-: Tonal quality to get a good one going,
and all I'm saying is
we have to understand... (audience laughing)
We must consciously understand
that we must do both simultaneously.
That's all I'm saying.
See, and I think the point that was left hanging
by what your statement was,
what we did in the movement was politicize the movement.
You said Jim Lawson's a good man.
We know he can step, we let him into Congress.
We check on him every two years
and we'll stop teach-ins.
We'll stop mobilization.
We'll stop mass political education.
We'll stop supporting the rise of local leadership.
We politicized it.
Now what we've got to do
is take governments back from the government.
That's what we gotta do.
And we do it neighborhood by neighborhood.
Speaker: Yes ma'am.
-: [Female Audience Member] Yeah,
this business about whether racism has changed,
I think it is really important to note that
there has been, I think, some shifts in meaning,
and a lot of racist agendas get perpetuated
because people do not agree on what words mean,
and they don't agree on what issues mean.
For example, this whole thing about school vouchers,
which I think is both an assault
on the public school systems,
an assault on the public sphere of life,
and also a way to begin reinstating
class and racial differences,
but the reason why this isn't that clear
is that a lot of working class blue collar black people
feel exploited, manipulated, and cheated
by the public schools, -: Mm-hmm.
-: and are therefore perfectly willing to go along
with an agenda which poses itself as being democratic
about educational empowerment and so on and so forth,
about resentment of arrogant teachers unions
and so on and so forth,
but which in fact also has another agenda.
And I think until we can somehow disentangle this question
about meaning and language,
it's a lot of racism that's masquerading
under facially neutral stuff.
-: That's why I'm saying it has to change.
That's what I mean when I say
it has to change. -: Right.
-: Answering another question on...
Answering another question,
I'm trying to answer questions that you have raised.
We haven't forgotten about those questions,
and that a question comes up about
did we do right in the desegregation of schools?
Did we do right in the integration of schools?
Do we like the results of what we have?
What?
-: [Male Audience Member] Oh, that question, really,
I have asked that question since 1972.
I went into the fifth grade
in a segregated school in North Carolina.
And then I went to college at central,
but I left college and now I'm back in college.
Now, private school just shows you basically
a segregated school,
and which is better, which is worse,
and what's the result?
But I like knowing that if I want to transfer
from Charlotte and go to state, I can.
I think it's a personal choice whether you
want to go to a predominantly black
or predominantly white or totally mixed, or...
But the choice, the option, the freedom to do it.
Yes, it's terrific, yeah, you know.
But I think the choice if you want to go
to a predominantly black or predominantly white
or mixed school or whatever
is yours.
But to have the freedom to do that,
to make that choice. -: Did you have the choice
when you were in high school?
-: Hmm?
-: [Female Audience Member] Did you have the choice
when you were in high school?
-: [Male Audience Member] Yes, I could have gone
to a private school.
You know, and there are schools in North Carolina,
many church schools in North Carolina now
that are basically black,
you know, predominantly black, and if my parents
could afford it and could pay for it,
and if I want, you know, I could,
I do now have the choice, and I think that's,
to me, that is what it's all about.
At one time, we didn't have the choice.
It wasn't a choice.
You know, there wasn't an option.
That's what racist segregation was like.
-: May I say something about that?
I think that violence, racism, sexism,
greed, capitalism and greed,
which in many ways are the same thing,
have all taught the American people a lot of individualism
rather than teaching us democratic values of community.
The issue is more than an issue of choice.
And I can speak as one who had choice all of his life.
I have always gone to desegregated schools.
I grew up in Ohio.
So I'm not talking about whether or not
choice is important or not.
That was the only thing available to me in Ohio.
I'm talking about the fact that it is the responsibility
of a democratic society to have quality education available
for every child whether they live in Ohio
or Mississippi or in Guam,
and a quality education that is accessible,
that helps them to become literate human beings,
human beings who are able to tap the resources
that are in them to accept life and to grow in life
and to become life.
That, it seems to me, is the fundamental question.
-: [Male Audience Member] Literate and human beings.
-: Yes, literate and human beings.
Capitalism since the 60s
has directed the educational system of America
towards: stay in school so you can get a better job.
Well, we are not just people who get jobs.
We are human beings.
We bleed and hurt and cry.
We love, we hate.
We're human beings.
Education should be about helping to enrich children
so that they can take full advantage of the gift
of life that is in them.
-: [Male Audience Member] Say amen.
Audience: Amen.
-: So that does mean we have to find some ways to help
we the American people to develop a sense of community,
a sense of democratic community,
that looks at these issues not from my personal situation
only or primarily,
but from the point of view of the whole people?
-: And a system that deals with racism in the school system.
-: No way. -: See some...
Let me, let me, let me, let me see if it can go
to your belly. -: Okay.
All right.
-: Can you understand why
a black man would not want a white man
or a woman beating on his children,
disciplining his children?
Huh?
Can you understand why a white man
would not want a black man
or a woman beating on his children?
-: [Male Audience Member] I wouldn't want nobody
beating on my children.
-: All right, all right, you might say that,
but there's got to be some discipline.
We can argue over that,
but I'm saying why is it easy for us to accept this?
The stopping of all discipline in our schools?
There's got to be discipline in our schools.
There's got to be some discipline in our schools,
some kind of way.
And I'm from the old school. -: Yes sir.
-: I'm from the old school, yeah.
I'm saying, I'm saying...
(laughing)
Audience Member: I'm sitting next to,
between your foot and your head.
(laughs)
-: Yes, I know that.
-: I'd like to speak from my side,
or my point of view.
I mean, I'm a young black man,
and I was in school when you were punished by your teacher
'cause I used to get some serious whoopings from my teacher
with rhythm sticks or whatever, whatever,
and it also curbed the appetite of anybody else in class
that would want to act up because the teacher had the power
to keep them from acting up
because this is what you're here for,
you're here to learn and you're here to do this.
And then, on the flip side,
I went to school where you couldn't do anything.
The teacher's hands were tied,
and I see the teachers getting hit with chairs,
and all different types of things going on
in the public school system that don't need to be there
for the simple fact is the discipline is gone
and also the whole community is gone.
I mean, the breakdown of our community
and our people as it takes.
It's an old African proverb:
it takes a village to raise one child,
and the whole thing is our whole community is broken down.
Now you see little black kids walking down the street.
Before you couldn't go down the street
and do something wrong without your parents knowing
by the time you got home.
You would get three whippings.
You would get a whooping from the person
that saw you doing it,
then you'd get a whipping from your pops
or your mother when you got home,
and then you'd get another whipping from the other person,
your other parent when they got home.
You know what I'm saying?
And that's what happens.
And that's what's wrong with our people today
because our kids are so lost and so mad
because, okay, well, naw, you can't touch me,
you're not my father, you're not this, you're not that.
And then here come the parents trying to defend that
but yet they don't understand that we all need to help
discipline all the little ones
so when they get older they understand.
It is a community, and it's all of us together.
Man On Right: But may I say
we need to stop bashing our children and young people.
-: That's right. -: Mm-hmm.
-: Because our children and young people have been birthed
into this American environment,
and they have gained from the environment,
no matter where there's a birth,
whatever that environment is offering.
Their values have been taken out of the environment
in which they have been birthed.
And if there's violence in the schools,
that is because we have a violent society
that nobody really wants to deal with.
And it's equal to the issue of racism.
Racism was a violent institution.
What do you think lynching came from?
Who do you think went after escaped slaves?
The sheriff.
The sheriffs and the militia,
that's what became the police.
Who do you think have been a major vanguard
to help keep black folk in their place,
especially black males, but the police?
I mean, the system has been from day one a violent system,
and the children did not learn the violence
from the man on Mars.
They drank the milk of violence here in the United States,
which is one of the reasons why you cannot be against racism
and then for the Iraqi policy of bombing in Iraq.
You cannot be for racism,
you can't not be against racism,
and then be for police forces that are able
to batter or torture people in jail
or kill them on the street though they are unarmed.
And you cannot be against racism
and then for an economy which says that it's fine
that some people work for nothing,
and few have the wealth from the poor
switched over to them.
It's why these issues are interconnected and interdependent.
And what one of the things that the movement
of the 60s came to and what one of the reasons
for a non-violent perspective was to recognize
fundamentally human problems are interconnected
and interdependent.
And you cannot become myopic people
who see race as a kind of a singular task
and don't see the way in which the...
What's the octopus?
Uh, tentacles?
The tentacles of racism are everywhere across this nation,
and you can't cut one off.
You've got to deal with all of them to stop the stuff.
Speaker: Reverend Lawson, I agree with
the broad vision that you have is beautiful,
and I love that vision.
I wish everybody could embrace it.
Can I take us back to the point where we were before,
which is on a smaller scale?
Think about a specific school.
Think about being in a school at the time of desegregation,
and I've read about communities where
when schools were desegregated,
one of the big problems of course was that the surrounding,
the majority society, the white society finally was forced
kicking and screaming to desegregate schools.
When they did it, they didn't do it
in the best way possible.
Usually what they did is they just threw
some black kids into white schools
and expected them to deal with the majority culture
and the way the white kids would respond
and all of it any kind of reciprocal way.
But, that having been done, in that bad way,
a lot of teachers both black and white would say
that some things that had been present in the old school
maybe got lost in the old black schools,
have been lost as far as teachers supporting students,
letting them know that they were loved
as well as disciplined,
because all of a sudden you got white teachers
and black teachers having difficulties figuring out
how to still express that concern that goes beyond
academic concern for students that they feel
like they don't know,
and I think that, you know,
the expressions that I've heard from many African Americans
who experienced segregated schools
and remember them as being nurturing places,
despite the fact that the books were old
and they were torn up and the desks were old and whatever,
remember them as being nurturing places.
What they feel was lost was some of that nurturance
that was there in the segregated setting,
and I just, you know, leaving aside the questions of Iraq,
when I think about desegregation of schools
and maybe what was being lost,
I wonder if you could respond to, you know,
the idea that what could schools do to sort of regain
some of that feeling of community that was present
before desegregation?
Male Speaker: We got to go back to the basics.
Male Speaker: It seems it comes down
to human relations, right?
-: [Female Audience Member] Yes, it does.
-: [Male Audience Member] We're talking about teachers having
-: We got to reclaim our schools.
-: Yeah, I'll just tell you.
I've been very involved with these school issues.
I worked for a desegregating school system
when I was right out of college,
and participated in the desegregation.
We were really excited at the time.
We thought, this is great, we didn't realize
all of these issues that were emerging.
And, of course, part of what was happening
was that black teachers were losing their jobs.
Black principals were losing their jobs.
These community institutions were being shut down.
A lot of times the schools were sacrificed.
-: Let's not make a mistake. -: And you know
we did it wrong.
I mean, that's the reality, is that
is was done wrong.
-: Well, it wasn't done according to the wishes
of the African American community.
It was done by the school board
that had maintained segregated schooling
and who thought that segregated schooling meant
that the black folk were inferior
and that the black folk got the second hand
textbooks if they got textbooks and all
the rest of it.
It was, it was the passion
of the teachers in the segregated school systems
especially, primarily in the South.
It was the passion of the teachers
and the educators who in spite of
the circumstances caused the school
to become a productive community for learning
and for becoming.
-: [Male Audience Member] Let us please not make a mistake
of trying to enhance segregated schools
Audience Member: I know.
-: But let us look at what we're not talking
about, what we have to go back to
and that is stability, order, the respect
that education was given by the black community.
I lived in a small town.
I knew everyone in that town.
Everyone in that town knew me,
and from the time when I was 10 years old
until I left at 17 to go to community college,
I was told by everyone in that town,
whatever you learn cannot be taken away from you.
The land can be taken away from you,
your property, everything, all of your money,
so I'm saying, I'd say this,
I was buttressed by an entire community
that knew that I was going to be the first
one from my family to graduate from college,
that I was going to do that,
and it was, it became sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We don't have that anymore.
Let us understand that we do not have that.
And if we start looking at the school system
without that social underpinning of a community
that says, in my day and age, it would have been
treasonous for someone to say that
because I'm trying to get As
I'm trying to be white.
Young blacks faced with that in the
educational school system today.
So let us when we romanticize,
let's put a little pragmatism
in that romanticism and say
we need to build that culture that supports
and gives credence and credibility to education
and not to a segregated school system.
Jim: Yes, sir, in the back?
I see a hand.
-: Okay, thank you, first off, I want to say
that it's a real privilege to be here,
to actually see, to actually connect
names to faces and all the people
that you've been kind of reading about
and hearing about.
I'm a student in Charles Paynes' class over at Duke
and so I'm really excited to be here.
I have a question kind of related to
some of the things that we have talked about
in terms of in terms of education
and people's relationship to education
and also kind of a democratic response
to undemocratic initiatives, mainly this voucher,
voucher program.
Here in North Carolina
I know there's a lot of you who could
probably do this better in terms of
there's a large number of African American
families and children who are moving into
charter schools in the state of North Carolina.
I think the state of North Carolina
has the highest per capita percentage
of African American students from all income
levels in charters schools.
It's pretty high
if not the highest in the country.
And one of the phenomenons that's going on,
one of the things that's happening
in places like Durham and in Charlotte
and in other cities in North Carolina
is that low income families are being approached
by charter schools and by charter institutions
and are being told, look, your schools,
the schools that your kids are in right now
aren't providing them with the things,
with the basic essentials that they need,
and here's an opportunity for you
to take your kid out of that school
and come into this charter school.
And so my question is, and it seemed to me
that this, um, I'm thinkin' a lot more
about these things, my wife is pregnant
with our first kid and so I'm already thinking
about okay, schools, what's up?
Where are we going to have to move to?
What are we going to have to do?
Who am I going to have to smack?
I'm not above smacking somebody if someone
wants to mess with my kid.
Um, I'm not there yet, Reverend Lawson,
I'm getting there.
And so I guess
my question is, is in with this phenomenon,
what is the kind of the democratic response
to this phenomenon, which to me seems like
one of those, one of those really serious
intersections of personal and political?
You know, when I don't have any kids,
you know, yes, I'm an avid supporter of public
schools, and I'm an avid supporter of this,
but what happens when it comes down to the comedown.
When I'm given an opportunity
you know when I'm given an opportunity
to make this move, my question again
is, what is the democratic response,
what should be the democratic response
to that phenomenon?
Jim: Yes, sir.
Audience Member: The, um, I want to say two things.
One is we're, we can't go back to where we were
because we're not the same people.
We're no longer a Southern people.
We three generations removed from the South.
It's not a question of whether or not
some black schools were nurturing
and some were strict and some of us
who went to integrated schools got the
rattan like your white confreres did,
we cannot recreate those situations.
But part of the discussion revolves around symptoms.
When Jim Lawson talks about
we have to change the culture in the White House
and the prison system, one of the developments
that came out of the movement is we began
talking about systems.
We were fighting a system.
We are still fighting a system.
It doesn't, as Jim Lawson, says it's all connected.
It doesn't matter
whether it's the, what is vouchers?
When Jim talks about the names of people
the Republican party is the organized
expression of reaction in this country today.
They define conventional discourse.
Vouchers are simply one of their fundamental
tenets which is raid the public treasury,
privatization, that's what vouchers and charters are.
They want the public treasury
whether it's privatize the schools,
whether it's privatize the prisons,
privatize the sky, air, earth or water.
It's to raid the public treasury, and that's
where WTO comes from.
Who funds the IMF who funds the group?
-: World Bank.
Audience Member: It's no longer something
a question of surplus coming from the labor, we must,
the times are different.
Audience Member: Can I just say one thing about charter
schools that, that?
Audience Member: Well, our people are not the same.
If we used to say and it was implied
it was very clear, we had to be twice
as good as white boys to make it.
That was clear.
That was how we were taught,
but now you have a situation where a little
12 year old kid on a crew being a lookout
for the gangbangers makes more money
than his daddy if he has a daddy.
So the myth of America that it's about education
when it was always about power, the myth
of education no longer holds, no longer obtains.
It's not the way in fact, it's not the golden road.
You can be as ignorant as you want to be
vis a vis George W. Bush Jr.
(laughing) (clapping)
Audience Member: Or Ronald Reagan.
With the air of confusion in which they are
continually being misinformed, disinformed,
given false explanations, false rationales,
false analyses, and our task is to try
to see through a glass darkly.
-: Okay, uhuh.
-: I think, I think one response to your
question is, we have got to, the way
to stop violence in schools is to bring more
creativity and more involvement of parents
and students into the curriculum
and into the day to day activities of schools.
It, the freedom schools, proved that.
The success of the freedom schools
was people felt a sense of ownership.
And unless we can work that kind of
the labor unions and the parents and the students
into that equation because we can't argue it
for the sake of arguing.
They're gonna want to
look at test scores because oh, we gave
the charter schools test scores, we gave
your school some test scores, and look at this.
And the mistake we shouldn't make is
using good will and altruism as an argument.
-: Well, I think right now the most exciting union organizing
in the country is in Los Angeles
where a number of our unions that are waking up
to the necessity of organizing the poor workers
have discovered that it can't be done 10 by 10.
It has to be done one by one
because the management is harassing
and making people fear for that little bit
of money so badly so there has to be a one
on one process until that person at the New Otani Hotel
where we've had a struggle
going on now for four years, until that one
person in fear who needs that money for his
household or her household gains from
that one on one relationship enough courage
to recognize, I can do something about this,
and I will do something about it.
And they join the cause.
So we have rediscovered the importance
of that one on one business for the terrible
organizing we have to do, so focus in and get started.
Do something.
That is in large measure what many people
did in the 50s and the 60s
that produced the movements of the 60s.
Focus.
Work at it.
Research it.
Develop strategies for acting.
Train people to do it, and go to work on it.
-: And please, before you use the Freedom Democratic Party
as a justification for not acting, please listen.
-: No, that's something-- -: Please listen,
all of you, to Linda May Johnson's tapes
for the two weeks of the convention.
He spent his entire time
stopping that movement. -: Exactly.
-: And he pitted the entire federal government--
Audience Member: Yeah, that's right.
-: There are tapes to demonstrate.
Audience Member: Exactly, exactly.
-: And incidentally, that is one of the historic tools
of non-violence,
to create a parallel institution.
(laughs)
the Freedom Democratic Party is a classic one,
it's a beautiful example
of creating the parallel institution that caused.
-: But you came through that, son.
Quiet time.
You came through that just when you get off of work.
Audience Member: Between classes.
-: Yeah, between classes. -: That's right. (laughing)
Audience Member: Stop assigning so much reading.
(audience laughing)
-: You need people to commit themselves
and drop out and fight.
You need that.
Now, where is it going to come from?
I don't know, but when it comes,
I'm going to be supported.
Audience Member: But you also need to have
the type of relationship between the local issues
that you're fighting on,
and the national debt-- -: Exactly.
Audience Member: Because there are people sitting
around little rooms, smaller rooms than this
well, plotting has been about the Heritage Institute,
or the vouchers in the charter schools.
People sitting around plotting,
their plot may manifest themselves,
impact a variety of institutions in a variety of ways,
but they are plotting to take over, in fact.
The right wing now controls the house and senate
of the United States.
They've appointed two thirds of all the federal judges,
this is why Kenneth Starr kept winning all those deals.
And if Bushy-wushy wins the White House
there will be a control of all three branches
of the American government.
-: Mm-hmm. -: Exactly.
Audience Member: I will say as long
as we say Donald Trump.
-: I'm just saying my assumption is
that these guys here,
whoever under the hearing of mount recourse...
Audience Member: Well...
-: Will commit themselves.
Drop out. (audience laughing)
I'm not talking about dropping out of school.
I'm talking about in the sense
of dropping out of society.
Don't be touched by the golden apples,
the $200,000 house.
Something's got to wait.
Audience Member: You'd get caught now.
(audience laughing)
-: He's right though.
He's absolutely right.
We must have no loyalty to racism, sexism, violence,
greed, capitalism as this present shows for sexism.
Man On Left: We, in a group like this,
if there's a group...
-: Withdraw all loyalty.
-: If you got 10 guys
that committed themselves to go further,
and all you're doing is going for it
like we used to do,
you've got time to read,
you've got time to get on the internet,
you've got time to see what the national issues are,
and who are acting.
You've got time to get in a push-mobile
and go to California
and hook up with them guys,
and go to Minnesota and hook up with those guys,
and go to Chicago and go to New York.
You've got time to do it.
And that's what it's going to take, the hook-ups.
The hook-ups, I mean.
I just hope I'm alive,
because my dream is that
in about 15 years, emerges...
That some magic's going to happen in our country,
number-wise, and it's going to be possible
for some political things to happen,
because it never happened before
in the history of our country.
And I hope that I'll be alive when it does happen,
20, 25 years.
Group leader: Yes, sir.
Audience Member: Just a couple of things...
Speaker: Oh, I've got to see some women's hands.
I haven't been really.
Okay, I've seen one.
Men are talking too much.
Audience Member: Well I just wanted to--
Speaker: And I'm talking too much.
Audience Member: My name is Wally Rather.
I worked in Mississippi and Safety Corp,
and one of the things that I learned
and I still carry with me
is that freedom is a constant struggle,
and there's not little solutions that solve it,
like integrated schools,
that can solve the problem, right?
The problem is there.
It's a system, like Bill said,
and you may have a victory, or you may have a defeat.
But that's not the end of it--
-: Right. -: You know?
It's there and it's going to take the rest of our lives
to straighten it all out. -: Yeah.
Audience Member: And you've just got to keep on going.
-: Keep at it.
Audience Member: And for you, with the kid on the way,
go into that community where he's going to go to school,
and start running for the school board now.
Or better yet go to the people who've lived there
for a long time and get them working on it.
Audience Member: Gotta organize first, see where
the school board's at. -: Yeah.
-: Yes, please.
-: [Female Audience Member] Yeah, and this sort of piggybacks
on what was just said because it think
part of this young person's frustration
that I was hearing was this idea that no matter how hard
people fought the system didn't respond in the way
that it should have,
and then I think when we say things are the same
it might give the impression that no progress was made.
I mean, that, you know, Vincent Harding said this once,
I think it must be in a movie or something,
but if you think things haven't changed,
you don't know how they were,
and we have to understand
while struggle is eternal and constant,
each generation has a destiny to fulfill, what's the quote?
Strichlan knows all the--
Audience Member: This is supporting Fanon,
"Each generation must, out of relative obscurity,
"discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it."
-: [Female Audience Member] Thank you.
Where's that page number again?
(audience laughing)
You know, there has been progress and there has been change,
that while there's still racism
it is in a different form today,
and each generation has to figure out
the particularities of injustice and oppression.
I mean, I teach, I'm a historian,
and one of the things that I find comforting about history
is that things don't,
I mean, things don't stay the same.
They do change.
The one thing you do know about the future,
it's going to be different than today.
It can be better, it can be worse,
but it's going to change,
and human agency plays a role in that.
Human beings and what we do or what we don't do
really does matter,
and that's the ultimate source of,
not that we're going to achieve some utopia,
but that what we do matters is what keeps me from being
terribly, terribly cynical.
So I think that, you know, I mean,
things that people in the 60s did was absolutely heroic.
It made a difference.
It didn't solve all the problems,
but it did make a difference,
and that's part of I think what we have to understand
in order to give young people confidence,
and the last thing I'm going to say is
there are student struggles going on,
and you mentioned the sweatshop movement
which is very active.
University of Michigan just had a,
What was an 18 day sit-in
over a racist club that exists there,
and I'm always getting emails about struggles.
I think one thing about understanding the new situation
is that our enemies,
and I think we ought to say it like that.
-: Yeah. -: You know, and I've gotten
more sophisticated measures
of not allowing movements to spread.
I mean, one of the ways a sit-in spread
was partly through word of mouth
but also was through the media,
through the black press, et cetera.
Media doesn't cover a lot of struggles
that happen on campuses and so forth,
so we have to develop other networks to do that.
-: Yeah, to be fair, we need...
I need to say to you what many of us from the 60s
have said about today,
that everything has changed,
and nothing has changed.
There are sort of two parts to the picture.
-: It's dialect. -: Yeah.
Now, one of the biggest evidence that things did change
is the organization of the religious
and the political right to turn it back,
still finding another illustration that things did change,
is that no president since the Civil Rights Bill of 1964
has ever funded the Affirmative Action entitlements
section seven, title seven,
with staff and the educational resources
because title seven was to convince the American people
that we do not have a meritocracy,
that you're getting hired by who you know,
and to convince the American public and the marketplace
of the necessity of genuinely desegregating
and de-sex-an-iz-ing the marketplace.
Now, that has never been done,
and that's why the right has been able to say,
"Oh, reverse discrimination.
"Preferential treatment."
All of which are lies.
But that's what you hear,
because they have organized so vigorously and thoroughly,
with a great deal of money from right wing foundations
for the purpose of reversing
the changes that the 60s did begin to initiate.
Everything has changed and nothing has changed.
Audience Member: The other thing that is
most effectively is they removed the respectability
from the senate.
Audience Member: From the what?
-: From the senate, and the right to desecend.
And we must restore that. -: Yes.
-: And must regenerate it, -: Exactly.
-: and re-fight it.
We must be very concerned of devaluating social movements
and organizations by the number of people
they get involved,
as well as the objectives.
And I think once you get someone to join a labor union,
or to register to vote,
or to speak out against the World Trade Organization,
then all of a sudden they retreat,
say, "I'll never do that again."
They find other things to do.
Speaker: All right, yes, go ahead.
-: [Female Audience Member] I would like to ask
that they are going to be around
the rest of the conference.
I teach at Ole Miss,
and I advise a student group that's two years old, that--
-: Yeah, SEED. -: SEED, yes.
That hosted a statewide student seminal race last October,
attended by 180 students,
all eight public institutes and higher learning
plus four private schools,
and some of it is that they had to go back to their schools
and organize on some of those campuses
because there wasn't any organizing.
But there's a core there now,
and they're interested in reaching out,
and there are some of those students here,
and if y'all meet, maybe you can energize each other,
and then you sort of take this expertise--
-: Harvard! -: and go back to your campuses
so that you can start an organization
that you're talking about right now.
Don't wait for somebody else to do it, do it now.
Audience Member: Currently we've just formed
a progressive alliance at Duke,
attempting to network all the progressives.
-: Let's hook SEED up. -: Organizations that exhibit--
-: Let's hook SEED up. -: current students against
workshops, so they basically that.
-: Let's hook up, and then y'all come to Mississippi,
or whatever. -: So despite my frustration,
you still--
-: [Female Audience Member] You're still frustrated
but you're doing the work.
-: [Male Audience Member] We're doing it anyway,
that's right! -: That's why I said it.
(laughing)
-: It's a good life,
but it's being frustrated in life trying to do right,
trying to do that which is just,
and to fasten it.
I see any other hands?
It ends at 4:45 period,
and it is 4:45.
Audience Member: I have a reading list here.
-: Oh! -: Oh!
-: I'm leaving this special reading list.
Those people who do not read the books
have afflictions, and they go to hell.
(audience laughing)
Now, would anyone like this reading list?
(laughing)
-: Yeah, please? -: Please!
-: And if you don't, if we run out,
I want to reproduce it because I want you to have it.
I concentrate on Mississippi and on race.
I especially refer you to By The Color Of Our Skins,
and A Nation of Strangers.
To read those two books is to understand racism in America.
-: [Female Audience Member] The Color Of America.
Audience Member: We were talking
about discipline in school,
something that was pointed out about showing this,
welcome this morning,
and that is that it has, was began in 1865
and it had a policy
for non-discrimination in 1865,
it was one of the few schools in America that had that.