(applause)
- Well, that was nice.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
- [Both men] Thank you!
- It's interesting that I
have spoken with each of you
many times over the
years, but never together.
So, Ken, I think you were the instigator
of this get-together.
Why did you want to have this
conversation and why now?
- Well, first of all, I've known Skip for
a quarter of a century and love him.
But after the massacres
in Charleston last June,
and then after the sort of denouement
where the Confederate flag was removed
from the state house grounds in Columbia,
we'd already been in touch, both of us,
with ex-Mayor Joe Riley,
then Mayor, Joe Riley,
in Charleston about what we
could do, how we could help,
and we're all continuing to do that,
but, I was disappointed by the fact
there seemed to be a
palpable sense of relief
that we no longer had to
talk about race again,
which is something that has been
in almost every film that I've done.
If you're going to study American history,
you're going to bump up with
a question of race in America,
and racism.
And, I reached out to
Mayor Riley and said,
"You know, I want to
continue the conversation.
"It's really important that a symbol,
"like the Confederate
flag, had been removed."
Symbols are hugely important,
particularly in our republic,
but we need to do better than that.
You know, sales of Confederate
flags just skyrocketed
right afterwards and so
he said, "Well come down,
"let's have a conversation about race."
So, I said, "I'm not going to come alone."
(audience laughing)
- This is the muscle.
- So I wanted to bring
my backup and my muscle,
so we started in early
December in Charleston
and we had, at the Gaillard
center, 1,800 people,
a really good conversation
and we showed clips
from both of our films and we felt like,
you couldn't really measure,
have you advanced the conversation,
but you felt like you
could really open it up.
And people, there was a diverse
crowd as there is tonight,
and we took it to Pasadena
and then we took it
to South by Southwest on
Saturday night in Austin.
We did two things Monday
at the National Press Club
and then at George Washington
University on Monday night,
and we're here ending it, appropriately,
in the place where this
extraordinary experiment
of bringing Jackie Robinson up,
but one of the great cities
on earth, Brooklyn, my birthplace.
(applause)
- Mine, too.
Hank, why did you say yes?
- Well, it was something
of a healing gesture
for Charleston.
I'd interviewed Reverend Pinkney
for Many Rivers to Cross,
and we used him in the trailer.
- [Michel] Does everyone
know who Reverend Pinkney is?
- Reverend Pinkney was the
minister who was murdered
- At Mother Emmanuel.
- At Mother Emanuel.
So I went to bed, heard
about this terrible thing,
and I was on a flight to
California the next day,
and our senior producer,
Asako Gladsjo, who's here,
emailed me and said, "You
realize, a guy we interviewed,
"was murdered."
And I went, "Oh, my God."
And it put a face on the
heinous nature of the evil.
It's bad enough, but if
you actually know somebody.
So we quickly got the footage out,
I wrote an op-ed page piece for the Times,
all this on a place going to California.
We edited the interview, then
Ken approached me about this,
and just said that it was tearing him up
and he wanted to do something.
And meanwhile, I had some friends,
some anonymous friends here in New York,
who wanted to do something,
and they ended up, in about
three days, putting up
three and a half million
dollars in scholarship funds
for the children of
survivors of Mother Emmanuel.
So, when Ken asked me, I
thought, "This was something
"I could do in tribute
to Reverend Pinkney."
That's how it started.
And when we did this event in Charleston,
1,800 people came,
and you see that it was
important to that community.
People don't realize how
black South Carolina was.
48% of all the slaves, our
African-American ancestors
who came into the United States enslaved,
came in through the
Port of Charleston, 48%.
There were so many black
people in South Carolina,
- My family is from South Carolina.
- Really?
It's nickname was Negro
country, which is one reason
it's so crazy in terms of
race and race relations
because there were so many black people
and one of the most
famous rebellions ever,
in the history of American slavery,
was the Stono Rebellion in 1739.
So all these mechanisms
of control and repression,
South Carolina is a special case.
- All those crazy stories that
Isabel Wilkerson writes about
in her book, The Warmth of Other Suns,
like black people and white people
can't play checkers together, true.
Black people can't own guns.
Black people have to be in
certain places at certain times,
all that from South Carolina.
- And, it was because of the numbers,
because they were outnumbered,
as far as they were concerned,
there was this paranoia.
Ken and I were part of
this ritual, exorcism,
this collective grief, and
it was very moving to me.
And we no idea, we could have no idea,
that when we agreed to
do this, that by spring
Donald Trump would be the repudiative
nominee of the Republican Party.
- To that end, I'm glad you
brought him up, because, words.
Well, we're going to talk
a little bit more about it,
I think we'll be chatting a
bit about what's happening now.
But the whole point of words
and how words are being used,
I do have to ask each of you
if you really ever thought
that you would see in your
lifetimes people using words,
the way they're being used now,
in the context of the
presidential election.
- I think in the history of
the united States, we assume,
we presume, we hope that
it is a rising road,
that is steadily rising
and we have made progress,
but I think in a country in
which words actually matter,
as they do in the United
States, and more importantly,
their dangerous progeny
ideas, we can also become
susceptible to the way
they've been misused.
And I think what we've
seen, just in the last year
since Charleston, has been a
perverted sense of who we are.
We're getting away, I mean, we used to say
in the media and the press, a dog whistle.
It's no longer a dog whistle.
Dog whistles have frequencies
that only a few people can hear.
These are out and out crying
fire in an open theater
right now that's happening with the words.
So, as Sarah Burns and David McMahon and I
were finishing our film on
Jackie Robinson last summer,
trying to unpack Charleston and the grief,
and how palpably we all felt it,
and dealing with the
story of Jackie Robinson,
who, though, lives somehow in another era,
everything was current.
Here was Confederate flag
issues and driving while black,
stop and frisk and black
church and Black Lives Matters
and all of the things that we
think are contemporary now,
I suddenly realized that
Jackie might offer some help.
It was a voice from the
past that might provide us
with a calmer table around which
which we could have a civil discourse,
because, clearly, that
discourse has deteriorated
where now it takes a
presidential candidate 24 hours
to suddenly realize that
he should distance himself
from the Klu Klux Klan and
David Duke and white supremacy.
A very calculated one, which is like,
Republican establishment
is supposedly freaked out
about this, this is something
new, but Ronald Reagan
began his campaign in 1980 in Philadephia
and Mississippi where the
three civil rights workers
had been slain and he said,
"I am for states' rights."
That's the first thing he
said, which was the wink-wink,
just as the period
between the conversation
with Jake Tapper and
Trump's ultimate repudiation
of David Duke and the
Klan and white supremacy
took that long.
- You were saying, you didn't
think that you are surprised.
- I'm a child of the
sixties and you remember
that we thought, this
is the last generation,
our generation's different.
The old generation, once they go,
the petty forms of American
apartheid will disappear.
All right, then people forgot that,
then Barack Obama's elected.
Remember all those theories
of post-racial America?
I even had a colleague who wrote
a book called The End of Black Literature
because a black man
was in the White House.
Hello, can I have an instant
replay of that moment?
I missed it that era.
- Well, we talk about the
Onion Magazine headline
in his inaugural, "Black man
given worst job in the world."
The friends of mine who said,
"Now, will you stop talking about race?"
I said, "Just watch."
- Did people really say that to you?
- Well, first of all, I've
gotten a great deal of hate mail
all the way through
about dealing with race.
And then I have friends who say,
"Why do you keep bringing it up?"
And people who ask, even scholars who say,
"Why do you keep bringing this up?"
And I said "It's American history."
"I'm not looking for it, it's
just there is every essence."
We put Black History month into February,
our coldest, shortest, darkest month,
as if it's some
politically correct addenda
to our national narrative,
when it's actually,
at the burning heart of who we are.
It's our original sin when
we inherit the hypocrisy
of all men are created equal,
written by Thomas Jefferson,
who says, "Oh, thank you, Sally."
"Oh, thank you, Jacob."
That's what happens.
This is the America that we have.
So, when he was elected,
I knew that most of us
want to believe.
When the President sang
at the memorial service
in Charleston, he sang Amazing Grace.
That was the better angels of our nature.
That was us projecting
ourselves to our best selves,
and saying, this is who we really are.
But, there's also a subset
of that, not a majority,
I'm happy to say, but
people who are disturbed
by the old guilts, that
Robert Penn Warren called
the Civil War, and want, that can't stand
living side-by-side, cheek-by-jowl,
with African Americans,
and so have to make these rules.
We posted, PBS posted, a small segment
of the President and First Lady, talking
about Jackie and Rachel, and
how Jackie wouldn't be there
without Rachel Robinson, as you'll see.
They put it up about a week ago.
If you go on their Twitter
feed, you can look at it.
It's a wonderful, very funny,
moving scene, and very human.
But if you go on the Twitter
feed, you cannot believe
that we are in the 21st
century, that we're in 2016,
the comments are what you'd expect
in Jim Crow, 1880, Macon, Georgia.
- And, speaking of Jim Crow,
there is the Jim Crow Museum
at Ferris State University in Michigan,
and we filmed there for
Many RIvers to Cross.
And, there are two kinds of black people,
either you think that Sambo or,
at least two kinds of black people.
- I thought--
- Wait, I thought there
were 42 million kinds of--
- There's some more, but go ahead.
- When it comes to racist
imagery of black people,
there are two kinds.
Either you collect it and you
think that by collecting it,
you can explicate it and
if you can explicate it,
you can exorcise it, and
then there are other people
who think it should all be part of
a big bonfire and destroyed.
And there is a, David Pilgrim is a scholar
and he's created the world'
s first Jim Crow Museum.
When we filmed there, two
years ago, three years ago,
already there wasn't exactly a wing
dedicated to Barack
Obama and racist imagery
of the President but
there was a whole section,
with the vilest, sexually
demeaning, just things
I don't even want to say
out loud, and it was just
somehow electing a black
man, putting a black man
in the White House just flipped
some people completely out.
- Do you think that words, your words,
will matter in this current environment?
- Oh, you have to believe that.
I'm a student of African-American
history, as you know.
And one of the things I
tell my students is that
our ancestors, imagine, in
1860, the 1860 census, Ken,
90% of our ancestors were enslaved.
These are people living in slave
cabins, in one room, right?
With their children in one
room and there was no promise,
no guarantee that slavery
would be abolished.
But they believed a
better time was coming.
Think of all the phrases in
African-American discourse.
They made it way out of
no way, hope against hope.
They believed that one day,
you would be sitting here,
I would be sitting here.
A white man would take
as part of his subtext
for his corpus of brilliant works,
race in the presence of black people.
They believed that and somehow,
where did they get the faith?
Where did they get the hope?
How could we have any excuse
not to believe in the future
if our ancestors put up with
all that shit from slavery?
- Alright, well, to that end, though
(applause)
This seems like a good
place to start bringing,
and you both have new films coming out.
Ken's is first, then
yours is coming out when?
- [Henry] In the fall.
- In the fall, yours is coming
out April 11th and 12th.
Produced along with Sarah
Burns and David McMahon.
- Who's in the audience.
- She's here.
We're going to play some clips throughout
our conversation this evening.
I think this is a really
good place to start
becasue clearly you believe
that the truth does matter,
at least to some people,
and that knowing the history
does matter to some people.
I want to play, there'll be a
clip from each of your films.
And this one, I'm going
to play the clip first.
I do want to ask you, why
Jackie Robinson and why now?
- Well. it's a very good question.
You know, we had covered him significantly
in my 1994, nine-episode,
18 and a half hour series
on the history of baseball.
He was in nearly every episode,
and we'd done a good job on it,
and his widow, Rachel, who's
now 93, began speaking to me,
more than a dozen years ago,
asking for a stand-alone
one, would I do that?
And I said, he certainly
deserves it but were busy
and Sarah and Dave and I finished the film
on the Central Park five and
said, yes, wholeheartedly.
One of the reasons is, he
is the most important person
in the history of baseball, I would say
in the history of American sports.
He is the beginning of the
modern civil rights era.
He's not the first civil rights
activist in the 20th century
but when you realize on April 15th, 1947,
when he walked out on a ball field
to play first base at Ebbets Field,
not too far from here,
Martin Luther King was still
a junior at Morehouse College.
Harry Truman hadn't
integrated the military.
There were no organized
sit-ins in lunch counters,
except when Jackie was a teenager
and refused to get up and Rosa
Parks was still a decade away
from refusing to give up her
seat on a Montgomery bus.
Though Jackie'd done it three
years before at Fort Hood.
And, perhaps most importantly,
Brown vs. Board of Education
hadn't declared that
segregating school children
according to race and color
was no longer constitutional.
And so, you begin to
realize as Dr. King said,
that Jackie Robinson was
a sit-iner before sit-ins
and a freedom rider before freedom rides.
But as I said before, almost
every aspect of his life,
once you've scaped away
the barnacles of mythology,
the sentimentality, children's book stuff
about this very passive black man
who turned the other cheek
and made it possible to go through.
Once you took out the sort
of dominant, patronizing view
of Branch RIckey, the general
manager of the Dodgers,
reaching down like God and
bestowing on his son, Jesus,
this role of the first
one, once you understood
the dynamics of an active black press,
pressing for decades, once you understood
that there was a left wing press,
including the communist
Daily Worker pressing
for that Fiorello La Guardia,
a left-leaning Republican
Mayor of New York,
I'm not going crazy,
that actually happened,
(audience laughing)
And other forces--
- People are going to
be Googling right now.
- Jackie Robinson becomes
both this beautiful accident
but suddenly he's no longer
a statue out in the park
collecting pigeon shit, he's
a real, dynamic human being.
But this is a portrait
of a multi-generational
African-American family,
a beautiful love story
that's not perfect,
there's tensions in it.
And that it was possible to
invest in the story of Jackie.
New life, new dimensions, new complexity
that doesn't in any way diminish
him in a revisionist fact,
in fact makes him more inspiring
because he's not this perfect being.
And so the film is an attempt to
show, in more and greater depth,
as Sarah and Dave and I wish to do,
an important figure that has somehow
receded into a kind of two-dimensionality,
we think George Washington
had wooden teeth, he didn't,
then we understand that
anybody's susceptible
to that kind of erasure, that
time and conventional wisdom,
and the subtle maniuplations,
and I would suggest,
racial manipulations,
that what we focus on
is when Jackie was a good
Negro and when he was
no longer had to turn the other cheek,
and he began to speak out
and argue with umpires,
he was suddenly, in his words, uppity.
- Let's play the clips now, and
then the first clip you see,
will be from Ken's film and
then the second clip you see
will be from Skip's film and
I'm going to have you talk
out of it and tell us a
little bit more about it.
Let's hear it, let's watch.
(piano music)
- It was my mother's idea.
We would have had a small wedding
and been finished with it.
She wanted me to have the
gown, the biggest church
in Los Angeles and all the
flowers and everything.
I put a dress away at Saks
Fifth Avenue and paid on it
for a year before I could
afford to take it out.
We did have a grand wedding.
- [Voiceover] On February 10th, 1946,
Jackie and Rachel were married
at the Independent Church
of Christ in Los Angeles.
A few weeks later, the
newlyweds prepared to leave
for spring training in
Daytona Beach, Florida,
where Jackie was to tryout
for the Montreal Royals.
Branch Rickey had invited
Rachel to join him there,
the only wife allowed at Dodgers camp.
They were to fly to Daytona Beach
with stopovers in New Orleans
and Pensacola, Florida, along the way.
- We never really had a honeymoon.
We went to our first spring
training on our honeymoon.
It was terrible.
We were bumped from two
planes getting there.
And, fortunately, Mallie
had met us at the airport
with a shoebox full of
fried chicken and she said,
"Take this on with you, you may need it."
And we were embarrassed.
We were bumpied in New Orleans,
we were bumped in Pensacola, Florida,
and white passengers
were put on in our place.
I'd never seen signs on
restrooms, on water faucets,
and that kind of thing.
So, I went into the ladies,
white ladies, bathroom,
just so I could recover
my own sense of myself,
and I walked in there
and did what I had to do,
and nodded to the ladies and walked out.
We finally took a bus to spring training
from Jacksonville
on our honeymoon.
We went to the back of the bus
and when it got dark, I started to cry.
Because I had felt my great
husband, who had been a fighter,
and a dignified person had been reduced
by discrimination and by segregation.
And he had caved in
to what the society wanted in the south.
But, the fried chicken was great.
(percussion rhythm music)
- [VoIceover] In the spring of 1965,
the student non-violent
coordinating committee,
known as SNNC, sent teams of activists
to rural Lowndes County, Alabama.
Among them was a charismatic
23-year-old named
Stokely Carmichael.
- [Voiceover] We have to use our vote
to get out of the cotton fields.
- That's right.
- We can't get out of the cotton fields
voting for the boss, man.
We gotta vote for people who've been
in the cotton fields like ourselves.
And they're the ones
who gonna bring us out
of the cotton fields.
- [Voiceover] At first,
Carmichael had trouble
convincing black residents to join him,
because so many were terrified
of the white landowners
who controlled just about
every aspect of their lives.
The rivers and roadsides here
were dotted with the bodies
of men and women who had dared
to stand up for civil rights.
The county was nicknamed Bloody Lowndes.
Anyone who even talked
about black people voting
was taking an enormous risk.
- Help me to understand
how people felt when they were approached
by SNCC at the beginning.
- They were afraid
and they thought that
they would be killed.
They were frightened for their family.
- [Voiceover] John Jackson
grew up in Lowndes County.
He was 16 years old when Stokely arrived,
and was one of the few to welcome him.
- I was a student at the time
and I saw this civil rights
worker, so I was excited.
And they said, "Well, we're
looking for a place to stay
"in the community so we can
organize Lowndes County."
So then my father got a
vacant house down there.
I say, "Y'all come on down and meet him."
- You volunteered your parent's house?
- Yeah, I said, "Come talk to Daddy,
"he might let y'all stay in the house."
- Wow.
When you went home and told your father,
did he say, "Are you crazy, boy?"
- No, he didn't.
He say, "Well, let 'em
come on down, fellas
"we'll see what we can do."
So they came down to meet
him and they hit right off.
And he told them, he says,
"No inside bathrooms either,
"substandard building, you
cats gonna stay in there?"
"Yeah, Mr, Jackson, we just
need somewhere to stay.
'because these folks shooting at us."
- (laughing) How did your white neighbors
react to Stokely and SNCC activists?
After they found out they was really here,
they called my daddy and told him,
"You don't need them down here."
He said to them, "Well, I just
want it better for my children,
"so they gonna continue
to stay down there."
(applause)
- Thank you for that.
I think we all loved Rachel's face
when she talked about her,
we all loved the look on Rachel's face.
- Mallie is Jackie's
mother, and she knows.
She has moved her family
from Cairo, Georgia,
where real Jim Crow, to Pasadena,
where they've experienced
another kind of more covert racism,
but pretty dramatic as well,
cross burnings and "Don't
move next door to me,"
that sort of thing, so she knows.
I think there's something hopeful,
as Skip was talking about,
that they were married.
Here was this experiment
that was possibly going to take place.
They're going to go try
out for the farm club
of the Dodgers, the Montreal Royals.
But she understood what could happen
when you went down south,
so the chicken was produced.
That embarrassed them, and I
think at the end of the story,
the moral of the story,
is that Rachel realized what Mallie knew,
and took in the sense of wisdom embodied
in a box of fried chicken.
- It might have embarrassed them,
but she didn't throw away
the fried chicken away.
- That's why we all like,
that chicken was good.
Yeah, she know what was up.
So talk to me, tell us a
little bit about your film.
- Well, I was
at the end of the cycle with
PBS thinking about what's next.
After Many Rivers to Cross.
And we had done 500 years
of African-American history.
So what do you do next.
So I made a list of 10
projects, and my partner,
Dyllan McGee is here,
and I were brainstorming.
And, you know, if you're
blessed with good friends,
you should take advantage of your friends,
good, smart friends.
So I went to one of my
friends, a guy I admired,
who happens to be Ken Chenault,
you know who he is, most people know,
he's the CEO of American Express.
Same generation, we
overlapped in a lot of ways,
in fact his two sons are students
of my lecture course at Harvard.
I went down to American
Express headquarters.
- You didn't call to say
your bill was late, right?
- (laughs) No.
- See what happened was--
- Yeah, what had happened was.
- What had happened was.
- When black people are lying, they say,
"What had happened was."
- What had happened was, see was.
(group laughs)
(audience applauding)
So it wasn't that conversation.
- [Henry] It wasn't that conversation.
- Okay, all right, 'cause
that would have been mine.
- I asked him for, could I have 15 minutes
with one of the smartest
people on the planet,
and I know he's expecting
me to ask him for money,
sponsorhip, but I didn't.
I said, all I wanted is your opinion.
What should we do next?
Now, at the top of my list,
was the great civilizations of Africa.
Because one of the worst
aspects of slavery,
not only were our ancestors
persons and personhood stolen,
but our stories were stolen.
And that's a terrible, terrible thing.
And Africa's still,
unfortunately, for many people,
is just a version of Tarzan stereotypes.
So, I wanted to go back
and tell 5,000 years of African history.
And that's what we're filming.
Right now, I'm just back from Africa,
and in three weeks I'll go back to Africa
and film on the continent.
So, he looked at the list and
said, "You gotta do Africa."
But, he said, "The
second most important one
"is not on the list, number 11."
And I said, "What?"
He said, "You and I were
born about the same time."
I was born in 1950.
He said, "You have to tell our story."
"You have to tell the
story of the last 50 years
"of African-American history."
And, you know what, I looked at him,
it was an epiphany, it was
like a bolt of lightning.
I never would have thought of that
because it was my story, it's our story.
So the conceit of this
film is, what would,
if MLK woke up, or Malcolm,
Malcolm was killed in '65, MLK in '68,
and they said, "What's been
happening in the last?"
What would you say?
And so, that's what we're doing.
We take it from the passage
of the voting rights act
up until, well, I was gonna say, up until
the re-election of Barack Obama
or the second inauguration,
but we recently decided
that events since last
fall are so momentous
with the emergence of Donald Trump
and this political campaign,
that's why we not showing in April.
We're going to add a coda,
I haven't told anybody else,
- Are you going to go before the election
or after the election?
- Well, we're going to cut it,
it'll be after the election.
But, also, I also want to add the opening
of the African American
Museum on the mall.
And, I think that is really,
really, yeah, single.
But, as Ken was saying,
and as you were saying,
did we ever think a candidate,
since George Wallace,
could get away with
certain kinds of language
and run for office?
And a person who probably was
a center of the road person
before he decided to be president.
And the answer in my lifetime is, no,
and particularly after Barack Obama.
So I'm rivited by this
phenomenon of Donald Trump,
and we want to take it from the passage
of the Voting Rights Act to whatever is
about to unfold in the general election.
- One of the things
that's been interesting
about looking at your films,
the sections you've made available to us,
and, Ken, your film as well,
is toggling back and forth.
I don't know how to say this,
is unexpectedly disturbing.
And the next sections that we want to play
speaks to this whole question.
Obviously one of the
enduring challenges, issues
for people of color has been
the relationship with state authority,
however it manifests itself,
or even when it isn't
state authority but claims
the authority of the
state to its own ends.
- Which has worked positively
and negatively for our people, right?
- Well, I'm interested
in your take on that.
Do you want to play the clips first,
or did you want to tell
me about why you say that?
Because when I said claiming the authority
of the state to its own ends,
I'm thinking Trayvon
Martin, George Zimmerman.
- No, but I was thinking
of Brown v. Board.
There were times when
small groups of people
did what was right and if
there'd been a referendum
on integrating schools in 1954,
it never would have passed.
But it was a nine-to-nothing
unanimous decision from the Supreme Court.
I was thinking of things like that.
- Mmhmm, which other people
would call judicial activism.
And which they are now
trying to eliminate.
Ok, so let's play this next set of clips
which speaks each in its own way,
speaks to this whole
question of the relationship
of the state to the person.
Are we ready, let's play those.
- [Voiceover] In early
1943, the club's directors
pledged their support to Rickey's plan
to integrate the Dodgers.
Rickey immediately instructed his scouts
to begin searching for the right man.
(blues trumpet music)
Back at Camp Hood, Texas,
the 761st Tank Battalion
was preparing to go overseas.
On the evening of July 6th, 1944,
one month after Allied
forces landed in Normandy,
Jackie Robinson boarded a military bus
headed to nearby Temple, Texas.
- He got on the bus on the army grounds
and he sat next to woman who
looked like she was white,
she was a friend of his,
and she wasn't white.
The bus driver came back and said,
"Move to the back of the bus."
And Jack refused, he said, "I will not."
- [Voiceover] I ignored him.
I'd just seen the army regulations
that had been sent out.
No discrimination on any army vehicle
on an army post in the United States.
I refused to allow this
civilian to dictate to me
where I was going to sit.
Everything would have been all right
if I had been a "yassir boss" type.
At the last stop on the base,
the bus driver demanded
Jackie's identification.
a white woman threatened to press charges.
Witnesses recall Jackie swearing at her.
But Robinson claimed that
he only told the bus driver,
"Quit fucking with me."
The military police arrived
and were disrespectful to Robinson.
He refused to back down.
- Think about the number
of black men in 1944
who challenged white
authority in such a bold way.
Not just refusing to give up his seat,
not just refusing to do what he was told,
but to actively stand
up and swear at them.
- The fact that he stood up and he spoke
in a very, very aggressive
way to the officers that came,
was extremely threatening.
and extremely unsettling to the
white people who were there.
He was very lucky in many respects
that he wasn't, that
it didn't turn violent.
- [Voiceover] Robinson was arrested
and charged with insubordination.
The trial began on August 2nd, 1944.
In his testimony, Jackie admitted
that he had threatened a
private who had insulted him.
"If you ever call me a nigger again,
"I'll break you in two," he'd said.
When asked what the word
nigger meant, Robinson said,
"My grandmother was a slave, and she said
"the definition of the word
was a low, uncouth person.
"I don't consider that
I am low and uncouth.
"I do not consider
myself a nigger at all."
- Jack as a young man
always railed against segregation.
He always carried himself
with a sense of dignity
and a sense of purpose in a way that says,
"I will not be ignored.
"I will not be denied."
- What you see at the forefront
of Jack's consciousness at all times,
is the fact that he has a
responsibility to the race
to do everything possible to ensure
that they'll win full equality.
And Jack, in that sense, is
the quintessential race man.
(explosions popping)
(sirens wailing)
- [Voiceover] Five days after the passage
of the Voting Rights Act,
Los Angeles, California, exploded.
(crashing thuds)
(sirens wailing)
An altercation between
an unarmed black man
and the police sparked riots
on the streets of Watts,
a predominantly black neighborhood,
- [Voiceover] First one drops
their hands is dead, man.
- [Voiceover] revealing that America still
faced deep racial issues.
(shouting)
(crowd yelling)
- It's so easy to think racism
was a southern problem as opposed
to midwestern, north and western.
No, it was a national problem.
We had simliar conditions.
Segregated housing, we
had segregated schools,
you had massive unemployment,
massive underemployment,
and police brutality, if not
downright, police terror.
- I'm getting tired of being pushed around
by you white people, that's all.
Stopping us on the street,
kicking in the nose,
taking down to the police station
and kicking your teeth in.
- [Voiceover] Well they're
stopping people on the street now
- Oh yeah, being beaten by cop,
oh they been doing it
a long time before now.
- I think it started 400 years ago.
- [Voiceover] What would make it better?
What would make the rioting stop?
- I don't think it'll ever stop, really.
- Pillage, looting, murder and arson
have nothing to do with civil rights.
- [Voiceover] President
Johnson was shocked
by the anger in Watts.
But Watts was just one
spark of a much larger fire.
In the coming years, urban unrest
roiled cities across America.
I remember my father saying it was crazy
for people to burn down
their own neighborhoods.
But African Americans were fed up
with segregation, deprivation,
and everyday humiliation.
They wanted genuine equality.
They'd been fighting for it for decades
and not enough had changed.
When Dr. King visited Watts
in the wake of the riots,
the frustration was right in front of him.
- Nobody here is for riots.
Nobody wants to see anybody killed.
But who wants to lay down whlle
somebody kick them to death?
(crowd cheering)
- You all know my philosophy.
You all know that I believe
firmly in non-violence.
- Sure, we like to be non-violent
but we up here in the Los Angeles area,
we're not doing that in the streets.
They are selling us again
and we're tired of being sold as slaves.
(applause)
- Okay, quick quiz for the audience,
and no, I'm not to grade you.
How many here,
can we turn the lights up just a teeny bit
so I can actually see, would that be okay?
Apologies to our streaming audience.
How many here remember
that Jackie Robinson
had actually been arrested
before he went into the major leagues?
Anybody remember that?
Maybe, maybe I see a couple hands here?
How many remembered that
the Watts riots, uprising,
happened five days
after the passage of
the Voting Rights Act.
Anybody, remember?
I see a couple of hands back there.
Wow, how is that we don't remember,
know these things.
But I do want to ask
you, Skip, and obviously
I'm going to ask you
to talk at out of this,
what about at the present moment
strikes you about what we just saw?
Well, obviously Black
Lives Matter comes to mind,
the denuciation, or just
the, not accusation,
but the fact that the
man on the street said
the police have been abusing
us for all this time.
This is August 1965, and no
one has done anything about it.
- And not a few people
have noted that the fact
that the current wave
of protest has occurred
during the administration of
an African-American president.
A lot of people find that puzzling.
- One of the themes we have
to deal with is something
we're all acutely aware of is that
within the African-American community,
to paraphrase Dickens,
it's the best of times,
it's the worst of times.
Since 1970, the size of the black
upper middle class has quadrupled.
The percentage of black people making over
$100,000 a year has quadrupled since 1970.
The percentage of black people
making over $75,000 has doubled.
That's great!
Best of times, right?
Why, because of affirmative action.
But, the percentage of black
children living at or beneath
the poverty line in
1970 was just over 40%.
And, according to the
2010 census, it was 38%,
the worst of times.
It's a paradox.
Dr. King would have thought,
and that generation,
if you and I were on the stage
and Barack Obama was in the White House,
my God, there's some kind of
revolution taking place, right?
If the black upper middle
class had quadrupled,
in other words, then the
percentage of black people
in poverty would have decreased
by the same proportion.
But that's not what happened.
And, why?
Because of affirmative action.
Many of us have read, everybody's read,
Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers.
I was born in 1950.
I hit Yale in September '69
with 96 black men and women.
The Class of '66 at
Yale had six black men.
What, was there a genetic blip in the race
and all of a sudden there
were 90 smart black people
who existed three years ago?
Of course not.
Yale had strict racist quotas.
Historically, white
colleges and universities,
a term I prefer, had strict
racial quotas on the number
of black people allowed to matriculate.
And when I got to New Haven,
who was there with me,
Sheila Jackson Lee was in my class,
a congresswoman from Houston.
Kurt Schmoke, first
black mayor of Baltimore.
I was pre-med, because, you know,
that's the way it was back in the day.
Smart little black girls and
black boys had to be doctors,
so I was going to be a doctor
so once a while in a lab
I'd run into a guy from Michigan.
I'm trying to remember
his name, it was Carson,
I think, wasn't it?
Ben, Ben Carson.
(audience applauding)
Over at the law school, we'd
go to the film society, I mean,
I'm being careful about which kind
of film I'm talking about,
but we'd go to the Yale
Law School Film Society
and Clarence Thomas was there.
- (laughing) I get it, hey, hey hey.
- I didn't mean it.
- I'm just saying, we were part
of the crossover generation.
Of course Bill and Hillary were
there at the law school too,
at the same time, we didn't know them,
I didn't know Clarence either.
But my point is, that the
American society opened up
at the height of the economy.
Ken's masterpiece that's
coming, I know it's hard
to imagine Ken making anything better
than what he's already made,
but he spent 18 hours on Vietnam.
We had guns and butter.
We had almost zero unemployment.
We were fighting a war abroad.
We were fighting poverty at home.
So, it was easier for the
American society to feel generous.
To say, okay, we're going to diversify
historically white institutions,
and that was affirmative action.
What happened within a few years,
somebody woke up and said,
"There's enough of y'all in here already,
"I don't know how y'all got in here,
"but we're going to shut the door."
And that was called
Allan Bakke, it's true.
And so, those of us who were able
to benefit from affirmative action,
were able to integrate
the upper middle class,
and the middle class, which
is why I find it paradoxical.
Ideology aside, you know this,
and Ken's film makes this clear,
we've always had great
ideological diversity
in the black community.
We've had black Republicans, until 1964,
we had a significant number
of black Republicans,
including Jackie Robinson.
We've had black Democrats,
we've always been arguing.
But for someone to have
benefited from affirmative action
as much as I have, and
then to stand at the gate
and try to keep other people out,
and saying that somehow
there was problems with
affirmative action,
it was un-American, it gave
us an unfair advantage,
I think it would make a person like me,
as far as I'm concerned,
nobody has benefited
from affirmative action more than I have,
and for me to adopt that
position would make me
a hypocrite as big as Mr.
Justice Clarence Thomas,
and I'm not ever going
to be that hypocrite.
(applause)
- Do you address that in the film, though.
Do you address it in the film,
the rise of the counter narrative,
- [Henry] Absolutely.
- about the black experience.
Because one of the
things that fascinates me
in the current moment is just
this completely different
sense of reality.
as it is lived by.
You know, people used to think,
if you have the same facts, you
come to the same conclusion,
and that is certainly, we
have made it very clear
that that was an 18th
century enlightenment conceit
that clearly is not the case, right?
So do you address this, what
in your view accounts for this,
just people who have very
similar experiences to yours
and just say, well, know
this, know that, know this.
You mean within the
African-American community?
I think it's complicated in
the case of Clarence Thomas.
I don't know him, I've never met him,
I was at the Supreme
Court once, I saw him,
we kind of nodded at each other.
I find it tremendously difficult
to understand how anybody
who could have profited
personally so much from a policy,
then say it was the worst thing
to ever happen to his life
Going to Yale Law School
was a disastrous thing.
This was an unfair thing
to a person like him,
and his buddy, his running
buddy, Justice Scalia,
who had the audacity to say,
maybe it would better for
those people, not his phrase,
to be at a school where they were
more intellectually comfortable,
than a school, like an Ivy
League school, that would be
not forced to integrate but
implicitly forced to integrate
because of affirmative action.
I think it's part of a
collective inferiority complex
that is a remnant of slavery.
Yes, I think the worst thing--
(applause)
- There are people, I'm
very interested in, again,
in making the connection
betwen past and present,
because Donald Trump keeps saying that
there are black and latino
people who will support him.
On my show just last week I had a person,
many people might disagree with this
but I have interviewed people, Omarosa,
a former person on the Apprentice,
there's this Pastor Mark Burns,
who was quoted over the weekend
introducing a Trump rally, saying,
that Bernie Sanders should accept Jesus.
who are all, whose an
African-American minister,
Omarosa has multiple degrees
from Howard University,
and they're supporting him
so I'm just interested in.
These are public figures
so I feel that it's okay.
- Sure, now that's different.
At first, I thought you were talking
about why would a black person--
- No, I'm talking about
people who have embraced
this alternate narrative
of the black experience
of which I think Clarence
Thomas is but one.
He's not the only one.
- No, but I think that Donald Trump,
you know, I sit around talking trash
with my buddies up at Harvard,
I have dinner every
Sunday with Larry Bobo,
the great sociologist, and
his wife Marcyliena Morgan,
whose the founder of the Hiphop Archive.
We argue all the time, right,
and Larry and I team-teach
a course called Intro to Afro,
the kids call it Blackness 101,
(audience laughing)
It is about the great debates
in the African-American tradition,
about what it means to be black.
And we start in the 18th century.
Black people have been
arguing with each other
over what it means to
be black since the day
our ancestors got off the boat trying
to figure out how the
hell to get out of here.
Now, in terms of Donald Trump,
it's easier for me to
understand that support
than understand how a black person
can be against affirmative action.
Because so many people are afraid.
I found this quote.
Actually, somebody sent
me an email this morning
about would I help save
James Baldwin's house
in the south of France.
And, I went there and
that's a whole other story
and I love James Baldwin.
But I'd forgotten this
quote and listen to this,
this is from Notes of a Native Son.
I imagine James Baldwin wrote,
"One of the reasons people cling
"to their hate so stubbornly is
"because they sense once hate is gone,
"they will be forced to deal with pain."
"They will be forced to deal with pain,"
and I think that the sense
that the world has betrayed you,
the sense that world is coming undone,
that your children will
not do better than you,
grandchildren will not do
better than their parents,
that there's terrorism, and
there's a rise of an economic world order
we're not prepared for.
I think people are terrified,
and that Donald Trump,
and I said to Larry and
Marcy when Trump's candidacy
began to manifest itself,
this guy's no joke.
He's smart, he's charismatic,
he's very articulate,
and he has the capacity to speak
without the layer of metaphor.
He just calls it the way it is.
Unfortunately, unfortunately--
- I'm going to use that the next time,
I'm speaking without
the layer of metaphor.
(audience laughing)
- Or, euphemism.
And that is speaking directly
to a lot of people who are afraid.
Unfortunately, he looked
at the circumstances
of our fellow citizens, did his analysis,
and went for the lowest
common denominator.
He decided to appeal to the worst
in the collective American experience
and not, as Ken is fond
of saying quoting Lincoln,
to our better angels.
but to the demonic forces that I think
cause nightmares for people.
- I'm going to actually go
to the next set of clips
because the reason I want to do that is
because one of the things
that a lot of the people
are talking about now
is the role of the media
in allowing these
narratives to go forward,
in both in what is included
and what is left out.
- Just look at this.
We have fed Donald Trump and
we have fed him continually
not with the so-called earned media,
but, in fact, there is
a net loss of Mexicans.
There are more Mexicans
leaving than are coming over.
But we want to build a wall.
No one in any of the debates
has brought that fact,
that inconvenient fact, to him
that those Mexicans who do come over
commit crimes about one-third per capita
of the Americans who are already here.
So we're already dealing
with this counter factual
counter narrative.
It's no wonder that we're disturbed.
And, I think one thing
that we talked about before
that has to be brought in
is this question of class,
because it isn't just race, it's also.
Of the six officers on trial
for the murder of Freddie
Smith in Baltimore,
three are African-American.
- [Michel] Freddie Gray?
- Freddie Gray, I mean
are African American,
and we've got situations.
So it's not unusual, in fact,
I'm not distrubed by finding
that there are African-Americans
supporting Donald Trump.
I think we're going to find
the entire insane rainbow of those things.
(audience laughing)
We have to actually look at the way
in which race, and racism,
which is probably the
more important subject,
interplays with class and money.
(applause)
Because we have had for the
entire history of our republic,
it has been in the
interest of powers that be
that make sure that
particularly poor whites
were opposed to blacks
and latinos and others,
that they could say quite incorrectly,
that these people are
eating off your plate,
and particularly in a period of abundance,
you can maybe be expansive enough
to have an affirmative action.
- And that was a way of becoming white.
- And that was a way of becoming white,
to join in, but now that things
are a little bit tighter,
we're not sure when we
do have that anxiety,
and we do want to postpone
the hurt and the pain,
the internal hurt, and the pain
that James Baldwin was talking about,
then we will invent the ways
in which these are the enemies of us.
And so what we have done
is perpetuate, God forbid,
for the powers that be,
that those people suddenly wake up
and realize that for generations
you have been voting
against your self interests
and if you broke bread
and made common cause
with African-Americans,
with latinos and others,
you would create a
revolution in this country
that would change everything.
(applause)
- You know, it's interesting to me
because this next set of
clips that you all chose,
or your folks chose,
speaks to this whole
question of myth-making.
And that's one reason
why I'd like to play.
I don't know that we're
going to get to all the clips
just because we're chatting.
- [Henry] You're the boss.
- Okay, well, I'll take it.
- It's your show.
- I will take that, I will take that, too.
I'd like to point out,
I've had shows taken,
I've had shows given,
so I will take that.
Let's play this set of
clips because this is
about the whole question of myth-making.
(guitar blues music)
- [Voiceover] The story goes,
the Dodgers went to Cincinnati, which was
one of the two most southern
cities on the circuit,
and it was also very close
to the home of Pee Wee Reese,
who grew up in Kentucky.
and that Robinson was taking
horrible, horrible abuse
there from the fans.
People calling him nigger,
shouting death threats,
and that in the middle
of this shower of abuse,
Pee Wee Reese stepped across the field,
dramatically put his arm
around Jackie Robinson
and sent this message to the fans
and his own teammates
and to the opposing team
that Robinson was one of us.
And today it's remembered in statues,
in children's books,
but I don't think it happened.
- We don't know that this ever happened.
We don't know when it happened.
If it happened it is likely
it didn't happen in 1947,
because reese would have had
to traipsed across the diamond
to first base to throw
his arm around Jackie,
and even if there were evidence for it,
how much are we to congratulate a person
for behaving properly.
- [Voiceover] There was no
mention of the gesture that year,
in either the white, or black, press.
- [Voiceover] When they
decided to make a statue
of Jack and Pee Wee with
his arm on Jack's shoulder,
I asked them not to do it and told them
I had a better picture
that I would like them
to make a statue of the two of them.
When they were coming off the
field and their hands touched,
and, I thought, this is
the way we want to present
this relationship between that
black man and that white man
as partners and no one would buy it.
- [Voiceover] We want to
feel like white people had
something to do with this,
that we were open-minded,
that we saw what was right and
we wanted to make it happen.
And, Pee Wee Reese is our symbol for that.
We all want to be the ones
wise enough to see that
and we could do better as a country.
So, that the myth serves
a really nice purpose,
Unfortunately, its a myth.
- [Voiceover] Progress was taking place
in ways that I could glimpse
but not yet fully understand.
- I think it's important to point out
that the actual policies
that were enacted in response
to the civil rights movement
are actually creating
more open spaces so black folks
are more a part of society,
literally are coming out of the shadows.
Our voting can move around
in public spaces in different ways.
- Because of that movement,
so much has happened.
Because of that movement,
people have a seat at the table.
Because of that movement,
the heroes and sheroes of that movement,
America has changed for the better.
- [Voiceover] In essence, the victories
of the civil rights movement meant
that African-Americans
were equal before the law.
and, finally given the chance,
we were making significant gains.
Some were economic.
By the late 1960s, the
percentage of black families
living in poverty was dropping.
Unemployment was decreasing.
And black incomes were rising
at the fastest rate in history.
♫ R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find
out what it means to me
♫ R-E-S-P-E-C-T, take care, TCB ♫
- [Voiceover] But many of the most
visible gains were cultural.
("Voodoo Child" by Jimi Hendrix)
Black culture was permeating
mainstream American culture
like never before.
("For Once in My LIfe" by Stevie Wonder)
You could hear it in music,
see it in advertising.
- Oh, I don't use just
mouthwash, I use Listerine.
And even watch it on television.
When I was kid, it was extremely rare
to see any black people on TV.
I remember how excited
my whole neighborhood got
anytime an African American
appeared, even in a minor part.
When BIll Cosby got a
starring role on I Spy,
back in 1965, we were ecstatic.
And by the late 1960s, we
started to see more shows
with black stars and black co-stars.
Then, in 1971, there was
a show made just for us.
- [Voiceover] Soul Train,
60 non-stop minutes
across the tracks of your mind
into the exciting world of soul.
- Hey now, welcome aboard for another
super hip ride on the Soul Train.
- [Voiceover] Created and hosted by
visionary entrepreneur Don Cornelius,
Soul Train brought black
music, dancing and fashion
into homes all across America.
- Back then, when I
finally got my Afro at 16,
Soul Train, I know all the dances, mm-hmm.
Don Cornelius.
He had the presence to show us
how to live our best lives.
- We wish you love, peace, and soul.
(applause)
- You know you want to do it.
(applause)
Let's do it, you know you want to do it.
Wish you love,
peace,
- [All] and soul.
- I feel better now.
(Henry laughs)
But, okay, but here's the thing.
Here's the thing.
There are people who
will say at one point.
There are so many interesting
things about this.
The top-selling genres of
music in the United States
are country and hip hop.
But at what point, and then,
people say, well, that's fine,
but then you got this whole
toxic element of the culture,
and when do we get to talk about that.
- I'm not following, toxic
element of American culture?
- No, of the culture that has
become sort of mainstream.
Like when Don Imus said what he said
about the young ladies from
the Rutgers basketball team.
"I'm just talking the way they talk."
"I'm just," right?
- I think that this is related
to the concept of myth-making
that you are alluding to,
and it ties into something
that Ken said earlier.
The biggest myth, was that somehow,
black people were subhuman.
The biggest myth of
America, was that somehow,
we were a breed apart.
We do not descend from common
ancestors with Europeans.
That somehow, in the
history of the development
of the animal species, that
our first cousins were apes
and not Europeans, right?
And why was this done?
It was done to economically oppress us.
It was done to create the fiction
that we were commodities.
And slavery was the
merger of race and class.
You are a racialized commodity.
And the reason that was done was to create
a huge free labor pool
so that this country
could realize its great promise.
And to do that they had to
create a myth that somehow
we were not fully human beings.
And that myth is the myth
we have to fight against
even today, every day, every day.
(applause)
I was raised to.
My father, and my mother
said to my brother,
Dr. Paul Gates, chief of
dentistry, Bronx-Lebanon Hospital,
they said, "We have to
be ten times smarter
"than white boys and white girls,"
because otherwise--
- You forgot the rest of it.
"You have to be twice as
good to get half as far."
- And that's very much a
leitmotif of Jackie Robinson,
and we still live with that legacy.
When you walk into a room,
what's the first thing
that people see, do you think?
Do they see you as a woman?
Do they see you as a black person?
They see you as brilliant journalist?
What do you see?
For me, someone my age, I'm still aware
that we have to refute stereotypes.
That we have to refute
these myths about us.
When Ken says, you look at the website
with the marvelous clip of
the President and Mrs. Obama,
and what do you see in
terms of commentary?
A repetition of these same myths
that hit Frederick Douglass
and Sojourner Truth 150 years ago.
- Talk a litte bit more
about the myth-making.
Ken, I think your great
series on the Civil War is one
that I think, for many
people, is a seminal work,
for many people it was
when the South lost the war
that the myth-making,
became the alternate reality of history,
really took over.
- [Ken] Exactly, it's
always popular to say
the victors write the
history but in the case
of the United States and the Civil War,
the losers wrought the history.
Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind,
proposed an upside-down
version of the past.
They suggest that a home-grown
terrorist organization,
the Ku Klux Klan, still in
the news, were responsible
for rescuing this dire situation
at the end of the Civil War.
It goes all the way back to,
Thomas Jefferson's notes
on the state of Virginia,
he considered it one of his finest works,
in which that proposes that black people
perspire differently, they have
different glandular systems,
and this account for their--
- and they were not intelligent.
- And this was all to prove the point
that you could commodify race,
and that's a hugely important thing,
and the guilt that comes of that,
metastacizes as often into
anger and violence towards,
as it does into atonement and doing that.
So, Michel, what happens is,
I think we live in a world
with way too much information,
as you alluded to the Enlightenment,
where someone like Thomas Jefferson
could have read most
of the books available
if he spoke, as he did, several languages.
But what we have now, is a kind
of sanitized Madison Avenue,
whitewashed version of our history.
And so, for the case of Jackie Robinson,
it was important in almost every area,
that all of the rough
edges be smoothed out.
So, the early biography of the attacks
in Pasadena on his house and
the crosses, and the neighbors
who threw stones and Jack
threw the stones back,
isn't part of the narrative.
There was a pool in Pasadena that had
what they called International Day,
so that every Wednesday,
the blacks, the few blacks,
and latinos and Asians
could swim in the pool,
at which point the city fathers reassured
the white citizens, the
good white citizens,
they'd drain the pool, clean
it, and then fill it up
for the other six days
when it was available
only to the white population.
That we have to, in order to
understand Jackie Robinson,
we have to give him a white babysitter.
He has to only be the
product of the imagination
of Branch Rickey who's
going to also coach him
in to how he's going to behave.
You're going to turn the other cheek.
We're going to need to signal
what's right and wrong in America,
by having a white southerner who said
he never even shook hands with a black man
until he'd met Jackie Robinson,
put his arm around him,
which didn't happen in order to do that.
I made a film on Jack Johnson,
the first African-American
heavyweight champion,
called Unforgivable Blackness,
after a comment W. E. B.
Du Bois made about him,
and we turned that into
a Pulitzer Prize-winning
Broadway play but it was
called Great White Hope.
What it postulated underneath,
what the subtext was
is that in order to be this
successful black boxer,
he needed white brains to help him.
well, Jack Johnson didn't
need anyone's brains.
He was a great writer,
he owned three patents
at the US Patent Office,
he just wasn't going to buy
into anybody else's version
of how he should live,
he was going to live
and sleep with whoever
he wanted and he did
and it got him in trouble.
And when he couldn't, and
when the white people couldn't
bring enough great white
hopes, he defeated them all,
and what did they do?
They went into the courts and
defeated him in the courts,
and ginned him up on the Mann Act.
- How does the myth-making
work now, in your view.
One of the things we were
talking about backstage,
before we got here, you talked about
the superficiality of the media.
You have a truth-making
moment and then it moves on.
- That's it, we don't ever,
we're sort of butterflies, we flit
from every single thing
and so we don't stop
to consider substance but we've got
all of these different tropes.
I'd say right now, the
word that disturbs me most,
is the word that's frequently
used by Donald Trump,
which is political correctness,
in which we understand that that is bad,
which is a way of saying to the mob.
like you're St. Bernard, "Sic 'em!"
That's what, and we are burdened,
I guess it's not politically
correct to say this,
which is basically giving permission
to take off layers of civilization,
and return us to a kind of tribal state,
and so, it's bad,
and that myth-making is going on a lot.
(applause)
- I couldn't agree more,
but I also think, though,
that it's important
that we're not guilty of demonizing people
who support Donald Trump.
That's why I read the James Baldwin quote.
People were terrified,
you've been terrified before.
You can be spoken to one way or another.
Donald Trump has chosen to speak to
a segment of our collective psyche,
a segment of our population,
with one language.
I'm hoping, it looks like
it's going to be Hillary,
full disclosure, I
support Hillary Clinton,
she's a friend, I want her to be
the next president of the United States.
But I think her analysis,
she'll look at the same group of people,
the same set of circumstances,
and speak to them in a rhetoric
that brings us together.
Speaks to them in a rhetoric that,
to use her phrase, a commonly used phrase,
builds bridges and doesn't divide us.
Because, the fears aren't
going to go away, unless it is,
well, it'll take one form
or it'll take another form
As Ken said earlier, when we talk about
the history of this
myth-making, part of it,
why has so much energy
been spent on demonizing
the image of the black, on
demonizing black people.
When you go to the Jim Crow Museum,
there are tens of thousands
of these racist postcards.
Why?
To keep the people who are
most exploited in this society,
black and white, from realizing
that their best common
interests, their best friend,
is with the person who
is equally exploited
but just who is a different color or face.
Believe me, if they ever
join hands and link up,
there's going to be the
biggest transformation
in this society that we've ever had.
- Couple of questions I wanted to
talk to you about, though.
We've actually been mentioning again
that you are invited to
join our conversation.
You can join the conversation on Twitter
at BAM_brooklyn, hashtag BurnsGates.
People have already been sending in
questions and comments
over the course of the day.
There are a couple of
things that occur to me
as a result of what
we're talking about here.
First of all, as writers
and as filmmakers,
we've all done these things.
We've caused pain by what we've included.
We've caused pain by what we've left out.
We have a couple of people who
have written in to say, why are we still
discussing race in a binary
fashion, black, white,
until we're able to talk
about the variety of races
that are and have been a part of
the fabric of the US for generations.
Remember that the southwest
US was once part of Mexico,
so this lack of inclusion of these people,
which should be obvious,
continues to be disheartening.
I'm editing a little bit for time.
It leaves out what's
increasingly a larger percentage
of the population of this country.
I wanted to put that
question to both of you,
and also we have another
question from a woman who says,
"What do you think?"
I disagree with the premise but
I'm going to read it to you.
Why do you think nothing has been written
about Asian Americans,
who contributed so much
to American history?
Are they too quiet and unassuming?
- No, let me answer that,
because in the body of my work,
we've dealt with all of those issues.
But I am particularly fascinated by race
because it is the American original sin.
There is only one group of people who had
the peculiar experience of
being unfree in a free land
and that's African Americans.
And they inherit a sort of memory.
People like to say that our great genius
as Americans is improvisation.
We do have the shortest constitution,
only four pieces of paper,
in the history of the world.
It's still the operating
manual that we subscribe to.
But if you're unfree in a free land,
you've got to improvise
a hell of a lot more
than anybody else.
I think the disturbances
of our country are
admittedly about a whole
range of diversity,
and we've covered them
in many, many films.
We did a history of the
West in which we decided
to forego the traditional
stories of the gunslingers
and the mythology of the
Jesse James and Bat Mastersons
in favor of the hispanic
and Asian narrative
that is part of our history of our West.
All of the Russians and Chinese,
for whom it was the East,
and for the white
Americans it was the West.
and for the Brits it was the South
and for the hispanics it was the North
and for, very importantly,
300 different separate
nations it was home.
And that's been an
important part of our work.
But I think, time and time
again, the disturbances,
the kind of things we're
been talking about tonight,
that are based in race and
racism, it's not to say
that it's not extended and we're
not limiting it in any way,
but I remember something, I
said this the other night,
that Wynton Marsalis said
to me in our 2001 series
on the history of jazz when
I asked him about race,
and he said, "Race is," and he stopped
and he just closed his
eyes in extraordinary pain
and he clenched his fist
and he looked up to heaven
for inspiration and he said, "Race is,
"you know, it's like the
thing in the mythology
"that the kingdom needs
in order to be well.
"It's something that we
should be running towards,
"but we're always running away from."
What he was postulating is that jazz
and its incredibly ecumenical and generous
and democratic spirit,
permitted a kind of call and response
that allowed the tensions,
say between black and whites,
to co-exist.
The tensions between Saturday
night and Sunday mornings
to co-exist and be reconciled.
And so, what we look for
in our narrative is a place
where one and one doesn't always add up
to the safe and rational two.
What we look for as we do
in our life, in our sex,
in our relationships, in
our faith, in our art,
for that strange and improbable calculus
where one and one equals three.
- Slavery was as horrible,
so monumentally horrible,
it's difficult to find
language to describe
the nature and the function
and import of slavery,
but we can never forget
that the enslavement
of African Americans and the shipping
of 12.5 million Africans
across the Atlantic
between, say, 1515 and 1866,
was built on the attempt
to completely annihilate a people,
a genocide of the people
who owned America in the first
place, the Native Americans.
We need to hammer that
fact home and we forget it
and Native Americans are still living
with the consequences of that genocide.
And it's something that we can't,
it's a story that's not told enough.
A story that we bracket, I think,
because of the depth of our shame.
- There's a question to
you also, Skip, about that.
This question's about finding your roots
in the controversy about
Ben Affleck finding out
that slave owners were in his family.
Generally, his reaction was
to distance himself from that.
It seems like an allegory
for how America writ large
deals with race, we act as
if it was a long time ago.
We can't possibly be racists now.
Is this imagining racism is
limited to individual actions
in its structural impact.
The question goes on but that
does raise a question of,
I understand that you said
that you took that out
because it was repetitive
to other story lines
but doesn't that reinforce the idea
that this is just a series of bad actors
as opposed to something that touched
so many Americans that it
is a part of the fabric.
- That's a great question.
We had eight stories in
that series about slavery.
Ken's treatment of the Civil
War is fascinating to me,
and the role of the CIvil War.
One story we never talk
about enough is the fact,
Ken was pointing out yesterday,
two days ago when we were together,
that 750,000 Americans
died in the Civil War.
And one of the traumas
of that much death was,
well, the response was spiritualism,
the growth of the belief
that somehow the only way
that you could process that was to believe
that basically your ancestors
were in another room.
There was a person who
could be the transport
between you and that other room.
One of Ben Affleck's
ancestors became a medium.
And, so, I wanted to
tell the story of slavery
in the Civil War through
that unusual story.
It's as simple and as complex as that.
And we had eight other
stories about slavery.
The mistake I made was--
- What was your mistake?
- Not talking to Paula Krueger at PBS
and asking her opinion about it.
- But he was upset about, that
was the way it was reported,
that he was upset.
And it was upsetting, people are upset
when you share with them things
about themselves that they would,
perhaps, wish were not true.
- And we could talk to Ken about that,
because, I had, well,
this is very interesting
about the weight of an unpleasant story.
It's your story.
I told him two unpleasant
stories about himself.
You tell me, would you mind?
- So I had my genealogy,
I had been interested, as you can imagine,
in my genealogy all my
life, and had been trying
to find a connection to
the poet Robert Burns,
that my grandmother insisted
existed and no one could find.
- In fact, there's a question about that.
Are you related to Robert Burns?
- I am indeed.
"O would some power the gift to give us
"to see ourselves as others see us."
Which is the whole point
of this conversation,
he said in "To a Louse,"
which is a wonderful poem,
and I commend it to everybody.
But I'd learned a lot in
previous genealogical expeditions
but Skip brought to me several things.
He connected me to Robert Burns, finally,
through some very complex
mitochondrial DNA research,
which I was particularly
was pleased about.
But there were two moments
where I knew I had Southerners
in my blood and I had known
that my great-great-grandfather,
Abraham Burns,
fought in Captain McClanahan's company
of Virginia Horse Artillery,
and was captured in August of 1863
in what is now Moorefield, West Virginia,
and held captive at Camp Chase.
- About 20 miles from where I was born
- And right near where Skip
is from, so we're kind of,
It gets a little bit more
complicated, than that, maybe.
He revealed to me that I was
a slave owner, and it did not.
I mean I had ancestors
that were slave owners,
(audience laughs)
- I think we would have found out by now.
- I think I'm going to leave now.
(audience laughing)
And, it didn't shock me one bit,
because I've been dealing with this.
We were taking about the mythology
that's even more pernicious
than the Ku Klux Klan
is that somehow African
Americans were passive bystanders
to the Civil War instead
of the active, dedicated,
self-sacrificing soldiers they were
in this intensely personal
drama of self-liberation.
That's an extraordinary story
and ought to be included
and we tried to do it.
What really bothered me,
the bad news that he really brought,
is that on my mother's
side, there's a guy named,
I'd heard about him before
from some other research,
didn't know anything about
him named Eldad Tupper,
I thought, what a great name,
we're getting a dog, let's name him Eldad.
Until, Skip broke the
worst news I ever had,
that he was a Tory.
He fought for the Brits in the
revolution, I had to leave--
- He almost died,
- I almost died on the spot.
He redeemed me by giving the last thing,
which was, you know, he
tortures you in this thing,
and the last thing, after
four hours on the stand there,
was that, he was going
to give me Robert Burns.
It's interesting, I'm an American,
I've got all of this stuff in me.
He pointed out with the ancestor,
I got one percent sub-Saharan African,
which means somewhere along the line,
somebody is fooling around.
And I've got one percent
east Asian, which means
that one of those Tuppers in Massachusetts
were responsible for Indians,
something was going on there.
And so, these really small percentages.
I've tried to in all of
my work try to represent
this question, who are we, and obviously,
like James Baldwin's
statement, the, who are we,
is a very convenient set
of armor that permits us
to avoid saying, all of
us, including me, who am I.
I think that the reason why we're drawn
so inextricably to Skip's
series is that, who am I,
is just you are naked there.
You are who you are, the sum total of all
of this genetic memory,
all of these ancestors,
and since we're all
imperfect, we live in a world
in which we somehow expect
everybody to be heroes
and think because no one's
perfect there are no heroes,
which is ridiculous because
heroes are always the war
between positive forces and
negative forces within a person,
that Achilles had his heel in hubris.
This is why were drawn to this.
We find out about us.
I found it sublime to
have just the awareness
that I contained, as
Whitman said, multitudes.
But the only thing that pissed
me off was that goddam Eldad.
A Tory!
(audience laughing)
- When you think about myth-making,
and I'm sure it's something
that you're aware of
- Most African Americans, if
we could turn the lights up,
which I'm not going to ask you to do,
and I ask every African American in here,
who was raised to believe
that their great-great-grandmother had
high cheek bones and straight black hair,
and was therefore a Native American,
everybody would raise
their hands, virtually.
But when we look at the DNA evidence,
less than one percent of
the African-American people
have any significant amount
of Native American ancestry.
But the average African American
has 24% European ancestry.
And where does that come from?
That comes from slavery.
That comes from rape and
force, cajoled sexuality.
When I did Chris Rock, I asked Chris Rock,
he was so disappointed
because he didn't have
any significant Native American
ancestry, and I said, "Why?"
And he said, "Because it's easier."
And it was easier for our
ancestors to create a myth
that your ancestor ran
away from the plantation,
over the hill, found solace
with Native Americans,
smoking the peace pipe, chief says,
"Oh, you're fine, African American.
"Why don't you pick one of our,"
you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
It's not that it never happened,
but it almost never happened.
- There's a woman who wrote
in about this and said that,
"13 years ago, I had my son
in a hospital in Queens.
"My husband and I are both
dark-skinned black Americans.
"My son came out fair-skinned
"with a head of shiny straight hair.
"The night maternity nurse
was African American.
"The next evening she brought
my son to me for a feeding,
"I burst into tears and said,
'This baby doesn't look
like my husband or I.'
"She said, 'Oh, child, that's slavery.'
(laughing)
"She said, 'Don't worry, he'll darken up.'
"I'm not sure why but I
found it terribly unsettling,
"that I might not be what I thought I was.
"So my question is, are
black Americans finding
"through DNA that we have white ancestry,
"what does than mean for us?"
- It means that we have
up until recently, now we use
three DNA companies in finding our roots.
And none of those
companies, until recently,
had ever tested an African American,
no matter how phenotypically
African, quote unquote,
who was 100% of African ancestry.
This measures, for those
of you who don't know,
your ancestry back 500 years.
It's called the an-mixture test.
And not one had tested an African American
who was 100% sub-Saharan African,
because of slavery.
so not only are we
experientially intertwined,
we are genetically intertwined.
- This is a country in which people
owned their own children.
They know that, they know that they did.
- They sold.
- They sold their own
children, we know that.
- Wedding vows were changed 'til death
or distance do you part.
- Or, the perversion of, do you follow
the condition of the father or
the condition of the mother?
You follow the condition
of the mother, why?
Because the overwhelming percent
of interracial liaisons were white males
and black females who are owned.
- That goes back to the
question I asked you
at the beginning of our
conversation, both of you,
which is, does this information matter?
Do people care?
Because really and truly,
we are talking about family.
We are family, we are indeed related.
- I have never had,
and you know the series
when we track down,
we do our best to track down the names
of your enslaved ancestors and then
the white people who owned them.
And sometimes their DNA, several times,
we have found a match that we know
that you are descended from the white man
who owned your ancestor.
That, in effect, was your
great-great-grandfather.
So I showed a picture of
what we have, a portrait,
and a few times, I said,
"Would you like to meet
your white cousin?"
And never has an African American said no.
Even knowing, that most likely,
that white ancestor is in their
family tree because of rape.
- What about the other way?
Does the white cousin want
to meet the black cousin?
- The only time,
no, we've never tried to arrange a meeting
when a white person said no.
But Geoffrey Canada, whom you know,
and you all know the
Harlem Children's Zone,
we thought it was reasonable
that he might be descended
from this slaveowner.
And we traced a man and a woman,
the woman was in Georgia, I think,
the man was in Virginia or vice-versa.
So we talked to the man, the
producers called, we tried,
he said he was not interested
in taking a DNA test
to prove that his ancestor
actually fathered a child
with an enslaved human
being, a black woman.
So then we found his sister
and his sister loved Oprah
and I sent her the
episode with Oprah in it.
(audience laughing)
I called her and I was really nice.
I said "We're not trying
to embarrass anybody,
"Geoffrey Canada just wants to know,
"if this man was his
great-great-grandfather."
And I waited and waited and
waited and our producer,
I think it was Jesse
Sweet, and he could be here
in the audience, he
tried, and I called her.
She said, "Dr. Gates, I've decided no."
And I said, "Well can I ask you why?"
And she said, "It would
embarrass my daddy."
And I was thinking,
damn, your daddy's dead.
No, I didn't want to say that,
I don't want to say that.
She said, "No, it would
embarrass my father,
"it would embarrass my family."
To know it, and she had the
DNA to prove or disprove.
- Let me bring a couple of short stories.
- Briefly, because I want to do one more
set of clips before we go.
- One is at the heart of
our national mythology,
which is Thomas Jefferson
and Sally Hemmings.
So Sally Hemmings is a product of,
he inherited a lot of slaves
when his father-in-law died,
his wife's father, and
one of them was a woman
who had fathered a child
with Mrs. Jefferson's father
and produced Sally Hemmings.
And Jefferson's wife died.
- In other words, Jefferson's wife
and Sally Hemmings were half sisters.
- So, after his wife
died, they looked like,
and he looked every day at this woman,
- His wife with a suntan.
- His wife with a suntan,
and they fathered,
we believe, six children together.
That's at the heart of our formation,
the guy that wrote our catechism,
we have that in our blood.
So which makes us, as you
suggested earlier, a family.
Two nights ago when we finished something
at George Washington University,
there was backstage a brief reception.
Two men came up to me, one
African American, one white.
They were both on the verge of tears
and they brought some paperwork.
They had the same last
name and they were related
to each other, they had,
through generations ago
on an Alabama plantation,
mixed names that stayed
and they had been reunited
and now they had found
each other's soulmate.
They were two brothers,
literally, and it was
one of the nicest postscripts
we've had to these.
We've had some extrordinary encounters
and great and challenging questions
and extraordinary attention given to
what is a difficult subject.
And I felt that two nights ago
and both men were close to tears
as they described the intimacy
which they had now connected,
and had become brothers,
and I thought i saw.
for just a glimpse of just a second,
of the possibilities of
where we would could go.
The thing that animated Skip's passion
at the beginning of our
conversation about we have to do,
we have to keep going,
you have to look forward,
you have to rise up.
- What would you like to conclude with.
We could conclude with Million Man March.
We could conclude with Black Lives Matter.
What would you two like to conclude with,
we don't have time to do both.
- [Henry] Black Lives Matter.
- So can we skip?
There's some very interesting meditation
on masculinity but you'll
have to watch the films.
So there it is.
And let's, can we go to clip five?
Are we ready, I'm not
sure, can we go, thumbs up?
(drums tapping)
- One day, we had a birthday party
for Pee Wee at Ebbets Field.
In the fifth inning, the game was halted,
and he's going to get a
car and we gave him awards,
and we sang Happy Birthday.
And while the lights were down,
the ground crew went
on top of Ebbets Field
and ran up a small Confederate
flag, in his honor,
because he was from Louisville, Kentucky.
And we're in the clubhouse after the game,
and Jackie is irate.
I mean, he was livid.
Who would ever let Jim
Crow back in the ballpark?
- I think it's very difficult
for many people to
understand the indignities
that a black person had to endure.
And Jackie Robinson was a man
who had an incredible
amount of race pride.
And saw no reason why he should have
to endure indignities of that sort.
(dramatic tones music)
- [Voiceover] On August 9th, 2014,
a police officer shot and killed
18-year-old Michael Brown,
during an altercation
in Ferguson, Missouri.
The conflicting accounts of what led
to the shooting have
never been reconciled.
But, regardless of the circumstances,
the sight of Brown's body,
lying in the street for hours,
was an outrage.
- The picture of his body in
the street is being tweeted
and they still haven't removed it.
why is this happening?
Why is the boy lying dead in the street?
Black communities know what it means
when a black kid is killed by somebody
that is white with power
and the body is left there
to terrorize the community.
- You took my son away from me.
You know how hard it was for me
to get him to stay in school and graduate?
You know how many black men graduate?
Not many because you bring
them down to this type of level
when I feel like I got
nothing to live for anyway.
(somber piano music)
- [Crowd] Don't shoot! Don't shoot!
- [Voiceover] After residents gathered
to protest the killing,
the police response
shocked the country.
It looked more like a
scene from war-torn Iraq
than a suburb in Missouri.
- It was the tanks that made
everybody pay attention.
Conservative white folks,
Republicans and Democrats,
and white people across
the spectrum saying,
"Why do you have a tank
in Ferguson, Missouri?"
'Why are the police in
military riot gear?'
(tear gas canisters exploding)
- [Voiceover] You must
disperse the area immediately.
You are in violation of
the state-enforced curfew.
- The police had every type of
machinery you could ever have
We got tear gassed.
I got tear gassed in an American street
fighting for the police
not to kill people.
I was like, this just isn't okay.
And I'm just one of many who like stopping
silent because of what happened in August.
- [Voiceover] DeRay McKesson,
a former math teacher,
was appalled by what he saw
on the streets of Ferguson.
- [Crowd] I am Mike Brown.
- [Voiceover] He left his job
to become a full-time activist
Joining a rising groundswell of outrage,
unified by a simple but powerful slogan.
- [Marchers] Black lives matter.
Black lives matter, Black lives matter!
Black lives matter,
Black lives matter!
- We know black lives matter
the way all lives matter,
unfortunately in America.
you gotta say black lives matter because,
when you say all lives matter,
oftentimes, you don't
get to the black lives.
(applause)
- Well, thank you, for your work.
And thank you both for your work.
And we're down to our
last couple of minutes
and this is obviously a story
which continues to be written.
Both of these stories
continue to be written
in ways that I think continue
to surprise some of us,
and shock some of us but don't
surprise and shock some of us
given the body of work
that each of you has done.
I'd like to ask each of you
to take a couple of minutes
to give us whatever closing thoughts
you would like us to have.
I thought we started with
the power of symbolism
and I think a lot of us are
intrigued that we're still
talking about things like
the Confederate flag,
so do you want to start?
- Sure, I'll start.
I think that the biggest problem,
the thing that I worry about the most,
is that the class divide in America,
which is so stark and so pronounced,
will become permanent unless those of us
who genuinely care about the quality,
the quality of race but
also the quality of class,
say enough is enough and
a small group of people
cannot make such a
phenomenal amount of money
at the expense of the welfare of regular,
good-hearted working-class
people who are now
being manipulated by demagoguery language
through a candidate
appealing to their fears.
Unless we as a society decide
that equity and fairness
are values that we're going to fight for
just as we fought, as
we fight against racism,
we fight against antisemitism,
homophobia et cetera.
Unless we decide that class
really is the great evil,
one of the great evils still
confronting American society,
I think that we're headed
for a very bad time
in the immediate and
longterm future of America.
(applause)
- I've always been drawn to
and continually surprised
by the power of history.
For most of us, history is a subject
that we're told is good for us but hardly
good-tasting castor oil
and not the great pageant
that has come before
this moment, this moment.
And I'm always struck by
how contemporary it seems.
William Faulkner is famous for saying
"History is not was, but is."
Harry Truman said the only
thing that's really new
is the history you don't know.
And I've spent my entire professional life
delving into stories because I knew
they had a kind of
urgent contemporariness.
At the same time, they
may be describing periods,
decades before, even centuries before.
From my own work in trying
to deal and ask this question
about who are we, the complicated republic
that we think we are
and all of those people,
and perhaps either ignore or listen to the
who am I part of it that is really real
and that kind of inner,
outer conversation,
I'm reminded after the Civil War,
the veterans would complain
one-fifth of the entire budget
of the state of Mississippi in
1866 went to artificial limbs
that the soldiers would
complain that they could feel
those limbs long after they
were missing, they tingled.
And history is a little bit like that
and I think on an evening like tonight
we conclude at least for now
a long-running conversation about this.
I realize how much I miss people.
There are missing people right now.
When I was twelve years
old, I played with guns
in my backyard and no
cop came up and shot me
within two and a half
seconds of his arrival.
I'm alive but Tamir Rice
isn't and I miss him,
Trayvon Martin is not here,
but if he'd been a white kid
in a hoodie, walking
through that neighborhood,
he'd still be alive.
We have an opportunity, I
think, to open ourselves,
if it is as you suggest
and I believe it's true.
Skip has proven scientificially as well as
with his huge and capacious heart,
that we are all the same.
We're obligated to
continue this conversation.
and to talk about how
you enlarge this family
and not let the demagogues narrow it
and use fear to divide us.
So, I'm happy that this
conversation can go on.
But I do miss Tamir Rice and
I do miss Trayvon Martin.
They are missing people in our culture.
- I'm going to ask one more
question, which is that--
(applause)
Thank you.
Many people will be sitting here
and listening to our conversation.
They will be asking
themselves, what can I do?
And each of you is a teacher,
each in your own way,
I am not in the should
business but you are.
What should we do?
- I have only Frederick Douglass'
advice to a young acolyte.
Agitate, agitate, agitate!
- (laughs) Amen, that's it!
Thank you.
- Ken Burns.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Thank you both so much.
