting
money he thinks, for us,
which we'll give to them.
It doesn't make any sense."
And so with the help of a local black guy
who had worked for the white
guy, whose name was Vaughn
and who got disgusted with it,
and who told her that...
What he did was he was
gonna lobby Congress,
send petitions off to Congress
to try to get pensions.
She organized this movement.
It's a rather simple story after that.
They traveled all over the South,
they sent out pamphlets,
they had meetings.
They wanted to get the
names of every person
who had been a slave on a petition.
There are some in the book
and the petition notes where
the person was a slave,
who owned them, and so you
could identify the people
and actually find them and
find families if you want to.
And all of those records down
in the National Archives,
because they got petitioned.
If the person could write,
they wrote their name.
If they couldn't, somebody
wrote it for them.
And then they just put an X.
And all of these petitions
were sent to the Congress
of the United States.
After a while, the local white
people get very concerned
about this movement.
And they asked the federal government,
they wrote letters, the letters
were there, the files too.
Saying, "You should stop this woman,
she's exciting all these Negroes,
they think they're gonna get some money.
And when they find out they're
not, they're gonna be mad.
So we don't know what they're doing,
but they go and have meetings in church
and then they come out singing
and walking up and
down, like they're happy
about one day, our day is coming.
They are not getting anything.
Why don't you tell them, then
you used to stop this woman."
Well, the records of the
Pension Bureau at that time,
which had its own intelligence operatives,
was that they got concerned
because they got so many notes from people
who said, "Go get her,
do something to her."
They sent out undercover agents
to go to some of the meetings in churches,
to see what they were doing.
And the undercover agents came back
and said they weren't doing anything
except getting petitions
and having people...
Have the names put on
them and then they'd sing.
They paid dues 25 cents a month.
And they kept talking
about well, someday, we
might be able to get this.
And they told their stories
about all the bad things
that happened to them.
Then they went out singing
and they went home.
So we didn't see them do anything.
So they said, "Oh, boy, we
can't charge them with anything.
What can we do?"
Finally, what they did
was they charged her
with using the mails to defraud.
By sending out pamphlets
and notices of meetings
and having meetings.
Their argument was that
she should have known
that the government
would never give pensions
to these people.
By her organizing them to get pensions,
she was engaged in fraud.
And the long short of the story
is that they convicted her
in the National Federal Court
with an all white jury and judge,
of using the mail to cause fraud.
I found in the records
at the National Archives,
a file which had complete records
of one of the chapters
with names and everything.
And it was in the litigation file
of a lawyer who went to court, prosecutor.
Lawyers put together a litigation file.
And he went to court and
told the judge and the jury
that they didn't have any chapters.
That it was all made up.
And she was just a charlatan and a crook.
But the file was right there.
Today, any lawyer who did
that would be debarred
because that is fraudulent,
not sending information that you had.
Anyway, they sent her to prison.
She went to prison in
Jefferson City, Missouri.
The federal government said
that at the time that
she was incarcerated,
the organization had at least
300,000 dues paying members,
which means it was the largest
grassroots organization
of black people.
And all of those petitions were sent
to the Congress of the United States.
Some of them were introduced
and sent to committee,
but they weren't acted on.
And they're still in
the National Archives.
When she got out of prison and
she went home to Nashville,
she became ill and she
did no more work in that.
She went back to being a washerwoman,
which is what her family
had been, what she had been.
But the movement continued.
I traced the movement from that time
through Marcus Garvey's movement,
he supported the reparations.
And some of the people in his chapters
were people who had been in
the chapters of her movement.
And you can trace those people
all the way up to the
organizations that exist today,
like N'COBRA and others,
are people who are descendants
of the people who were way
back then in this movement.
Also, while she was in prison,
she was in the same
prison with Emma Goldman,
who some people may recall
were radical history.
And both of them were
seamstresses and washer women.
And they both sewed on the machines.
That's what they had the prisoners doing.
They made clothes, things like that.
They were there together.
And Emma Goldman made
a detailed description
of what was happening in there
and how they did it and all the
rest, which was very useful.
Now what this book and
what she hoped to do,
what she hoped to do, Callie House,
was to provide a basis for somebody,
even if she didn't do it,
to come along sometime
and try to get reparations
for these people who had been slaves.
And there were about 2
million still alive in 1900.
And if they had been given reparations,
which for older people
would have been $15 a month,
and younger people would have gotten less.
You could argue
that we would have wiped
out the debt to those people
with one fell swoop, if a
decision had been made to do that.
But obviously there was no decision.
Now, what does this have
to do with anything else?
After the Japanese movement for redress,
which finally ended
with a piece of congressional legislation,
and other debates
around what kind of
reparations you would give,
for example, to indigenous
people who in the main,
aren't looking for the kind of money,
what they want is autonomy
and their nationalism,
which is something they've
gotten in the Tulsa case
and recently involved back in Oklahoma,
that their nationhood has been taken,
sovereignty has been taken away from them.
So it's a different approach.
Different movements
towards different things.
What it has to do with it
is that the hope was
that when the time came,
and a bill could be passed
and Congress might give reparations,
all the information about
slavery would be put in the mix.
How hard it was, what it was like,
the details of what
happened after emancipation
and all the rest would be used as a basis
to give some kind of reparations
to the descendants of slaves.
When H.R. 40 was finally
debated last year in the House,
they didn't discuss any of
that actually in any detail.
It was sort of interesting.
They talked mainly about Jim Crow
and what has happened in
the recent past and so on.
But the people who argued
for reparations for years,
they thought that if
you describe to people
how awful slavery was,
if you talked about convict leasing,
and apprenticeships and
the period after slavery
and all the things that
happened both to kids,
and the grown people.
And if you just described all of that,
that people would understand
that at least the descendants of slaves,
even if you didn't include anybody else,
and especially the people
who had their names
but on these petitions,
which was very risky,
would at least get something.
That's what they thought.
But that argument has not been
the one that has been made.
Now, whether you get reparations or not,
since that time a lot has happened.
You've had, Deandra a farmer,
Paulman, a lawyer, black woman lawyer,
who brought lawsuits against
banks and other people
for the loans that they gave
and the financing of businesses
that used slave labor,
and that used convict labor.
And she got an apology from some of them
and some money given to a few people.
There have been people trying to get money
for the people in Tulsa, where
the 1921 massacre took place.
They got commission reports and publicity
and everything else, but
not any resources for them.
So there've been many
arguments about what to do.
Some people, recently in
North Carolina, Asheville,
I think it is.
The city council decided
to give some reparations
to the local people for being
moved out of their homes.
But the whole concept of
reparations for slavery
and for the aftermath,
which as one book says is
slavery by another name,
hasn't really gotten the kind of attention
that people like Callie House
probably hoped it would.
Also the using they are using
the mails to defraud argument
that they used against her,
they used it against Marcus Garvey.
That's exactly what they used.
They tried it out on her and
they used it on Marcus Garvey.
A lobbyist I know
said that if you can go to
prison for organizing people
to try to get the federal
government to give them something,
a tax break or some
kind of a appropriation,
and you don't get it,
or you think the likelihood
is not that you will get it.
And then that is fraud.
He said, "I would be in prison right now.
Cause that's what I do for a living.
That's what lobbyists do."
He said, "So I don't understand
how trying to get Congress
to give somebody something..."
The other thing that's
interesting about Callie House
is "One Season," the book,
is just from that little fifth
grade education that she got
in one of those schools that
was set up after slavery,
she remembered the constitution.
She would talk about it in her letters,
when the government was after her.
And she didn't know why
they were after her.
She'd remind them
that there's a first
amendment to the constitution
and that people have
the right to petition.
I learned that in school.
Like some people today
don't even know the difference
between the declaration of independence
and the constitution.
Now, as to what that has to do with now,
there are many black people
who support reparations.
There are many people who are not black,
who support reparations.
But there are many people who don't.
And whether that happens
or not, I don't know,
but I think a study commission,
it ought to be time
to at least have some
kind of study commission
to get our bill passed,
to look at it and what it does,
it ought to look at the
records of these people
who were courageous
enough to make a record.
And I was also happy to
resurrect Callie House
so that people would at
least know she existed
and that you can organize,
even against the odds,
and that she was willing to do it.
And put, she said, "I'll give
my whole life for this cause."
And that people who, even if
they have a minimal education,
it's like imperfect
people can create change.
People who are not well
educated can make great change.
So it's an example of what you
can do if you are persistent.
A lot of black people
don't want reparations.
I've given talks where some
have gotten up and said,
"We don't need reparations
and seem we're asking
people for something."
I found that an odd statement,
but that's just my opinion.
We should stand on our own two feet,
saying that we don't need
anybody to do anything,
which I think ignores the
history of race in America.
One of the problems though,
is that many people do not know
the history of white supremacy.
They don't know the
history of race in America.
They haven't been taught it.
I have just recently
been trying to explain
to a corporation that
invited me to give some talks
about diversity and inclusion.
That the reason why it
doesn't work effectively
is because most people don't
even know why we have it.
They don't really understand
the history of race in America,
so since we really don't understand it
and how everybody's complacent,
they won't understand why we need it.
And since they don't
understand why we need it,
it's hard to make them understand
that people should be doing something.
That's especially true...
It's true of Americans who
people have been here forever.
It's also true of immigrants.
We haven't even had rudimentary education
about history of America.
They come to the country
and nobody bothers to tell
them anything about it.
So they have no idea
of why we are doing it.
So I have told you about Callie House,
I hope you will read
the book and enjoy it.
And I'm happy to answer any
questions you might have.
- Wow. Thank you so much.
It's such an important, powerful story.
And after reading about
her work, I just think,
how could I not have known about this?
How could we all not
know about her effort?
And I think the point you just made
about how much she savored her education
and how much she did with
such limited education.
And, it makes me think about...
I think it's earlier in the book
where you talk about the freedom schools
and how in early reconstruction,
they were seen as reparations.
They were potentially
apart of reparations,
the access to education
and how, as long as that was controlled
by the federal government,
it seemed to be growing.
And it was a positive
force that people savored.
But as soon as the federal
government pulled out
and ceded control to the states
and then states ceded control
to the to the counties
that they just evaporated.
The quality declined and they lost access.
And so I'm wondering if...
What if you could offer
us some of your insights
about the role of education
and potentially more
centralized, federal control
over funding for public education
as a form of reparations?
- Well, the reason why we don't...
First of all, the achievement gap
has persisted in the United
States, in the public schools.
And in some places, the public
schools have been abandoned.
In New Orleans, for example,
after Katrina and the floods,
the state took the opportunity
to fire all the teachers
because they wanted to get
rid of all the black teachers.
And they said, "We're gonna
close down the school system,
so that means we can fire all of them."
So they did.
And then they set up charter schools,
the whole system they're no
public schools in New Orleans,
they're all charter schools.
And then they went out and hired teachers.
Some of whom were in Teach for America,
the kind of students who
were my students at Penn,
some of who went into Teach for America
then came back and told
me how terrible it was
because they really
didn't know how to teach.
I mean, they came back and told me that.
"Dr. B, I really don't know how to teach.
I don't even know about
classroom management.
I don't know all this stuff.
I want to, I have a good heart
and I wanna do the right thing, but gosh."
And so it's a disaster,
but the reason why we don't
have centralized school systems
is because we have federalism.
And I remember when I
was running education
in the federal government
for Jimmy Carter,
Senator Claiborne Pell from Rhode Island
was chair of the education committee.
And he went to France or something
and came back and he told the president,
"We ought to have a
national educational system
like they do in France,
where the federal government
controls what's taught,
make sure that everybody
gets a good education.
And on any given day in France,
everybody's learning the same thing."
And Jimmy Carter said to me,
"why don't we have a meeting
and bringing all the chief
state school officers
from all across the country
and let him present his ideas
and see if they support it,
and then we could support it.
And we did that and they all opposed it.
They said, "Look, we
have a 10th amendment,
we have federalism in this country.
The governors control their states,
the chief state school
officers get elected
as they do in Massachusetts
and everywhere else.
And we like it that way.
We want you to give us money.
We want you to appropriate
part of our budget,
and the rest comes from our state funds,
but we don't want you
telling us what to do.
We're not gonna go along with that,
and if you try to propose
it, we're gonna oppose it."
And that was the end of it.
So we have 50 disparate
public school systems.
50 States deciding what they wanna do,
even if they want to get rid
of the schools in one place
like New Orleans parish,
because cities and parishes
are in fact creatures of the state
under the state constitution everywhere.
And so we don't have any plan...
The thing that affects
us with everything we do,
when you think about
the virus and the COVID
and all the arguments about what to do.
Every state has its own
way of doing what it says.
The rules are, the CDC
could make announcements,
but they can't make anybody do anything.
The president can't make them do it.
And then the governor have
power in the 10th Amendment.
So we have money that is
appropriated to the States.
We have a program that's
supposed to be for poor kids
to help them.
And we might be able to get a law passed
that gave additional requirements.
We had something under George Bush,
"No child left behind."
I think he called it.
and we now have one,
"Every student can learn."
A program where the
federal government makes,
as a condition of giving you money,
that you do something X, Y, Z.
But most of the time, it
doesn't make any sense.
It's all politically motivated.
What we really should...
And then we say, why don't we
give vouchers to the parents
and let them go out and find their own,
you know, whatever it is, education.
But our educational system
is a mess, it really is.
And it's particularly
a mess for poor kids.
It's also, even where it isn't a mess,
the virus and closing
down the public schools
where the schools are good
and where the kids are,
has been one of the most
devastating things that can happen
especially the poor children
who don't have resources,
who can't get connected,
who can't even get to the school
to get food or anything else.
And nobody's figured that out,
it's a federalism issue
is really what it is.
- Wow, okay.
And I just would like
to remind our viewers
that you're welcome to enter
questions in the chat box.
We have a lot of different
questions coming in
about all different angles
of reparations here.
So I'm gonna try to put
some of them together
and ask you...
But there's both a question
about what kind of...
what are the reparations
movements right now?
What are people asking for
and who would benefit from the
campaigns that are happening?
And do you have an opinion
about whether they should
be restricted to people
who are descendants of slavery
or more broadly distributed
among the African American community?
- Okay.
There're proposals that are being made
and that may be considered
by this commission,
if it's ever set up under H.R. 40,
that they would give reparations
based on all the harm that
has been done since slavery,
by Jim Crow, segregation,
poverty, all the things,
the asset gap, the wealth gap, so on,
so that there could be a
reduction of inequality
in the country.
The debate about who
should get reparations
if we ever have them, will go on.
My own view is that we
should give reparations
in the first, if we ever get them,
in the first incidence,
to people who are descendant
of slaves in the United States.
That the United States government should,
and United States institutions should.
CARICOM the Caribbean, there's
a Caribbean Commission,
which is arguing for reparations
for people who were
slaves in the Caribbean.
And they have had some success getting...
The University of Glasgow has
given them some resources.
Some of the Brits agencies
have given them resources.
The argument is that
nation that is responsible
for the law and framework
that made you a slave
and permitted slavery to exist,
is in the first instance
responsible for what happened.
Because if they hadn't had
it as legal and supported it
and permitted people do it,
then that would have
been a different story.
So they get...
If you are a descendant from
someone in the Caribbean,
you are in the United
States or wherever you are.
In the first incidence,
your reparations should come
from the place where your
ancestor was a slave.
That is the British, the French
or whatever Caribbean ally it is
or whatever colony it happened to be.
So that would be the colonial enterprise.
In this country,
I don't know what the answer is
to what you do after you
give descendants of slaves
in the United States.
Some people say we should give it
to anybody in the United
States who's Black,
whether they're immigrants
or not immigrants.
And some people say,
well, it doesn't make any sense
if their ancestors were
slave somewhere else.
I don't have any clear
preference or anything else
about any of that.
As far as I'm concerned,
as long as you give it to
the descendants of the slave
whose families actually
signed those petitions.
There are people who
have died for all this.
Then I think that whatever
else, all bets are off.
- Wonderful.
I have a bunch of specific questions
about specific forms of reparations
that have been thrown around.
But then I also have a bigger question,
which is, should we be talking
about a different response
since there has been so much
resistance to reparations
from white Americans historically,
and even as you said, from
within the black community,
is there another way to
achieve economic justice
for black people in America
that's different than reparations?
- Well, we've talked about different ways.
Diversity and inclusion doesn't do it.
The data on diversity and inclusion
shows that it doesn't work
for slave descendant African-Americans.
In fact, I'd be interested to know
in the enrollment at Amherst College
of the Black students in there,
how many of them are from families
that are slave descended
African Americans?
I know that at Penn and
at all, the big Ivys,
as opposed to little Ivys,
I don't know what the little Ivys have.
That most of the Black
students who are there
are either second generation
immigrants from Africa
or the Caribbean.
Well, they are.
And that very few of them
are slave descended African Americans.
And very few of them are
from the surrounding area
in which the university
happens to be located geographically.
That's true of the Ivys.
And the reason for that
is that we aggregate the data on race.
This is true of Latinos too, by the way.
That most of the Latino
students at the Ivys
are not from people who have
lived here in the United States
and came legally and have children
and some of them are poor and so on
and now are in areas around the schools.
They are mostly people from
South America, Central America.
They're people from Chile,
from Argentina, from Spain,
from all kinds of places,
and this is true, not
only of the students,
but of the faculty.
And so diversity and inclusion,
because you aggregate and
because you don't tease out,
that is what we call dis-aggregation.
The numbers, so you can actually
see what you're looking at.
You can escape, understanding
that these things are the case.
And so diversity and inclusion,
which some people thought
would do the thing of
leveling the playing field
and all that, hasn't really done it.
Okay.
Some people think that what you should do
is simply give a certain
amount of money to everybody
who is at a certain poverty level.
There's some program that has
been proposed by Jim Clyburn
and other people to do that.
That would not level the playing field,
because if you are trying
to reduce inequality
and you give everybody $1,000,
you don't reduce any inquality.
You just gave everybody
a thousand dollars.
If there was already inquality,
it just means everybody,
whether they were unequal
and not unequal or whatever,
they got $1,000.
So, but you could come up with
some kind of poverty measure,
which would capture lots of black folk
because Blacks are
disproportionately poor.
It would capture a lot of white people.
If you were trying to relieve poverty
and get rid of anything you did
to relieve wealth, inequality
would be wonderful.
But one thing you might do,
is in your admissions to
higher education institutions,
you might desegregate
the data on admission.
So you can see who you're
targeting and how you're doing,
because those are the pipelines
for people to get good jobs
and to move up in hierarchies
all across the country.
And we know that.
- And well following along that line,
would you say then,
could you expand on the
role of higher education
either in terms of tuition breaks
or other ways that higher ed
institutions could play a leading role
in either reparations for
people descended of slaves
in particular, or racial
justice more broadly?
- Well, some schools have
about, and made public
their direct relationship to slavery.
I mean, there's a Georgetown story
where it wouldn't be a university
if they hadn't sold the slaves.
So what they're trying to do
is make recompense by letting descendants
come to the school for free
and take certain other
steps to make up for it.
Acknowledging. One of them
is acknowledging the past.
People have to know...
You have to know the past,
and then you have to
acknowledge it and own it,
and say one thing that
this poverty initiative,
which is called the Low
Income Student Initiative,
that many colleges and universities
have started participating
in in the last few years
has helped in a sense,
because it has made them look
around their own communities
at the poor people who
have been overlooked
in the admissions process before,
since when Martin Luther
King was assassinated,
the few years after that,
many higher education institutions
recruited a lot of poor black students
from their own neighborhoods
to try to makeup for what had happened
as sort of repairing the bridge.
And after a while they stopped doing that.
One, the faculty said, these
students aren't prepared
and wouldn't be bothered.
And the students were difficult.
They demanded things like
Black Studies programs
and all kinds of things.
It created tension, so it dissipated.
But this low income initiative,
first generation, low income initiative,
we have one at Penn and
other places have them,
has made us reach out.
And one of the people
we reached out and got
was this young Black woman in Philly,
who never would have been
recruited, Anea Moore,
who was in my class, my seminar,
the same one you sat in.
When she was a first year,
she demanded entry and I let her in.
She was great.
She graduated last year, she's
a road scholar right now.
Never would have been in Penn,
the way we usually admit people,
hey, she would never be there.
People have to be
innovative and imaginative.
But they first need to count
the data and dis-aggregate
so that they know what they have
and they know what they're trying to get.
- So in a slightly different direction,
because I feel like I've
been asking you questions
from the place of accountability.
We know that there has been
incredible racial violence
and racism and racial inequity,
and we're trying to figure
out how to respond to it.
But I have a question here
from a different kind of direction.
And that is, is it
really fair to ask people
whose ancestors bitterly opposed slavery
and they themselves were new immigrants
who weren't here and
benefiting from slavery,
to pay into reparations now
for injustices from the past
that they themselves were not a part of.
- Right.
That's a good question.
It's often asked.
And that's because most
people do not know.
Most people don't know,
cause it's not taught,
that the foundations of this country,
the economy, the capitalist economy,
because we are a capitalist economy,
the constitution makes us one.
We have private property,
which can't be used for public use
without just compensation.
That means we have private property,
which means we have capitalism.
It's in the constitution.
We have white supremacy
and the slaves built the
infrastructure of this country.
The infrastructure that
people go to Washington,
when there's not a virus,
to take their kids,
to see the buildings
and go to all the different institutions.
Most of them were built by slaves, okay?
The older ones, slaves
built all those things.
Slave markets were there.
The slaves built them.
And most places in the
country in that early period,
slaves built them.
Washington, especially,
and the economy of the
country that was built up
to make us a great nation
in the 19th century.
Cotton, sugar, the mills,
the trade, all of it,
the input to all of that was slaves.
In other words,
there wouldn't have been a
prospering country for immigrants
who are later coming to come to.
If the slaves hadn't built all of that.
And then immigrants who
came in the 19th century
added to it and worked hard at it.
And immigrants who come
later benefit from it,
but they look around to see what's there.
And then there's this great economy.
It began in the beginning with
slaves, even in the North,
the slave trade.
People ask me, why was it
that Northerners supported
keeping the slave trade open
when they wrote the
constitution and the debates?
And why did some Southerners
like George Mason in Virginia
say, well, we don't need it anymore.
It was because the Brown
family and rode out,
the people in Massachusetts
who were slave traders,
they were the ones who brought
the slaves back and forth.
It was all an economic enterprise
and the economic enterprise.
If there had been no
slavery, the cotton gin,
when it was invented, you had
needed more and more slaves.
South Carolina had more slaves
they had black people more
than they have white people.
And so when you come
later to an enterprise
and you see it all built up
and there it is and
then they're wonderful.
And you say,
"Well, I don't have anything
to do with what happened here."
You did have something to do with it.
You are enjoying the benefit
of it without the pain of it.
And when you say you work
hard, if you came here,
slaves worked hard, they didn't get paid,
which is why when they were emancipated
and they weren't given anything,
that they didn't have anything.
And which many of them
slipped back into slavery
and kept on working as the conduct leases
and apprentices and all the rest of it,
the children in the factories
and in dangerous occupations.
So it's not fair to say,
it's not even not fair.
It's not true
to say that I didn't have
anything to do with that.
I didn't get any benefit from it.
But if you don't know the history,
because no one ever taught it to you,
then you wouldn't understand that.
And it's understandable.
- Yeah, I wanna connect this conversation
to current events and police violence.
I have seen you do many
interviews this summer
about the police killings
of innocent black people
and the protests that have
sprung up across this country.
And I noticed repeatedly
in those conversations
that you brought the conversation
back to economic justice.
And I'm wondering if you could tell us why
and explain your thinking
on the importance of that connection
between police, violence, rioting
in the streets for justice
and why that is a story of
economic justice in your mind.
- Well, because we have wealth inequality,
because well, the two things.
All the police are doing
is enforcing what they
are told to enforce,
which is racist capitalism.
It's white supremacy.
Whether it was beginning
with slave patrols
or whatever it was...
That's what police, they're just doing,
what they're supposed to do.
And it doesn't matter
whether they're white police
or black police or asian police,
or whether they're Latino police,
they're doing their job, which
is to control these elements.
These Black people, they've been doing it.
I mean, that's what they do.
I've done hearings,
when I was at Civil Rights Commission.
Our police departments,
all across the country,
shooting Amadou Diallo in New York.
And they had huge hearings,
subpoenaed police and mayor
and everybody, all of this.
So that's what they're doing, their job.
And until having to
contain racist capitalism
is no longer the job, then
it will be their job, okay?
Protect racist capitalism.
White people, if you look at it carefully,
you will see that many of the Black people
who have been killed.
Not all of them, Brianna Jones, Moore,
was not in that situation.
But those guys who have
been killed by and large
were in precarious situation.
They live with precarity.
George Floyd in an economic situation
in which his living was precarious,
which made him vulnerable to
being in the position he was in
which made it possible for him to be tamed
and end up arrested and
killed wherever he was.
The man who was in the car,
outside the Wendy's in Atlanta,
precarity, poverty, precarity,
no opportunity, no future.
Eric Garner in New York who
was selling loose cigarettes.
Why is the man on the street
selling loose cigarettes for a living?
Because the kind of education,
the kind of family support,
the kind of thing that
people need contextually
was not there for them.
And we have in the community,
people over and over,
who don't have the
benefit of the reduction
of this kind of precarity,
which makes them vulnerable.
They are best positioned
to be in a situation
where the police get called
in or see them doing something
and if they don't flinch or do whatever,
and sometimes no matter what they do,
the police are exercising their power
and police exercise that power,
not because they're bad people,
but because that's their job,
that's what they trained to do.
That's what they're taught to do.
And that's what they're doing.
So I said, vulnerability,
if you could have better education,
if you could have better houses,
if you could have better jobs,
if you could have more resources,
if you could have less precarity,
these folks who were so vulnerable,
wouldn't be in those
vulnerable situations.
So if you understand it that way,
you can see the connection.
And when you see people
doing things like protesting.
Right now, people are protesting
because of what happened.
They also have more time to protest
because even people who are
not in precarious situations
are in precarious situations.
Cause they're not working
or they're not in school or whatever.
And so they have the time and
place and management to do it.
But let's reduce the vulnerability,
let's indeed level the playing field.
Let's indeed do something about resources
and all the rest of it,
so that when people are engaged in crime
or doing something that puts them at risk,
they don't have the cards
stacked against them.
That puts them in that situation
where they can be harmed.
And let's not assume when
people go around assuming
that Black people are...
White people assume
that Black people are in
a precarious situation.
The Karen's of the world.
They are right to assume that
because many Black people are in
a precarious situation.
The white people who walked up
when I was standing under
the canopy of a luxury hotel,
just standing there or
luxury apartment building.
And they were going in the
building and they looked at me,
askance at me, standing
in front of the building,
just standing there and
repeatedly, as they came in,
some said, "Well, can I help you?"
"What do you want?"
And they went on in the building.
Finally, the security guard comes out
and says, "People are concerned,
'cause you're standing out
here outside the building.
Why are you standing here?"
I pointed my finger up
and said, "It's raining
and I don't have an umbrella."
But I was out of place.
I was in a white space
and because I was Black.
They didn't know I was a professor,
they probably wouldn't care.
Chair of the US Civil Rights Commission,
whatever I was,
there was this Black
person standing outside
under the canopy of their building,
who they assume is a
vulnerable dangerous person
who is in a precarious situation
and they're standing
outside their building.
Those assumptions are often valid
because of the social
and economic situation
and the lack of open mobility
and the vulnerability and all the deficits
that people face who are poor
and people who are
disproportionately black.
Did that explain it, Jen, or not?
(laughing)
- Well, I believe it, yes.
It explained it to me.
Some of our students
here at Amherst College
have shared similar stories,
some of our African American students,
of being questioned as not
belonging or not in place.
And I have to say,
that's one of the reasons
why I want to have these conversations
and open up these conversations
because we have to do better.
And people have to
understand this history,
but to connect back to some
earlier things you said just now
about why people are in
precarious situations
and lacking a certain social safety net,
access to jobs and better
funding for social services.
Those are some of the arguments
that I'm reading about now
from people who are saying
we should defund the police.
Is that part of your logic
when you kind of make that case?
Do you share ideas and a philosophy
with people who are making that argument
around defunding the police as well?
- Well, I understand
why Black Lives Matter
wants money that funds
the police to be shifted.
Some of it, into social services
and other things that poor people need,
who suffer from their vulnerability
and the precarious state that they're in.
And if funds were put
into that to help them,
they might not be, as at risk
of having encounters with police.
It's sort of like, their
vulnerability might be reduced
and there may be an indirect way
to keep this kind of stuff from happening
at the same time that we redefine
what we want police to do.
That's hard to do because as
long as we want capitalism,
and as long as we want white supremacy,
it's hard to redefine what police do
because they're protectors.
But I can see when people
say defund the police,
some people of course think they mean
get rid of the police altogether.
But when they say shift the resources,
I can see why they want
to shift resources.
I can see why they don't
want police in the schools.
They're having police
officers in every school,
especially having them in schools
as they do in some communities
where the majority of
the students are Black,
because our school systems are segregated.
What signals does that send?
That means that you're
getting put in prison early,
before you committed anything.
You might as well get
used to it as a child.
As a police officer
told one of my students
who went to work in a school
under one of these programs
where they go off and work.
And she came back and told me
that the kids were
playing on the playground
and they got into a fight with each other.
And these are kids who were
in like the third grade
and a cop was passing by and
came onto the school grounds
and grabbed them to arrest them,
and says to her,
"Well, I might as well put
them in the system early."
So they're like targets.
So you don't wanna start
putting them in the system early
by having the police actually
in the school grounds,
to keep order and all that.
So the defund of police
has been taken to mean
that they wanna get rid of all police,
which by now I think most
people who paid any attention,
know that's not what
they're talking about doing,
but they are talking about
using the resources differently
and I agree with that.
- So the movement for Black
Lives was launched in 2015
in response to the killing of Eric Garner,
Michael Brown and others.
And more recently, some polls indicate
that the protest of June in
response to George Floyd,
might've been one of the
largest protests movements
in US history, this upsurge of protest.
And I'm wondering from where you sit
on this five years into the
movement for Black Lives,
What progress has been made,
and where do you hope it goes from here?
- First of all,
since I happen to believe that protest
is an essential ingredient of politics,
I'm glad to see that the
Black Lives Movement developed
and that three women did it.
Some people don't know, but
on most college campuses,
the people who are the heads
of the black student movement
in many places are women.
And they have been for quite a while.
Instead of just being the
secretary of whatever it is.
And so I'm happy that they did this,
and I hope that the movement persists.
And I think that the
demands that they have made
in the documents that they
put together make sense.
Progress, the George Floyd,
reaction to George Floyd
and the huge protest that took place,
took place on the one hand,
because of the video of...
We had a video of Eric Garner
as seeing Eric Garner killed
and Philando Castille,
but it happened in the midst of the virus
and the layoffs and the bad economy.
And everybody had time and
people were out of school.
So there were a mass of people
who were interested more
who could go out and protest.
Who had the time, the
energy and everything else
to go out and do it.
And it was so egregious,
especially for those
people who keep hoping
every time something like this happens,
it is never gonna happen again.
And then when they see it happen again,
they say, "Wait, whoa!
I thought, you know, having seen that."
Maybe the police officer
will have a second thought
and not do that.
But the police officer
isn't thinking that.
The police officer is
thinking I'm in control,
my whole mantra is to
be in definite control
and exercise that I'm in control
because that's the way
I keep control, okay?
I think that that is what
happened with George Floyd
and the whole reaction to it.
It had begun to dissipate.
Congress passed, the House passed a bill
to control police behavior.
But the bill is a watered down version
of something that even if
it passed in the Senate
and got signed by the president,
it would stop anything that you see,
because it says we should
have videos and cameras,
but we already have videos and cameras,
and we already see these.
It's not like we don't see what happened.
And none of that...
What will make a difference
is when we attack white
supremacy directly,
when we attack that,
we've defined police as
engaging in certain behaviors.
That's why they're not officer friendly
in the Black community,
giving the kid an ice cream cone
and sitting in them up on
the counter and saying,
"Are you lost a little tyke?
You know, one of those movies.
The reason why they're not doing that
is because that's not
the way the community
that they're dealing with
that they're in control to control.
That's not what we've
said we want them to do.
That's why they're not doing it.
And so until we deal with that,
we've got to educate everybody
about why we have white supremacy,
how it happened, how
everybody is responsible,
what we need to do about it.
Then I think that...
And we get rid of the
precarity that I talked about,
the vulnerability, the
exposure to these risks.
Then I think that this
whole thing will continue.
Unfortunately, it's going to happen again.
It is going to happen again.
- So, getting rid of white
supremacy, capitalism,
these are big charges
and I want...
What's that?
- That's why we are not
getting rid of capitalism.
- Okay, so then I want to create
an opportunity here for...
There's a lot of this
phrase, like liberal guilt
when it comes to racism.
And I think a lot of us know
that we benefit from white supremacy,
but sometimes we get stuck
and we're not really sure
where to go from there.
And I'm wondering what you
would say to our viewers
who are here, who are saying,
"Dr. Berry, I want to
be part of the solution.
I want to help end racism."
- What can you do?
- What should they do?
What do we do?
- Here's what you do.
Here's some practical things you can do.
You can tell the university
or college where you went
to start admitting people
and going out and recruiting students.
And dis-aggregating the data
on who they're recruiting
and to try to do something
for that group of people
who live in those poverty
communities who are vulnerable,
so that the next generation coming along,
won't be vulnerable like that.
Give them some opportunities.
You can also try to work hard
and insist on improving public
education wherever you live,
and the education of those students.
You can also help to figure out some ways
to open the schools there
with the kind of distancing
and all the different things
that people tell us to do,
or having school outside or whatever.
Be keeping in mind the precarious nature
of the existence of those children
and what there'll be missing.
They will have another, if this goes on,
they'll miss two...
They're already behind.
They'll miss their education.
Where you went to university
or graduate school
or law school, or wherever you...
Have them take initiatives
to bring in more people
from these communities so that
they have job opportunities.
Also support legislation
that will give actual real
training for jobs that exist.
Training programs, very
often train people for jobs
that don't exist.
What's it gonna be
if you're training for
something that no longer exists.
You get involved wherever you are.
Also if you are white,
don't ever be a Karen.
Don't even think about it.
Don't see yourself as walking
around in white spaces,
and what is this person doing?
So that if a 5'2 black person walks up
and stands under the canopy
who weighs 120 pounds soaking wet,
you wanna know, "Why you
standing under my canopy?"
When all you had to do
was look out at the rain.
Use your brain, and try to be kinder
and try to be more intelligent.
Learn more about our history
so that you understand
how we came to the paths where we are,
and then you might help
us unravel some of this.
- Oh, thank you so much for
all of your words this evening,
especially that wonderful
advice at the end.
I'm gonna turn it back
over to Provost Epstein
for some closing words.
- So thank you so much
for this really fascinating
lecture and discussion.
I loved how you moved from Callie House
to this very wide ranging discussion
of the situation in the
United States today.
And of course, I love your plea
for people learning more history.
So before we formally close,
I'd like to make sure that everyone knows
about the next lecture in this series.
Martha S. Jones, professor of history
at Johns Hopkins University
will speak on Vanguard.
How Black women broke barriers,
won the vote and insisted
on equality for all.
The lecture will take place
on Tuesday, September 22nd
at 7:00 PM.
Also, it's not too late
to sign up for the seminar
and join in a discussion of
Mary Frances Berry's talk
and the related readings.
Join the seminar from the main event page,
and you will then receive an invitation
to discussion sections.
Finally, thank you again
so much Professor Manion,
and especially Professor Berry,
and to all of you in the
audience for joining us
and good night, everyone.
