The framing of this panel is what a campaign to tax the very rich looks like in the field. And I should let you in on a planner's thing. We had a debate within our planning agenda, whether to do this session a lot earlier in the day to sort of ground the whole conversation in how does this show up in the field. And we didn't want to undervalue the role that the campaigners and organizers brought to the work. But in the end, we decided to have it at this point because, you know, we've had this conversation about policy. We've begun to have some conversations about messaging, but now we're going to ground truth this discussion. And we are so fortunate to have four of the most brilliant campaigners in the land who not only work on issues of taxes, but work on multiple issues of economic justice and social justice and think about politics, but also are connected to social movements and kitchen table organizing and the like. And we really wanted them to reflect on this day and to bring us into sort of the reality of what would these campaigns look like? How do we move these things? We've heard a number of compelling conversations about the need to shift power, to build power, to change power relations. These are folks, leaders who understand how that works. So I'm going to introduce them. They'll each speak. And then we will also maybe converse among ourselves and then have a conversation with all of you. So let me introduce our speakers. And this is the order they'll speak. Stephanie Taylor, who is Progressive Change Campaign Committee. Some of you may know her work from Bold Progressives. They have really, for like a decade, really kind of brought digital tools and on-the-ground campaign tools to changing the landscape. And so we're fortunate that Stephanie is with us. Shelly Gupta Barnes is the campaign. She works at Kairos Institute in New York City, but she's also the campaign director for a Poor People's Campaign. And you probably saw last week Poor People's Campaign was everywhere doing hearings and direct, you know, witnesses. And she works closely with Reverend Barber and others in the Poor People's Campaign. And they put forward an incredibly ambitious and bold program that includes many of the components of things we've talked about today. So we're looking forward and fortunate to have Shelly with us. Serita Gupta from Jobs with Justice. Many of you know her. She's co-director. We should also note that this is her last week as co-director. And we want to lift her up. I know. I'm so thankful. And she's been kind of been cloistered writing a book on sort of worker organizing. And later this week we'll be celebrating her tenure publicly as well. But we're very fortunate that Serita could join us to offer reflections on decades of organizing work. And Connie Raza from Center for Popular Democracy. And a number of people have alluded to the work that she was involved with both the Demos and CPD on sort of the Race Plus campaign. Understanding the interaction of race and class and the interactions of those in campaigns on the ground. So we are in for a treat. And let's give a welcome and encouragement to all of our panelists here with Stephanie going first. It might be helpful to start by laying out a few essential tactics in a potential campaign to tax the very rich. Because setting a framework for this discussion and also to make sure that we're all able in this room to operate from a common vocabulary. And as some context my organization, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and our sisters C3 and C4 organizations have employed all of these tactics successfully in different ways on campaigns for Medicare for All and expanding social security and zero debt college. And so I'm really drawing on elements of those campaigns and making sure that they're sort of put on the table for discussion here. The first is polling. I'm a big believer that any campaign has to begin from understanding how we should be speaking about and persuading people. We had a panel that very ably talked about in the ways that successful polling around taxing the rich. But we should also run polls on which messages people find to be most persuasive. Especially when we're operating in a very urgent and reactive environment, which I'll talk a little bit about later. The second would be a communication strategy and that would mean taking the winning persuasive messaging and then looking for opportunities to push it into the media. And this would also mean inserting wealth tax messaging into the preexisting news cycle. My guess is that the coming year of presidential campaigning will have numerous very ripe opportunities for doing that. The third element that we should consider is an inside-outside strategy. And that also means taking and using power. So that means electing key allies and decision makers who support and campaigned on taxing the rich and therefore they were elected with a mandate to take action on taxing the rich. And it also means giving our allies in power the mechanisms for building momentum and support. This could include everything in Congress from signing on letters, resolutions, and also making sure the draft legislation is ready to go when we are in a governing moment. That's something that we had prepared prior to the 2016 election, working with allies in Congress from Schumer to Sanders, preparing debt-free college legislation for a moment when we thought that we would have a governing moment. But it's still a good strategy. And the final is to turn wealth taxes and taxes on the rich into a mainstream issue in the political zeitgeist, which means that this issue, much like Medicare for All or Zero Debt College, is seen as an issue that is widely important to people and that people care about. So there's two challenges that personally, as I think about this and I think about the strategies, these are challenges that I'm personally struggling with. And so I wanted to bring them into the room because I thought more people could help solve them. And the first speaks to the messaging problem in those urgent reactive moments. And I want a show of hands who remembers the single, pithy, short, sticky democratic message during the Trump tax fight. Not you. We did not have rapid response networks built that could swiftly disseminate a single memorable message about the Trump tax bill. The week before that vote, my co-founder and I happened to be in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania running some focus groups. And we threw in some last minute questions about what people had heard about the Trump tax bill just out of curiosity. We hadn't even been planning on polling on this. We heard from them, this would be a fair tax. This would be a flat tax and that they would pay less. There was no kind of counter democratic or progressive message. And everybody in the room, and these were we were polling, Obama, Obama, Trump voters, everybody in the room was very supportive of the Trump tax bill. So the establishment of rapid response networks to very quickly disseminate a message feels to me like a very critical problem to start attacking. And the other problem, and this is important for establishing a public narrative, is how do we make wealth visible? Chuck Collins, our moderator, has an excellent yearly report called Billionaires Bonanza, which is a, it's really good reading. And I was reading it and one fact stuck out to me is that last year the world's billionaires grew their wealth by one trillion dollars. I can't even wrap my mind around that number. I mean, it's like trying to contemplate the origins of the universe. It's so massive and so how do we really try to make visible to the public so that they are galvanized to take political action, the scope of inequality that we are facing here, because it's so hard and these numbers are so big. I have a few ideas, but I would really love to hear your ideas. So I'll leave you with that question and that challenge on how do we make wealth visible. Shelly Gupta-Barns. Hi everybody. First, thank you to EPI and IPS for organizing this conference. As you all know, the discussion about taxation is really about building power and showing people that there is a new way to organize ourselves in this country. This is of course the role of movements and grassroots campaigns. And so I just wanted to both show that a new way is necessary, but also that it's possible. So I want to just spend a few minutes talking about what the Poor People's Campaign is doing and why taxation is such an important part of our agenda. So the Poor People's Campaign, a national call for moral revival, is building organization and power among the 140 million people who are poor or low income in this country, who are facing the brunt of that income inequality and wealth inequality we've been talking about today, and bringing that group together with labor, clergy, and people of conscience. And we're doing that to be able to shift the narrative on poverty and wealth in this country and to impact policies and elections in our favor and in the favor of those 140 million who have been left out of the political and economic discussions in this country. This is a fusion movement. And we've organized around five pillars, systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, militarism, and a distorted moral narrative that is centered around extreme religious nationalism. We are multiracial, multi-gendered, intergenerational, and a cross-issue campaign, and we're grounded in at least 40 states in this country. We are organizing across race and recognizing both disproportionate rates of poverty among black, Latinx, and indigenous people, and also that the largest numerical group of poor and low-income people in the United States is white. And how important it is to build unity across that racial divide and around these issues. So last year we conducted an audit with IPS on the past 50 years, since the 1968 campaign, the Poor People's Campaign, which is Martin Luther King's last campaign before he was assassinated. That shows in many ways that we are in a worse position today than we were in 1968 around these issues. We have fewer voting rights. We have fewer good jobs and government support. We have more homelessness. We have more prisons. We have more wars, and we have more wealth inequality.  And it's also informed our activities of the past year. We've done hearings. We've done demand deliveries. We did a bus tour across 30 states that brought all these issues together and showed the life and context that these demands and agenda are connected to. And we're bridging real difference, building real unity across that. So tax reform is a critical component of our agenda for three reasons. First, as you all know, the current tax structures economically unsound. Progressive taxes can fund critical programs and investment we need. And it is in line with our morals to have a more equitable society. It is simply the right thing to do. And in our assessment, tax reform only works when it comes alongside all the other elements of our agenda. This includes cutting the military budget by $350 billion a year. It includes ending mass incarceration, having meaningful immigration reform, securing robust voting rights, having good jobs, living wages, a strong safety net for times both when we aren't working. And also to recognize the role of caregiving and home care in building this economy, having affordable housing, healthcare education for all, including programs like Head Start that encourage the maximum feasible participation of the poor, having water and sanitation infrastructure, and addressing climate change. And more, we need it all. This is what it means to be a fusion movement. We aren't just bringing different people together. We're bringing all of the issues that they are facing together. And therefore, we need to bring all the solutions together. So drawing on the work of Americans for Tax Fairness, we worked with IPS and EPI on a moral budget. And we're calling for progressive tax measures on the very rich, fair taxes on the wealthy corporations, and on speculative activity, including a financial transaction tax. And these together would raise about $880 billion per year that could go towards meeting the rest of our demands. And this is all very clearly laid out in our Poor People's Moral Budget, which shows that our morals can be consistent with our economy, an economy that works for all of us. This budget was released last week, felt like a year ago, just last week, at our Poor People's Moral Action Congress. We had over 1,000 people from 40 states come together in D.C. for three days, and the budget was at the very center of what we were doing. There were nine presidential candidates there who had to or challenged to take up our budget, this budget and this set of tax reforms. We presented this budget to the House Budget Committee, and it will be central to our organizing over the next year, as we mobilize towards a massive march in Washington in June 2020. So before I end, I just want to say a quick word on our methodology. We're a grassroots movement, and we've drawn out the insights that are coming from the grassroots for all of this policy work, from the poor and dispossessed. We're indicating a way forward, not just for themselves, but for the rest of this country. The poor are not part of any political or economic debate right now, and that's partly because they aren't organized, and also partly because of the stigma of being poor, and people not believing that poor people have meaningful contributions to make other than mobilizing and being agitational. This campaign and this report does not believe that. And instead we brought the economic and political insights of the poor to first reveal what we need and the direction we need to take. And then we found incredible partners in IPS and EPI and others to show how that was possible. So we want to really thank everyone who is part of this report. It is so critical to our work, the work around taxation, and critical to the movement we're building in this country. So I just want to end by saying what we've been saying for a long time is forward together, not one step back. Sarita Gupta. It's great to see so many old friends in this room. I'm really excited to be here. And yes, it's a little bit of an overwhelming week for me, so I'm going to do my best to stay focused on this conversation at hand. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk and share some reflections from our work at the local level as we campaign and the issue of taxing the rich has come up. I'm largely going to draw reflections from our recent campaign in Maine to win home care for all. And it's never easy as an organizer to get up and talk about a campaign that you did not win. But I'm actually going to do that today in the spirit of helping us figure out what we do better, right? So in addition to Jobs of Justice, I'm the co-director of a campaign called Caring Across Generations. And we partnered with Maine People's Alliance to run a ballot measure that would have established universal access to home care supports and services for more than 20,000 seniors and manors with disabilities. It would have been the first in the nation. Passage of the home care for all ballot measure would have allowed families and individuals to have affordable access to care, which is a really big part of what Caring Across Generations is working to do, which is to transform the way we care in this country, both to create more affordable and accessible options of care to support family caregivers and thirdly, to strengthen and grow the care workforce. Our proposal would have created a dedicated funding stream and I'm going to get to the pay for in a second. And we would have established a trust board. Actually, I see friends from Community Change here, but Center for Community Change many years ago created the community housing trust boards as a model. And so in the worker field, we are trying in fact to use that model. So this would have created a trust board for home care. Instead of what that meant, what that would mean is the trust board would be governed by sort of like a tripartite board of home care workers, families who use this benefit as well as industry together to design the programs to figure out the wages and benefits, the training opportunities for the workforce and much more. So we were very excited on the onset of running this campaign. Why did we run it in Maine? Because Maine has the oldest population in the nation. 70% of Mainers will need care just to meet basic daily needs. $54,000 a year is what it costs on average for home care, home healthcare. It's $117,000 a year on average for nursing home care. And the state is facing a message worker shortage. We know 90% of the population wants to live in home in their communities, but we don't have the workforce to support that. So massive worker shortage, especially in rural parts of the state. So through great organizing that Maine People's Alliance had been doing, this issue became more and more relevant. And therefore, we decided to move forward with the ballot measure. How were we going to pay for it? Well, we were going to pay for it by ensuring that individuals who earn more than $128,400 will be subject to a 1.9% tax on earned income above that amount, which, as you know, represents the current Social Security cap. Employers will also contribute to the 1.9% unearned income above that amount. We also wanted unearned income above the same threshold. So this is income earned from investments to also be subject to a 3.8% tax. And then 100% of that revenue would in fact be deposited directly into the trust fund. So as you can imagine, our opposition came out in full force against this. We lost the ballot measure, but we did learn a lot. And so a few things that I really want to share about what we learned about how people reacted on the ground to the idea of taxing the wealthy. Even if it would create revenue, that would make their lives better. Because let me tell you, on the doors, we heard horrific stories about people struggling to make ends meet and making choices, impossible choices between necessities. Yet they were not ready to say we should be taxing the wealthy. So what did we learn? Being on the doors, we had hundreds of canvassers, volunteers on the doors. One, we were not prepared for this to be a fight about taxes. We went into this fight and this campaign believing it was a campaign about home care. And what we really learned very quickly is that in fact, this was going to be turned into a fight about taxes. And from off the bat, language matters is what we learned. We needed people to understand that the tax is on a household, not on the individual. And in fact, our opposition was really good at confusing people. And some of that, there's a lot of like, could the language and the ballot have been stronger and stuff that we looked at. But at the end of the day, what we learned was that Governor LePage's administration at the time put out a fiscal note that made it seem astronomical, the cost of it. And basically, it turned very quickly into a fight about taxes. Second of all, we had no narrative infrastructure nor strategy to manage that in the moment of a ballot measure. The narrative, the opposition was framed and I quote, the main ballot measure is essentially suggesting that a teacher and a fireman combined salaries was going to pay for Martha Stewart's home care. So they were going after the universality, the idea that this would provide coverage to people with the means to pay their own ways. So it promoted tremendous confusion on the grassroots level.  And that's really what happened. So we didn't have the narrative infrastructure to inoculate the grassroots base in the way that we needed to say, we're going to make this very ambitious proposal and this is what we're going to hear back and this is how we need to counter that. The other piece that really became an important narrative that we learned was if we tax the wealthy, they'll leave our state and people really deeply believed that, that meant jobs were going to go, the tax base was going to go and remember, these are the same exact arguments you hear when workers are unionizing, when we fight for minimum wage campaigns or paid sick days and paid leave campaigns, the same exact arguments. The third was that there was a lack of understanding of how little higher incomes are taxed. So we literally on the door heard people say, well, I believe in this, but I don't believe in double taxing wealthy people. So when the discussion, we can get more into that. And finally, we learned that we had no plan on how to talk to wealthy people about this, right? For some wealthy manors, the out of pocket cost of care would have been greater than their annual taxation under the ballot measure, like significant 50,000 to 2000, right? But people weren't willing to even be open to hearing this because all they could hear was that their taxes were going to go up. So those were some really concrete lessons that I hope I'm just throwing into the mix as we get into discussion. All of this for me just reinforces we need better infrastructure. Organizing is critical. And it's not organizing on issues. When I say organizing, I mean power building. How are we actually building power? That it is about a culture shift and learning how to talk about who the wealthy are, who are the individuals who are really shaping the economy in our democracy. And finally, that at the end of the day, I coach my daughter's soccer team. Let me just say that for a second. This is the first year I did it. They're nine-year-olds. And when you teach nine-year-olds how to play soccer, the thing you teach them is to not just look down and dribble the ball. I feel like as a progressive movement, we got to learn to look up, right? So my chant in soccer coaching is like, look up, look up, pass the ball. And so my parting words are as a progressive movement, we need to learn how to look up and figure out how we're passing the ball in the right way to each other. Many people in this room have expertise that we really could have used in the campaign and vice versa. And we have yet to learn how to really make the right connections to ensure that all of us win. Thanks. Thank you, Celica. Connie Rasa. A provocative panel and building power, right? So I think that, you know, we've all talked about it so far. I'm going to just pick up on it. But really, in order to be able to move, tax the very wealthy, tax the wealthy, taxes are good, sort of platform, we actually need the power. And we need that power through organizing and through campaigning and taking the time, actually, and having the resources to be able to take the time to do political education of the base, but also of wonks, frankly, right? We need to figure out how we talk about the economy in such a way that it is understood to be real experience and not abstractions. And so part of that means that we have to be thinking about how are we agitating around taxes in such a way that it is tied to the real things that people live and how they experience what the outcome of those taxes are. So home health care, right? There's streets, public education, all of the things that we know those taxes will pay for, but not just that, right? I think the Poor People's Campaign is a great example of being very explicit about how budgets are moral documents. Our taxes are also moral. And if what we believe is that we should have an economy that is fair, an economy in which all of us are free to thrive together, an economy in which we're able to do together the things that we are not able to do alone, then our tax code should reflect that and the way that we're talking about it needs to reflect that and the way that our folks are understanding that and understanding what it means for their lives needs to reflect that. And that means we actually have to spend the time on the doors having those conversations with them. And that means we have to have the resources to be able to do that. That means we can't be going for the quick victories, but we actually have to have the resources to build the infrastructure together. So CPD is a network of state-based organizations representing 600,000 members. That's a lot of people. That's a lot of power and it's not enough. And with Jobs with Justice, with the Poor People's Campaign, with People's Action, with Faith in Action, with a number of organizations that are building power in their communities, with labor unions that are building power in the workplace, we've got a lot of power and we don't have enough power yet. And so there needs to be an investment in building that power and in building actually understanding that we're building our sense of the solutions from the experiences of people on the ground in addition to the expertise of people who really have been studying how our economy works, how our policy works. You know, one of the things that I think is so exciting about this conversation has been how we're talking about structural change. And I think that when we think about the economy that we're in, we have to go back to, as Dorian was saying, as Valerie was saying, the way that our economy is grounded in racial capitalism, right? The way that our economy is always already about race. It's always already about those disparities and the decisions that we've made historically and continue to make that put us in a more disparate place. And that, hmm, I feel like it was Dorian who was talking about this, but I might be wrong, so I'm sorry if I'm misciting. But the way that race actually provides an excuse for the wealthy and the powerful to convince working class white folks, poor white folks, that their interests are not aligned with working class and poor folks of color. And so we have to be working to educate folks about that and about how when we're speaking in a color, I don't know where Solynda went, but when we're speaking in a colorblind way, we're not actually even speaking to the ways that that narrative is working. I also think that we have to educate people about who the very rich are. So we have ideas about who they are, but we don't actually know. I don't even know. Like I think of like the real housewives, I'm not even being funny, but like the real housewives, they're kind of rich, right? I mean, like they can go into a store and they can pay $5,000 for a watch and they're kind of rich. But like, actually, the rich have have done what Paul Krugman said this morning, they've insulated themselves. And so we don't actually even know what that lifestyle is. We don't see the rich. When I'm traveling places, I don't see them. And so the work of my colleague, Mike Kink and Charles Kahn and their work with CPD and which the hedge clippers is so important in really exposing what not just those lifestyles are, but what those interests are, what is it that they're protecting? And how is it that our policy, tax policy, certainly, but policy broadly, what is it that the policy that they're supporting and moving is actually about? What is it protecting? And what is it keeping us from? And so like, I think that if we do those things, we lay a groundwork for organizing that gets at not just the structural problem of taxes, but it also starts to help us unravel some of the work that's been done to make self-evident to folks that, well, we need to keep some people from being able to vote, obviously, right? And like, there's structural change on taxes that we can do, but also on democracy. I want to also say I think that it's important for us to unambivalently love taxes. So I think that like, it's great for us to be talking about taxing the very rich, and I think that we have to do that. But my concern is that we do that in order to hedge that we need to be taxed, we all need to be contributing, contributing fairly to the things that we have to do together. I had other stuff I really wanted to say, and I'll say it if you ask me about it. In a moment, we'll open up and maybe we can get our microphone people ready. But I wanted to pick up on a couple themes that each of you said. Stephanie says, how does wealth show up? Who are the wealthy? And I'm curious, and maybe this is, I'll start with Sarita, and this is a conference talking about taxing the very rich. What does that mean, right? And I know in the case of the main initiative, the people who would be paying more, it reached maybe into the top four or five percent of mainers. But here, we're talking about proposals that maybe tax the top one tenth of one percent that's having this disruption. So I'm curious from an organizing point of view, when we talk about tax policy, does, is that matter the distinction when you can say it's it's only a thousand households versus 6,000 households? So I'd be interested in any of your reflections, maybe starting with Sarita there. Yeah, no, I'm glad you raised that. So I don't know if people remember we did, we were part of a broader effort with many movement organizations to do what was called 99 percent spring. And it was meant to be these like porch conversations about the economy and helping people like tell the story of themselves and how they view themselves in the economy at the time. And actually coming off of that, we went into a 99 percent shareholder spring. And in that process with a lot of partners, we recognize the importance of naming who are the individuals that we're talking about in the one tenth of the one percent and actually taking the fight to those individuals in the one tenth of the one percent. And so this became really important with worker campaigns and corporate campaigns. So at the time we were supporting many retail workers at Walmart who are organizing. We were also supporting hotel workers in California who are organizing.  And why not take the fight to him and have Walmart workers, hotel workers, community members, teachers and parents who want to fight around schools and actually surround him with a set of demands. And that's actually been a strategy in the field that's been developing, is how do we stop hiding or like allowing them to hide and actually name who they are, what, how they actually control important parts of the economy and how their decisions impact millions of working people in this country. And learning to tell that story, I think, is we're seeing a rise of and I think we need more of. I actually think that we need to get pretty specific about wealth. That I think that when we're talking about who are the very rich, a lot of folks think about what their income is and they think about income. But actually if we start thinking about what and talking about wealth explicitly and as many people did today during the day and how wealth functions differently and that you make money from money instead of from work and the legacy of how our decisions together have given wealth to select few primarily white folks who were maybe already wealthy and taken it out of largely communities of color, but not exclusively communities of color, that that also changes the terms of what we can imagine as solutions as well. And so I think like coupling that with very explicitly naming and targeting the folks who are using their wealth, their economic power in order to shift political power in that balance really makes a difference. I would add part of our strategy with the campaign is also to indicate the role of governments and the accountability and hold governments accountable to the people, to more people than who they are currently accountable to. This includes the federal government and includes state governments. And we've been with the help of IPS, we've developed these state fact sheets. So every state that's a part of the campaign can look through these fact sheets and say, oh wow, South Carolina, the richest 1% of South Carolina was expected to receive 30% of the benefits of the new federal tax law. Every state has that information. Every state can see what, you know, this is information that's available to people who know where it is, but a lot of these people don't know where it is from making it available. But the point of it is also to show and to reveal how governments are no longer held accountable to the poor and dispossessed, the poor and low income in this country. And so that's been a really important part to bring back, you know, this discussion of who is responsible for providing for the general welfare? What is the nature of our social contract today? And who is it with and who is it for? Which just by the way is a lot of where we see the teachers campaigns and like Educator Spring. I mean a lot of those fights are in fact about who are cities and state governments beholden to. Anyway, just wanted to throw that in there. And I would just add, I want to introduce a new concept. We've got the pay for, how about the paid buy? I think that Elizabeth Warren does a great job with her wealth tax of always describing it in very sticky ways. One, you know, two or three cents on the dollar, which I think is very memorable and easy for people to understand. But she also uses it to say this is how we pay for these things that are good and important for society that people want. And I think that what we can, what would be great to see, especially from the policy arenas, every time we see policy proposals, they didn't just include, you know, what they cost, but also, you know, one penny on the dollar from billionaires will, you know, provide free childcare to X number of families and really start to build in that paid buy.  Can I just add, there's something, and this is like my drum that I beat all the time, but there's something to the grammar. And I just want to appreciate Valerie, how you were very specific about how we've made decisions that lead to these disparities rather than taking the current balance as like just nature. It's just what is. And then we're going to go from there. I just think that it's so important for us to name who decided what, that does what, and how when we're speaking. Let's open up. We're looking for a couple of pithy questions in our final 15 minutes there. John and Josh had deployed people there. Sure. I heard in the conversation with the main referendum, the argument that I've heard a lot of times, oh, if we do this or do that, everyone will move out of our city, out of our state, out of our country, move to Mars, whatever. Can we make the argument that like we have to stop appeasing these people? Any comments? How about in the back right there? Yeah. Elephant in the room that has barely been referred to, except thank you very much, but Ms. Gupta Barnes talking about the Poor People's Campaign, I was there, it was wonderful. Militarism, and it crosses over because a lot of the filthy rich are manufacturing murderous machines. We have 800 to a thousand bases all over the world in more than three quarters of the world's countries.   As Jesse Jackson said back in the 80s, you get the money where the money went, and a lot of it went to the Pentagon. We have to get that back too. Any amens from the choir? I'm just looking at people who haven't had a chance to ask a question yet. Let me come over here. We're looking for a non-repeat offenders. Thank you so much. Thank you all so much. So one question I have is as we're looking at a potential tax on the upper upper echelons, one thought that I had is with the main tax, what extent do you think, because it was 110,000 that people might think, well, geez, that might actually be me. I know Salinda once said like a year and a half ago, when we were working on the tax cups, job debt, is that people think, oh, I might actually make a million. So they see themselves in a higher bracket. I wonder if you feel like, if Maine had been on the upper 1% or upper 110, the 1%, do you think the outcome would be different? Is that enough of a change that could shift it? Yeah, great question. I'd be curious to what my fellow panelists think I'm at. We found on multiple campaigns that this piece that you just said, people aspire to be rich, is a real thing. Even if there's so far, I mean, there were people on the, when we were on the doors, there were people who were very clear, I make less than $50,000 a year. I am never, ever, ever going to make $128,000 a year. But I still might, you know, like there's this like, which, you know, it is, it is, but it speaks to why this is more than just messaging. This is like, it is a cultural, like reality that we have to actually confront, which means that we have to have a deeper strategy, which goes back to the organizing and the power building becomes so critical, the conversations with people and helping them understand what's really at stake. I mean, how our economy really functions, what is our, I mean, most people that we spoke to didn't even realize how little higher incomes are taxed. No idea. And so their assumption is everyone is getting taxed equally, right? It's like, and so we have a lot of work to do, all of that to say. So I'm not sure, actually, that it would have made a huge amount of difference. But I'm curious about my panel, panel panelists. By the way, I love this all women panel. Sorry, and you, Chuck. I'm honored to be here. Yeah. I could say maybe on the, on the other side of it, in terms of, you know, political education and awareness, you know, we've the poor people's campaign has really taken on the word poor. And what that means. And the Washington Post fact checker took us on as well. Well, it took Biden on to be more clearly, you know, kind of taking, we say there are 140 million poor and low income people in this country. But, and that's true. And but, but what it means, like what the meaning of that, how you become poor, if you failed as a, you know, moral failure of you have, you don't pray hard enough, you don't work hard enough, all these things. I think that's part of the, the association of, you know, where people see themselves, right? The aspirational, it's one thing to be aspirational. It's one kind of a shame that's built in in being poor, not being able to meet your needs. And part of part of the responsibility, part of the narrative change that we are trying to do is to move ourselves from, you know, you know, self blame to social claim and saying no, this is not the fault of the poor. Poverty is a process and it is caused by systems and structures that make poor, you know, make people poor differently. That's what racism does, right? And, and sexism and all these other isms. And, and then there there has to be a process to correct that and we can do it. Take organizing, right? It takes like people who people trust building the relationship to be able to have a counter cultural shift, right? And so I just think that there's this great partnership that I sure all our organizations participate in with organizations like EPI and IPS that give us the tools to be able to have those conversations and help people tap back into what they know and to be able to feed sort of some of those the findings that we get from those conversations as well back over. And there's also, and I think you were getting at this with your remarks too, that there's a difference between being a rich person and a wealthy person. And I feel like so often our conceptions of rich people are, you know, come from Real Housewives and Million Dollar Listing and, and are really divorced from, you know, what we're actually talking about when we're actually talking about, you know, this wealth that, you know, this kind of just, just voraciously moving through the world with very little human touch to it. And, and so I think that gets back to the challenge that I keep posing, which is how do we make that visible and how do we make that concrete? It's funny, Frank, Robert Frank wrote this book called Richistan and he, he broke the rich into several villages.  And so anyway, might be fun to do a popular education version of who's living in rich, when we say rich, what do we mean, you know, and then see if it can be helpful in a campaign context. Did, did we have a question right here? Yalani? Thank you. Former mayor of Berkeley, California. Having worked in movements for many, many years, I've seen citizen organizing. I'm assuming you mean some kind of door knocking, but I don't know. I've seen it come and go and we have not taken power yet in spite of the promise. So my questions are, for all of you, how do you deal with registering people to vote or talking about that? How do you inform and involve the people that become members by donating? And how do you work together nationally? Do you carve up the territory or do you compete for funding and supporters? How does this actually work to build a movement? Anybody want to tackle that? You don't all have to answer that. As what had been into action, what had been an ongoing conversation among many of us, that we need to collaborate more and move big funders especially toward helping us do that instead of being in a competition mindset. I think that one of the challenges for progressive organizations is that progressive funders look for quick wins and conservative funders have a 40-year plan. And so it's a different dynamic and an ecosystem. And so I think that those are challenges. I think that probably all of us are experimenting with traditional organizing, online organizing, and a range of other kinds of ways of engaging folks and moving people to action in the real world. And so I think that those experiments are really exciting and require patient money, frankly. And I think that I'm actually so hopeful and optimistic in this moment about how the progressive infrastructure is coming together and really thinking about creative ways for us to work together to honor the work that we've all done already, but also to really maximize our impact in this moment and beyond. Others have things? Well, I would ditto everything Connie just said. And it is true that I think we're in a moment of incredible transformation, like economy, planet, everything, in addition to like how we as movements can meet the moment. And so the experimentation is real. People are really trying new things and ways. And I think we do need patient money. So I loved how you just said that. And I want to acknowledge, and partially I'm in it because I'm transitioning out, but there are real generational shifts happening in our movement. And young leaders and leaders of color and more women of color who are running organizations who deserve the support and the long term support for the work that's happening. And I'm saying that because I think a big problem we have is that often donor bases and funders are not as comfortable when the person they've seen for 20 years, 30 years run an organization transitions. And that's real that we have to actually contend with, because the money question gets harder and harder. And if we are really a movement about equity, and we believe we want more people, more diversity and leadership, then we actually need to support leaders who are stepping up in this incredibly difficult moment in our history. So one of the ways that these will be our final comments, we're going to close out with this particular question. One of the ways we've been kind of encouraging that new leadership is the poor people's campaign is a state based movement. So we have committees in 40 different states. And that's where we actually drive all of our online donors, anybody who's giving, we encourage them to go to the state committees, because that's where they're going to be doing the cultural events and the door knocking and the organizing. That's where they need a place to to jump in when and if they can. And on the other hand, we know and we are going to be registering people for a movement that votes. We also know that one election is not going to change everything. So we have to build, as we've been saying, the long term infrastructure and capacity among ourselves, but with everybody in this room and everybody's not in this room to to to build something out for the long haul. We very much believe in not reinventing the wheel and also trying to do more with less as we all have to do in the progressive movement. You know, we supported 1100 candidates last cycle across the country and that required very intense on the ground work with local partners everywhere across the country. But I do think that investment in long term infrastructure, if there's sort of one one thing that I think you would hear from most progressive organizers, it's sort of a plea for an investment in long term infrastructure when we are we're the other side is dramatically dramatically outspending us. Please join me in thanking our panel here. Thank you all.


On behalf of Ford Fund, the philanthropic Arm of Ford Motor Company, thank you for joining us as we honor and recognize the important role of African Americans in our nation's history. For more than a century, Ford has put the world on wheels, fostered innovation, and stepped up in times of need. From our historic $5 day wage, regardless of race, to our contributions to the war effort during World War II, to the production of urgently needed medical equipment and PPE supplies to help combat the coronavirus pandemic, we are starting to build a better world for everyone, every day. That is why we are proud to partner with the National Archives Foundation and the National Archives and Records Administration to connect, educate, and inspire Americans to celebrate our shared history. We are especially pleased to support the Archives Fund for Rights and Justice and Black History Month programming, which brings known and lesser known stories of people of color to citizens across the nation and around the world, including how they have shaped our country's history and are laying a foundation for the future. We hope you are enlightened, encouraged, and inspired to share what you learn. For more information on Ford Fund's broader community investments, visit Fordfund.org or follow us on social media. Thank you. Greetings from the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to tonight's panel discussion on the Black Family, Representation, Identity, and Diversity. We're presenting this program in partnership with the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and we thank them for their support. The theme of tonight's program, the Black Family, is also the theme of this year's Black History Month. Family is the core unit of our society, and those seeking family history documentation compose the single largest group of researchers here at the National Archives. Indeed, the greatest boost to genealogical research here was the publication of Alex Haley's roots and the subsequent miniseries in the 1970s. Family research was no longer only for the elites. It was something we could all dive into. We could all fill out our family stories and share them across the generations. Now it's my pleasure to welcome our panel and begin our discussion of the family as the foundation of African American life and history. Our moderator is Ida E. Jones, University Archivist at Morgan State University, and our panelists are Allison Parker, Author of Unceasing Militant, The Life of Mary Church Terrell, Darius Young, Author of Robert R. Church Jr. in the African American Political Struggle, John Whittington Franklin and Karen Roberts Franklin, Managing Members of Franklin Global LLC, and Barbara Spencer Dunn, Vice President for Membership and Contributor, and member of the Black History 365 Professional Development Team for the Association of the Study of African American Life and History. Thank you for joining us today. Good evening and thank you Dr. Ferriero for the warm welcome. As the moderator, I want to share a statement so we can contextualize our conversation. The Black Family in America is one of the oldest institutions created by formerly enslaved Africans. Cattle enslavement complicated the formation of nuclear families while spawning kinship networks to provide communal ties. In the narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, he wrote, my mother's name was Harriet Bailey. She was the daughter of Isaac and Betsy Bailey, both colored and quite dark. My father was a white man. He was admitted to be such I ever heard speak of my parentage. My mother and I were separated when I was an infant, before I knew her as my mother. He modeled his life in two separate biographies during the course of his lifetime, from enslavement to self emancipation. Throughout his life, he became a husband, father, abolitionist, feminist, ambassador, and statesman. Clearly, his life served as a prism through which the light of the Black family's representation, identity, and diversity is refracted. Tonight, using the life of Douglass as a prism, we will explore select aspects of Black family, to politics with the church siblings, to marriage and familiar legacy with the Roberts and Franklin Union, to researching ancestral plantation in Cushing, Texas. All of these aspects of Black family life were expressed by Douglass in his autobiographies. Also, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, utilized Douglass as a prism, bringing all Americans into consciousness of Black history by selecting February for Negro History Week in 1926. Bookended by the birth dates of Abraham Lincoln on February 12th and Frederick Douglass on February 14th, Douglass himself stated, genealogical trees did not flourish among the slaves. However, today, we, as descendants, continue to seek understanding and celebration of how familial ties are organisms expanding and collapsing in each generation. In brief, the two church siblings represent a family from Memphis, Tennessee, and they worked independently and collaboratively at times to enrich the political voice of African Americans in bipartisan politics. Two recent biographies recover the personal and public lives of Mary Church Terrell and her younger brother Robert R. Church Jr. These siblings represented blended family born in enslavement and during reconstruction. They represented the aspirations of African Americans seeking voice and citizenship in national, local, politics, government and society. The idea of power couples lends itself to being highly visible and power broken in select circles. However, in the African American community, power couples are broadly defined through partnerships that unite legacy and vision. The identity of the Franklin Roberts family is a living legacy of a power couple formed from the educated elite. Their ancestry in medical, legal and academic professions spans a greater part of the 20th century. Inspired by their ancestors, the Franklin Roberts family demonstrates aspects of how identity is crafted, curated and transferred throughout the community.  The enslavement period morphed according to its staple produce, region of the country and proximity to port cities. Barbara Spencer Dunn embodies this aspect of diversity through sharing her ancestral roots from Cushing, Texas on the Monteverdi plantation. This story recognizes how the Dunn family survived. Their genealogical research sheds light on how plantation life was experienced differently in eastern Texas. In essence, the black family continues to refract the light of history, inclusion, patriotism, heritage, travail and triumph. Tonight's discussion will present a cursory introduction to aspects of representation, identity and diversity. For additional information and for further programming, please visit asalh.org as well as the National Park Services Frederick Douglas National Historic Site and as you heard from our audience in the United States, narah.org. Thank you and enjoy. I would like to introduce our panelists once again for your discussion. There are three groups and there are going to be three topics. So our first conversants will be Allison Parker, Chair, Department of History at the University of Delaware, author of Unceasing Militant, The Life of Mary Church Terrell. Followed by Darius Young, Associate Professor of History at FAMU in Florida, who's the author of Robert R. Church Jr. and the African American Political Struggle. I'll introduce the next set after they finish. Thank you and enjoy. Allison? Thank you so much for the invitation to be here. I'm going to try to share my screen now. Can you see it? Yes? Okay. I'm very happy to be part of this and I'm going to give you a brief discussion of Mary or Molly Church's family history and its connection to her activism. Mary or Molly Church's father was Robert Reed Church and he was born to an enslaved woman, Emmeline, who's in slavery. Dr. Burton allowed his friend, another white man, the steamboat captain, Charles B. Church, free and open access to her. Emmeline gave birth to Robert Reed Church in 1839. After she died at age 30, the Burton family sold 12-year-old Robert to his biological father. Decades later, Burton's daughter offered additional details to Robert about how and why he was sold. Captain Church, she claimed, had promised Emmeline he would buy you and emancipate you and put you in school in Cincinnati. But Robert's father and slave never followed through on his 1851 promise to the dying Emmeline who had hoped against hope that her son would become a free and literate young man. Later, during the Civil War, the still enslaved Robert Church courted Louisa Ayers, the enslaved daughter of a white Memphis attorney, T.S. Ayers. Robert and Louisa wed in 1862 in a ceremony attended by both of their white and labor fathers who served as the witnesses. Their daughter, Molly Church, was born enslaved in the middle of the Civil War in 1863 in Memphis, Tennessee. I emphasize all of this because some members of Robert Church's family later tried to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the notion that their revered patriarch had been a slave. In contrast, as a civil rights activist, Molly Church Terrell always drew on her family history to critique white nostalgia for the system of enslavement, a nostalgia that never acknowledged the harm done to enslaved families who were separated, humiliated, and treated as less than fully human. When her father, Robert Church, was an adult, he learned more of his family history from letters he received from the Burton family and described how they sold his grandmother Lucy away from her child, Emily, as a simple economic calculus. In the changing scenes of commercial life, grandfather was forced to send 100 Negroes at one time from Virginia to Mississippi to pay a debt. Among the number was your grandmother Lucy. She was bought by a very rich planter in Mississippi who gave her the same liberty of action our family had. The letter in life was she treated as a slave. This event separated your mother and grandmother. Without empathy or irony, the letter writer could not see that this permanent force separation was a searing illustration of the power of the institution of enslavement. Robert Church shared this 1901 letter with his daughter Molly, who was by then a mother herself. She was haunted by this matter of fact recounting and in public speeches pointed to her family's history to condemn white Southerners for their hypocritical nostalgia. When slavery is discussed and somebody rhapsodizes upon the goodness and kindness of masters and mistresses toward their slaves, it is hard for me to conceal my disgust. The anguish of one slave mother from whom her baby was snatched away outweighs all the kindnesses and goodness which were occasionally shown a favored slave.  For instance, the White National Purity Association invited Terrell to give a talk on purity and the Negro in 1905, in which she highlighted the vulnerability of black women to rape by white men. She charged that even in the 20th century, colored women have been regarded as the rightful prey of every white man, and they have been protected from the wiles and luxury of their destroyers neither by public sentiment nor by law. In spite of having spent her first two years enslaved, Molly Church grew up in a privileged household. She learned to use her class privilege, education, light-skinned color, and cross-class and cross-race connections in tactical ways to work on a wide range of social justice and civil rights campaigns. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Allison. And I'll go ahead and share my screen as well. I want to thank Ida again for inviting me to participate in this conversation. And I know we have a limited amount of time, so I will introduce you all to the person that I wrote about, Robert Church Jr. and the African American Political Struggle, which was published a couple years ago in the University Press of Florida, which really looks at Robert Church and his contributions to organizing the black vote in the first half of the 20th century by the 1920s. Church is probably the most influential black Republican of his era. Again, the son of Robert Reed Sr., who is a very influential real estate magnet, businessman, arguably the richest black man in the South during the height of his wealth, right? And so we talk about those issues, but today I want to talk about really his family and beginning with his second marriage to Anna Wright. Anna Wright, over here to your right is a phenomenal story as well. Anna was born free. Her father was a Quaker abolitionists in Pennsylvania, who would later move to Memphis, Tennessee. She attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and also went to school at Oberlin as well to study music. This marriage produced two children, Robert Jr. sitting down and his baby sister Annette, both of whom also following their big sisters footsteps, Molly, and attended Oberlin. Robert from there would go on to continue his studies for a year in New York at the Packard School of Business, really with the intention of coming back to run his father's company and in particular the bank that his father owned. In the book, I kind of talk about the child-rearing strategies of Robert Sr. and Anna that even though they were born into this privilege, even though they had access that most African-Americans did not have during the height of Jim Crow, very much so they were deliberate in the way that they approached, and Molly talks about this a lot too, Allison, in terms of how they were concealed really from the realities of racism. Instead of writing in second class cultures or in a black culture with trains, father would purchase an entire car. They went to these private schools up north and things of that nature with the intention of grooming activists who once they became a beige that they would confront racism when they were met with it, right? Robert marries a school teacher from Washington, D.C. by the name of Sarah, also known as Sally Parotti, church-born Sarah Parotti Johnson. She too comes from some privilege, went to the minor school in D.C., which is now UDC, also is a graduate of the famed M Street Colored High School, and as they were courting each other in 1909, 1910, Molly would often write Robert because Sarah would eventually come back to M Street and serve as a teacher, and Mary would kind of write him and keep him up to date with some of the things that she was doing and say hi for and things of that nature until they got married, Francis Grimke married them in this elaborate ceremony in D.C., and then they would eventually come back to Memphis. Their daughter, Sarah Roberta, church named after both their parents, too would have a very influential career in politics in the 1950s and beyond, a very significant figure as well in Memphis and Tennessee. When you're going through the church records, you know, she was very protective of her parents' legacy and did everything she would confront historians oftentimes if they said anything disparaging about her father, one of my mentors at Memphis, knew her very well, and I was very pleased to have access to those records when I was a student at University of Memphis. This was the church family house on Maudeville Street. There were other prominent black families who lived along that street. I wanted to show that house, not only because of how significant it is when we think about African Americans being able to achieve the amount of wealth to purchase a house of that scale, but to also talk about why it's important for us to continue to write these books and to tell these stories because that church, the church's house no longer exists as does none of the houses of the black, quote unquote, black elite in Memphis. It was destroyed a year after Robert Church Jr. passed away by a person by the name of Edward Hull Crump, Boss Crump in Memphis. He decided to light that house on fire in order to test the new fire nozzles that the fire department received. So that legacy is really a race in the city even though there are other markers of things available. So I'll go ahead and stop here to have more conversations about church and his contributions to the black freedom struggle during his era in the early 1920s and 1930s. Thank you. Thank you, Darius. Our next group will be Karen Roberts Franklin and John Whittington Franklin of the Franklin Global LLC, both managing members. Karen. Thank you. Good evening. Pictured here are my paternal grandparents, James Knox Roberts and Sally Jane Dangerfield Roberts, both born in Hume, Virginia in 1873 and 1878, respectively. They married in 1901 and moved to Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania where he was a mule driver in a coal mine and she was a homemaker. Next slide, please. My father, James Elvin Roberts, born on July 27th, 1903, seen here at the upper right-hand corner on his Hearst High School football team was the eldest of eight children. It was expected that he would become the foreman in the coal mines, but he wanted to attend college. Next slide, please. Following his high school graduation, he moved to Washington, DC to attend Howard University where he obtained his BS in 1931 and his MS in Zoology in 1933. Next slide, please. My father is pictured here having received his MD in 1937. He specialized in obstetrics and gynecology. Next slide, please. Here, he is after establishing his private practice near Howard University. His brothers followed him to DC and he established the Empire Laundry Diaper and Linen Service to employ them. Next slide, please. My mother's family is from South Carolina. My mother, Sevesta Othrin Viola Roche's mother, Hattie Viola Williams is pictured here in the center of the second row with her siblings and grandparents, circa 1900. Next slide, please. My mother pictured here on the left, she's around six years old, with her cousin Edna came to Washington, DC to finish high school at Cardoza Business High School in 1927. She returned to Columbia, South Carolina to attend Benedict College, her parents' alma mater. Next slide, please. She returns to DC to work in her aunt and uncle's store in Arlington, Virginia. She subsequently works as an executive secretary in the Department of Army of World War II. Next slide, please. She met my father in the 1940s. This photo of them dancing in the early 1950s was probably taken at Cai Delta Mew Medical Fraternity's Christmas dinner dance. Next slide, please. And this last image, they moved to Silver Spring, Maryland in April 1959, five years after their marriage, breaking the color barrier. Thank you. My father's family arrives in Indian territory in the 1830s as slaves to Chickasaw Indians. Born in 1820, David Burnie, owned by the Burnie family, frees himself and enlists in the Union Army as David Franklin. My grandfather, Buck Colbert Franklin, born in 1879, like his father, is a rancher and black cowboy. He goes to Roger Williams University, a black Baptist school in Nashville, where he meets Molly Lee Parker, my grandmother-to-be. Here he is in 1899 and 1901. These photographs are taken in the Calvin Brothers Studio in Nashville. While they're in college, petroleum and natural gas are discovered and Tulsa becomes the oil capital of the world. They marry in 1903, and he and my grandmother are farmers and teachers. Grandpa apprentices with other black lawyers in the Ardmore, Oklahoma, as admitted to the bar in December 1907, one month after statehood. The next image, please. On February 20th, exactly 100 years ago, 1921, he moves to Tulsa to establish a law firm with IH Spears, leaving his wife and two youngest children in Rentusville. May 31st to June 1st, 1921, the black community of Greenwood is destroyed by Tulsa race massacre. Pictured here on June 6th, he, on the right, and his law partner, IH Spears, on the left, receive their clients in a red cross tent with their temporary secretary, Effie Thompson, and my grandfather's college roommates. Next slide, please. My grandparents are not reunited until 1925 when Greenwood is still rebuilding. In the next slide, here is my grandfather, here's my father on the left with his brother, B.C. Franklin Jr. in the early 1940s. The next slide, please. My mother is from Goldsboro, North Carolina, pictured here with her brother before 1920, and in the next image, with her sister, Bertha. The next slide, please. Dad's brother goes to Fisk before him and my mother's sister follows her to Fisk. Here are my parents with my maternal grandmother at their college graduation in 1935. Next slide, please. Dad goes on to grad school at Harvard and mom to library school at Hampton. They marry in 1940 in Goldsboro. Their first jobs are in North Carolina. Dad at St. Aug, St. Augustine's College. You see them there in the middle of the front row. Before moving to North Carolina, College for Negroes in 1943, where he teaches history, and mom is the librarian. Next slide, please. They moved to Washington in 1947, just as from slavery to freedom is being published. Dad is a professor at Howard and mom in the next image, is a librarian in the last image, is a librarian in the Prince George's and D.C. public schools. Thank you. Thank you very much for that presentation, John. Our last panelist before discussion is Barbara Spencer Dunn. She is currently the vice president of membership of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History and a contributor and member of the Black History 365 professional development team. Ms. Dunn? Ms. Dunn. Every child should have a village. And my village was my community. I now understand the commitment my parents had to community was in their DNA. Their village was their community. So they grew up at a time right after slavery in the early 1900s. And so the pictures that you will see flowing behind me are just family photos that depict my family. Recently in 2018, my family joined many family members from around the country at a celebration when the state of Texas erected a monument to my family. Those who were enslaved on the Monteverdi plantation in Russ County, Texas, they were survivors. And that is why I know that we are survivors. I think a lot about the narrative of Frederick Douglass when he asked the profound question, why am I a slave? I'm going to answer that question today for the sake of this conversation because there is a root cause for slavery. The root cause is greed that created a system of slavery and that system of slavery has a clear, harsh, brutal logic behind this root. They created a false racial construct that empowered an entire culture of people to brutalize and inflict crimes against the other culture. This brutalization was against the humanity of this culture that still exists today. So what we have to do is the truth must be told. So what did my family do? That takes me back to Monteverdi. Even in the midst of slavery they found freedom in enslavement because they were free in their minds. They were able to grow their own crops and they kept the money when they sold the crops. So they had money when slavery ended. They worked together in that community. And when slavery ended in 1865 my great grandfather, Green Lewis and his wife, Phoebe donated the land that started the first school in church in that community. And what is very empowering to me is that my family when they were told they needed surnames they did not take the surnames of the slave owners. They did an African tradition who says to me they held strong to their African traditions even in the midst of slavery. I come from a long line of ministers and preachers men and women of God. And that is what really kept our family together. And in these photos you will see in 1987 we attended a family reunion and that was the start of us collecting information from our elder in the family at that reunion and we had our family research and we've been doing that ever since we cousins across the country. The community that my family grew up in was a village. They took care of this children in that village and when my parents got married in her parents' yard in Anadarka, Texas they left there and went to Borga, Texas and Borga was a strong community as well. The church was always in the lead in the community and my parents' old my parents moved me and my sister to Amarillo, Texas and my third sister was born in Amarillo. Amarillo was a strong community and the churches again were in the lead in the community. My father was a pastor for 36 years and I can remember my father being in three piece suits with his fellow ministers and they'd go downtown and bail people out of jail. They were very much the head of the community. They would come home weekends and they would end at midnight and we walked home without fear because our village took care of us. I can remember the bookmobile coming to my home and it was a night until years later that I realized we could not go to the library which is why the bookmobile came to our neighborhood but our families, our communities fought for us to have those bookmobiles so we could have the same things that other people had. And my family our community was strong nobody was hungry in our communities and when I go back to Monteverdi in 2018 the state of Texas erected a monument that really honored those enslaved on the Monteverdi plantation and it was the first time those enslaved were honored with a monument and my family's name Spencer and Ball are on that monument. This is the school where my parents grew up they grew up in a Rosenwald school that was built in 1925 and 26 but it started in 1868 when they started the church in Outer Darker we had a strong family community my parents had a strong family community the black community has been the moral base for strength in this country and we continue to do that so I say to you as Dr. Woodson said Christianity in this country we know what Christianity is the Negro was a Christian himself and he did not doubt the power of the principles denunciated by Jesus Christ but the religion that was practiced at that time he doubted if there was actual Christianity that ever existed in Europe and he said if it did it died an untimely death on his trip across the Atlantic the church must be strong as it was during my time it's time for us to take the lead again in order to save this country and what will save this country is the truth the enemy is not the individual who has oppressed him but the evil system which has permitted the individual to do so so let's question that system that still exists today by educating all about the truth of our history and I look forward to this discussion thank you Ida thank you Barbara very enriching so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to have questions and I think I'm going to start with Karen because I have an affinity for Washington DC and Howard University and I would like you to discuss about the empire laundry business as an MD and OBGYN for your father to have opened a business to be parallel to that in terms of wealth or notoriety in the community well it changed my family because his brothers his younger brothers were still in Pennsylvania and they weren't able to complete college and my father did not want them to have to work a menial job I worked for white men and so he had the means to be able to obtain a loan from industrial bank of Washington and to create the laundry service and one of his patients had complained to him about how there wasn't really a good diaper service in DC and he knew there was a new theater as well as Howard University was one of his one of their main clients as well in the limited service so he created that business because he did not want his family to be dependent on working for white men thank you and that would lead me back to Allison in terms of how her mother talking about Molly Church and her mother how important was Louise Ayers Church to terror in her personal life and then her own issue with motherhood as you describe in your book about various medical health issues yeah Louise Ayers Church was a business owner and she was able to set up a hair shop that sold hair extensions and wigs for elite white women in the era in Memphis Tennessee after the Civil War and from what we can gather her white father who was also her enslaver seems to have either given her a loan or money to start the business but she was able to leverage that to buy the first family home and their first carriage and so this was at a time when Robert Church was having his own series of troubles because he had challenged the basically the black codes and tried to open up his own business and so Molly Church Terrell always looked up to her mother as someone who was an independent businesswoman thank you we have a question from the audience which I'd like to post both Darius and Barbara and I'm going to start with you first Darius the question was how do the stories of the persons that you're talking about compare to those not as advantage to have left documentary evidence or photographic evidence how do you view that in terms of scholarship and how you capture stories well I'll kind of talk about just my introduction to Church I actually was a student at University of Memphis and I planned to write about race violence in lynching and I in my first research seminar started to I wrote about the lynching of ill persons in 1917 and from there I really saw how close politics were to understanding race violence in the south and I came across this guy Robert Church Jr and when I was there the collection from what I understand had recently been open so I was in a very advantage position Allison probably has seen the collection as well where I mean there's dozens and dozens of boxes and papers from Church senior from junior from Roberta and the entire family and from that you think about really for me it was black politics but I wanted to use Church and place him into the conversation of black leadership and really develop a narrative that intertwine those two where we're talking about him as this black political leader who's close with James Wilton Johnson and interacting with WB Du Bois and all these Titans when we think about the black freedom struggle but also to talk about the people organizing the black vote and him really teaching and talking to folks not only in Tennessee but throughout the United States about the importance of that and you know I was just able and really lucky to be able to do that with the access that I had to that collection and I hope I accomplish that in the book as well so Barbara can you also answer a question similar along the lines of how does the stories that you're talking about compare or how would someone who has less documentary evidence tell their story or be included in that narrative of American history? That's a very good question Ida because my family was very surprised when in 2010 we found out about a book that was written by Norman Winfrey. He did his PhD at the University of Texas and these records were left by the slave owner to the University of Texas we would not have known all the information we know but I am really asking people to do and which is why I really address the brutal root of slavery we have to come together as the human family because most of our records we have to get to the rest of our records by connecting with the white family that enslaved us and if we don't do that all we will know is what we get from our family history, the oral history and through our DNA connections I am connected with cousins who have found me, a cousin in England who found us through DNA but I have a cousin that is really working hard because he found his cousins through DNA he is working hard to help other people find their relatives through DNA so we have to really come to a reconciliation in this country because we're not going to get to the end if we don't come together as the human family. Thank you and that's a perfect segue to John. I would like to know how your mother's career as a librarian will you facilitate your career as well as your father's kind of person in the stacks to be an assistance to him? Well you know that to avoid rape black fathers sent their daughters if they could to college before they'd send their sons to college so my grandmother and her sister went to Livingston, their daughters of an A.M.E. Zion Bishop so they go to Livingston College in Salisbury, North Carolina at the turn of the 19th to 20th century and they graduated in 193 and 194 respectively so my mother grows up in a household with college graduates her father and mother college graduates she and my father become freshman sweethearts through college and she decides to go straight from Fisk in 1935 to Hampton and I asked my parents about when did they first come to Washington, when did they first come to the Library of Congress and my mother comes in her first year at Hampton to Washington with her class to visit the National Archives and the Library of Congress and she's committed to being a librarian by that time and so her first job in Goldsburg as an English teacher but when she and my father marry she then goes to a series of librarian positions in Raleigh in Durham as I said at North Carolina Central Law Library at North Carolina Central and then when she comes here to DC she has the same experience that my father's mother had she's working for the Prince George's County school system as a librarian but she doesn't have sufficient tenure in the system and the superintendent and Karen and I found this letter in my mother's meticulous files at the Duke Library the superintendent denies her maternity and so she leaves the Prince George's County system takes care of and has me and then as soon as she's able joins the public library system in Washington and is the first librarian at Spingard when it opens then she like Karen's mother when we come on the scene and are living in predominantly white and hostile neighborhoods they stop working to usher us through elementary school when we come home if a crisis calling us whatever at school they're home to support us before our fathers get home so after I leave the nest at least after I leave elementary school she then begins to be involved sometimes as a librarian at children's hospitals but she becomes deeply involved in Illinois family and child services and she's on the board of Illinois child services and so she's concerned with children and their welfare she's also very concerned and her sister becomes a librarian and Karen's mother at one point also is a librarian she becomes concerned with the dearth of materials for African American children because children's books published in the United States are primarily at that time for white children so there's a movement among black librarians to make sure that their children's books written for and geared to are available to black children in libraries that's a very fitting question I would like to ask both Allison and Darius to talk about this relationship of books for children it's my understanding in reading Darius's work that Molly would send her brother books and kind of encourage his literacy as a young person and give him a global perspective so if Darius and Allison kind of talk about a familial relationship between sister and brother almost could have been his mother because of her age difference with him what did that mean in terms of the sense of the sense of agency and the sense of responsibility to community right in many ways Church follows Molly's footsteps in times of going to Oberlin and things of that nature but yeah when she was studying in Germany she would send him these coloring books children's books that were written in German she would sign her letters using German language and the kicker to that was Church was like three he was just this kid but that was very much his introduction and I mean it gives you a lesson so what education meant to that family and she challenged him as a three-year-old, four-year-old in those letters to constantly read and to learn other languages and to really be abreast of the issues of his day as a toddler and so she has this very profound impact on him not only in terms of his pursuit of education but even as he's trying to come into his own and he's trying to emerge on the political scene you know he is very much a victim of his day in some of his early work when he first comes back home from college and you know evidently he was espousing ideas about women should not have the right to vote but his big sister is Molly Church Mary Church Terrell right and so I mean she wrote this four-page letter she said in title you know it starts off my dear sweet little brother and that was the nicest thing about that letter from there but from there as he develops the Lincoln League Mary plays a role, Ida B. Wells plays a role all the church women are registered to vote, help start the NAACP so she really shaped and molded him as a political activist and I think she may have been one of his largest influences in terms of his political activism as he matured into an activist of his own right yeah thank you for those stories that's really wonderful it is true that she was very smart and really precocious child and so her parents both thought that she needed to leave Memphis which at the time only had a very very inadequate so-called colored school that they didn't think that she would thrive in and she was from early on reading children's magazines and entering little contests and very very interested in things having to do with writing and even though she became a speech writer and a journalist she always had hopes to be a fiction writer which she didn't really entirely achieve so that was something that she regretted but she did really it mattered to her that her father had not been emancipated in 1851 church senior he didn't really know how to write he could read but he had somebody often Anna write church his second or technically actually his third wife because he was married much earlier during the period of slavery before Louisa but in any event the real issue for her is that he was not fully literate and she was so proud of what he achieved but it bothered and upset her that he had never had that opportunity because he was so brilliant and her mother was taught French by her young mistress who was also her sister and so she learned some French but she also was kind of barely literate in terms of her ability in some ways to write so it was a strange mixture of being able to speak French but not and so it was Louisa who paid for her German lessons when she was in elementary school because her mother wanted her to truly be literate and fluent in multiple languages and she ended up being fluent in five so her mother's goals were reached so Thank you and I'd like to ask John and Karen to kind of chime in about the idea of how do you stewarder legacy of expectation from an educated elite background what is the intentions or is there an intention or is there a responsibility to raise awareness such as your great grandparents or grandparents might have had you feel some kind of compunction in the contemporary to kind of continue to hold that torch in that regard John why don't you start first I'm new Mr. This being the centennial of the Tulsa race massacre I've been deeply involved and concerned with the way that story is told you remember that the Tulsa massacre was suppressed for decades and some white journalists trying to do research about it in the 70s received death threats because the children of the people who destroyed our community who looted our homes burned the homes, bombed them from the air was still running Tulsa and when you read Tulsa's history by 1925 no white person is talking about the destruction of little Africa as they called it and when I took a delegation to Switzerland from Tulsa of people who should have known each other but didn't know each other and we showed the silent footage of the smoldering black community the international audience assumed it was world war Europe after world war two that's the result of white supremacy in the United States in 1921 and when a country like ours made practically no recognition of the centennial of the red summer of 1919 we realized that we must tell the history of 1921 and after January 6th I remembered my grandfather's words about being in a white mom and I've read those words in various talks so we have a responsibility to make sure that people do not forget we are a country that loves to forget and as my father called it likes happy history so we are forced to bring this to the attention of white tulsans I accused white tulsans the great extent of being holocaust deniers and I found it very interesting that as we approached the actual centennial in May and our spread planning for the 12th annual John Hope Franklin Reconciliation and America Symposium that one of the groups that reached out to us is an African-American Jewish theological group out of Chicago who are watching this history want to come and witness the centennial and one of the leaders of the group drew my attention to the fact that the Yiddish press June 1 June 2 1921 talks about Tulsa in the exact terms of pogrom that they used to describe the pogroms in Europe and they will be doing a panel at the symposium looking at the chronicling of attacks on black communities in the Yiddish press and Yiddish literature so they knew about it in London they knew about it in New York but the people in Tulsa growing up black and white have basically not known that history so part of the centennial purpose is to make sure that every child learns this history and every adult learns this history I think that it's important for us to document our family's histories and that's why John and I both plan to write about our lives as well as I want to write about my mother and father I think that's most important while we are able to and we have such rich images as well as documentation we also have found both, John and I both have found that while growing up a lot of people are just whites but a lot of people are not aware that African Americans that my grandmother my maternal grandmother and grandfather both were college graduates from Benedict College my mother was a graduate from Benedict College and my father came to Howard and received his medical degree and most people most particularly whites are not able to believe that I attended a reception with John and his father I don't recall what year but it was probably in the early maybe 2003-2004 and a lady told me that it wasn't possible that my grandfather had graduated from college she asked me what year was he born and I told her she looked at me and actually amazed me like I was blind that's possible because she couldn't imagine that because most whites did not graduate from college in the early 1900s in the early 1900s where my father graduated from college in 1931 my mother graduated in 1935 so I just think it's very important to educate everyone about our legacies thank you as we get ready to close and I'd like to give you all just a brief moment to think and how you learn a phrase is to think about what does the legacy of the black family representation, identity and diversity mean to you in terms of the lay community those who are simply just passing by and in terms of our young people the millennials what does that mean to them and then thoroughly to those individuals who might not know that their family did something because there's no documentary evidence there's no wealth of photographs or old tradition or even geographic stability so how would you speak to either one of those communities or all three of those communities in terms of what does the black family representation, identity and diversity look like from a millennial perspective a lay person's perspective or someone who does not feel that their story warrants research and I will start with Ms. Dunn Thank you Ida That is a really good question because the first thing that I think that the millennial community needs to understand is how important history is, how important knowing the past and how to understand what your present is and as we work together with an intergenerational flow of information what we have to do now is correct what's happening in our school systems that's one of the reasons why I'm very excited about BH 365 because this textbook is really an interactive textbook that reaches the millennials in a huge way not only do they have the truth and they start in Africa they also have music that goes along 41 songs that go with the units in the chapter and what I found from the young people that are engaged in this book they are really blown away with the information that they do not know and so for the lay community for the millennials even for the elders who got through life and still didn't get the truth I think all we need to do now is tell the truth it's documented and Dr. Woodson's work made sure it was the association for the study of African American life and history who is the reason why we celebrate Black History Month every year the documentation is there for us to get so I tell everybody start today doing your own self study don't wait for people, don't wait for us to fix the school system which we are working on but let's all come together and start a plan to learn what the truth about the history is that will really solve the problem that John is having with the 1921 Tulsa Massacre and everything else because we have to tell the truth and the truth does exist Thank you I'd like to Allison Yeah, I think that we really can communicate this idea that everyone has a history and everyone's history matters and telling the stories of prominent Blacks and elites who went to college and did all of these things is fantastic but it's not the end of it and I do think that saving records even you know if it's emails that people can be aware of the fact that their stories and lives matter and I think that oral histories do have a role to play in this because most families know something about their family histories and the projects that have you interview your oldest relatives and the story core type of ideas you know that's a really accessible thing you can do it on a phone and a lot of people do have phones these days who can record a conversation so it's really encouraging people to do that and to work with the libraries and archives to think about whether it's possible to save some of their family's documents in a way that feels meaningful to them with the full cooperation of the families rather than feeling like their papers are being taken away and one thing we did with Terrell's family when they donated a portion of the last papers that they had to Oberlin College is we also made sure they had copies of every single thing that they gave in multiple forms so that they could access it anytime they wanted and didn't feel like they were losing that family history when they gave those last papers to Oberlin recently.  Well I agree with Allison I believe it's important for the younger people to start off interviewing their elders even if they do not have the papers or they don't have a collection of photos they could still start off with talking with their elders and getting to know their elders and finding out what their story is and I agree that everyone has a rich history it doesn't have to be where you have to be a college graduate to an order to have had a rich life but you certainly could start off with interviewing your elders and give most people take the time or when they do they wish they had there's so many things I would have liked to have asked my parents that I did not and you will find that that you're unable to do so so I would start there and then to educate our children I really don't think that they know their full history and that's what's so important and I think if they knew their rich history they would know that they are playing an important role in the society. Thank you I'm going to go to Darius next we're saving for last John. Alright so real quick again I agree with everything the panelists said before me the first thing I wrote down was to have conversations with the elders and your family but also when you think about the theme that Asala has came up with this year it forces us to think about family outside of just the context of these blood bonds and to think about it in terms of community and kinship and that some of us may not have access to our elders anymore in our own personal families but if we think about family from a community perspective and understand that all of our stories whether we're from the families like Mrs. Franklin just said or from working class families whatever that all of those stories are important vital and are all connected and I think that's what we're trying to do ultimately with our work is to not separate and divide the elite from the masses or so on and so forth but to really talk about the collective black experience and how rich and diverse it is so to think about family from a community perspective and to be interested in learning and telling those stories as we move forward so Thank you Ida It's been a great discussion I've enjoyed being with all of the panelists My father said that everyone's life is important and everyone's life story is worthy of a book regardless of where you are in the social hierarchy we're such a stratified society that we must realize that we actually have family members of different social classes and we value them whether they are as aunts, uncles, children, cousins so within our families we have a range of experience and we need to know not just the experience of our elders but if you have two or three generations children need to know about their parents and their cousins lives if you have the opportunity now with telephones and we can talk to each other across the country we don't actually have to physically be in the same city to learn from each other so in the museum community as echoing my fellow panelists we encourage young people to learn the skill of interviewing and once you interview someone you know and realize that they are repository of knowledge of all kinds of things that you haven't experienced then you can take that skill and ask your neighbors and then you can even ask people to let know about their lives so you can delve into the richness of the human experience and then share those experiences with other people that's what makes us able to understand one another but I do have to put in a point this has sort of been a binary black and white community discussion right now and one of us who consider ourselves freed the descendants of people enslaved by American Indians are battling with the tribes who want to deny they enslaved us and this is current law yesterday the Cherokee Supreme Court announced that they were no longer considering relations by blood so that people who were enslaved by them have rights to citizenship in the tribe if you go through the court system now there's a Supreme Court case dealing with the eastern half of Oklahoma so these are issues between Native and African American people that have yet to be resolved and we are being denied citizenship and access to our rights as citizens of those five alleged civilized tribes I get off my soapbox it's a lovely soapbox and I thank you so very much of course like I said this is going to be a sweet conversation and I want to thank my panelists Allison, Darius Karen, John and Barbara for a lovely conversation from the vantage place of the black family representation identity and diversity I would also like to thank the National Archives Foundation and a generous support from the Ford Motor Company fund for their sponsorship of this program I would also like to thank the partnership with the Association for the Study of African American Life and History the Association or a solid mention throughout all of this please do visit us at asalh.org we'll be having a conference in September we'll be going into greater deeper dives with a national and international audience on the black history theme the black family representation identity and diversity I'd be remiss if I did not thank Susan Clifton of NARA and the NARA IT community that have been very supportive of making this some seamless and making me a temporary engineer clicking buttons and I'd also be remiss if I did not thank Dr. Betty Gardner and Barbara Dunn for their planning and strategizing this collective conversation with our panelists once again thank you so very much please support our sponsors and like our panels have said start to investigate with the self going outwards into your community thank you all very much and have a good evening


t will do it tonight have a good one Mike um have a good everybody else enjoy the game Kenzie's gonna be live 10 a.m. Eastern tomorrow rip in personals and then no breaks tomorrow night we'll resume uh daytime Monday with Matt baseball 10 a.m. Eastern I'll be here Friday evening uh sorry Monday evening ripping uh group breaks as well and then drip personals on Monday with Kenzie that evening all right take care everybody