Good evening to all of you joining us for this exciting and informative night and celebration of civil rights. I'm going to start off as we always do with a little bit of singing. I don't know what your day was like, but there was song in mind as I did a performance this afternoon actually talking about history and race. And that always includes the civil rights movement and the amazing, brave, courageous, wise folks who help to change the world by helping America to face itself. So settle under your seat and get ready for an exciting, amazing evening. I'm going to sit at the welcome table. Feel free to sing along because these songs are made to sing together. I'm going to sit at the welcome table. I'm going to sit at the welcome table. I'm going to sit at E2K together. I'm going to sit at E2K together. Welcome table. Sit at the welcome table. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Definitely feel free to join in and release whatever it was about your day that was perhaps an obstacle. You're going to hear some stuff tonight. Some things tonight that hopefully are going to inspire and fuel your soul for your soul and your body. So from the underground railroad that was also sung in the movement, we know that the struggle is long and hard as we like to say the struggle continues. So we know that we have to wait with those children all dressed in red. That's going to trouble the heart. That's going to trouble the water. With those children all dressed in white. That's going to trouble the water. They must be the ones getting ready to fly. That's going to trouble them. Sing it with me. Sing it with me. Sing it with me. That's going to trouble the singing or the same way. All dressed in blue. That's going to trouble the water. They must be all dressed in black. Sing it loud wherever you are. That's going to trouble the heart. That's going to trouble the water. That's going to trouble the heart. I can almost hear y'all singing from here. We will not rest till the storm is over. We will not lay this burning down. We will keep each other strong. We will love and carry on till we stand all together on solid ground. Been a long hard journey on a winding road. So many have gone before us. They carried a heavy load but they went there singing as they made their way. Now it's in their footsteps we follow as we work Today we will not rest till the storm is over. We will not lay this burning down. We will keep each other strong. We will love and carry on till we stand all together on solid ground. Till we stand all together on solid ground. Till we stand all together on solid ground. Well thank you again for joining us tonight for this second program in the four webinar series with the Living Legacy Project and we are so happy to be bringing these to you as a way to enlighten and inspire and certainly as you join us tonight we hope that you are understanding that the road to freedom and justice is a long and hard struggle but we make it. We can make that struggle as has been so demonstrated by those in the civil rights movement and by our esteemed guests tonight because they not only kept one foot in front of each other and kept their eyes on the prize but also because they realized that we do not make this journey alone. That we have the voices and the arms and the legs of so many who have committed themselves to the struggle. So thank you so much for the generosity and the spirit that you have brought to not only our webinars but to the mission of the Living Legacy Project as we seek to entertain and inform. And I'd like to welcome our host this evening, a colleague of mine and a long, long, long time soldier in the war on civil rights, Pam Zeppardino. Thank you Reggie.  It's going to be a wonderful program. For those of you who don't know the Living Legacy Project, our vision is a world where there is equity, where there is justice, where people of different backgrounds and different cultures and different ethnic groups and different races all have the same rights and privileges and work with each other to make the world better for all of us. And so our mission is partly being fulfilled by what you're seeing tonight. We want to make sure that everyone understands what happened in the civil rights movement and what that means for today. We're not just about the history. All the history is incredibly important, but that history has a message for us today and how we can work in our communities today. And so our mission is to provide education, mostly experiential education, webinars, pilgrimages to places in the South, mostly where major events happen during the civil rights movement. So you all, if you're with us, can understand how that all came together and how you might be able to take lessons back to your own community. And so that's what we're about. If you've been on one of our pilgrimages before, thank you, and we'd love to see you again, because you might not have been on one that goes to some of the places we go to now. And if you haven't, check out our website because there are a lot of interesting things on there, former webinars, prior webinars that you might be interested in. And if you enjoy tonight's program, if you take something from it, we hope you will support our work. We are a volunteer organization, and so we live by donations. And our Operations Director Annette will put a link in the chat at some point this evening where you can make a donation if you'd care to, because we want to keep our buses on the road, our Zoom channel working, and we want to bring more people into this work. So with that, I'd like to introduce you to tonight's guest who I am so honored to be here with, Mr. Dave Dennis Sr., who was an important part of the Civil Rights Movement work, especially in Louisiana and Mississippi. Not that he didn't get other places, but tonight we're going to be talking about some of his journey, how he got involved, how he sees the work that he did coming forward, and how we can take that forward. And also, sort of winding through this is going to be the fact that he and a guy named Dave Dennis Jr., so that would be his son. He and his son have written a book about his experience, so we'll chat a little bit about that as well. But welcome, Mr. Dennis. We are thrilled to have you here. Good to be here. And I'd like to get started.  And we know that he was murdered in 1955, but there were lots of other things that were going on at that point in time that were an attempt to keep the races separate and attempt to keep white supremacy and power. And I'm wondering how that all came together for you, as you were growing up. Well, I was like most black people at that time, I think, is trying to figure out how to survive. I was born and raised on the first nine years of my life on the plantation. And so in a place called Toulouse, Louisiana, and then outside of Shreveport, Louisiana. So the first school I ever went to was a one-room building house. The old pot stove, the things you read about, and some things that people don't believe happen, but it's a pot stove. And I was in a room, at that time, I was around six or seven years old, but we had people, well, 18, 19 years ago, the basics of teaching, learning was around reading, writing, and what they call arithmetic, because the fact is that that's what you need just in terms of survival. And so the beginning of my life is, that's what I came up with, is watching, you know, picking cotton, and we had no lights. I was nine years old before I was exposed to even inside toilets, you know, running water to think that nature. So that was a way of life. So in addition to that is pretty much conditioned, and I was one of those people's condition around survival and doing what is necessary. For instance, when Emmett Till was killed, I saw, I was shown the pictures by the neighborhood. So we actually, I grew up, although we were poor, after left the plantation, moved to a place in St. Port, Louisiana, called Cedar Grove. Even there is, it was about before we had running water, even in the area that we lived in, although we lived in the city, we still had outside toilet and things of that nature. But when Emmett Till killed, the men took the boys, the black boys, to a church and told us what to do and what not to do in order to survive so that we didn't end up like Emmett Till. So if you saw a white woman walking down the street of someplace, you crossed the street, you did not look them in the eye, you did not do anything that one might think accused of being flirtatious or whatever nature that. And you didn't make sure how you spoke to people at that time is, white people is. Some people, young people, you could get beaten by saying properly, yes, sir, or yes, man. So you had to do the draw thing, you would tell how to say yes, no, no, sir, because you had to play the role, because anything outside of that role could get you killed in those particular days or beaten or going to jail for the habits. So actions around survival. So I grew up not understanding a lot about, you know, the civil rights movement, that type of protest. Although some things happen in my life is that demonstrate to me a different type of protest that black people were involved in. So we were part of a protest from the time that black people came here as enslaved people, using different types of things at the same time as figuring out how to survive as you do with personal types of protests. So that's how I grew up. I had no interest in becoming involved in a civil rights movement until I entered college at the University and that's another story. So I did not, people ask me all the time is if we did you have this burning fire and anger, you know? I won't call it, it was anger in the senses, but at the same time that one that took me out of my lane. But at that time is what I felt I had to do in order to survive. It's interesting. It's very much what we hear today, what everyone who is friends with African American families, that the talk happens very much like you were told that families talk with their children, especially male children, about you know, what you say to a police officer, what you don't say to a police officer. So it seems like that not much has changed in that sense. Well, I think that what has changed a lot is the concept of family in the black community pieces. I came from a single parent home.  The concept of family was different when I grew up. We actually had real communities when I grew up. There was the black communities. And so Mr. Jack, who lived down the street, was like a father to me, isn't he? He had the right and permission from my parents, my mother and my grandparents, to jack me up if I did something wrong down the street. So it's all in terms of love, because we had the idea that young people would talk to respect your elders. And we respect our elders. And at the same time, reverse is the elders respect the children. So if you did something good, you got rewarded for it. If you did something bad, the community let you know about it. So what I'm trying to say is that we had this camaraderie that we had is the family that we had came out of, you know, how we were forced to live. I mean, the first thing happened when black people brought here as enslaved people, the families were broken up. I mean, fathers were sent someplace else's and mothers have sent someplace else. A lot of times the children would take their moms and their mothers and send someplace else as enslaved people. So we learned and taught and began to live the way by the children became the children of the community, not just if anyone took biological care. So that's what I grew up with is this caused me to be strengthened, I think is, and was protected. And we were protected by the elders within the community. So you mentioned that you got involved in the civil rights movement when you were in college. How did you get started? Well, a lot of it has to do with faith, so I have to go back a little bit now. So I believe and my grandmother always told me that, you know, you're here for a particular purpose on this earth, all human beings are. So what that is, you find out as long as you live.  And so I didn't understand what she meant about that is, you know, but as I think about my involvement in the movement and how I got here, things began to happen. I went from one school to the other. I went to a boarding school for a reason. I don't know how, why I got there to the largest extent, because we were poor. I ended up at this Catholic boarding school. I ended up from there is, for my senior year, I had taken out a boarding school and lived with my aunt in Baton Rouge, and I went to a place called Southern Lab School with Southern University. So here I am is for the second walkout, which is one of the largest walkouts in history, and civil rights movement from colleges at Southern University. The lab school was right there on the campus there. And so there's a march by my best friend in that school. We've sat outside and his brother was leading the march and said, come on, come on, join us. And we said, no, so we went over to my best friend's house and play basketball. And so I had, we didn't get involved in the movement. We didn't want to do that. Well, show you how fate was touching me on the shoulder because my best friend at that time was a person by the name of Hubert Brown. They don't want to be known as H. Rat Brown. No. And so we went out of separate ways and I went to Diller University. I got involved. There is that when I got on campus, there were students who had been jailed at Diller University, Cesar Carter and some others. And then there was other students from one from Suno by the name of Rep the Castle, who was a icon of the civil rights movement, the street name after it. And then there was a Rudy Lombard who was the big civil rights leader and core and people and so in the intervention of us. And so these people, you know, were in jail, but I didn't want to have a thing with the movement in a sense this. I knew it was happening, sympathized, but I wanted to be an electrical engineer, make some money for my parents and my mother and stuff is to help her out. And also to make some money, you know, so I never have to go back on the plantation, not realizing what the plantation that meant to them. One day I was walking across campus and so there was a rally on campus and there'd be flagpole at Diller University is and there was this young lady who was speaking. And so I walked by and so I went back to talk to see what's going on is, but I didn't go back so much to hear what she was saying. She looked good. I was going to go back and try to get a date with. And so I went to talk when she finished. I went to talk to the data. Well, make a long story short. She convinced me to go with her to a meeting, which ended up to be at Mount Sinai Baptist Church is which was also found out was the church was a Southern Christian Leadership Conference was founded in New Orleans. And there I am with these people who became later on known as very icons with civil rights moving to orders in Louisiana and also the on the national level is. And so I was chasing this young lady whose name was Doris Castle, who happens to have been the sister of this icon civil rights leader in New Orleans, Louisiana. And so the rest became history to largest. And so my chasing Doris who kept challenging me. And I kept trying to get a date she would not date them until finally, she convinced me to go on a sit and they were doing sit ins and demonstration in New Orleans at that time. And so I decided to go. But they weren't arresting people. They were warned them. And the idea was what they call hidden run to sit at lunch counter police comes, you know, and beyond the Saturday. And so that would keep the traffic of people going into the store without police around so people don't want to trouble so it was affected boycott. And so this is being affected.  They're not going to jail anyway. Right. And so I did on the day that I decided I put on that time as you wore a little suit and tie, you know, cotton. And I dressed up and I was ready to go on the seven feet be impressive finish to her. Well, lo and behold, of course, that's the same day that the police in the city decided they're tired of this stuff is they ain't gonna do no warning is gonna come and arrest everybody. So I ended up my first demonstration going to jail. All right. So that was the beginning of my involvement in the movement at that time. So that's how I really began to get started. I got my feet wet. It wasn't because of inside commitment to the movement. It was because I was trying to get a date which says is that you don't know where it is, where it's going to hit you. You know, and it remind me of the old Baptist, we grew up and the whereby you set up a morning bench and the preacher would preach and try to get you to join church and my grandmother used to say one day it will hit you. And it took me a long time to deal with that issue. So and so when the movement kind of stuff is you don't know when it's going to hit you. So that was the beginning, but that wasn't exactly where they hit me as arrested, but it was got me into a position whereby it did hit me a little bit later on. In your book, you talk about a time when being arrested didn't bother you anymore. You were actually ready to go. Can you talk about that a little bit? Well, that happened in some very interesting pieces, but I'll talk about faith. So at the time, I've got to go back a little bit here too. So at the time that we were in this demonstration in New Orleans, we're talking about, the core has started the Freedom Rides from Washington, D.C. and the host for the group that was supposed to be for the Freedom Rides was the New Orleans core chapter. Then so, you know, the Freedom Rides started. So I got out of jail and everything else. Now, going back to school, Dilly University is saying I'm trying to keep myself out of trouble getting rid of exams and this is when I'm April and May, and when May rather was. And so what happened is that the bus was attacked in Aniston, Alabama and Birmingham, Alabama. We know that story, but part of the, a lot of the people there on the bus, especially in Aniston, Alabama and Birmingham were beaten and very badly and injured very badly. And they could not get medical attention where they were either Birmingham or Aniston, Alabama. So they had to get them out of the areas and sent them into New Orleans. And so we were able to find doctors in New Orleans.  So they had to practice in the black hospital which was Flint Goodrich, which still happened was connected to Dilly University at the time. So that's why we were able to get treatment for them and they were able to stay, put found house and for them at Xavier University in New Orleans at that time. And so when these people came in, they were like, you know, really beaten up and stuff is what the untold story is, these three of those people, four, they think of us, of those people in those original, on those original two buses in Birmingham, and Aniston, Alabama eventually died as a result of the injuries they received in those buses that we don't read about and talk about. So at any rate is that there were two things going on at the same time is there was a group out of, there was an issue about whether or not the riots should continue. And that was a group out of Nashville, Tennessee, young people are led by Diane Nash, James Belville and some others. And there's a group out of New Orleans also that was also demanding that the riots continue. And that was led by Retta Castle, these two fantastic Black women who was taking on this leadership. Retta Castle was having a discussion with Robert Kennedy, I think Diane Nash was dealing with Singapore, I think his name was. It was also the Attorney General's office pieces. And so that was the demand that the riots continued. And then and so, again, my following dars, Retta called us all to a meeting at her house, which is where she lived with her mother and father about what we call the Freedom House there, which is located at 917 North Tontia, still can't remember the address.  So she didn't think about going to jail that time was enough. And so I ended up going on a ride. So we have five of us from New Orleans who decided that we want to go on the ride. And that was a group that came out of Nashville, Tennessee. So there was a meeting hell in Montgomery, Alabama, we know about the church, where the king and then we're trapped in the church by mob of clansmen and others. And so we took a train from there to to Montgomery, Alabama. And we had this meeting. There was this big meeting at Dr. Harris's house, who's a pharmacist, the black pharmacist there. And they were the federal government, the candidates they called for martial law. And it was really tough. I mean, when we got there. So we get there is been this building and I'm meeting for the first time all these icons as Abernathy, there was a king, there was just you name him, why to walk with Andy Young, all the people that I've heard about. And there they were Diane Nash for the first time meeting her and James Belville and the rest of it. And so we're sitting there in this room. And this is when it hit when that we talk about what hits you, you never know. And so I'm debating whether or not I want to be number one, why am I here? I don't want to get back to school. I'm going to go to jail again. I'm never going to go to college. My career is over. You know, my mama didn't know where I was. She even though I had been arrested one time now, now we talk about a second time. And so I was sitting in this room, you know, all of a sudden that was this all I heard was someone say it loud and clear, you know, there's not enough space in this room for both God and fear. For some reason is it like hit me just by between eyes. And before I knew it, my hand was up. I'm ready to go on the ride. And let's go. And so from that to it became the difference for my understanding between fear and being afraid. I can't say that I've never been afraid. And then I can't say I wasn't afraid then to move forward. I didn't have that fear that paralyzes what you have is so that I didn't have fear. So I separate the two. And with that piece is that I joined into the civil rights movement and never looked back. It was whatever hit me. Hit me in a way that that changed my whole course of life is I've never even thought about it again is in terms of what I should be doing. So that was the beginning of the making that particular changes when I talk about you don't know how it hits you where you hit you, you know, but that's how I really got into it. And from that point, I went to Jackson, Mississippi, went to jail, parchment. And then from there, they ended up being arrested 30 times during my life. It's interesting. I teach college students and I asked them if there was anything they'd be willing to go to jail for and they look at me like go to jail. But, you know, I think they haven't found what hits them yet. But, you know, very much they were like you originally were like, Well, I've got my career and I've got all of this stuff to go through. But you went on and stayed as part of the movement, a very powerful part of the movement. What, what about your experience in the civil rights movement? Do you see as most life changing for you most important for you? There is no one thing. I think it's a continuation combination of a lot. And I think it had to do with when I talk about this whole thing about family, you know, which is one of the things that really I think was amazing. We young people did not start this movement. That's one thing needs to be clear about. When we came in, like in Louisiana, there was already a movement going on in Louisiana. There was already a movement going on in Mississippi and Alabama. It was just a different type of a movement. Bob Moses just talked about the Mississippi theater. That thing was there. So we was young people began to move into the areas to direct action. And we could do things that the elders could not do it. But we came in the pathway that had been already set. I mean, the stage had already been set. The play had begun. And we became supported actors into this play. And now, and we became part of what was already theirs continuation. I mean, Mississippi, what, but the way had been opened goes for answers for years and there is one of the most powerful people there. People like mega Evers and RLT Smith and M's and more. You know, Louisiana is that I found out that one of the leaders was my dentist. I grew up as a kid, you know, was one of the leaders and one of the founders of SCLC Dr. C. O. Simkins and others. So the movement had been and also the other fallacy we have to deal with the fact is what was made of the movement, the movement was made us. We didn't make the movement. It was made of a cross section of people. Good example is what I mean by that cross section of the community. But it's Mississippi. We always talk about these three fantastic women in Mississippi. One was they represented what the movements all about as far as I'm concerned. One was Ms. Fernando Hamer, who was a sharecropper that we know. And everybody knows them as family. And there was another one in there who was a top leader was related by the name Ms. Victoria Ray, who lived out of down in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, who was actually from Virginia. And she was a school teacher. And then out of Kansas, Mississippi, there was this powerful lady by the name of Ms. Anna Devine. Ms. Anna Devine was a business lady and also insurance agency. So what she did was sold those 25 cent policy, but she knew everybody in the whole area around it. But these three powerful women represented three sections of the community. Then you had leaders of Dr. Aaron Henry out of Clarksdale was one of the leaders of WACP. He was a pharmacist. Ams and Moore, who took Bob Moses in and taught him the ropes about what to do and how to do, how to organize in the area, all right, was work for the post office and he owned a service station, he owned a home, right? And then you got the step toes and people like that is.  So you had a cross section of people who made the movement ministers and others, you know, and their children and families and pieces. And the family piece became people always asking when you got in Mississippi Freedom Summer, you brought in a thousand kids. I mean, how did you do that? We were able to do that because of the people. They were howls by the local people, poor people gave up their beds for these kids to come in and sleep and stuff like this. And they knew the danger was, you know, and so they came in, they hit them, they fed them, you know, took care of them, protected them. And they knew that one of days, a few months down there is that these kids are going to get on that bus this and stuff and leave them. And they were going to be down there by themselves. And they did it anyway. So the real heroes of the movement like we, it's a few of us who get a lot of credit. There's a lot written about us, you know, about the boom. But we could not have done anything of what we've done, you know, without the support of the community. And the people that the real family, they took us in because we would like their children, you know, we would extension of that family pieces. And so we have to figure out a way as we think about this as the movement is of all of these thousands of people out there is who march and everything else is who put their lives in danger that we don't give honor to, don't give credit to, and don't understand the roles that they play. Because they have a real movement that's similar to what we had at one time is we must understand, you know, wrap our arms around the people just because a person wears his pants low should not be a reason for them not to be led into the door, you know. And so, you know, and worry about that is not really worried about the wrong end anyway. So the thing that we have to be going to look at how do we build families and rebuild communities, which we don't have in the mall. We deserve the community. And that's not, you know, by accident, that was an intentional act on the part of this country to destroy what I consider to be the civil rights movement. You know, so one things I think about if you look at it real carefully is this 1964 Civil Rights Act, you know, actually became like a Trojan horse of the civil rights movement. But I mean by that is we didn't think about all the things that was connected to it that was used to destroy the movement rather than to protect and to make the point to grow and to be equity and equality for all people. So we can talk about that as we move forward. Do you talk about that a little bit more? Yeah, well, we came the challenge to the Democratic Party in 1964 really challenged power. We really didn't understand what power it was until we, at least I didn't, until then. We got right to the door, you know, and slam the door. I mean, when power really acted, I mean, we had the Credentious Committee just about wrapped them with our hands as after Ms. Hamlin gave her testimony before the Credentious Committee. We had it wrapped up. And Johnson and the others went through the back door is needs to be threatened people that overnight. The next day is some of the members of the Credentious Committee, if you don't change your vote, your husband's got for a judgeship, that's gone, you know, you got this, that's gone, you know. And so they were threatened. I mean, even in terms of our lawyer at that time was Joe Rao, who was the attorney for the Teamsters Union, Walter Ruth with them. But Walter Ruth went to Joe Rao and said, you don't change this around as you use in your job. All that happened within the 24 hour period of pieces. So that's when power acted. And they changed the whole thing about we've able to get the seats to the democratic party pieces. But we came close, too close. So this country then at that time made a concerted effort to fact is that this would never happen again. And so one of the ways of not doing that is to begin to attack what they knew would be the, which is the strength of the, of the, of the black community. And that happens to be the community. We had families. So they went after that structure. The first thing they did was he came out, people called, right, you know, was they called the Morning Hand Report. The Morning Hand Report became directed at the family structure of the black, black family structure. But we were blamed for the problems of racism, the impacts of racism, you know, because of the black father that's not in the home and not taking consideration. The fact is that as soon as we were brought in this country and say, people, the first thing to do was separate the families. You know, so that was the first thing about it. And some people bought into that. It was pieces. Then you got the poverty program, which looked good on the services. But what it did really did, if you look at it was to drain the black leadership out of the black communities. And they ran across the track, took a lot of big jobs. What you have is the main, main offices of the poverty program did not exist within the black community. It existed across the track. And so there you're left there. You had the whole thing as we had at that particular time, business, the whole thing about we didn't have business, didn't have capitalization in the black community. But it's not true. We had all grocery stores, stores, you know, you take them places around there.   So the first thing to destroy that piece is so the tack on that is was that they having to have grocery stores and stuff like this is you had to pick the wigglies and wiggly pigglies or whatever you have is who was able to sell groceries, they put the stores not to into the community per se, bone outskirts of the communities, but they sold cheaper. And so the boycott in terms of the fact is black peas and backstores and stuff like that could not get the same prices, it breaks in terms of that. So their food and stuff was higher prices than what's in the white store.   Blacks tried to come together to, you know, form larger grocery stores, but they're probably they couldn't get the loans downtown. So you blocked it. So all of a sudden you got a whole shift in terms of where the financial structure that happens to have been. The other piece happens to be is that that wasn't enough is how you deal with the culture in those businesses that still existed, the communities in the communities, they call it urban renewal. And so if you look at the place, to me, is they put those expressways across the country, but most of them, especially in the South, in other places, it went straight through the black community and basically where the business sections existed. New Orleans, it was Claiborne Avenue. It wasn't St. Charles Avenue, the most beautiful street in New Orleans. It was Claiborne Avenue, where blacks used to come between Orleans and St. Bernard Avenue, Claiborne, beautiful trees, picnic all through the summer, and everything else is all that's gone. Business on both sides of the street, Mississippi at Farage Street, where that was now is all boarded up and everything else because the fact is that don't know businesses existed at the time. So it's a drain on the community. Where do you think this has all brought us to today? I mean, where the movement sort of, you know, if we look at it historically, we had all of these, the Mississippi movement, the Louisiana movement, but it certainly seems like we've still got a long way to go. And how do you see what you all did back then coming forward to today and how we can move that forward? Well, you have to talk about rebuilding. I mean, this country has a way of every 60, 70, 75 years, so it goes to search forward and search back. I mean, the 1964 was not the first Civil Rights Act, right? 1876.  And so then you have what you call the beautiful behaves compromised, whereby some of what you have if you look at it, you know, the search back, search forward, you know, politically is the political deal that was that for other VAs to become president is there was a deal made, the deal was, it would take out the move, remove the restrictions on the Ku Klux Klan, allow them to take out the soldiers out of the country and gave it back to what they called the Dixit Crafts, right? So the Dixit Crafts ran the south, all right? So that whole thing, we came back to segregation, get to Jim Crow laws, but back in effect is and constitutionally they've done the civil rights act 1876 would consider to be unconstitutional, you know, and so the in that the 1415 amendment, the 3040 15th amendment did not apply anymore. So you have that is, if you think about what happened then, you know, the civil rights act and what's happening now with the voters rights act and everything else is, it's quite similar in terms of that particular path. It took time is in turn for that to build. So you take from 1964 until now what has been having very slowly happening down the line. So it's not just, you know, you got the Reagan's and, you know, and others when Reagan became, became president of the announces president of the United States is okay. He recall is that he set the sense about changing the direction of this country to the to more to the right. So where does he makes his announcement? Slap in the face of about the showbook County, the same place is with chain of goodness when we're murdered. The showbook County fair. If you read that, it's a blueprint where we are today. So this has been in the process of 1968. If you look at it is as they search back pieces in 1968 is white males left the Democratic Party of the Dixiecraft PC and they said, they don't have it, you know, and they went all to the Republican Party, all right, because Republican Party, if you recall, was a party Lincoln, as well as most of the blacks were outside of the South. And, but because in the softest, we did the challenge where we did do the challenge to the Democratic Party because that's the only part everybody had in power existed. So if you do anything, you have to deal with the challenge to Democratic Party. So that's why it was that pieces. But the 1968 white enjoyed the white males left the Republican Party and went to the Democratic Party. So if you look at that history pieces how he existed, that's when the whole piece began to really gel in the country. Well, it's not about a Trump, you know, I mean, people keep talking about Trump and Trump and Trump, this is not about Trump. It's about the people who are following, not following, but leading to Trump's group. That's a whole lot of people. You talk about 40, 50 percent, you know, people, that's a lot of people in this country. So it's not, it's a whole culture system, you know, that we up against at the present time is that's in the making for a number of years. Well, I can't, we still have a little bit of time and I can't let you go without talking about your book a little bit. How did you and your son come to write this book about your experiences? Well, there have been a lot of people after me about telling my story and I didn't want to do it. It's a very painful thing to deal with because I lost a lot of friends during that period of time. I mean, I was in Mecca one hour before he was assassinated. I was with Chaitanya Goodman sworn in 24 hours before they were murdered and during that period of time, I'm involved in the movements. We lost 19 people that people don't talk about that murder. So the talk about that is, is these families and things of that nature that you have to relive and think about and then how do you get the story out? And so my son from a very small kid, he came up with us, you know, a bit, I listened to these people in these stories, but he always told me, I want to write your story, dad, I want to write your story. So he's the one who pushed me when he went to school and journalism, graduating stuff like this, he really got in his head, he wanted to do this and he kept after me. So it started out really about him and I because he talked about he wanted to know more about his dad because he felt that he didn't know his dad. I didn't understand what he was talking about this. And so as we got more and more to the book, I began to understand about this relationship. I did not know anything about understanding about PTSD. And so we in the movement spent years writing, I mean, nonstop. I mean, something was happening every day on the movement and I stayed in the movement without coming out doing anything. It's not even vacation from 1961 to 1965.  And so that's why I didn't have it and any understanding about the impact I was having on my family as I grew older and like this and his coming up and stuff like this. And so our conversation, one of the things in the book he does is that he didn't tell me about it till the very end, by the way, that he writes me five letters that he shares in the book about this relationship and stuff like that. So anyway, Brian brought us closer together as a father, son.  He just coughed, he was like that, you know, kind of stuff is. And so that's how it came about is and so it's a story that he writes and it's more when I think of more of his passion than I told him the story. And also he was good for him because most of the people we talk about in that is other people that he came up with and knew at one time personally, you know, he met them, talked to me. Bob Moses used to take his bed when he comes to places, you know, so people of that nature became to love and he calls them all Uncle Bob, Hank, Canada, whatever he has to be, you know, it says aunt and uncles and stuff like this throughout the movement. So it became part of that big family that I was talking about. So that was the beginning of it and how it began to grow was was through his eyes and his feelings going up in this piece. But at the same time, it's the whole idea of what family being beyond just biological family. So you got to understand about that is so he's the one who came from him. In terms of his feelings that made I think the success was he made the story come on. And what he did also was he understood this whole thing about all these other people that made the movement. You know, it wasn't just these icons because what they did was they were telling stories about people that you don't read about. Do you know Mr. Turnbull? Hey, you know Mr. Turnbull did this blah, blah, blah, CEO Chen did this, you know.  And so we have this, the movement where we have to begin to do is it's being, you know, understand that you don't have to be, it's not these people who tell me all the time what we need is another Martin Luther King, what we need is another Bob Moses.  You got to have a desire to feel of want to be, you know, free, you know. So that's what it takes to come out. So you don't know where that great leadership is, but the leadership of the movement was about the accumulation of the whole lot of people, you know. There's a story that, if I can't just one minute, to me really tells me what the courage is all about is. And when you talk about fear and all this stuff. So we used to have these days of freedom vote days whereby people come out, as many of you possibly can, or usually on the Friday to try to register the vote. There's really a demonstration to refute the idea that people trying to spread in the country is that blacks would not register the vote because they were complacent and didn't want to do it. We say, no, it had all these things happening. I mean, to try to register the vote was almost like a death, which, you know, sign off because people were getting killed and beaten and stuff like this. It's just about trying to register the vote. So we do that to give that demonstration. So these are real heroes to me because people coming out and trying normally couldn't do it. Facing, you know, the white supremacy supremacy there, no, as they did, that is. And normally I had to go back in those back woods of places, you know, to face them every day, share some of what we have is, but they did it.  And they came right up to the courthouse. There is an old gentleman who had, what, suddenly go past, he had a pair of overalls on, white shirt and a tie and a hat. The lady had an abominant long dress. Never forget it. And he got up and said, hi, y'all. Hi, you sir. And he held her down off the wagon. He looked at us and he said, where do I go to vote for George Raymond? George Raymond was a very brave young kid who the civil rights were about at New Orleans, who was working in Canyon, Mississippi. So he was, for some reason, he thought he was coming to vote for George Raymond. We told him, George wasn't running for anything else, but this was where you go to register the vote in case George decided to run, you can vote for him. So he said, okay, if I do this, I can vote for George Raymond, yes. So he took his, I'm assuming that's his wife, up to the courthouse. And he went by the sheriff. His name was Billy Noble and just looked him in the eye and kept walking. And he had these whites on the side, spit the tobacco, looking at him, pointing at him. They didn't care. They went in and tried to register when they came back out. And he helped her and he said, thank you, son. Y'all have a nice day. And he helped her on the wagon, he did that on the wagon, turn the wagon up and that clipped the clock. Clipped the clock. I'll never forget that because I wake up sometime at night wondering whatever happened to them. That was bravery. That was fighting fear all those years. They're back there in those backwoods, not even having a car. But on that particular day, they faced it. That is a powerful story. When I read the book, that one stood out to me as well. It was just an amazing thing that those people did. Just amazing. Right. And so those are what we need to remember as we talk about move from what life is all about is. And what can we do? What should we do? What am I willing to do? I mean, a lot of us, where we are today, and a lot of people have a life that they have. And the good side is because of people like that. It wasn't us. We hit road on that couple's back on their shoulders, which helped me and a lot of us do what we did. They're the ones who really paved the way. So that's what we mean. We say the movement made us. We didn't make the movement. What would you say to young people today in terms of trying to change things for the better? There's got to be something that makes them angry about what's going on today. Got to be something. So embrace. I mean, I don't know this much about these young people who are stuck in these areas, these places. They're not communities anymore. They intentionally put areas whereby they end up fighting against each other. And what we have is they don't want to be there. We need to figure out how to help open that door to help them to get out of their areas. Embrace them. But they have nothing to hold on to. But young people who do have something to hold on to need to begin to embrace and try to figure this out. So we're working with young people today to try to say to them, there is a way out.  And how do you begin to change that and value something that's going to be beneficial to you? What is that? So the whole idea about family. So we all can help this out. I mean, we're young people. I mean, our elders have an obligation. When I grew up, the elders helped me. They put support for me. I mean, they were there for us. When we were in the movement, we worked. We got $15 to $25 a week in order to do the work we did. Out of that came, you had to pay your rent, car, gas, food, everything on that. So a lot of days we went to bed hungry. And all the people there, some of the best chicken sandwiches they've ever had is going to the door, trying to get people to register to vote. And somebody come up, Sonny, you hungry? Would you like to have a sandwich? And they had to fry chicken. That's why you take a double slice of white wonder bread and wrap it around a drumstick. And that was good. But it's appreciation that she had is and what we had in turn to live with. And I met a young person. He's younger than me. And he reminded me of something. He says, Dave, do you remember me? I say, sure. His name is Hezekiah Watkins. I know Hezekiah. He's a supreme rod and worked in civil rights movement in Mississippi. He said, no. He said, when I was a kid, you know, you took me in for a couple of weeks and fed me and stuff. You had some of the best food, man. He said, because I was poor, I didn't have any place to live. And you said, come on, stay with us until you get to find your parents and stuff, get you together, find your place to stay. And he said, you remember that? And I lied to him. I said, oh, yeah, I don't remember. So I ask people all the time is if a young person came up to you with his pants hanging down and stuff like that is, would you walk away from him? Would you talk to him? Would you have a conversation with him? Or you'd be concerned by the fact that he has pants low?  I mean, how do people, how do we allow this to happen to our children? No, instead, we're looking at who's out, our larger child is and say that it's not happening to him, but her. You know, but all of these children, so when I grew up is when we have real communities, you know, the children or the children of the community, you know, and how do we bring that back? You know, so we need to figure out how to rebuild our communities and take them back. These old dilapidated houses, rebuild them, you know. That's a powerful place to begin to wrap this up. We do have the after session, so we'll have another half hour with Mr. Dennis, and I see that the link has just gone up, but looking at the children as the children of the community, I think, is something that we really have lost. And you're underscoring the importance of that is very powerful. There are many points in the book by the two Mr. Dennises are very powerful. For me, it filled in the spaces between those things with the people we hear about and all the people who were there doing the work that felt very important to know about, that it wasn't, you know, Martin Luther King may have been very important, but he wasn't the only one doing the work and so on. And stories of young people being taken in back then who didn't have a place to go. And so things in some ways haven't changed too much, but the work, the work has to go on. And if you haven't read the two Mr. Dennises book, The Movement Made Us, it is something you should pick up and read. You'll learn so much, and you'll feel so much about what it must have been like. So you've used that phrase just to wrap up a couple of times that we didn't make the movement, the movement made us. Can you just explain that one more time as we go out? What I meant by that, what Davey meant by that too is that there was a movement around at the time, began at the time that enslaved people first brought into this country. They always put some form of resistance that was theirs. And so the people came after them on that particular show. So a lot of people give credit to the fact is to say that the young core people, young SNCC people in SCLC and LACP, they didn't want to create the movement as if the movement began with their work. And so what that means is that these organizations, the organizations are made up of the people. The people made the organization, the organizations did not make the people the movement. So therefore in terms of the movement, it was there. And so we didn't make the movement. The movement made us help us to be who we are. It took us where we are today is the people who were there. And now is the question is how do we do the recognition to those people? Thank you so much for this past hour has been amazing. And we're not finished yet. So I hope everyone will click on that link and come to the after session. And I see Reggie is back with us. Are you going to take us out, Reggie? I am. I'm going to say thank you so much to Mr. Dennis. Dave Dennis, you have been a very powerful witness of the movement, making those who came through it and leaving us such an amazing legacy of how to keep persevering. I remember seeing you on on the films and TV, had the opportunity to see you in 2014 at the reunion of Mississippi Summer. Such a powerful voice for change in America. And folks, you have an opportunity to ask a question or two. Join us in the after talk. The link is in the chat. And you can join us there. We'll have some time for Mr. Dennis to also entertain your questions. Remember the songs of the civil rights movement talked about community. They talked about the fact that people were not working alone. They were working in solidarity and in community to keep themselves on the path and keep their eyes on the prize. So as they sang, ain't gonna let nobody turn me round. I'm gonna keep on walking, keep on talking, marching up the freedom land. They were not marching by themselves. And we don't have to march by ourselves either. Because together we are more powerful than we are alone. So thank you very much for joining us tonight. Please be generous. And if you have the means, we ask that you be generous in your donations to the work and the mission of the Living Legacy Project. You can go on our website for information and also to see past webinars. They were all recorded and they were all available there for you. See you in the question answer. The link is right in the chat. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Dennis. It was an honor and a pleasure. Thank you, mine also.


Hello, everyone. This is the Circuit Python Weekly for June 1st, 2021. It's the time of week where we get together to talk about all things Circuit Python. I'm Jeff, and I'm sponsored by Adafruit to work on Circuit Python. Circuit Python is a version of Python designed to run on tiny computers called microcontrollers. Development of Circuit Python is primarily sponsored by Adafruit, so if you want to support them and Circuit Python, consider purchasing your hardware from Adafruit.com. This meeting is hosted on the Adafruit Discord server. You can join anytime by going to adafruit.com. We hold the meeting in the Circuit Python Dev text channel and the Circuit Python voice channel. This meeting typically happens on Mondays at 2 p.m. Eastern, 11 a.m. Pacific, except when it coincides with the U.S. holiday, which is exactly what's happening to us today. If you want to be notified about changes to the meeting, the best way to do it is to check the calendar that's available on GitHub and add it to your favorite calendar app, although we also call your attention to it on Discord if you are a member of the Circuit Pythonista's role. This meeting is recorded. We're recording the audio from the voice channel and the video of the text channel. If for any reason you prefer not to have your voice recorded, you are still welcome to participate. The meeting will be posted to YouTube and the audio will be released as a podcast. If the podcast isn't available on your favorite podcast service, please let us know. There's a notes document to accompany the meeting and recording. If you wish to participate but can't make it to the meeting, that's where you leave your hug reports and status updates. The notes document will be augmented with timestamps to go along with the video, so if you're watching or listening to us later, you can use that to skip around to the parts that interest you the most. The meeting tends to run 60 to 90 minutes so that we find is helpful. A link to the new notes document is posted in the Circuit Python Dev channel every week shortly after the previous meeting. And of course, if you're listening or watching, it's in the notes. It's in the doobly-doo. So the meeting is held in five parts. The first is community news where we take a look at all things Circuit Python and Python on hardware. This week it is a little look back at the Python on my controller's newsletter. The second part is the state of Circuit Python, the libraries and Blinka, where we look at the numbers that tell us the health of the project. The next part and the first round robin section is hug reports, an opportunity to highlight the good things folks are doing and taking the time to recognize the awesome folks around us in the community. The fourth part is status updates where we sync up on what we've been up to. We invite everyone to take a couple of minutes to talk about what you've been doing in the last week since the last meeting and what you'll be up to in the next week. And the final part is in the weeds. If we need a longer term discussion, then status updates can accommodate. This is the place for it. Add your topics and we will take them in the order that they are presented. And with that, I will switch over to the notes document, take a timecode and get us started on community news. Normally this is a preview, but as we are on Tuesday, if you're a subscriber, the newsletter is already in your email box, but we'll cover it anyway. So top is that the Python on hardware was listed in Gartner's embedded software and systems report. MicroPython and by extension, CircuitPython are on the so-called slope of enlightenment. Their advice to users is to adopt MicroPython to accelerate development and reduce development costs, especially if your time to market is critical. Next up, CircuitPython 630 release candidate zero is out now. We added support for new boards, like a lot of these tricky boards, many corrections to existing boards, and the addition of a consistent board dot LED property to most boards. And finally, a timing fix that affected certain samples of RP2040 boards. There are release notes on GitHub and of course we covered it on the Adafruit blog. Next up, CircuitPython snakes its way to the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect, which is the blue board from that favorite blue company that you know of. But if you don't want to program it in the Arduino environment, we can do it with CircuitPython now. And I'm not sure whether that's in the pre-release or in 630, you'd have to check. Next up, we are the Python languages back in the second position of the Tyobi Programming Popularity Index. And beyond that, looking at longer-term trends, C is losing popularity. So maybe just maybe Python could reach first place in the index in the first half of next year. And last up, LaMour Lady Ada appeared in the Microsoft Build keynote with Kevin Scott, CTO of Microsoft, and the topic was machine learning on the edge with Adafruit and Microsoft Loeb. That was a fun video. If you ever want to operate a bakery, I think that's the way to do it. The CircuitPython Weekly newsletter is a community-run newsletter emailed every Tuesday. The complete archives are on adafruitdaily.com slash category slash CircuitPython. Also, head to the front page of adafruitdaily.com if you want to subscribe. It highlights the latest Python on hardware-related news from around the web, including CircuitPython, Python, and MicroPython. To contribute your own user project, edit next week's draft on GitHub and submit a pull request with the changes. You can also tag a tweet with hashtag CircuitPython on Twitter or email cpnews at adafruit.com. Next up is the state of CircuitPython, the libraries and Blinka. Now these numbers generally cover one week, but since we are eight days out from the last meeting, I also pulled in some statistics from the previous day's report. So for the seven days ending last night or early this morning, we had 43 pull requests merged. Although if you look at the one day earlier report, we had 56, which is just a phenomenal number. And that came from over 21 authors, I think actually about 26 authors, but over the eight days, including some names that I don't recognize or don't see often. We have Emerge Reanimator, MikeJC58, Y-Wing83, and Z-Lite, and BJ Neuer, which I'm sure I didn't pronounce right just now. So thank you, especially to the authors who are new or who are infrequent and dipping their toes in. We love to have you helping us out and improving CircuitPython. The next stat up is the 13 reviewers. Reviewers are the people who check things over, maybe give it a test, maybe read the source code changes, just as an extra step so that we can provide high quality software. And without them, we can't bring in pull requests and we can't improve it thing. So this is super important stuff. If you are interested in getting started reviewing, the thing to do is check out open pull requests, test them if you can, provide feedback, and once you've been doing that for a while, just let one of us know you'd like to become a reviewer with the power to affirmatively accept a pull request. And then the next overall statistic and the last one is that we had 22 closed issues by 10 people and 21 opened by 19 people. So first we had a net decrease in issues, which is always nice to see. The number tends to trend up overall, but this week we were down. And also having a couple dozen people opening and closing issues shows that we have a lot of people who are interested in what is going on. And with that, I will pass it to Scott to tell us about the core statistics. Hello, totally blanked on having to do this. So let me scroll, scroll, scroll. I'm in the right dock. I don't want to read the wrong ones. For the core, we had 18 pull request merge from 11 different authors. So thank you to all of those authors. I won't read the new folks. We had five reviewers. So thank you all of those reviewers. We have 21 open pull requests. There is one that is greater than 200 days old. That's 251 days old and we have a few that are getting up there. But I think I did knock out one of the real old ones. So that's good. And a lot of these ones aren't too old. So as always, I think the call to action here on the core side is there are some PRs, some pull requests that have just like lingered a bit. So if you want to help us out on the core side, please take a look at those. There's a couple I know that are just for boards. And those are pretty easy to do. So if somebody wanted to pick those up and either close them or finish them, that would be amazing. We always want to keep our pull request down. I think our pull request countdown. Issues wise, we had 10 close issues by five people and 10 opens by 10 people. So lots of people involved as Jeff was saying. And we have total of 457 open issues. That number grows slightly over time, which is not the end of the world. We do have five active milestones. We use milestones to triage issues as they come in and kind of prioritize them. So we have 56 open issues under the 7.0 milestone, which theoretically we want to finish before we do 7.0 stable. But I suspect a lot of those we won't actually do. We'll probably add some additional seven milestones to move those two. We have three bug fixes for 6x. So we should check those as well. Those are the priority ones. And then we have this longer term bucket of 373 open issues. These are the ones that are good ideas, but we have no immediate plans to do or at least aren't a priority. And then we also have seven issues not assigned to milestones. So those are the ones that need to be triaged still. So we want to make sure and look at all the issues as they come in. I'll be particularly worried about issue counts if that not assigned to milestone number goes up. Because we should at least take a look at what people are reporting and respond to those. So yeah, that's good. Overall, Dan did the 6.3 RC0, which is great. And I suspect that we'll do a 6.3 stable this week. And then once 6.3 is stable, we should be able to do a 7.0 pre-release, which will be really great. Thanks to Dan for taking on the releasing. And that's it for the core. Thank you, Scott. Next, I will hand it to Catney to tell us about the libraries. Thanks, Jeff. So this applies to all of the Adafruit Circuit Python libraries, which is every library that begins with Adafruit underscore circuit Python underscore, as well as a few other things, including the community bundle. So across all of the libraries, we had 24 pull requests merged by 12 authors and 13 reviewers. And it's great to see that there are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven PRs it looks like that were open longer than two weeks. And so we're starting to get caught up. It's slowly happening. And that leaves us with 48 open pull requests. We had 10 issues closed by six people and nine opened by eight people, leaving us with 310 open issues. If you're interested in contributing to Circuit Python on the Python side of things, consider going to circuitpython.org slash contributing. You'll find all of this information and more including open pull requests, open issues, and some library infrastructure issues. Take a look at the open issues, see if there's anything that you're interested in doing. Let us know that you want to work on it and get started. If you want to start reviewing, take a look at open PRs, see whether there's anything you can comment on. Make a comment and once you're comfortable with that, we can work on leveling you up to joining the actual review team. But commenting on PRs is an excellent way to get started. All of this happens on using Git and GitHub. If you are new to that, we have a guide, contribute to Circuit Python using Git and GitHub. And we're always available to answer questions. We want to make sure that you are able to contribute in a way that works for you and we want to help you whatever that means. So in terms of library updates in the last seven days, we had one new library, Adafruit Circuit Python dash display, and a number of updated libraries which I will not read off. Overall, we are seeing a push to get through some of the older PRs. Early hug report to Jose David for handling that. He's been going through all of the open pull requests and tagging people and helping people out and getting things moving forward, which is excellent to see. Because every week we say we really need to get caught up and then we don't. And it's actually happening now. So that's excellent. And it's good that we're always seeing weekly updates to the community bundle. We always wanted that to be exactly what it's turning out to be, but without folks to contribute to it, it sat for quite a long time. And now we're seeing a lot of contributions to it, which is really great. And that's where we are at the libraries. All right. Will you be talking about the branch naming stuff later on in the meeting today? Yes. Okay, great. Then we won't do that now. And I will pass it to Melissa to tell us about Blinka. Hello. For Blinka we had one pull request merged by one author and one reviewer. There are three open pull requests at this point, which just goes to my going down. There are were two closed issues by one person and two opened by two people, leaving a net of 55 open issues. And there were 5,637 PI PI downloads in the last week. And we currently are supporting 75 boards. And that's it. Thanks, Melissa. And with that, we are ready to move on to hug reports. This is the first round robin section. And as I mentioned earlier, it's the time for us to highlight the positive things that all the community members are doing to help each other. So I will start things off and then we will go down in the order that people are in the notes document and wrapping around to the top when I get to the bottom of the alphabet. So my first hug report, brother, is for community moderators. There were some moderation issues, particularly this morning, but also over the last week, since I've said thank you to them, they really keep the community running well, talking to the people who are willing to be talked to and showing out the people who just aren't doing it right. Next, a hug to Catney and to Scott for running meetings while I was out for a couple of Mondays. And finally, a hug to Dan for some code reviews and merges over the weekend. Next up is Jerry. And then after that, I'll read notes from Jose David. Hi. So, yeah, hug to Nara doc for doing some being really incredibly helpful and patient on discord. It's a fun to watch the interactions and the amount of help provided. To Carter and Jose David for commiserating with me on this TCA 9548 a issue. It's going to get us all. All right. Up after this is Catney, but now I have notes from Jose David who has a hug to you Jerry for helping on the TCA 9548 and BME 280 PRs and for always answering the call when more testing is needed. Next, a hug report for the summary for participating in the DPS 310 PR giving tips and solutions. And last, a hug for doctor on discord for being present and keeping the discord chat moving and very dynamic. All right. You're up Catney. And then after that, I have more notes to read. All right. So my first hug report is to Dan for taking care of some moderation issues on discord and to the community moderators as a whole on discord for being there to keep our community amazing. I have a hug report for Jose David and Lisa Mara for working through the DPS 310 PR and to Jose David for agreeing to update the DPS 310 learn guide to match the PR. And one I didn't enter is once again I want to thank Jose David for taking on going through all of the open library PRs and making sure that we get caught up. All right. Keith the EE who is text only writes a hug report to Jose David for sitting down and helping me walk through some API and documentation decisions for the SGP 40. All right. Next is maker Melissa. And after that is Scott. Let's see. I've lost the tab here. Here it is. Okay. I want to give a hug report to Catney for taking on learning how to add a board to the Arduino CI checks and group hug to everyone else. All right. Thank you. Scott. Tanu.  And then after that I have notes from attic data. Thanks Jeff. Group hug generally. Whenever I step away I took I took Friday and Monday off. I'm always amazed at all of the activity that happens just over those short periods of time. And so I just want to say thank you to everyone who's involved here and on the discord and on GitHub. You all make this community awesome. And I really, really truly appreciate how well the community does every day. It's just amazing and it wouldn't be anything without all of us. So thank you all. Thank you, Scott. And I guess I should give a belated hug report to you. I asked for your feedback on a PR and you're like, no, I'm out. It's my vacation. And thanks for enforcing those boundaries. I think I just queued it up on my tabs to do that today. Yeah. That's great. Appreciate it. Because I also managed to enforce those boundaries pretty well on my own recent trip. And it's just good to reassure each other that's the right thing to do when you're unplugged, be unplugged. So yeah. 100%. And that goes for even the people that are not paid by anybody to work on circuit python. You should always feel free to take time for yourself away from this community. That's that's the nice thing about seeing all these awesome folks is like no one person is critical. You can, everyone can take time off as needed. All right. And it's important. People should. That has been a public service announcement. All right. I'll read anecdote is hug report and then it will be Dan who is up after that. So after I take time codes and stuff. So anecdote has a group hug. And let's see. So we'll have Dan and then I'll have notes from David. I cannot hear you, Dan. All right. I'll just go ahead and read Dan's notes. Dan has a hug for me and DJ I X 123 for making MP Y cross run natively on Mac OS M one and a hug to AT makers bill for testing user supplied hid descriptors. Next notes from David cloud who has a hug for Dan H for the dynamic USB learn guide. And now without warning, it is foamy guy. All righty. Thanks, Jeff. For this week hugs. Definitely second what a couple of folks have mentioned to the discord moderators for handling some of the issues that have popped up in the last few days to you, Jeff, for working on repurposing the requirement screenshot tool to work with library examples. To fed a to for hanging out during my stream over the weekend and especially for sharing some knowledge and helpful tips and utilities around server configuration and SSL. To mark gambler for reviewing an RS bone. The user on GitHub for testing a PR in the HID library that I put in over the weekend. And then lastly is thanks to Scott for shouting out my weekly streams on show until last week. That was really cool. I appreciate it. Thanks. Very nice. And that wraps up hug reports. So the next section is status updates. It is a similar round Robin. We're inviting you to let us know what you've been up to since the last time you checked in, maybe a week ago, maybe longer. And what you hope to get up to in the near future. This focuses on circuit Python, but if you have anything else. That is going on that you want to let us know about, please feel free to do that. So I will start and then we will go around the alphabet again, same as last time. So over the last week, I built MPY cross for M one max. With, as mentioned before, a quick correction and improvement from community member. DJI X 12123. This was fun as I don't own any max, let alone one that can run the M one software, but GitHub actions can do it. And Dan kindly tested it. And we have that now. So that's great. I also added to the action CI. Steps to build most of the ports on windows. So it builds one board for. At my Sam D one board for STM 32, one board for Pico. So one board of each kind except for the ESP 32 S2. Just to verify that we don't have these problems crop up. Where it stops building because we don't have many community members who use windows to build. It's mostly Mac and Linux. But we do want to support that for one key user. So it's good to do that. And then last and the big thing is I started adapting the ESP 32 S2 camera capture code into circuit Python. There is an example that goes with the Kaluga dev kit. And it works with a calendar with a calendar with a calendar called OV 26 40. But the low level capture code should adapt to the camera that we already have working with circuit Python, the OV 76 70. So I've got a bunch of code integrated and written. And I need to wire up this board, which as I mentioned a little bit below is a vexing process. It just seems to take a long time and you make mistakes. And anyway, so that's this week. Number one is the code is written. I'm going to test it and see if it works. And besides that, I also this week will be checking my feedback on learn system and responding to user questions, community questions about the stuff that I have on learn. Next up, we will go to Jerry. And after that I have some notes to read for Mosaic of Eid. So there's a bunch of testing on this TCA 9548 a issue where the only on the RP 2040 it just doesn't work reliably. Works fine on them for really kind of scratching my head. I did post in the issue some screenshots from the logic analyzer, which shows that it's definitely not working right. It's definitely missing. There's a command needed to send it to switch to multiplexer. And it's not getting there sometimes. But at this point, I have no idea why. So anybody has any suggestions? Happy to hear them. And then I was playing around with the in the along with the data box that came with the fun house had ended a long time ago. And it's what do you call it? HCS R04. Sonic sensor. And I tried it on RP 2040. Just for fun. And it doesn't work quite right there either. Basically, every other value is wrong. Is there a correct distance and a really short distance and a correct one. So it looks like I posted the issue in the HCS R04, but it might be a circuit pipeline issue. So I did. I did post a note to the issue saying that there may still be some lingering issues in the RP 2040 pulse in. So if that's an own issue, then hopefully it'll get fixed at some point.  The interesting one that came up where someone wanted to run an airlift on a RP 2040 Pico using micro Python. I thought, oh, wow. Now we have Blinka that should just plug and work. Not so much. I ran into a funny thing that I hadn't really thought about much that micro Python doesn't support timed up monotonic. It has time dot time and time dot other things, but not time to monotonic. So any libraries that use that won't work. So I did a quick change, quick fix to the library to fix the calls to time to monotonic, but then ran into a more serious issue with SPI. So and I haven't gotten anywhere with that yet. So keep looking at it, but anybody's been playing with that. And I don't even know if it's, if it was expected that an airlift would work under micro Python on a Pico. So be nice if it did. All right. Thank you, Jerry. Next I have notes from Jose David and up after that will be Catney. So last week, Jose David was reviewing PRs working on the BME 280 and DPS 310 memory optimization and doing some small doc updates. And next week's plans are to be in PR land for one more week and doing reviews if needed. Catney, you are up and then followed by maker Melissa. All right. So last week, published the Neo key trinky guide started the rotary trinky guide, finished up the analog in template and tested a new page replace feature on learn that is sort of going hand in hand with the templates because there are pages in learn that get mirrored into other guides. And so you write a single page and then it just gets mirrored into a different guide. So every time you want to update that page, you don't have to update it in 30 places. You can update it in one place and it automatically updates. However, we've decided we want to replace some of those pages with templates and that would have been a nightmare. So our one of our learn developers put together a page replacement feature that you replace the page and it actually replaces the links and all the mirrors automatically. So it's seamless to the user that I want to put a template in place of an existing page and no one else will know, which is great. And then this week so far reviewed the DPS 310 PR. That's looking good. It was just a matter of making sure that the learn guide got updated as well and continued working on the rotary trinky guide and did the final testing for the page replacement feature. So the rest of the week finished the rotary trinky guide, do some pretty pins, pin diagrams for the SAMD 21 boards. And then somebody posted to GitHub. I want to say on the Clue library that they wanted to be able to use the simple text display feature in the Clue library on the Fun House. And notice that it wasn't available in the Fun House library and so they factored it out into its own thing and then asked whether we would be willing to do that. So what I'm going to be doing is creating an Adafruit Circuit Python simple text display helper library that handles that simple text display. It just makes it super easy to display sensor information on a display and so any of the boards that we have that have sensors on them and displays built in will benefit from it. And it just happened to be that the Clue library is the only one I've written so that's the only one it went into. And as for your question earlier, we are starting the move of all of the Circuit Python repositories from master branch to main branch. We're going to start small on less used libraries. As Dylan put it, she was the only one who has made any commits in the last three years on some of them. So that means it's mostly Adabot. So we're starting there. The things we need to be aware of are references to master in documentation and the fact that the learn system has embedded code from library repositories and those all reference master as well. And we have some set of steps in place to handle that. But inevitably there's going to be something we didn't think of. So if you run into issues, please let us know. The very last thing we're going to do after making sure everything else is in place is delete the master branch so that we don't run into the same confusion that we had on the Circuit Python core repo. But we want to make sure that we get everything else in place before we do that. And the thing that will be different is that as a contributor you need to be working from main and not master. And that's the reason why we're deleting master because we don't want there to be confusion with that. In theory you should be working on your own fork and on a branch so you should never be pushing directly to main. But when you make a PR you want to make sure that the code that you were working with is up to date. And all of the up to date code will now be in main. The contribute to get and GitHub, I'm sorry, contribute to Circuit Python using get and GitHub guide has a section on using GitHub to tell whether or not a library has been moved to main or not. And so check out that guide if you want to make sure that you're working with the latest. It shows you how to verify whether or not we've gotten to that library yet. But this is something we plan to do over the next three to four weeks. So it's coming quickly. And we will be super careful with the really high traffic libraries but that is the overall plan. Dylan is starting on that I think today. All right. I'm happy to see that happening and I feel like when we did it with the Circuit Python core there was a minimum of trouble and most of the trouble stemmed from still having the master branch remaining. So I'm happy to see that the window of that time is going to be smaller and that we plan to remove it. And I think people will do fine. It's mostly a matter of the order in which we do things. And I want it to throw an error if somebody tries to do something with master because I don't want there to be situations where folks are trying to use both. So that will eliminate that. Right. Next up is maker Melissa. Then after that it's tenured. Hello. So this last week I went through circuit python.org and did some board updates on there. I started working on a new learn guide for speech recognition. I went through my guide feedback and made updates were applicable. And I also went through the Google assistant and eating guides and redid the steps for the Google setup on the calendar guide as well. So it's very completely changed. I have cat me with adding some Arduino boards to check when peers are submitted. And this week I am working on a learn guide for this the speech recognition thing. And I'm going to take a look at some of the Raspberry Pi shell script peers and issues. And that's it. Thank you. All right. Scott is up next and then I will read Hello. So I took Friday and Monday off which meant I had a nice long weekend got outside went for hike saw some friends and made some progress on the fiber deserts project last night to which is exciting for work. This week I am working on the BLE workflow. I added different advertisements based on whether the board is bonded or not. I've added a one second wait for enabling BLE so if you're on a USB powered board it will not broadcast by default. You'll have to click it after there's a one second wait for safe mode and then it'll be a one second wait for BLE after that as well. I'm working on the USB and BLE file system sharing. I think the way I'm going to do it is USB code will win versus BLE. So if USB is connected it will show up as a drive and people will be able to edit it unless but if not then BLE will work. User code access will follow the existing API so nothing will change there. I think this does mean that it is backwards compatible which is nice. So I'm going to polish that up today. I filed an issue with Antonio and talked with him earlier about the app crashes if multiple packets are used for a single response and I'm hoping to get them a build of circuit path on this week so we can start iterating on the multi packet stuff and then also on the connection stuff as well. I have test scripts already for the stuff but the test scripts don't do some of the like reconnect stuff that the real version is doing so I can't get very far in my test script without the test script failing so I have to debug that as well so I can use that for testing all the different APIs. And I'm taking time off in June here so a week from tomorrow will be my last day for just over a week so I'm off the 10th through the 18th and back on the 21st the 18th is a Friday so there's the weekend there too. So my last deep dive will be on this Friday and then the two Fridays after that there will be no deep dive so heads up to that and as a reminder if folks do want to be notified about my deep dive we have a deep diver's role on Discord now that people can be added to to get notified about all of those updates. That's it for me. Alright. I will head back to the top of the alphabet and read the notes from Anikdata who says they are off the grid no internet for most of the next week or so. Dan you are next and then I'll read notes from David. Okay hold on. Let me find my well the good news is we can hear you now. Yeah I was micromarphone was set to the wrong thing. Okay so there were in dynamic usb descriptor news Bill is working on some various hid devices that need their own descriptor and so I found a couple of bugs which cancelled each other out which I fixed. I'm still working on native keypad support for simple keypads where there's one key per IO line and also matrix keypads where there's rows and columns and also I'll be working on shift register support in some cases also. So that's all still under development and I mostly been working on the API right now but I'll do one thing all the way down and publish it as a draft PR soon. As Scott mentioned I release 630 release candidate zero we haven't had any issues on that I think I will release 630 later today or tomorrow and then we'll be able to do a 7 00 alpha immediately so that we have another unstable release which we can point to more easily. And finally I've been working on a PR to the Pico SDK to handle some Adafruit RP2040 boards that don't where the crystal oscillator is a little unreliable about starting up and so we have a workaround which is just a way longer and that support is going into the main Raspberry Pi Pico SDK. Okay, thanks. Thank you Dan. I have notes from David and then FOMI guy will get to wrap up status updates. So David writes as far as CircuitPython just chatting with Cgrover about the thermal cam, maybe a CP fatigue and non-CircuitPython successfully used WLED an ESP32 Wi-Fi LED animation with NeoPixel and .star in 5V but failed with the 12V LED strip I planned to reuse playing with Docker on a Pi 4 with IoT stack. There is a link to GitHub.io in the notes document and last acquired a 3 meter by 1.4 meter reflective plastic to do the green screen trick with LEDs which is something that our own JP demoed a couple of months ago. It's a neat trick. And now I will take a time code and pass it on to FOMI guy. All righty, thanks Jeff. Last week I implemented guest user functionality on my design.io web page so it allows people to make designs without having to have a user account first if they would like to do it that way. I did some research into consumer codes. I was looking for the brightness up and down for a screen. I was looking to find those codes and I did end up finding some. And perhaps most exciting to me personally at least is I over the weekend I think I found a working solution for installing the stubs from PIP. It took a little bit of kind of massaging to figure out the right way to get it to copy the files but I think I have a working solution so for this week I need to I need to validate that that it will actually work with a test listing on Pi Pi. Everything I did so far was just locally. So I'll try to get that done and then as long as that works the next step is kind of like getting prepared a repo or whatever we need for how we will deploy that stubs. I need to also this week write some code that will use a rotary encoder to send those brightness codes the up and down brightness consumer codes and then I'm also going to be working on a 3D design this week that will hold a phone or a tablet and it will have a way to kind of attach a crank arm onto the side of it so that it can crank the rotary encoder and send the brightness codes from that so that's what I got for this week. Thanks. Alright and Scott remarks in the text channel quote I think we can just build and deploy from Adafruit Slash Circuit Python. So I guess talk to Scott about how best to do that. Nice I will do that. Because that rounds up status updates and we head out into the weeds and I will pass the baton to Dan to introduce his topic. Okay this is about we have alternate names for the sort of the standard files in oh sorry there's some junk that got pasted in here. Alright let me fix this up later. So boot.py can also be called boot.text or settings.py or settings.text that can even be called settings.text.text and some other things like that and we never really documented the settings.py thing I think or maybe only one place and in fact I had a user over the weekend who had an innocuous settings.py which was not meant to be boot.py and which was interfering with their boot.py so considering that we don't document that you can do this and we haven't recommended that people do that I propose in 7.0 that we just drop settings.py as an alias for boot.py and then the sort of the second consideration is we added all the .text stuff because we thought people were going to be editing on windows where the default setting was not to show the file extensions using say notepad or something but we highly disrecommend using notepad and we recommend other editors now that are better at showing extensions and I'd rather just document how to turn on showing extensions so I'm proposing also that we drop support for .text and have people fail early rather than later when their programs don't run and maybe even drop support for the double extension stuff too which will save a tiny bit of space but mainly it's just another thing to have to explain to people so I'd like to feed back on both of those proposals I'm on board for both we document that in one place which it's a short paragraph and a guide the no not settings.high settings.high is not documented that I'm aware of I'm talking about the .text and we never documented the double extension thing either so I don't see a reason to keep it I would much rather just teach people to do it right we did it a long time ago I think I was even the one who proposed some of this and it was solving a problem that doesn't exist okay I will submit a PR for these and it will save a tiny bit of space I think the double extensions was added by a community member so maybe just CC them on it okay I'll see about that the only double extension I'd consider keeping is like code.pi.text yeah and it prints a message as opposed to working site only but people don't even know how the people are using Mew I think it's kind of better and Katnie I'll try to see if I can write up something about turning on showing extensions and put that in the guide somewhere yeah we'll find where the file names are documented like I said it's a small section and then you can just put it there instead okay alright thanks okay alright I guess I'm done alright in that case Jerry you are up next okay well I don't even know if it's an issue or not so I've noticed many comments in the forums and on discord I think about the encoder the new ITC rotary encoder I believe it's the same for the trinky that when you turn it the counts are sort of counter intuitive at least a lot of people think they are that they decrease when you turn clockwise Katnie that doesn't mean much and they increase when you go the other way so my question is is this an issue or a feature and does anybody else care I was very careful to make sure that when Jeff redid rotary encoder most recently in the regular rotary encoder in the latest PR that they turned in the same direction that they all turned in the same direction right so if the ITC one is backwards I think maybe we should change the library or something which I think it's in the seesaw well so I mean I don't think the library has anything to do with it can you just reverse the pins no because it's all a monolithic thing you can solder in the encoder but you can't flip it around and solder it the other way so it's just too late in the library could you just multiply by negative one does it know these comments are correct I believe that it is not the intuitive way not the way people expect it to be is that I know that the Stenma QT rotary encoder increases when you turn it counterclockwise and I think some of the others increase when you turn them clockwise although I don't know which boards have an integrated encoder are there other boards that had an integrated rotary encoder before now I don't know I don't think so the trinky turns is the trinky go the wrong way I thought it went the right way I'm pretty sure it goes the right way I just did a bunch of examples with it and I don't recall thinking it was weird right so clockwise increases yeah there's a circuit python library that supports the seesaw right so yeah so multiplying by negative one sounds like a good idea why don't we just tell those people to multiply by negative one I guess well I mean because it gives you a network okay that's fine we're not even multiplying just negative minus minus just negate it it just comes up Jeff you found an issue with it before that I haven't seen any comments on and I confirm the same issue that it does actually miscount but yeah you could wiggle the dial in a certain way and it will either count it I think it counts up without actually moving a detent over I'm very tempted to go interfere down in the seesaw library but it's not what I need to be doing so I'm trying not to I don't feel like I've ever seen a rotary implementation that actually works 100% of the time my next question was you know is that just a fact of life with rotary encoders so that's my no rotary encoders should work right and it's totally possible to make them work right and I think the one in the core works pretty well right now it's still it doesn't with your reverse direction it loses account but right if you go a single step from a non known position you don't know which direction it goes yeah I think it might be possible to check for that by making sure that by checking to see whether you're in a detent position which is when both are grounded or high I can't remember which grounded but if you do that there's there I think that you then introduce the possibility of getting false counts because there might be bouncing going on so I think it's a trade off but I haven't tried that in detail there is a user who's interested in this but we haven't and he tried a bazillion ways to fix it and didn't succeed right well when I insist that encoders work I mean I know they're used in industrial servo motors and they accurately keep position are they optical encoders rather than yeah but the quadrature waveforms have the same properties whether they're optical or mechanical right but the frequencies are different yeah the frequencies are really low for mechanical so it should be easier not with bounces I don't think the optical ones have as much of a bounce problem bounces don't matter to the extent that they're like wavering between two neighboring codes you have to make sure and get all of them though right to be correct are you saying that optical encoders also handle the reversing they don't lose a pulse on reversing usually they don't the motor controllers don't really care about that if they the ones on industrial servos can't long term lose position or all of your machine parts would be wrong yeah I mean isn't that why it's common to have end stop so that you can reset your position it's true that there are home switches that let you accurately find a repeatable position but you say your part program runs for 8 hours you can't slowly lose position over that 8 hours as you know way more of your steel or aluminum or whatever it is well sometimes they add hardware debounding and they may use other things I mean they're absolute anti-turn position keeping devices as well but it should be possible to make it work we put a lot of time into it already so I push back on putting any more time into it well yeah I'm trying not to I just feel it should be possible I think we should fix the reversing direction thing up to wazoo so yeah I think that if there's an easy fix for that in the library I think we should fix it now rather than because the product just came out so we need to fix some guides and have some people rewrite their code now the number of people who are affected is very small yeah there are at least two sites that you'll want to change because there's one property that gives the total number of counts and there's another that gives an incremental number of counts I think which was a little strange but check and make sure that there may be two different methods or properties and do the negation and both of them there's a count and there's a delta account so it's a little different the last time you got it yeah that thing that Jerry just said alright I think we've exhausted that topic in which case it is time to wrap up the meeting thank you everyone for joining us for the circuit python weekly meeting on June 1st 2011 the next meeting will be back on Monday as usual that makes it June 7 2011 at the usual time of 2pm Eastern and I think that is 11am Pacific thanks for joining us today and we hope to see you soon again thanks everyone