So welcome Dr. Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders, thank you so much for being willing to talk with me for this story in the self course. I'm really glad you could be here today. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> Yeah, so I'm excited to talk about your work and the way it connects to the themes of the course today. I think there's a lot of intersections and overlaps and maybe just to start us off with a little bit of connection to your life and your work. I wonder if you could share a story of someone's lived experience that shaped you growing up, regardless of format, that could be fiction, nonfiction, a conversation, a song, an image, anything that comes to mind. >> Well, actually, probably the lived experience that shaped me the most growing up was my great grandmother. She was probably the older relative that I was closest to and knew the most about growing up and probably the oldest living person I ever knew. She was 97 when she passed away, I was about 12 years old. She came to live with us when she was probably about 93, 94, and she had been living on her own up to that point [LAUGH] in time. [LAUGH] And I was just sort of fascinated by her. She had this sort of incredible life story where she had raised my mom and my aunt two twins. Since they were about two or three years old, their mother had left and my grandfather had moved away. And one of the sort of fascinating things was just to be this kind of child and knowing that she was coming to live with us. We had gone and visited her. She lived in a small town called Dale South Carolina out in the country near Buford South Carolina. It was all these small creeks and little rivers. If you know Buford it's just lots of water. She had all of these like peach and plum trees around her house, this little house. We would go running around the little porch, there's like pictures of us like on her porch. [LAUGH] And we went one day to kind of clean out her house. My mom was like her memory is going and we kind of don't really trust her to live on our own anymore. When they were cleaning out her house, one of the things they found in her nightstand was a loaded gun and I was like why in the worlds did this 92-year-old black woman in the south have a loaded gun? Well, now that I am older myself and I have studied black history for so many years and black people in the south, now it makes perfect sense, right? Why a black woman living on her own, particularly in the rural south would have a loaded gun. But I think about that memory a lot because it makes so much sense about how we understand black autonomy and black armed self-defense, black women's arm self-defense, black women's inner lives. And I think about black women in our lives a lot because I realized as much as my side project of trying to understand a lot about my own family's history, how little I still don't know about her old life, right? Because there's so much about black women in our lives that they purposely kept to themselves, right? The historian Darlene Clark Hine talks about this a lot, right? She says that black women purposely kept a lot to themselves. And I think about her a lot when I think about my own work, I think about how black women and black people in the south, how we've passed stories along to the next generation. And how unfortunately for people from my generation we're still trying to piece together so much from that, not just from our own families but from people that were trying to write about historically, right? People, I don't know, I'm still trying to piece together. They didn't leave traditional archives. They didn't leave new [INAUDIBLE] or letters or not many letters, right? So still a lot that I don't know from the people that I write about, but constructing those narratives and stories. I'm like, it's like history, detective work and it also requires a lot of creativity, a lot of speculation, a lot of speculative writing and that's sort of what it is to write black history. So like my great grandmother's life really and like the things I know and don't know about her I think is really emblematic of how I think about history and memory a lot as well. And I always hold like that particular that loaded gun and I always tell people about it. And when I asked my mom about that gun, she was like, yeah, of course, she had a gun. Sometimes the middle of the night she would hear something outside and she just take her gun and just shoot, pop pop into the night. [LAUGH] And I was like what? So [LAUGH] I think about that memory a lot wondering about the life of this kind of what I assumed was kind of like little lady because that's what I knew her as. And then I have learned so much about her life since, the hardships, the complications but realized that I could write a whole story of black people in the south through her life. I really could. >> That's so beautiful. Yes, wow, there's so many threads from what you just shared that I'm really appreciating. And one of them is the ways in which stories are shared sometimes without words or we have to use artifacts or other elements to piece together the story. So I'm wondering for your family members, what are some of those ways that you've been piecing together these clues? >> Well, a lot of it's just like talking to my older relatives right? Some of that is objects. So for my great grandmother, some of the objects are quilts, which of course are really historically important in black communities. My great grandmother had about four or five will my mom actually sent them to her grandchildren. So her granddaughter, so she has three granddaughters. I have a daughter, my sister has a daughter and my brother has a daughter. So she sent three of them to the granddaughters recently. There was a syrup panic this year because the quote that she sent to me was thought to be lost. And I about burst into tears. [LAUGH] And I tried to not think that it was actually gone. It actually came and showed up one day thankfully. because this quilt was made before my mother was born. So likely in the 20s, 1920s and 1930s. >> Wow >> And it's literally just a patchwork quilt that was made by my great grandmother. And it's something that was just pieced together and my mother helped repair it just years ago. My mother and my aunt repair some of the quilts that were in lesser conditions. But this was just they made blankets, they made clothes, things like this revolver, which is really old. There are other things like there's a broom that was in our family that was been used at weddings, the jump over the broom tradition. There are things like photographs or old pictures actually, you think there weren't their old pictures that my mom actually struggled to identify some of the people in these pictures. So she was like I think that's my father's grandmother, she legitimately did not know. But the stories from my parents and some of my aunts and uncles who are a little bit older have really been the things that have sustained me and helped me actually fill in the gaps with official records that do exist. >> Mm-hm >> So the official records that do exist are pretty They're sparse [CROSSTALK] records that are traditionally unreliable for anybody, right? Dates and names and birth dates are pretty much inaccurate, even more so for black people. [LAUGH] They'll inaccurately have names or relations, and connections, and putting that together is really hard. So where I found census records, I called up my parents and be, did my great grandmother have older siblings, I thought she was the oldest. And my mom was, you know what, I never knew that. But knowing what I know, which is that, child mortality rates, right, during the late 1800s were pretty high. Or that there were epidemics that happened during these certain time periods, likely children may have been born and have died, right? So having to piece together this from family stories, what they knew or didn't know. Or that, there's this person living in the household and they say this is a son and my mom was like, actually this was a nephew, [LAUGH] that was being raised in the household. So these connections that can't actually be fully captured by official records but are the sort of kinship networks that exist within our community that can't be actually officially recorded in the way, by these official records. And like I said, it's hard because my parents are in their seventies. So this generation itself, that's still only they've got just bits and pieces themselves, putting that together themselves has been really hard. Like I said, it's the text for [LAUGH] sitting there and I have all these running notes, like, okay, so this person was related to this person, and they were living here, and they did this. Figuring that out has been very hard, and mapping it together. It's been exciting too, because I've learned like so many stories. I was wondering, for example, why my great grandmother was living in Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1930s. And my mom said, yeah, she moved to Charleston, she worked in a cigar factory. There was a big cigar factory in Charleston for decades, and she worked there for about five or six years, I believe, when my grandfather was young. And so she was like, yeah, she lived in Charleston, so that's why for a time period she's in this census records in Charleston, which I did not know. So there are all these sort of connections, and it's interesting to realize that I'm never going to know everything. [LAUGH] It's scary to think that there's things I'm never going to get to the bottom of. But like I said, I do know that, because I'm a historian and person that has read a lot about black people living in South Carolina. And the actual relationships that have existed in labor and culture and all these things, that I can imagine the possibilities for what their lives were like. For example, I know my grandmother worked for a Jewish family in the 1850s, that own a shoe store. So, I don't really know much about what her life was like working for that family. I know she worked for that family because when she had dementia, when she was older, she kept calling my parents this couple's name. Yeah, [LAUGH] and I also knew because she had Matzo crackers. [LAUGH] And she's eating Matzo, which is, a black southern woman eating matzo, what's that about, right? And my mom was like, yeah, she worked for the Jewish family, they were really nice to us, they would give us free shoes, they owned a shoe store. And I know this family, I looked up the family, and actually that family has a whole archive of oral histories. Because, long story short, there is relatively large Jewish population in South Carolina, in the Charleston and Beaufort area. And this couple was one of the people that did oral histories. So I found out a bit about them, and their shoe store, and them living in South Carolina. So when I could write about what it might have been like for my great grandmother working for them, would have been through these sort of side source material. So crafting a narrative sometimes means, getting at the side sources, the side narratives, right? Reading through Hartman, reading through the archives against the biases, against the grains, right? So yeah, it's hard work, but it's necessary. And like I said, it's what I have to do even when I'm not writing about my own family. [LAUGH] What I want, because when I write my own work, I want to build out the stories of the people. I don't want them just to be people who show up in my work and say something, and then drop out. I want to at least say a little bit about who they are, right? I want to build in why they matter to, this woman says something about the civil war, right? She said that, white people knew what the war was about, which is what I think the title of my book may be. And I was curious, I was like, who was this woman? She was a WP navs, I want to know more about her. So I went into the census records and looked up as much as I could about her life. So I can pull four or five sentences of some kind of biography about her, because I think it matters for readers to know, and for me to know what kind of person she was and why she would say something like this. >> Yes, for people to be as multidimensional as possible. >> Exactly, exactly. >> Wow, some images that are standing out to me are, your grandmother and the Matzo crackers. >> [LAUGH] >> That way that there's so much story imbued in something small, that you get to follow and unravel. And also that idea of the quotes being passed down, and many generations hands adding their stitches and reinforcing and shifting them,. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Truly beautiful. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the work you do as an historian, and why this work called to you, because I think we're already getting at some of those things, but I'd love to hear more from you about that. >> Right, so when I first went to graduate school, I went to grad school and I was a little bit older, I'd worked for several years. I've always been interested in memory, right? I was very interested in this idea of historical memory, and I had done a Master's thesis around truth and reconciliation. I was interested in attempts to try to bring that model to the United States, because this was of course, when I was an undergrad, I took a class on truth and reconciliation attempts in Latin-America. And my professor randomly, I don't know if it was randomly or not, or he just detected that me and this guy were friends, and decided to pick us to do a project. because he heard on the radio in 2004, it was the 25th anniversary of this incident called the Greensboro massacre. Where five people who were affiliated with the Communist Workers Party, I think four of them were actually members, were killed by white nationalist in an incident in Greensboro, North Carolina. They had been activists who were doing work with the local textile mills mostly, but they're also trying to confront, which really was a resurgence of white nationalist activity in North Carolina during that time period, all across north Carolina. And they had showed up, right, at this event. American Nazi Party and the KKK were there and they were having this rally called the Death to the Klan rally. And these white nationalist groups, KKK, American Nazi Party, showed up there with guns and confronted them. Five people were killed, I think about a dozen or so more were injured. And there's evidence, there were police informants there, there were federal informants here, the police knew were going to happen. So this happened in 1979, this is the 25th anniversary in 2004. And it was all on the radio there because they were actually attempting to do, one, they had all these events around it. But they were going to probably do a truth and reconciliation commission around it. So our professor was like, you know what, I would like you guys to do your paper on this thing and to write it together. [LAUGH] I was like, okay, so it was sort of my first taste and really, I never heard of this incident before of course. And sort of my first taste of people really attempting to do this in an American context. I had heard before about the attempts to do commissions in Rosewood, but it wasn't technically a TRC to do commissions in Tulsa. But to do a formal TRC. And so when I went to grad school at Columbia, I was like, okay, I want to write about what this has looked like. All these attempts to have this kind of model like a truth commission model in the United States. So I was really interested in like bringing this idea of historical memory and reconciliation to the US. Which in my master's thesis which I've not looked at in many years, [LAUGH] I'm pretty sure I said that the US thinks that they're immune to this kind of looking to the past, right? We actively have our politicians say, let's move forward any time anything happens. And we pretty generically have said that about a lot of historical injustices and I talked about the exceptions that have happened. Like there was money paid out to the survivors of Japanese internment for example. Very little but there was paid, after much lobbying. I worked for years and then I came to grad school at Rutgers. I still wanted to think about the US and memory in some way because I wanted to think about why the US still thinks that they're kind of an exception to actually reckoning with memory in a particular way. But I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do but then [LAUGH] as I took my courses in the first year, the idea of Civil War memory really just kind of just stayed with me because I read quite a few books about Civil War memory. I read Blight's Race and Reunion, which was sort of one of the first books I read, which really reckoned with black memory. It was more a comparative work about black and white memory, but it reckoned with it in a serious way. And I was just thinking to myself, why don't we reckon with black memory of the war as its own important thing. And Blight's book ends around like 1913. And I was like, I grew up in South Carolina, I know that memory is still so, so crucial past 1913. So that's when I kind of came up with the idea of how black people thought about memory, confronted the lost cause throughout this entire time. How does black memory stand on its own as its own important kind of ideology? Like we think of the lost cause as an ideology of some sort. At least I do. And how do we think of black memory as serving ideological purposes as well? So that's where I kind of came to this myself and it is very much personal for me. I think I don't make it as clear in the recent article that was published about Denmark Vesey, but of course I'm from South Carolina. So my standing on this is that it's very personal to me because I'm from a place which is steeped in civil war memory and I went to high school during the nineties Confederate flag vows. So I remember going to high school in a high school where students were Confederate five belts and flew Confederate flags on the back of their trucks and wore Confederate flag flip flops, so. And argued that they should be able to wear Confederate flags. And when I was in high school, the Confederate flag came up the top of the State House and moved to another prominent spot [LAUGH] on the State House grounds where it came down in 2015. So this was sort of very formative time in my life, was seeing how this kind of played out in a formative time in my life. And thinking always that black people never really got a prominent role, our position and thinking through the history and memory of the civil war, even though so much of important civil war things that happened in South Carolina are about black people. The whole battle, the 54 of the Battle of Fort Wagner, that South Carolina has made famous in the film glory, that South Carolina. The Port Royal Experiment where black people are running their own farms, that South Carolina. Harriet Tubman's Combahee River rage where she leads, they're the first woman to lead a military operation where they burned down the plantation, freed hundreds of slaves, that South Carolina. This is all happening in South Carolina. But the memory of the civil war in South Carolina is very much still Confederate dominated. And to me that really influenced my own thought about because to black people, our memories are very different and we've used them in very different ways and I've seen it myself. So, because I know and I've seen it myself, I just can't write a book and say, I know I'm seeing it myself, but [LAUGH] I can write a book that I can historicize all of this and say historically, how have black people thought about the war differently. And how have they used this memory of the war in a very radical way, I would argue, throughout time. The know, you just know it. I always say black people know these things, but we always have to prove it. And I guess that's the thing. That's the thing, the tentative title that I have, they knew what the war was about. They kind of just knew what it was, they knew it was going to be about emancipation before. Like I always say, before the war even started, they knew there was going to be a war to end slavery. They knew it would end in violence. You read any of the radical black abolitionists of the 1820s and 1830s, they're saying it's going to end in violence. So, I always sort of grew up, when I would read black history, and there's always radical reading and interpretation of the war. That is not the interpretation that you get in sort of the mainstream scholarship. And I want to see that reflected, right? So that's the book I want to write, [LAUGH] So but it's very personal to me. Like I want what the narrative that I kind of got as the person that got a black history that was pretty radical. I want to see that narrative reflected when I talk about how black memory has functioned. >> Yes, that's so beautiful. Yes, thank you, I really feel that I wonder if you could talk about how you think about the difference between history and memory and where those connect to ideas of justice. >> Yeah, I mean, a lot of people think history memory are necessarily hostile, right? The are like, historians are like the scientists that are like we're doing our calculated, objective, >> Somehow they are like somewhere absolute. >> Right, they're absolutely are fact finding missions over here. But historians have actually played an outsized role in crafting memory as well, which you maybe some historians will finally admit. Because some of the biggest perpetrators of the lost cause, which is a form of sort of memory as well were historians, right? And historians should and have been very concerned with memory. Memory is very, is both public and private but the way that it plays out is very public. They're both political, right? You think one is not, but they're both very political as we have seen, they're both political. I think the thing about memory is that memory encompasses everything that a society sort of wants to think about something, right? Like if we talk about, say for instance the American revolution, right? Everything that a particular group or a society wants to think about the American revolution may be a form of memory. So if you have people from Massachusetts may have a collective sort of memory, right. About the American revolution because they're in Massachusetts and it's like everywhere. My friend who grew up Massachusetts, like I'm sick of hearing about concord. [LAUGH] We had to go on all those field trips to Lexington and concord, I hate it. >> Yes. >> Yeah, [LAUGH] For me I you are south Carolina, there's also a lot of American revolution too, but also much more about the civil war. So I don't have as much that hang up as they do around it. Or if you're really into one of the founding fathers, you might really have a particular thing about it. Or if you look at the way like statues function, statues are a function of memory, but how they got there is a function of history, right? So I think that their memory and history are inseparable to me. I think that memory is a lot more powerful than history to be frank, historians don't like to, they don't like to see that point, but it's clear that it is. Because if you look at the fact that the fealty that we have to certain individuals and certain ideas are functions of memory and not history. I mean recently I had a thread on twitter go viral, crazy viral by the way, which I don't even know what happened. All I stated was facts about Thomas Jefferson because some person wrote went on a bunch of tv shows complaining about Monticello. And saying that it's like too woke because they talk too much about slavery. Monticello and all I said was Jefferson owned 600 people in his lifetime. 600, 400 of them were owned at Monticello and I was like, that's the facts we should start with when we talk about Jefferson. Like he was in the top of 0.1% of enslavers, like that's a crazy amount of people to enslave. Like it is, those are just the facts about slavery is that that puts you in the top, top top of enslavers, so that tweet went crazy viral, I do not know why, right? So that tweet went viral, as you can imagine when a tweet goes viral. Here comes the founding father stands, I muted it of course, eventually who has time for all of that? Here comes the founding fathers stands in my mentions, right? After you get like 15,000 retweets 100,000 this is how it was, right? The founding father stands did not like that they're like, you can't say that that's the only thing we should say about him. Because the declaration and the ideals and you know what that is? That's a function of memory, right like it's historically true that Jefferson did all those things. You want to say that those things are important because that's how you want to remember Jefferson, right? Ideals that the deals that you want to keep of a certain person, right? >> The story we want to believe. >> Stories you want to believe, right that's part of memory. It is, so like memory is important and memory is useful as part of a usable past, right? Like a usable past can be used in many ways, right? Like if you look at even some of these like the fascist regimes that we've dealt with in the 20th century, right? They knew how to utilize certain types of usable past for better, for worse, right? People who may not have agreed with certain these fascist regimes, right they used and utilize them, right? So usable pasts were important, they're important to quote unquote every national government has a usable past. And memory is essential for a usable past, they're essential for radical and revolutionary movements as well, right? And I say this in my Denmark Vesey paper is that Denmark Vesey is an important part of a radical usable past. For many radical and revolutionary people and that is a function of the memory of Denmark Vesey. Maybe not a function of the history of Denmark Vesey, which as I say, >> Which is quite speculative. >> Quite speculative, quite sparse, right I pretty much see the point that I don't agree with the Michael Johnson's that we don't know if it happened. I'm pretty sure that it did but we still don't know much about Vesey, right? We don't really know much about him but even so the bare bones story is enough that he did attempt this, is enough for people to take it and run with it. Like that is the function of memory and that's why memory is more powerful because just the historical details of Vesey story are amazing. But the memory of Vesey and how it's been used that is so much more powerful. And that's more interesting to me at least in this instance, right? >> Yes. >> So historical memory to me is like immensely more fascinating, I believe in the power of history and what history can do. But I think that memory provokes so much more emotion in people is dangerous too, right? I think it's dangerous it can be and I think that that's like why we should pay more attention to it. And I don't think it can either be good or bad, I think it be both. Could be, to me it's really neutral. [LAUGH] It's rarely neutral. It's almost always being used in some way or the other. I'm very wary of it, right? Like I think that, historians, like I said, historians want to be, they want to be the objective force. And I always have my students read Michel-Rolph Trouillot Silencing The Past. Talking about the power and the story and how historians want to see themselves as like, outside of the crafting of the story, but they're part of the crafting of the story. We're part of the story, right? [LAUGH] Like we're part of making the stories and crafting the stories. They're still that cadre, I think of historians who want to say that they come with no biases. They come to the table completely objective. They're not one of those type [LAUGH] of historians, bring their experiences to the table. Which is why I sort of appreciate this chat because you start immediately with the personal experiences I think. And that just makes sense because as scholars, how are we not starting with those experiences? It's just- >> Our lenses are social identities, are positions in this world. >> Exactly. >> Yeah. >> It's absolutely dishonest I think to say that we haven't been driven to where we are scholars, as thinkers, as artists or whatever we do without our lenses, right? Do they dominate everything we do? Maybe not. But I would not be here doing the work that I do if I was not. And I grew up in small rural South Carolina, [LAUGH] had a great grandmother that I had or the parents that I had and the love of black history that I've had since I was a child to be honest. So yeah, I think, we see the delineation between history and memory to me is modeled. >> Yeah. >> It is modeled, their distinct different phenomenon that interact with each other a lot. They function differently. But I'm also immensely immensely interested in the ways that historians need to pay attention to how memory continues to shape. Also how it shapes how we write and think about history as well. >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> Yes, that's such a beautiful response. So many threats make so much sense. I'm wondering, okay, what if we shift to talk a little bit about Denmark Vesey and then revisit that idea of the relationship between justice and memory, and what it means. So, Denmark Vesey was a free black man who was accused and executed for his alleged role in one of the largest slave revolts in our history. And you write there's a long afterlife of the Vesey plot worth exploring because of what it reveals about the ties between the history and memory of slavery and about the political uses and approval of violence. This is just what we've been talking about. So, I wonder if you could share with us a little bit more about these different narratives around Vesey and the ways he's remembered differently in South Carolina. >> Vesey is very interesting, right? So, for years there's sort of this push and pull around Vesey. In Charleston for pretty much the rest of the 19th century, the white sort of structure of power really use Vesey as a sort of warning, right? They use it to restrict further rights of African Americans. African Americans in Charleston, including enslaved people had relative freedoms. In Charleston as sort of like urban environment where enslaved people could sometimes work, had some freedoms of movement. And as we saw in sort of the aftermath of many slave revolt plots that was sort of used as a justification to restrict movement to, for harsher punishments and all these other things after words. And sort of a warning of like, maybe you are enslaved people are not as happy as we thought they were, yada, yada, yada. But at the same time. And, you know, as I think I mentioned, it's like, this seductive figure came in and corrupted our happy enslaved people. How dare he? You know, there's no further sort of like questioning of, like, how could we both these things be true, right? So, like, you know, it was a sort of a justification for crackdowns, but also, like, I think VC also sort of represented, you know, the, like, dangers of like free black people, educated, free black people, the free black community in charleston, which was relatively large. You know, being like a, you know, decent size southern city. And also, you know, violence, right? Like slave revolt and slave insurrection. Whereas a constant fear, right? Like the constant fear that black people were going to rise up in the south, right? Like VC. It happened after stone. Rebellion, you know, in 17 90 I believe was the stone of rebellion, in charleston and and charleston area, sorry, it wasn't exactly in charleston. And you know, this sort of fear that black people justifiably we're going to one day get angry enough and rise again against, you know, slave owners, you know, etcetera. Right? I'm really fascinated too by the ways that violence. Right? Like I said, like the use of violence, It's sort of legislated, not legislated, sorry, debated in the basic plot. So, you know, I said 17, 1739 with stoner rebellion. I should know, I just talked about this last night with Peter with the historian. So it's in 1739, this is colonial times, right? In charleston. And this, you know, this rebellion happens. You know, these enslaved people who many of them are actually from Africa, right? And you know, they rebel. You know, this is early colonial days, They use sort of like, you know, they're sort of joint, you know, some of them speak the same languages, you know, etcetera. They take advantage of like absenteeism, which is what was common, you know, during this time period. It's very different when V. C. This is a more established charleston, right? Like this is not like, you know, and enslavement is more established in south Carolina, which is a state in the United States, post revolution. So the idea that, you know, people who were sort of living in, you know, the states for this while had been enslaved for this amount of time would revolt and use violence, right? Not the uncultured Africans that had only been here for a short amount of time, which was the excuse making of the stonewall rebellion in 1739, right? Was also fearful people's reactions to bases revolt over time. To me hinged on comfort versus discomfort with violence. And when I say that, I mean not just like the conservative, like, you know, slave apologist, slave owning apologists who are like, of course this guy's a despot and a crazy person or even the 19th, the 20th century conservative scholars who are like, you know, these people are crazy because they were planning revolts. They're all nuts. I'm talking about, you know, liberals, right? Like, and I say that in the broadest sense of like how I would understand their politics, right? And I mentioned this in the paper, right? I tried as much as I can to understand the politics of these people. I may not have been completely accurate, but I tried just like these people, I would say are liberals. They were a C. L. U. Members. Right? Like we would say they're liberals and they still have a discomfort with slave rebellion because it would mean killing white people, right? It would mean murder of people, they deem innocent right? In some way, shape or form so that's what I really wanted to get into is like, how do we think slavery wouldn't right? Do we accept that slavery should end through violence and that any means necessary to end slavery would need a violent revolution where yes. There would be murders, there will be killings of white people and I think that there is a discomfort and I mentioned this throughout the paper with violent revolution and I think you see that in the responses today. See where you see that splits where even like, it's less a political splits on black and, black liberals, black radicals are pretty much on the same side on this, but on. >> You see more white sort of radicals like communists and radicals are like Basie and then you see people like that Hayward's and like, yeah, it was like, I don't know this exactly, slavery is bad, but right, like we get a lot of that, right? Like, this like John Brown was kind of crazy basically, we don't know about that so I wanted to get into the messiness of that, right? Like in our modern understanding, like everybody can say slavery was bad, right? But not everyone would still say that yes, we would support Nat Turner or john Brown or Denmark pc because we still cannot hold onto the idea that people would have been right to use violence to end it. So I you know I wanted to get into the messiness of that I wanted to get into the messiness of like how people think about how people defend themselves. How slavery would end how slavery itself was a violent system that produced violence and whether we still have a discomfort with how people would have imagined the ending to it right? And I think that bases memory really exposes the memory of bases attempted insurrection really exposes the fault lines of that really complex question around violent revolution and slavery right? Like I think ideally a lot of people would like to say that they would have supported M R V C but I like to get into the nitty gritty of it what was busy planning their plan to murder a lot of people right? Like something like a light would not turn or did which included women and Children right? And a lot of people say that's bad right? When that Turner did so like I like to get into the nitty gritty of these uncomfortable questions that I think that people have a lot of discomfort with. Still well also I think like I said we're in 2022 I don't think anybody, well maybe not anybody would be like slavery should have continued. But what would have supported Denmark V supporting Denmark VC would have looked like, what we understand what V C was trying to accomplish what would that have looked like? Our memory of the civil rights movement and our whitewash minister rights movement sort of impacts how we think about sort of violent revolution a bit or like how we think about violence and self defense and revolution. Because, a lot of our memory of the civil rights movement is like nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience and that kind of thing in MLK and being sort of a dominant part of the civil rights movement that we have the memory of. And of course we have the MLK that's frozen in time at the march on Washington who gave one speech and only one section of the speech where. Black boys and white girls and they're sitting down together and they're holding hands and the content of their character blah blah blah. That's it no more MLK after that apparently or before that, I don't know but yeah, so that's like the whitewash sort of speaking of memory, national memory of. The consumed memory of MLK is that the dominant part of the civil rights movement which has shaped I think the way that we think about how marginalized groups should respond to oppression. So I think about this a lot when I, I've talked to my students about protest movements which comes up a lot in both sections of my African American history course, right? Because I was like abolitionist, we're getting down right, we don't talk about a lot about abolitionist actually. They were experts in not just civil disobedience but armed self defense because when a fugitive slave act kicked in, they were like forming vigilance committees, right? They were there waiting for slave catchers to come to communities and they were fighting back, right? Like they were there fighting back they were like, look our slave catchers here, let's bring the alarm, we got guns were dragging people out. Like, there are great stories of them literally physically dragging and pulling, fugitives from slave catchers, right? Like there's just, we there are great stories of that happening like they have shot, they shot, slave catchers who are coming, to get, people who were fugitives, right? Like I think in Christiana and I think it's Christianity in Pennsylvania in 18 51 the slave catchers came to get, I think it was a couple three or 4 enslaved people are sorry fugitives who had, had escaped to Pennsylvania. Slave catchers came to get them, they rolled up, somebody rang a bell I don't know, people came out with guns and that was it like people got shot. Slave catchers got shot, they snatched the slaves up and they rolled out right? Like this is like people were they were here to defend and they weren't sitting down, they weren't like, singing songs and I'm not disrespecting that they were fighting physically to save people's lives, right? So multiple forms of fighting in defense and I think that the way that we've taught, protests in this country has leaned so much towards like, this is the one way that you don't fight back and to fight back makes you a bad person, right? Like, and so like when we've seen recent protests and if anything gets like any here out of line, the protesters are awful, riots, these riots, right? And I'm like, this is mild compared to like some of the like larger history of protests in this country, right? Like even the founding of this country was like a bunch of rowdy colonists, right? Like fighting back and being very rowdy, and violent to order to get their quote unquote independence, right? So I think, we've had such just a really Antonius around, the use of violence or like affirmative use of violence, I would even argue as far as, revolution or radical resistance or anything so when it comes up and I always teach it right? When it comes to abolitionists, when it comes to labor organizers, when it comes to, these were battles and these were people who mostly had violence. Used against them much more so right abolitionists were killed, right? Abolitionists were attacked, they were beaten this happened 1020 times fold on them not even to mention the violence of slavery. The same thing, you know when I teach US History the labor movement, it was violent like the beatings, the murders that happened against labor organizers, unions etcetera in the late 19th and early 20th century. It's a violent movement, right? Incredibly so. Same thing in the civil rights movement. We've seen this and we saw this in summer 2020. Look at the violence that was visited, we talked about the protesters being look at the violence that was visited against the protesters. One protester throws a rock at a cop. My God it's awful. The cops were dragging people by the hair just beating them. So I think like we have such this image of what people should do against depression in this country that's so shaped to be deferential to power. So I always to trouble that. And I think that about insurrections is a radical thought because one it demonstrates that people imagine freedom by any means and also people are constantly fighting back and people are not passive about it, right? People imagine it and in ways that may make all of us uncomfortable. You know, it may make some of us uncomfortable, I should say that they imagined like you know violent ways to free themselves and others you know, because they wanted to free themselves from violence. Like they there was not, there is no passive nonviolent form of slavery, right? Take my class. You know that you know, I just I you know, it's just it's it was a con credibly cruel and violent system that drove people to violence themselves. I think this this makes me want to return to that question of of justice and the ways that these narratives get us closer to it further from it. The ways that these struggles for freedom are ongoing in our times as well and what what knowing more of these histories can do for us. You know, I think it's interesting I think a couple of months ago I did a Q and a in long months with the author of a book called The Agitators, which is really good book where she looks at Francis seaward and Martha, right? And Harriet tubman who were all like living in auburn new york together. They were all women's rights activist and abolitionist. Of course we know Harry tubman, right? You know, who doesn't Francis c words, husband is probably more well known. And you know, he was Lincoln's Secretary of State, but and you know, she, I asked her, I was like you know the titles book, The agitators, I love that title because I think it's so direct and agitators are like seen as this like really sort of negative connotation and we talked a bit too because you know, I had this chat with her just a couple of days after the Dobbs decision, the Supreme Court decision. And you know, we kind of had this talk about, you know, you know, one of our questions that we got from the audience was you know, how do we see like the lessons learned from this book applying today and you know, me being the person I am. I'm very forceful and direct. I was like, well the lesson is to really respect the people who are agitating today. I said because I said just this past weekend while I was just watching the news and I'm seeing even in Greensville, you know, Greenville south Carolina cops beating protests, protesters on the streets that were protesting the decision. And I'm thinking to myself, we have people who are agitating on our streets today and we do not respect them. Like we respect these historical activists that are now rendered to our books. We talk about how great all the activists are from the back, all the martin Luther kings and you know, all the people like I said the Martha right, Harriet tubman's, you know the rosa parks, right? We don't even, you know, we didn't respect these people in our times, which is what I always say to and I mentioned that I said we didn't respect those people in their times. We did not. I said abolitionists were haunted in their time. It was like they burned down the pennsylvania hall when abolitionists were meeting. They chased Garrison out and tarred and feathered him, try to kill him. Yeah like William, Lloyd Garrison like these people's lives are threatened on a regular basis because of what they believed in. I said and that is still the case today, I said and we now we hold these people on a pedestal because they're no longer here, right? And we don't have to deal with the discomfort of not agreeing with them because they don't they have like you know uncompromising beliefs. These people are uncompromising because someone made a comment about like you know you know we're so divided and you know we really should get to like you know one of these like we really should like try to understand each other's beliefs and I was like well maybe that's true I said but also I'm thinking about how in the book, Francis wasn't trying to understand what the health slave owners wanted to think. In fact she really scolded her husband who went to go visit a plantation. He was like it's kind of nice here. She was like **** that, it's not nice here a plantation of the plantation, right? She was very uncompromising. She was like **** those people and the horse they rode in on right. Like there is no compromising with slave owners and I feel like there's a lesson to be learned here too is what I said, that's when it comes to people's rights. There is no compromising, there is no learning from the other sides. There is just my rights and that's it period, right? Like there are just issues that there cannot be compromised on. I said activists have always known this and believe this. I said was MLK trying to compromise with segregationist. No, I said we known this. So why in the year 2022 do we think that there's some compromising with people who believe that women shouldn't have have right to have an abortion? Why do we think that now is the time to compromise with people who believe absolute crap? I don't know. I just don't I don't know. I think we have this weird like you know, it's a historical, is what I'm saying, it's absolutely historical to like have that belief which sounds really good but does actually not respectful at all of the legacies of the people who we hold in such high esteem would not have done that at all on any of these issues, right? Like they would not have done these things. So we got to respect that I think and we also need to look at like, I don't know the domino effect of some of these decisions like I you know, I mentioned this which maybe some people didn't want to hear, but you know, I said that you know at a time when, you know, the dogs decision is happening, we're also, you know, having politicians push for more money for police. And I was thinking I was like, who's going to enforce these decisions? Who is going to be enforcing? These bands, there's going to be policing, the same criminal justice system. And these states are going to enforce that. We are giving money to these systems to enforce these very laws. The federal government is lining up to give money in these states, more money, right? So we really need to ask these questions, right? There's domino effects on these things, right? And I think that the justice component to me is just very real. I think if we look at the historical legacy of movements, of radical movements and how we pick and choose what we want to remember from them, right? [LAUGH] We people pick and choose what they want to remember and how commodified some of these movements have to come now and we lose the important lessons from them. I think because of that and that's why when I was talking about agitators, I was, my God, we need to think about how we don't really respect the agitators now. We still look at protesters in this sort of way, okay, people who are actually agitating on me, right? Like there's protesters and then there's people who are agitating, right? People are interrupting your favorite politicians, right? Who are nagging them, that you just want them to shut up because they're talking and you should be more respectful or the people who are not sitting there and refused to be at the table or sit down at the table with politicians who are demanding more. Refused to be there for photo ops, this are things like I said in that book, that all these women refused to do. I think that one of the things that I talked about with the author, Dorothy was Dorothy Weekend in is her name, was that like Harriet Tubman, there was this raid, this darien raid in Georgia during the war. And soldiers, mostly black soldiers, raided this town and it was just seen by confederates and some white newspapers in the north, this awful thing like, they raided, these civilian homes, it was just so bad. And Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, it's war, we don't care, their reactions were so different than the white union kind of reactions, right? And it just really made me think again about this kind of any means necessary situation, right? We don't have time to play these polite games. We're talking about people's freedom, right? And there's an urgency that they feel they were both enslaved. That white Northerners will never feel that same urgency. So I think about that now and I think about some of the critiques then. People want to make demands and that's difficult, but civil rights activist, they weren't making slogans or whatever, testing it with democratic politicians. They had an antagonistic relationship with democratic politicians, as I like to remind people. I show my students that Fannie Lou Hamer speech at the convention all the time and how LBJ made a now national speech at the same time, so that the national networks would cut in and not show her speech. At the same time undercutting this four black sharecropper woman who his a man they called ignorance. >> Wow. >> So this ignorant little woman, they were afraid of her and they cut so that they wouldn't show her speech. So, this is the Democratic Part, she was fighting against the Democratic Party, that was her fight because they wouldn't seat her and the other delegates because they still had to cater to the southern democrats. And this is the giant teller that I try to tell the students, this is not what activists were doing. They were not, MLK, had a very contentious relationship with LBJ particularly around the Vietnam War. So. >> This example that you just shared around Fannie Lou Hamer's speech and LBJ, I feel like that just solidifies in my mind. You have these formal halls of power, government and state actors, and then you have the power of truth of one black woman's voice being so threatening. And I think about that tension and I think about the generative nature of memory and of speaking a true story. >> Yeah, I mean, I could just go on forever but [LAUGH] about Fannie Lou Hamer, I just adore everything about her story because she just reminds me of black women I grew up with. My grandmother's, older aunts, she a sharecropper, she was one of 19 children to a mother who had been sexually assaulted. She herself had experienced a forced sterilization, which was very common throughout the south, particularly common for black women, right? She had had no formal education, but she became one of the most powerful voices to come out of Mississippi in the 1960s and she was insisting that the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, right? Be seated because she was saying it is not legitimate for them to see these white southern democrats or dixiecrats, whatever they wanted to call them. The battle behind the scenes at that 1964 convention was awful. You on the one hand, you had Stevenson and all these people trying to come out and sweet talk her or whatever. But then behind the scenes, they're saying awful things, right? They didn't want her to talk, they just thought she was just an ignorant woman who no one should be talking to, right? And yeah, I mean the fact that you had Humphrey and all these folks showing up and trying to put a stop to her talking, they preempted, they wanted, they preempted her testimony but her testimony is still what everybody remembers. So powerful, so powerful as I always have my students listen to her give that testimony about, is this what happens in this country, right? She's just talking about how she sleeps with her phone, off the hook. How she's been beaten, how she was beaten very badly. And it's just this powerful thing and the LBJ even preempting calling this impromptu press conference, right? This is this off move, it completely backfires of course. But even him doing that shows, like I said, the power of a voice. He would probably try to tell you up and down and nobody would care about what this like poor black woman has to say but he did care Very much cared very much cared about what Fannie Lou Hamer had to say and yeah and so they you know they had to care about what this woman had to say, the world was watching again right? Like in 1964 the world was still watching and in the Democratic Party, which was supposedly the party of civil rights right. The world was still watching the Democratic Party screwed up again, because they were still trying to include these white Southern Democrats, all right? >> They were trying to compromise instead they were compromised. >> They were trying to compromise, yeah. So, I mean, that's like, always the example I give to my students, and I'm like and here I'm just trying to show you that the battles were not just these battles. They're not like there was just this political party that was just all in on rights for black people. Like, they should already know that because we talked about FDR's administration, which did some stuff for civil rights. But also, handcuffed black activists, left and rights when they wanted to behind the white Southern Democrats who were still a huge part of FDR's base. So it's just like I said, we just be, we have to have that actual accurate history. Mm-hm. Of how activism [LAUGH]. >> Mm-hm, I'm so appreciating this conversation that we've had, the wide range is the ways we've talked about public and private ideas of history and memory. Man, this piece around agitation and the way we treat activists, people advocating from the margins, people trying to raise counter stories and resistant stories. This is really powerful in our present time. And compared to the memorialization that happens. So, is there like a, I don't know, a final thought that's reverberating around for you this conversation or something we didn't quite get to flush out? >> Mm-hm, I don't know, I think just that I really appreciate the space to think through narratives and crafting narratives and how central narratives is to the work that historians do. How my work is very narrative driven as you can tell from my own personal narratives to how I try to include the narratives of others in my own work. >> Mm-hm. >> But also how rooted I am, and what's currently happening still, I'm a historian, but I'm very much rooted in the world around me. >> M m-hm. Constantly wanting to be of use and to be rooted in that my students will tell you that I'm always ready. So [LAUGH] I keep them rooted in the present as well, because I know they are. I want them to make sense of the present. And I think that's why I'm very concerned with how historical narratives are used in the present, that usable past aspect. And I just want people to think more about this usable past, how the uses of history, the uses of memory and how narratives can be used in great and awful ways. >> Yes. >> I hope throughout this talk, I've illustrated examples of both, all right? And how complicated things can get when people want to use narratives to uplift certain ideals, but not others. >> Mm-hm. >> So yeah, I think it's been a great talk and I hope it's been food for thought for people about how we understand. >> Mm-hm. >> Some of these sort of complicated things around history and memory and narrative in the present. >> Absolutely, yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Dr Lawrence Sanders for sharing these thoughts with us. Welcome.
