Original subtitles

If you have ever owned a slave, please raise your hand.

And there's not one hand going up anywhere in this theatre.

Slavery is not our fault.

We didn't do it.

We didn't cause it.

It's not our responsibility.

But it is our shared history.

And when we try and turn it into something that it's not...

when we try and make more light of it than it was,

then we are denying who we really are,

and we are impeding our ability to truly move forward

as a community or as a nation.

We're at the Lorraine Motel.

And right outside Room 306, there's a wreath,

which is approximately where Dr King was standing

when he was shot down.

And if you look across the street, there's a building over there

from where the shots were fired.

It was a shot that almost couldn't miss.

Exactly one week before Dr King was shot,

there was a demonstration here in Downtown Memphis

to support the striking sanitation workers,

and my dad took my older brother and I to that demonstration.

It broke into violence and my dad told us to run.

It's difficult to think about now,

because there was a young Black teenager named Larry Payne.

He lost his life that day.

He encountered a police officer and was killed, and...

It's just one of those events in my childhood

that made me realise how lucky I was.

How lucky I was not to end up like Larry Payne.

And how lucky I was to have come out of Memphis...

in the way that I did.

We've gotta give ourselves to this struggle until the end.

Nothing would be more tragic...

than to stop...

at this point in Memphis.

We've gotta see it through.

Tonight, Jeff Robinson will tell us stories that we've not heard.

Stories that we think we know,

but have not wrestled with their meaning yet.

The story of us.

Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Jeff Robinson, y'all.

Hey, y'all.

I was 11 years old in 1968.

And to my young eyes,

we had been on a path toward racial justice that was amazing.

There was the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act.

We were winning on buses and at lunch counters.

We were seemingly, to me, at a tipping point

where we were either gonna roll forward

with this incredible momentum on racial justice

or we could roll back.

And then April 4th happened.

And King got shot in the neck.

And it felt like the whole thing just rolled back.

Because then came Richard Nixon and the War on Drugs.

We're 50 years later now.

And once again,

young activists in America are making Americans take a look in the mirror,

in terms of our true history of race and racial prejudice.

Once again, the young activists are calling us to account.

Once again, America is having to look at issues of race dead in the eye,

and once again, we are at a tipping point.

And the question for all of us in this room is:

"What are we gonna do about it?"

We are our own worst enemies

when it comes to making true racial progress in America.

And unless we are willing to take a long and hard look in the mirror,

this concept of taking two steps forward and three steps backward

is where we are going to continue moving in this country.

In 2011, my wife and I became parents.

My sister-in-law who lived here in Queens passed away,

and we became the parents of her then-13-year-old son.

And if you ask Matthew Liam Brooks, "What are you?"

He will tell you, "I'm Puerto Rican, Taíno Indian and African American."

And he's very proud of that.

And when I look at him, I say, "I understand, dude.

But you're a young Black male.

'Cause that's what America is gonna see."

And all of a sudden,

the surface skimming that I felt like I had been doing

on the history of race and what racism meant in America,

it wasn't enough, and so I started reading more.

And I found myself getting angry and feeling ignorant.

I went to Marquette University and I graduated from Harvard Law School.

I've had one of the best educations in America,

and I started learning stuff about the history of race in this country

that I had never heard before.

And I thought, "How could I not have known this?

How could I not have been taught this?"

And I started thinking, "If I don't know this,

I wonder how many other people don't know."

Slavery had nothing to do with the war.

That was not the cause of the Southern states seceding.

That was not the cause of the first shot being fired on that fort over there.

It was about money.

And it was not about slavery.

It was about Morrill Tariffs. It was about more money.

Lincoln wanted to impose 45% more taxes on the Southern states.

Taxes on the goods the Southern states were producing.

And those goods were, essentially, cotton, tobacco, and rice.

Predominantly.

And those goods...

were produced by slave labour.

All of it.

Isn't that right?

I mean...

Ninety-five percent of it?

Isn't that right?

If it's 95% produced by slave labour, enslaved people...

and the North is saying, "We're gonna tax you on that

because we want some of that money,"

and the South is saying,

"Wait a minute. We're the ones producing,

so you shouldn't be taking the money,"

that money wouldn't exist without slave labour.

That did affect the bottom line, wouldn't you agree with that?

They chose to stay.

In most cases, in the South,

that's the way it worked, because they were treated as family.

And they knew what they had.

They didn't know what they were being faced with if they left.

So your view is that enslaved people were treated as family?

Then why wouldn't it be all right for me to own you,

as long as I treated you like family?

If that's the way economics work.

Would you be satisfied with that?

-In today's world? -In any world.

-In today's time? -At any time.

No.

So was slavery evil?

Yes.

I'm not denying it.

And this flag has nothing to do with that?

No.

This was a soldier's battle flag.

I think I need to--

I'm a little sick today, and so I'm just standing in the heat.

Thank you for talking to me. I will say that.

I appreciate that.

-Thank you very much for talking to me. -Yes, sir.

I needed to walk away.

I am definitely interested in engaging with people that don't agree.

But it seemed like facts...

were not that important to this gentleman.

He knew that what he was saying made no sense whatsoever,

but he believes it so deeply...

that he's unwilling to let go of it.

So I don't know if he can be reached.

But I know that if no one tries, he definitely won't change.

People aren't just good or bad.

People are many things.

Every person in this theatre knows that's true,

'cause every one of us has been

a saint or a sinner at some times in our life.

And you know what?

Countries aren't just one thing either.

They're many things.

America has demonstrated its greatness time and time and time again.

And America is one of the most racist countries

on the face of the Earth.

Those two things are not mutually exclusive.

It is not an either-or.

And the reason I'm asking us to think about this

is that, literally, the future is at stake.

Can I see a show of hands?

How many people can see a triangle in the form on the board?

Just throw your hands up.

How about a circle?

How about a star?

The Star of David?

You realise none of those shapes are on this screen?

Not one of them.

Not one of them.

But what your brain does is to fill in the gaps,

so that the world makes sense.

And we look at these shapes and we say, "I kind of recognise them."

And so we fill in the gaps so the world makes sense.

And that doesn't have any problem when you're doing something like this.

But the thing is that we can fill in the gaps on all sorts of things,

including our judgements about people.

And sometimes,

what we're filling in the gaps with comes from a really ugly place.

This is the only time tonight I'm going to ask you to do this.

I want you to work with me,

and I'm gonna ask you to, loudly and quickly,

say the colour, not the word.

-Are we ready? -Yes.

Ready?

Go.

Red, yellow, blue, green, brown.

Blue, brown, red, yellow, green.

Faster.

Red, yellow, blue, green, brown.

Blue, brown, red, yellow, green.

This thing is 80 years old.

And what it does is to simply demonstrate

that you are making connections

between the word and the colour below your conscious level.

You don't even know that you're doing it.

And when that connection is broken,

it actually takes just a little bit more time

to get to the right answer.

That is the heart of the science about unconscious bias.

Whether it's unconscious bias or deliberate bias...

the person experiencing it experiences exactly the same thing.

If you don't get the job because a racist doesn't hire you,

or because somebody has unconscious bias,

you still don't have a job.

If you get arrested because somebody had bias to call the police

because someone Black is existing in space and they're nervous,

whether it's unconscious or deliberate,

you still have to deal with a law enforcement officer.

The difference is meaningless

when it is talking about the experience of the person who is victimised by it.

I'm moving from D.C., I'm sweating right now. I'm in my apartment.

But, you know...

somebody called the cops on me in my own building.

About-- How many of y'all?

About six of y'all showed up.

New at 5:00, a rude welcome to the neighbourhood

for a man on the Upper West Side.

He was moving into his apartment building

when a half-dozen NYPD officers suddenly showed up.

Darren Martin streamed the encounter live on Instagram.

He says one of his neighbours called the police

thinking that he was actually breaking into the apartment.

Even claiming that he had a weapon.

-So this is 106th Street in Manhattan? -Yep.

And on the night in question,

looking at where this car is parked right here,

is this where your U-Haul was?

Our U-Haul was parked right outside. Right over here where this car is.

Right in front of the building.

-And then, it looks like 56 is-- -Right over here, yeah.

So this is the apartment that I was moving into.

Yeah, this is it.

And it's outside. It's a regular building. Looks like any other walk-up here.

I don't know what those cops' intentions were when they came.

They were looking for someone with a weapon.

I could've been killed.

-Can I go see my guy? Can I go upstairs? -Not right now.

-Why not? Why can't I go anywhere? -We have to check it out.

What's the problem? I live here.

-We gotta do our investigation. -What are you investigating?

Listen, they called, right?

-We're doing our job. That's it. -Who called you?

If you're doing nothing wrong--

-Who called you? -Someone called us.

Well, I'm glad that this is nothing more

than a cramped space in a hallway

in an apartment building on 106th Street in New York,

and not another landmark

where another person from our community is killed by the police

and we're asking why.

The biases and prejudices

about race in America are so deep in our DNA

that sometimes we don't even recognise that they're there.

Take the Implicit Association Test, if you haven't taken it.

It's up on the Harvard website,

and it tests your implicit or unconscious association on all kinds of things.

On race, on gender, all kinds of things.

And I was interested, as I was looking at all of this information,

so I went and took it, and it made a mistake.

So I had to take it again.

Because, see, it gave these results and it's like, "That ain't me."

So I took it again.

And it had the same results.

A negative impression of Black males.

A negative impression of myself.

And I thought, "Where did that come from?"

I've had some good days

I've had...

All right, Betty Jo, where you at?

Some hills to climb

I've had some weary days

And some sleepless nights...

Well, he's got his hands up there for her now.

This guy's still walking.

He isn't following commands.

Time for a Taser, I think.

That looks like a bad dude too. May be on something.

He may have just been Tasered.

Shots fired!

Twenty-one, we have shots fired. We have one suspect down.

Sometimes clouds hang low

I can hardly see the road

Has your brother been misportrayed, in terms of who he was?

Yes, he has. The narrative...

started out as Terence being a suspect.

Well, he was a student, not a suspect.

Just left school 15 minutes earlier.

Fifteen minutes later, he was dead.

In the media, he was a thug.

He was a criminal. He was a drug addict.

-He was a bad dude. -Yes.

Nobody ever humanised my brother.

And I had to let America know who that bad dude was.

That was my twin.

He was a father.

He was a son.

He was a brother, an uncle, a cousin.

He was a friend.

He had a family who loved him.

And my brother did not deserve to die,

unarmed, with his hands in the air.

Nobody deserves to die and take their last breath alone.

He took his last breath alone.

He laid in the street like an animal.

George Orwell did not write about a year.

He wrote about a mindset of oppression.

And there are two things that he said that I would strive for each of us

to please remember as we go forward.

The first, "Who controls the past, controls the future.

And who controls the present, controls the past."

A government that is in power

has the ability to shape the views of the population it governs

by putting out a narrative that sometimes has nothing to do with the truth.

People don't realise, the Civil War--

-Yeah. -If you think about it, why?

People don't ask that question.

"But why was there the Civil War?"

Why could that one not have been worked out?

I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little bit later,

you wouldn't have had the Civil War.

He was--

He was a very tough person,

but he had a big heart and he was--

He was really angry...

that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War.

He said, "There's no reason for this."

There are several things that are problematic there.

The first is that Andrew Jackson died almost 16 years before the Civil War.

The second is that if he had said, "There's no reason for this,"

it wouldn't have been because he was saying,

"There's no reason to have slavery,"

because Andrew Jackson had no problem with enslaving people.

He was a slaver.

And Andrew Jackson will tell you what he thinks about slavery himself.

Andrew Jackson posted this ad offering a reward

for the capture of an enslaved person who had escaped from him.

And the ad describes the enslaved man, what he was wearing, where he might run,

promises to pay all expenses involved in capturing him

in addition to the $50 reward,

and $10 extra for every hundred lashes any person will give him,

to the amount of 300.

That's who Andrew Jackson was.

And that is who is on the face of our $20 bills.

Countries aren't just one thing.

They would sell enslaved people out of this location

six days a week.

Everyone from newborns to 70-year-olds were sold out of here.

For enslaved people to make the most money

for the traders and for the sellers,

they have to be prepped first.

Prep could be everything from high-fat and high-protein diets

to get them into better physical shape,

as well as, you know, fresh clothing.

You have this sort of prepping of the skin through oiling.

If they're looking a little bit older,

they could either dye the hair

or pluck any greys that someone would have,

things of that nature, in order to, when they come up onto the block,

they're able to garner the largest amount of money.

And I'm looking at, here, a "List of Negroes."

And it says, number one, the name is Sunday, the age is 45.

Enslaved people, they didn't have last names,

generally, until the 1870 Census.

And so it was the question of, "What is your name?"

Because the names could be changed each time you were sold?

They would be changed.

That's the first thing that is changed every time you're sold.

So on all broadsides you will ever see,

this is just the name they come to the sale with.

And keep in mind that the enslaved property of slave owners

was worth more than everything else they owned.

It was worth more than the plantation.

It was worth more than the land.

More than the goods that are produced on that plantation.

More than the house.

More than any other liveries that they have.

So the first thing that's going to be sold to pay for a debt is your enslaved.

Because you didn't have to buy them outright.

You could mortgage them.

When it came to movement of enslaved,

prior to being brought onto that block, they're going to be chained.

Now, everyone's going to be chained.

It's not just going to be grown-ups.

It's not going to be the elderly. It'll also be the children.

And so I think what I'm looking at are shackles

that were designed for an adult male,

and shackles that were designed for a child of maybe 3 or 4.

Yes. Yes.

Ista...

what are...

the three holes that I see in these bricks in the walls there?

They're fingerprints.

Enslaved people would begin to learn a skill at the age of about 6.

And so fingerprints and handprints and thumbprints

exist all throughout the city,

because enslaved people built the city.

And so on churches, on businesses, on--

In alleyways, you see these.

In theatres, you see these all throughout the city

in very, very subtle ways.

And if you don't know what you're looking for, you may not see them.

But they're there.

Absolutely, and they are a way of the enslaved who created this city

and created the economy that created this country

to remind us, "Hey, I was here too."

And so if I make the statement to you:

"America was founded on white supremacy."

You could say, "Jeff, that's an extreme statement."

And what I would say to you is, "Don't believe a word I say about it.

Just listen to what Americans said."

Because they were willing to tell you exactly what they thought.

All you have to do is go look.

We know that in 1619, 20-and-odd enslaved people

were brought to America, landed in Jamestown.

And by 1636, less than 20 years later,

we launched the first American-made slave ship, the Desire.

And it wasn't built in Alabama or Mississippi.

It was built in Massachusetts.

And look at the name of the ship. The Desire.

And the names of the three subsequent ships built in America

to go to Africa to get enslaved people.

The Fortune, the Hope andthe Prosperity.

They are telling you with language that is crystal clear

what they think about the concept of white supremacy.

In 1662, Virginia passed a law that said,

"Children of enslaved mothers are also enslaved."

Very simple law.

Why did they need it?

Because it was clear that white slave masters

were raping Black women on a normal and regular basis,

and these rapes were producing children.

And the law just wanted to say, "We don't want there to be any mistake.

If those babies come out with blue eyes or freckles,

those aren't people, those are enslaved people."

The law made sure to know that.

Virginia then passed a law saying, "If slaves become Christians,

that doesn't mean that they're freed."

Because you become a Christian if you are enslaved

only by the charity and piety of your owner.

This is the language that Americans were using

to describe the institution of slavery.

They equated it with charity and piety.

1669, Virginia passed a law,

"An enslaved person's death while resisting a master is not a felony."

Would you look at those words, please?

And think about the videos you have seen in the past ten years

of Black and brown people ending up dead in altercations with police officers

when they are unarmed?

It's still not a felony.

In 1739, there was a slave revolt in Stono, South Carolina,

that was incredibly violent.

There were some white people that were actually beheaded.

And the state of South Carolina responded, and they responded quickly.

By 1740, they had passed a 58-chapter law,

and the purpose of that law, in their words, not mine,

"So that the slave may be kept in due subjugation and obedience."

This wasn't just social racism or individual racism.

This was the law inscribing this.

Can you talk just a little bit about where you're taking us?

I'm taking you on Ashley Avenue

between Fishburne and Line Streets.

Now, the neighbourhood didn't look like it looks today.

It was a lot of farmland and some wooded area.

Some people just refer to it as the Ashley Avenue Oak.

Lynchings or hangings took place here on this very spot.

This happened from slavery, it happened all the way up until the early 1900s.

So there were lynchings here even after the Civil War ended?

Absolutely.

Well, everybody needs to know what happened here

so that we would all be able to learn from it.

Because it's a part of our history.

American history.

The word "slavery" appears once in the Constitution.

That's in the 13th Amendment, outlawing slavery.

And if you go back to the historical documents,

what you'll see is that the Southern states would get upset

when the word "slavery" was used.

And for God's sakes, we don't wanna make white people uncomfortable.

So the Northerners said, "Don't worry, we won't use the word 'slavery'

when we go to the Constitution.

We'll call them things like 'such persons.'"

The Three-fifths Clause in Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution.

All those Black folks in Virginia, 236,000?

Well, they will be counted as three-fifths of a person.

Each one of them.

Article I, Section 9, no ban on migration or importations of such persons

until 1808.

What are they saying?

"We have built all of these ships to go get enslaved people,

and we need at least about 20 years to keep doing it."

So the Constitution says,

"You can keep doing it for the next 20 years."

Article II, Section 1.

"Each state shall appoint a number of electors

equal to the number of senators and representatives."

What we are talking about, folks, is the Electoral College.

The Electoral College was based on the fact

that the Southern states were concerned

about the power that they would have

to prevent the government from taking the enslaved people from them.

And this was one of the compromises.

That Three-fifths Clause?

Three-fifths of 236,000 adds a lot of delegates.

Article IV, Section 2, no freedom for a runaway,

because slaves have to be returned to owners on demand.

And people have said that the folks who wrote our Constitution were brilliant.

And I agree with that.

They were brilliant and they were sneaky too.

Because they said, "You know, somebody may try and amend the Constitution

and get rid of Article I, Section 9.

So in Article V, they said "You can't amend Article I, Section 9,

until 1808."

This is how important the concept of white supremacy

was to the people that founded the country.

When they were talking about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,

they saw that as being completely consistent

with enslaving people.

The law picked a side.

If you read the historians, they will tell you

that modern-day police departments were originally formed,

especially in the South, in slave patrols.

I am not saying that modern-day police officers

are members of a slave patrol.

They are not.

There are law enforcement officers all over America

who are fighting for racial justice

and Constitutional and decent policing in our communities.

But I will tell you this:

People in my community,

from my great-great-great grandfathers on down,

have had a reason to fear that badge.

Because the people wearing it,

and the weapons and guns that they carried,

were used to oppress us.

So the next time you're wondering,

"Why is there such animosity in the Black community

when it comes to policing?

Why is there such concern?"

It's in our DNA.

I always used to tell Eric,

you know, "Don't have any interactions with the police officers.

Because the police officers, they have the upper hand.

You have to remember, they're the ones with the guns.

They're the ones that could arrest you, and no matter what you say."

So he would say, "Oh, yeah, I know, Ma."

And even with all the talk,

we can talk to our children as much as we want,

it's not always gonna be a good turnout when things like this happen.

That's Eric.

Eric is, I think, five months old in that picture, if that old.

He was my first-born.

Eric was a gentle giant.

He was a person who cared about other people

and who thought everyone was his friend.

Are you serious?

If you can share it...

what was going through your mind as you heard your son saying,

"I can't breathe"?

Until now, I cannot look at that video in its entirety,

because when I seen it for the first time,

I remember me going through this house banging on walls,

yelling at the police officers, "Let him go! Let him go!"

Now I could see exactly what they did to him.

Do not touch me.

When this tragedy happened to me, I just wanted to take to my bed,

and just go to sleep,

and just wake up when this terrible nightmare was over.

But it was never over.

And the Holy Spirit spoke to me one evening and says,

"Are you gonna lay there and die like your son?

Or are you gonna get up, lift up his name,

and let people know exactly who he was and not let the media demonise him?"

My son will not have died in vain.

We are gonna support him every step of the way.

Me and my grandchildren, my nieces, nephews, sisters,

everybody is going to support this cause,

'cause we won't rest until we get justice.

Even though it's too late for my son, we have to save other lives.

How would you like your son to be remembered?

Well, I would like my son to be remembered as

the sacrificial lamb, that everyone knows his name now.

And I am so glad that it is making a difference,

that people are more aware of the cruelty

and the injustice that's going on with people of colour,

and maybe they will stand up and take notice, and say,

"Well, hey, we have to do something about this."

This is real.

We see what's actually going on in this world today.

And I'm just hoping that his name will live on in history forever.

And as long as I live, I will always say his name,

and I will ask everyone else to please say his name,

and tell people what does it mean to them.

-His name was Eric Garner. -Yes.

Eric Garner was his name. Is his name.

A home and country

Should leave us no more

Their blood has washed out

Their foul footsteps' pollution

No refuge could save

The hireling and slave

From the terror of flight

Or the gloom of the grave

And the star-spangled banner

In triumph doth wave...

In case you doubt the lyrics to the third verse

of the national anthem that you just heard,

these are the handwritten lyrics from Francis Scott Key.

"No refuge could save the hireling and slave from the terror of flight,

or the gloom of the grave."

He is celebrating the murder of enslaved people.

And why would he do that?

He was the wealthy owner of enslaved people.

He came from a Maryland plantation-owning family.

In United States v. Reuben Crandall,

he prosecuted a man for possessing abolitionist literature.

He was the city prosecutor in Washington, D.C.,

and he sought the death penalty.

And here is his closing argument.

"Are you willing, gentlemen, to abandon your country,

to permit it to be taken from you and occupied by the abolitionist,

according to whose taste it is to associate and amalgamate with the Negro?"

I guess he wrote a nice poem, but that's who Francis Scott Key is.

By 1835, cotton from enslaved people's labour,

55% of U.S. exports.

So when we see America starting to become industrialised,

we see that cotton from the labour of enslaved people

was a critical part of this.

Twelve U.S. presidents owned enslaved people.

This covered about 50 of America's first 60 years,

and that's why I am saying to you,

the people that founded this country had no problem with white supremacy.

They depended on it to make America a great nation.

So when did slavery end in New York?

Slavery in New York ended in 1827,

but to really understand New York's rise,

in terms of becoming a financial powerhouse,

it's important to understand the connection between New York

and enslavement, even after slavery was abolished in New York City.

The building behind us is the Cotton Exchange, established in the 1850s,

one of the greatest commodities exchanges in the country.

New York was a centre for finance, is still the centre for finance,

and this is where slaveholders would come

to get all their endeavours financed and insured.

We found out recently that major insurers like AIG and Aetna

insured enslaved people as goods.

Enslaved people who died en route during the Middle Passage,

enslaved people who died on the plantation,

all those people, with their lives, were insured.

So they have life insurance policies.

Also, major investment banks, like the now-defunct Lehman Brothers,

provided financing for slaveholders.

So the economy of New York was entwined with slavery.

We're walking up just from the waterfront, right back here, about a block away,

and as we're coming to the corner of Water and Wall Streets,

there is this little park.

I have an idea in my mind when you say "slave market."

But can you just tell us, explicitly, what was happening on this site?

So there was a municipal market, a pavilion,

that operated from 1711 until 1762.

By the mid-1700s, one in five New Yorkers were enslaved.

So they created this municipal market,

where once you were kidnapped and brought here,

you would be sold at this pavilion.

In addition, if you were already enslaved in New York,

and your slaveholder didn't have something for you to do during the day,

you could be rented out for the day at this market.

Like any other transaction that might occur in the city

where the city would impose a tax to get revenue,

the slave trade was just another thing to be taxed?

Exactly. And that's why New York City was such a pro-slavery city.

When we say that to people, they're shocked.

New York was pro-slavery.

New York received, from cotton alone,

$200 million in that time's currency.

So if you could imagine the interests that would wanna protect that.

How many of you knew that the mayor of New York City

advocated that New York leave the Union during the Civil War?

He didn't say, "Join the Confederacy."

What he said was, "With our aggrieved brethren of the slave states,

we have friendly relations and a common sympathy.

We have not participated in the warfare upon their Constitutional rights

or their domestic institutions."

He was saying, "We can't give this up.

If we withdraw from the Union, we don't have to join the South.

We can make business deals with the North, and business deals with the South.

The money will keep coming in."

So, what was the role of slavery in America on the eve of the Civil War?

Well, that yearly cotton production, 1.5 million pounds in 1790,

try 2.3 billion pounds, 60% of U.S. exports by 1860.

If any of you have ever held a ball of freshly picked cotton in your hand,

with no stems or no sticks on it,

you will know that it weighs virtually nothing.

How much of that do you think you had to pick

to get to 2.3 billion pounds of it?

And how did they do that?

Because the number of enslaved people wasn't 700,000 anymore.

It was 4 million.

And remember, we're not bringing over people on slave ships after 1808.

Now, history will show there were definitely ships

of enslaved people brought after 1808, but that market dried up very quickly.

This was done by breeding.

Black women were bred...

so that they would bear children

who could continue American cotton production.

The value of enslaved people, in 1860 dollars,

$3.5 billion dollars.

One hundred billion dollars in today's money.

More millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley,

that's Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana,

than any place else in America.

Today, that is one of the poorest sections in the country.

There are all kinds of people who are desperate to make arguments

that the Civil War was about something other than slavery.

In the state of Texas, elected officials are trying to pass laws

that will require their school teachers to teach that slavery

was a side issue in the Civil War.

And my response to that is, once again, don't believe me.

Just go back and look at what the states said.

"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery,

the greatest material interest of the world."

"The people of the slaveholding states are bound together by the same necessity

and determination to preserve African slavery."

"That the servitude of the African race, as existing in these states,

is mutually beneficial to both bond and free."

"The election of Mr Lincoln cannot be regarded otherwise

than a solemn declaration

on the part of a great majority of the Northern people

of hostility to the South, her property, and her institutions."

"They have endeavoured to weaken our security,

to disturb our domestic peace and tranquillity,

and persistently refused to comply

with their express Constitutional obligations to us,

in reference to that property."

Georgia was essentially saying, "You freaking lied to us.

You told us that we could keep these people as enslaved people,

and now you're taking them away from us,

and we're leaving the Union because of it."

And you know what? Georgia was right.

They were promised that they would get to keep people as enslaved people.

I'm from the state of Tennessee, and if I wanna go to my home state,

and walk into the Tennessee statehouse to see one of my state legislators,

I gotta walk past this guy, Nathan Bedford Forrest,

who was either the originator of the KKK, or one of its first Grand Wizards,

somebody that was clearly involved with the KKK coming to a height of power,

somebody that was a Confederate soldier,

and what he had to say about the Civil War, at least he was honest,

"If we ain't fighting for slavery, then what the hell are we fighting for?"

Ignorance is not bliss, because it allows a false history to thrive.

"Who controls the past, controls the future."

And if slavery just ended, and then we had the Civil Rights Movement,

and everything was fine, then what are we still complaining about?

"Who controls the past, controls the future."

And your children, they are being taught

that slavery was a side issue in the Civil War.

Six months before the Emancipation Proclamation,

Abraham Lincoln passed the Compensated Emancipation Act.

What did that do?

He freed D.C. slaves,

and first, he set up a commission to pay approximately $300,

which was about $7000 in today's money,

in compensation to former slave owners, for each enslaved African freed.

Please read that carefully. I'm not fooling.

After nine months, 900 slave owners were paid $1 million,

in 1860 money...

for lost property.

So when people have a discussion about reparations for slavery,

it's a false debate, because reparations have already been paid.

They were paid to slave owners.

At the very same time that America refused to give the Negro any land...

through an act of Congress,

our government was giving away millions of acres of land

in the West and the Midwest.

Which meant that it was willing to undergird

its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor.

But not only did they give the land...

they built land grant colleges

with government money to teach them how to farm.

Not only that, they provided county agents to further their expertise in farming.

Not only that, they provided low interest rates

in order that they could mechanise their farms.

Not only that, today many of these people

are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies not to farm,

and they are the very people telling the Black man

that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.

And this is what we are faced with, and this is the reality.

Now, when we come to Washington...

in this campaign, we are coming to get our cheque.

So, what happened after the war?

Something was happening in the South,

because the enslaved people who were newly freed

had been in the starting blocks for 246 years.

And when the word "go" came, they were ready.

'Cause what many people fail to recognise is Reconstruction was actually working.

In 1868, before the 15th Amendment passed,

there were 700,000 Black registered voters in the South.

Two thousand Black men served in elected office.

There was a Civil Rights Act in 1875.

I bet most of the lawyers in this room don't even know this.

It outlawed racial discrimination

in housing, schools, public transportation, and jury service.

It was just overruled by the Supreme Court in 1883.

And then Rutherford Hayes got elected president.

And in 1877, he withdrew the Northern troops from the South,

and what happened then is that the Confederates regrouped

as organisations like the KKK.

The Southern states started passing laws to enforce and maintain white supremacy,

and if you want an example of what was happening, in 1896 in Louisiana,

there were 130,344 Black registered voters,

and two years later, there were just over 5000.

Why do you think 125,000 people

decided not to vote?

There was a chance at the end of the Civil War,

and there was Reconstruction, and it was working.

And they reached the tipping point, and they just rolled right back.

And this is what we rolled back to.

In 1896, the United States Supreme Court decided Plessy v. Ferguson.

Mr Plessy got on a train, on purpose, knowing he would be arrested,

to test the law in America.

And the United States Supreme Court said,

"The law of America is separate, but equal."

It's not the custom, it's the law of the land.

Now, I'm gonna ask you to look at that image,

and understand what was normal,

accepted, and American...

in our country.

Because you wanna talk about race in America at the turn of the 20th century,

well, there were race riots in New Orleans and New York City.

In 1901, 105 Black people are lynched.

1902, 85 Black people are lynched.

1903, 84 Black people lynched.

1904, 76 Black people lynched.

1905, 57 Black people lynched.

1906, 62 Black people lynched.

1907, 58 Black people lynched.

1908, 89 Black people lynched.

1909, 69 Black people lynched.

1910, 67 Black people lynched.

Between 1877 and 1950,

more than 4000 racial, terrorised lynchings in America.

This article appeared in the Chicago Defender, December 20, 1947.

It says, "Enraged, jealous whites shoot down successful businessman.

Believed Dixie gang murdered young father.

Enraged whites, jealous over the business success of a Negro,

are believed to be the lynchers of Elmore Bolling,

who was found last week, riddled with shotgun and pistol bullets.

Those who know say Bolling has long been a marked man,

since he was rated by whites here as too successful to be a Negro."

Your family found your father's body in a ditch.

Is this the ditch that we're looking at now?

Yes, this is actually the spot,

and it's ingrained in my memory

where I'm just looking at him in the ditch with his eyes open.

We heard the shots.

We thought that someone was killing some cows,

but we actually heard the shots that killed my dad.

We all went down there, not knowing what to expect.

His truck that he was driving was still running, with the lights on.

He had been shot six times with a pistol, and once in the back with a shotgun.

I knew that what had happened to my father

was extremely bad.

I cried most of the time until my mom finally sent me away with the neighbour.

This is a fabulous picture.

Could you tell us who is here?

This is Mom, Bertha Bolling. Bertha Nowden Bolling.

And this is my dad, Elmore Bolling.

And one of the things that we always laugh about, the children,

is that this thing in his hand, actually, is her purse.

She kept the money.

So on this picture, Dad took her purse and had it under his arm,

because that was the money.

What was the trajectory of your family after your father was lynched?

By my father being the main breadwinner,

we went from prosperity to poverty almost overnight.

And my mom, she became a presser in a dry cleaners.

And her arms had the burns that showed,

you know, that came along with that kind of labour.

And that was the labour that put me through college.

The lynchings occurred for terroristic purposes.

They wanted to keep Blacks terrified,

to keep them from trying to do things, and it worked.

Was anyone ever prosecuted?

No. The killers who, actually, one of them actually admitted that he killed my father

because he insulted his wife over the telephone, were never indicted.

And that was what made me decide to do the historic marker.

I had to have some symbol to tell the world

that here was a good man that was killed just because he was successful.

Am I correct that it is on, literally, the very spot where your father was killed?

Within feet of where he was actually killed.

And Confederate monuments started appearing in America.

And these weren't monuments that were built right after the Civil War,

when people were thinking, "Oh, my God, we just lost this war,

and our heroes are so dear to our heart. We wanna memorialise them."

No, no. They came mostly in the 20th century.

This is a guy named John Pelham.

What did he do?

Well, he resigned from West Point in 1861

to join the Confederate Army, and here's what he did to get a monument.

"He displayed a genius for dashing to a spot that commanded the battlefield,

and bravely raining shot and canisters

on forces that greatly outnumbered his own."

Translated, he killed a whole bunch of American soldiers

in defence of slavery.

And they built a monument to him for that, not for something else.

When people say, "Well, George Washington owned slaves too, and he has a monument.

Are you gonna take away his monument?"

And my response is the Washington Monument was not built

because George Washington owned slaves.

He did own slaves, and he will be damned for that.

Having said that, George Washington led the Revolutionary Army,

and, I don't know, he founded the country?

So maybe that's why they built him a monument.

The fact that he owned enslaved people had nothing to do with his monument.

The Confederate monuments were built for one reason,

to honour people for what they did from 1861 to 1865.

And those monuments honour people

during that time period for doing one thing,

maiming and murdering American soldiers

so that they could keep owning enslaved people.

That's where the monuments are.

Those are the top ten states.

And this is who we are in America.

What's up, y'all? Tami Sawyer here.

I'm live at the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue.

Right here in Memphis, Tennessee.

I just wanted to come down and let Nathan Bedford Forrest know...

that he has a formidable opponent.

I was asked, "What's one thing you think you could make happen in a year?"

I said, "We can get these damn statues removed."

And I didn't believe it, but I said, "That sounds like one thing we could do."

And I went on Facebook, and I made a post that said,

"Who wants to talk about these statues?" And next thing,

we had filled Bruce Elementary gym with 350 Memphians of all ages,

races, genders, sexualities, creeds,

even a descendant of Nathan Bedford Forrest himself,

who came together to say,

"We want Nathan Bedford Forrest and Jefferson Davis,

and all Confederate memorabilia, removed from our city."

-Take them down. -901.

-Take them down. -901.

Protect the people, not the statue.

Protect the people, not the statue.

Protect the people, not the statue.

How do you respond to the people that say,

"This isn't about slavery or oppression of Black people.

This is about Southern culture, and Southern history,

and maintaining our history"?

I think that those people need to, one, learn history.

When people talk about Southerners, they think about white people.

But the economy of the South and the culture of the South

was built off slavery.

The food we eat, right? Fried chicken, ham hocks, collard greens.

That's Black people.

The music we listen to.

Elvis is not Elvis without Black musicians, right?

Martin Luther King was killed here, right?

Blackness, the blood of Black people,

seeps so deeply into the ground of the South,

you cannot look at--

You cannot describe Southerners or Southern history

or American history with the exclusion of Black people.

And so the people who say that we're rewriting history, they rewrote history.

Now, if we had a statue that says,

"Here lies the graves of a notorious slave owner and his wife,

who only became one of the richest people in Memphis

because of his brutal practises towards Black Americans."

But that's not the history that people are ready to reconcile.

And I see our Black kids, their lights go out in their eyes

at 3, 4, 5 years old.

They believe they're lesser than by the time they've reached kindergarten.

And if we can change anything,

I believe that we could change the landscape of our city

so they didn't have to be reminded on a daily basis

that they are considered second-class citizens by many people in this country.

History is being made in Memphis tonight.

Within the next few hours...

both the Nathan Bedford Forrest and Jefferson Davis statues

will no longer stand in our city.

While we watched the cranes come in,

the park get filled with workers, and I was right across the street to witness,

at 9:01 on December 20th, 2017,

Nathan Bedford Forrest rise above that pedestal

for the first time since he was placed.

What was that feeling like?

It's a complicated feeling.

One of relief, one of joy, and one of sadness.

Where was the sadness from?

We had to fight so hard, right?

That I had friends who went to jail for this,

that a woman was killed for this, right?

And that our statue came down,

and almost another thousand stand across the country.

And that people are working harder to protect them

and tell us that we are wrong or attention-seekers

than they are to reconcile and get to a point of truth

and understanding about who these people were.

February 10, 1915, The Birth of a Nation is released.

D.W. Griffith's stupendous motion picture production of Thomas Dixon's famous story,

The Clansman.

It employed the services of 18,000 people, and a symphony orchestra of 40.

As you can see, it took three years in production.

It was one of the first movies screened in the White House.

And it had white actors in blackface, like this one.

And this story, by the way...

does damage, not only to every Black person...

but it takes the issue of sexual assault...

and twists it in a way that's incredible.

Because, of course, rather than let a Black man touch her...

she'll jump to her death.

This is what Woodrow Wilson had to say about the movie.

"The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation

until at last, there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan,

a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country."

This is the president of the United States.

Folks, this was entertainment.

This was a pleasant evening at the movies.

This is who we are as Americans at the turn of the last century.

Over your shoulder is a bridge with a man's name on it.

And I have seen pictures of that bridge ever since I was a young, young child,

and I see the name Edmund Pettus.

I think there are very few people in America

who know who Edmund Pettus really was.

Edmund Pettus was a powerful leader in this area.

He was a former U.S. Senator.

Most importantly, he was the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

Highest leader.

When this bridge was completed in 1940 or so,

they wanted a symbol.

They wanted to name...

the bridge after somebody who would send a signal

of "stay in your place,"

because symbols are more powerful than words.

And so this is a very powerful symbol.

Every time someone cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, it gets in them.

Every time someone see a photo of it, it gets in them.

Every time one sees something on TV, it gets in them.

So that's why, in the Senate,

I introduced a resolution

to change the name from Edmund Pettus Bridge

to the Freedom Bridge.

The state of Alabama, last year, passed a law that said

you cannot change the names of any of these

so-called iconic white supremacist symbols.

And somebody says, "Well, this is history."

This is symbolism. This is not history.

We ought never confuse symbolism with history.

Symbolism is somebody's idea about a response to what happened.

Not what happened.

You are to move off of the street immediately

and assemble in front of Lehman's Pontiac Dealer,

otherwise you will not be protected.

And here it is, 50-some years later after that,

and we're still fighting for the right to vote,

we're still fighting to keep our children from being killed,

we're still fighting to keep our people from being incarcerated,

we're still fighting for all kinds of things.

So that just demonstrates the depth of white supremacy.

And I didn't fully understand that.

The Greenwood neighbourhood in Tulsa

was called Black Wall Street by many people.

These are some of the images of how Black Americans

were living in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921.

The level of economic advancement was astounding.

Six hundred businesses, 21 churches, 21 restaurants, 30 grocery stores,

two movie theatres, six private airplanes,

a hospital, bank, post office, schools.

Libraries, law offices, even a bus system.

On May 30th of 1921, a young Black man was arrested

and accused of trying to assault a white female elevator operator.

All of the historical records say that the kid tripped in the elevator

and bumped into this white woman.

But he was arrested, and the rumour mill started,

and a lynch mob formed.

Well, the men in Greenwood were World War I veterans,

and when they heard about the lynch mob,

they got their guns and they went down to the courthouse.

Not to break anybody out, but to keep the lynch mob out.

On June 1st, 1921, white people rented airplanes.

They got burning balls of turpentine,

and they dropped them on the businesses and homes in Greenwood.

And when Black people ran out of the burning buildings and homes,

they were shot dead by white people standing outside.

I get angry when I read about this

referred to as "the Tulsa Riot."

This was not a riot. This was a massacre.

This was the cost of preventing a lynching.

I thought the world was coming to an end.

I felt, "Well, what in the world is going on?"

Being as young as I was, I didn't understand.

But it was quite a mess.

It was quite something.

Would you introduce yourself, please? Tell folks your name?

My name is Lessie Evelyn Randle.

It was Benningfield before I married, and...

I am 100 and...years old.

I remember, I don't know what you call them, rebels,

or what they were, came in,

and they just spared Grandmother's home,

they didn't burn her home.

But the homes all around us were burned,

and stores were just cleaned out...

and everything, but it was quite something.

I never want to see anything like that again.

I saw two or three being shot down as we were escaping.

At one time, we went in an area where they had killed so many,

just had them piled up in the street in a pile.

And I thought that was terrible.

I remember thinking that...

I said, "What are these people doing lying around like this?"

One of the people told me, "They're dead. They were killed."

I said, "Oh, my God."

That, of course, scared me, being a kid and everything,

but it was quite something.

-So this is a city-owned cemetery? -Yes.

-The name of it is...? -Oaklawn Cemetery.

And it was a place where we have

very credible evidence,

eyewitness testimony that's been passed down,

that bodies were dumped.

And we've gotten documented stories from white citizens that live in Tulsa

who had families here during the massacre and before.

'Cause one of the guys that I interviewed told me,

he said, "My father took me..."

You used to be able to walk up to the rail system.

He said they brought rail cars through here, flatbed rail cars,

and they just rolled bodies off.

But our contention was the bodies were dumped

all the way where the underpass is,

and they intentionally put the interstate on top of their bodies,

knowing that nobody would ever think...

-To look under the road. -To look under the road.

What is the most reasonable estimate of how many people died?

You're looking at 4000 people...

- Easy. -that you cannot account for.

-Yeah, I agree. -So it's a genocide.

It's an ethnic cleansing, you know?

Even to call it a massacre marginalises it,

because it's just too big.

It's too big of a story.

-You see the steps over to the left? -Yes.

We call those the Steps of No Return.

And why are they called the Steps of No Return?

'Cause the houses were never rebuilt.

Yeah, it's a powerful...

Powerful place to be.

And you look forward, you look at the city,

-and you just imagine what was. -And what could have been.

-Yeah. -If this hadn't been destroyed.

This city could've had an incredibly different destiny.

-Yeah. -Definitely.

I never wanna see anything like that again.

Of course, you never know what may happen again. You never know.

Because the way it's going now, from what I've seen...

I feel like anything could happen.

How is it possible that this could happen in America

and not be taught in history books up one side and down the other?

Do you know how many people were prosecuted for the Tulsa Massacre?

Zero.

Do you think law enforcement didn't know who rented an airplane on June 1st?

Do you think law enforcement couldn't tell from the pictures

who were walking around town with shotguns over their shoulders

to figure out who may have shot some of the Black people?

Do you really think law enforcement didn't know what happened?

The reason I have shown this, and shown the pictures of lynchings,

is that these kind of things could not happen

without law enforcement acquiescence or direct involvement.

You can't hang somebody from a tree in the middle of the city

and have the police not know about it.

The hand you see in that picture is the hand of Emmett Till's mother.

That woman is one of the bravest women in American history,

because she took her personal tragedy,

her incredibly personal tragedy, and she made a decision.

"I am going to make America look at who we are."

And in 1955, this next picture appeared in newspapers across America.

And I believe, personally,

that many white people across America woke up

and looked at this picture in the paper,

and said something to themselves like this:

"I know those coloured people down there are causing a problem...

but I didn't sign up for this."

Everyone thinks that America

is still one of the most segregated countries in the world

because of social individual prejudice, and finances.

And I'm not saying that those two things don't have some relationship

to our segregated country.

What I am saying is, federal, state and local governments

deliberately sabotaged Black homeownership.

This wasn't a mistake.

This was the deliberate policy of the federal government.

The Federal Housing Authority drew redline maps

of every major city in America.

That's the redline map of Brooklyn, New York.

"A," or green ranking, meant the neighbourhood was homogeneous.

A "B," or blue ranking, meant it was still desirable

and expected to remain stable.

A "C" ranking meant it was declining,

beginning to be integrated, bordering on Black neighbourhoods.

And a "D" ranking was red, for redlining, any Black presence at all.

And this was the truth from sea to shining sea.

And then we reach 1954, with Brown v. The Board.

I will tell you, this had a major impact on my life,

in terms of school desegregation.

This is what Thurgood Marshall argued in the Supreme Court.

"Separate but equal was the inherent determination

that people who were formerly in slavery, regardless of anything else,

shall be kept as near that stage as is possible."

And doesn't that make sense?

What the heck is "separate but equal" except:

"You are not human enough.

Don't drink my water out of my water fountain,

don't use the bathroom and my toilet, don't go to school with my children."

Let's stroll and see if we can find our eighth grade graduation picture

and second grade First Communion picture.

It used to be down here.

I think the lights may come on as we walk.

-There we go. -There it is.

Here we go.

-Yeah. -1963.

-There's First Communion. -First Communion.

That's me.

-That's Opie right there. -That's right.

-That's my older brother, Herbert. -Yep.

My older brother, Herbert, and I were the first two Black kids

to come to school at St. Louis.

Opie, you and I met each other the summer before the second grade,

and that was the start of one of the best friendships

I've ever had in my life.

Well, as we were going to school here,

and different things were happening in the world,

I remember when King was assassinated, for example.

Op, what do you remember about that?

I remembered that... I think it was the first time I saw my father

be armed with a shotgun in our house

just because of the fear of civil unrest.

But we were still so young at that time

that we didn't have a true sense of what was really going on.

Yeah.

-We were just having fun. -Yeah.

And we would go places, and the only thing that really...

I think the first time that I felt any discomfort is,

and you might recall this,

we took the bus to the Crosstown Theater,

and the movie Patton had just come out, with George C. Scott.

And at the Crosstown...

we went and we had to sit in the balcony

because Jeffery wasn't allowed to sit in the main area.

I didn't think much of it because I wanted to sit in the balcony to start with.

It's pretty neat up there.

But it was the first time that I realised that there were differences

on how we were treated by others.

And I remember it was something that we kind of brushed off

in our childhood, but looking back on it, it's just sad.

One thing I remember more than anything else

about those days, where y'all were concerned,

and hopefully you don't even hardly remember this,

because I tried to take care of it in a very professional manner.

We went to Sacred Heart in Walls, to a basketball game,

and we were all getting out of the car, and we were walking into the gym.

And a man grabbed me by the arm, and said, "What are you doing?"

And I said, "Pardon me?"

And he said, "We don't allow Blacks in the gym, or to play in the gym."

So this is Mississippi, which is right over the line.

And I said, "Well, that's fine."

And I remember turning to y'all, and I said,

"They've got a problem with the clock,

and with what's going on here, we all are out here. We're leaving."

And the parents of the team, they were fine with it.

I explained to a couple of them.

We were walking out the gym door,

and the pastor there at Sacred Heart was coming in.

He stopped me, and said, "Mr Orians, what are you doing?"

And I said, "Well, this is what happened when I went in the gym."

And he goes, "No, that ain't happening."

And he went back in that gym,

and he got the coaches and the parents together,

and we went back into the gym and we played.

I didn't know that.

I figured not.

What I remember about that tournament,

a kid on the other team, at one point, calling me a nigger.

And I remember there was a time out,

and my dad must have been near the bench, and I said to him,

"You know, this kid called me a nigger."

He looked me in the eye and he said, "What do you wanna do about it?

Do you wanna quit? Do you wanna cry? Or do you wanna keep playing?"

And I was like, "I wanna keep playing."

And he's like, "Then forget about it and keep playing," which is what I did.

But my memory of that was always just that

it was this kid...

who had interacted with me.

I definitely remember the trip to Walls, Mississippi,

because I remember that you could get a Coca-Cola for a nickel

in those machines,

and up here, it was like 10 or 15 cents, and I'm like, "Damn, this is great.

Maybe we wanna live here," and my father's like, "I don't think we do."

But it's one of the things

that you protected all of us from,

and I just wondered whether those things were still in your head.

I was thinking about this work that we're doing,

and thinking about coming back to Memphis,

that the relationships that I built here,

even though I haven't seen people in so long,

are some of the warmest things that I can ever remember.

And these kind of relationships are the things that are important in life.

And it is so good to see both of you.

And I just love the fact that we were able to grow up together.

Dick, I'm gonna give you back this ball.

The first integrated high school game in Memphis,

Catholic, 14, Father Bertrand, 7.

-There you go. -Yeah.

-Thank you both so much. -All right.

-Jeffery, man, good seeing you. -Absolutely.

-Dick, thank you, brother. -All right, buddy.

The promise of Brown, what a lie that's turned out to be.

American schools today are almost as segregated

as they were in the '50s.

This is the "victory" document from the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

The document that was circulated in the Black community

the night before the buses were gonna be integrated,

a bus boycott that lasted for more than a year,

where Black women were going into white homes,

being maids in those homes,

and they were getting up at 4 and 5:00 in the morning

to walk to those homes,

and then walk back to their homes in the Black neighbourhoods,

and get there maybe at 8:30, 9:00 at night,

try and feed their families, try and take care of their families,

and then get up the next day, and do it all over again for over a year.

And I get 15 minutes late to work, and I get pissed off.

This is the victory document.

"The bus driver is in charge of the bus, and has been instructed to obey the law.

Assume he will cooperate in helping you occupy any vacant seat.

Do not deliberately sit by a white person unless there is no other seat."

Where did this come from?

This is the difference that every Black person in America knows.

It's the slip between the law and living.

Yeah, the law says you can ride that bus and sit wherever you want,

but don't go getting yourself killed over it.

"In case of an incident, talk as little as possible,

and always in a quiet tone. Do not get up from your seat.

Report all incidents to the bus driver."

"Talk as little as possible, and always in a quiet tone."

Don't make white people uncomfortable,

because the cost of that could be your life.

"If another person is being molested, do not arise to go to his defence,

but pray for the oppressor...

and use moral and spiritual force to carry on the struggle for justice."

And I don't know what to say about that one,

and I definitely don't know what to say about this one.

"If you feel you cannot take it, walk for another week or two."

This is the difference between the law and living...

when you're Black in America.

When was the last time you were here in this temple?

Fifty years ago.

Larry's funeral.

I remember it was around 700 people here.

I mean, they was all outside, it was packed.

And Larry was in a white casket.

And my mother and father were standing at his casket.

And they was crying.

This is where the march started, at Clayborn Temple,

and they marched downtown.

Larry and...

some more of his classmates had left school,

because the school was urging everybody to go down there.

And so him and some of his friends had went down there.

What did your family hear about what actually happened to Larry?

It was-- Witnesses.

I mean, a lot of witnesses at that time,

and they said that the officer, Leslie Dean Jones,

he was running with a shotgun,

and Larry saw him running with the shotgun.

So he ran in what they call a boiler room,

and he ordered Larry to come out.

And Larry, he came out with his hands in the air

and said, "Don't shoot."

He put the shotgun in his stomach, and pulled the trigger...

at close range.

At close range.

My mother, she ran out the house,

she didn't have no shoes on,

and she reached to touch Larry,

and he put the barrel in her chest, and told her to "Get back, nigger."

And she said, "That's my son."

When I got home, my father, Mason Payne,

he was in the driveway, and he was crying.

And I said, "Dad, what's wrong?"

He said, "Larry gone. He won't be back.

He won't be back."

He was a young Black man...

in school and working.

He didn't have a chance to live his life.

Larry was murdered in cold blood for no reason at all.

Devastated. We were devastated.

I mean, still going through it.

Still going through it.

Larry's gone, but he will never be forgotten,

not by the Payne family.

But I must confess that that dream that I had that day

has, in many points, turned into a nightmare.

Now, I'm not one to lose hope.

I keep on hoping,

I still have faith in the future,

but I've had to analyse many things over the last few years,

and I would say, over the last few months,

I've gone through a lot of soul-searching and agonising moments,

and I've come to see that we have many more difficult days ahead,

and some of the old optimism was a little superficial,

and now it must be tempered with a solid realism.

And I think the realistic fact is that we still have a long, long way to go.

I think the biggest problem now is that we got our gains

over the last 12 years at bargain rates, so to speak.

It didn't cost the nation anything.

In fact, it helped the economic side of the nation

to integrate lunch counters and public accommodations.

It didn't cost the nation anything to get the right to vote established.

Now we are confronting issues

that cannot be solved without costing the nation billions of dollars.

Now, I think this is where we're getting our greatest resistance.

They may put it on many other things,

but we can't get rid of slums and poverty without it costing the nation something.

A lot of people who want change,

they just don't want the change to cost them anything,

or to require them to change anything about the way that they're living.

Fifty years ago, this report came out.

It came out about three weeks before King was killed

in my hometown of Memphis.

And these are the things that it said, the basic conclusion of the Kerner Report:

"Our nation is moving toward two societies,

one Black, one white, separate, and unequal."

Folks, this is what they're saying 50 years ago.

"The deepening racial divide is not inevitable.

The movement apart can be reversed.

Choice is still possible.

Our principal task is to define that choice,

and press for a national resolution.

To pursue our present course

will involve the continuing polarisation of the American community

and ultimately the destruction of basic democratic values."

Does that sound familiar?

"What white America has never fully understood,

but what the Negro can never forget,

is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto.

White institutions created it,

white institutions maintain, and white society condones it."

This is 50 years ago,

and three weeks later, that's what happened in my hometown.

King was killed on April 4th, 1968.

He was scheduled to give a speech in a Memphis church

that Sunday, April 7, 1968.

This is the title of the speech that was found among his papers

in the Lorraine Motel after he was killed.

I wonder what that speech would have been like.

So in 1968, the Fair Housing Act ended 34 years of legal redlining,

and what I wanna tell you for a few minutes now is about luck.

Because if you look at this picture,

the guy on your left with the little gangster lean

and the tilted hat, that's me.

The guy in the front with the hat looking down at my younger sister

is my younger brother, who's seated in the front audience.

And that's my father, my older brother, and my younger sister.

That's the house we lived in in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1962.

In an all-Black neighbourhood in Memphis.

And what happened in '68, after King was killed,

is that there was a developer who was essentially buying

all the houses in our neighbourhood.

Well, my dad wouldn't sell our house.

My dad and my mother were converted Catholics,

and they wanted their kids in Catholic school,

and that meant schools in East Memphis,

and that meant living in a white neighbourhood.

So my dad made a deal with the developer.

"You buy me a house, and I'll give you my house."

We went looking at houses.

Every time we would look at a house, we would offer the asking price,

and the house would get sold by somebody else,

or "Another agent sold it,"

or "We lost the contract when we went fishing

and it fell out of the boat," and all these excuses.

This is the house that we ended up living in.

Four bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms,

a quiet place for me and my brothers and sisters to study,

a good school district,

all the things that Americans say you need in order to be successful.

We went to look at this house and offered the asking price,

and we had white friends of ours go about a half an hour later,

and they offered less money, and they sold it to them,

but they were buying it for us.

-This does bring back a lot of memories. -Yeah.

-And it looks about the same as it was. -It really does.

Maybe a little paint, but this is pretty much how I remember it.

We moved into this house after Dr King was killed in 1969.

And your family played a role that I never quite understood

until you and I have just recently talked.

-Could you tell us about that? -My mother-in-law was a realtor.

She was a 64-year-old Jewish woman who had been born and raised in Memphis.

And so she agreed to be your parents' realtor,

and she would show them houses,

and when they came and saw this house,

it was a brand-new house.

The real estate agent came to the door,

and at first, I think she thought my mother-in-law was the customer.

My mother-in-law gave her her card,

and when she realised it, she said something,

and slammed the door in their face.

So by that time, they'd seen so many houses,

they just said, "We've got to find another way."

So then their friends, Web and Pat Smith,

were the ones who bought the house,

and when they came and the realtor saw them,

she was very excited and happy.

And so then they bought the house, and transferred it to your parents.

And what I remember is you and Andy, and my parents...

I have this memory of you guys laughing in our living room,

and I knew it had something to do with a house,

and I knew you and Andy had helped us to get this house

and we couldn't talk about it until we moved in

because my parents were concerned

that somebody would do something to the house,

if they knew we were moving in.

But then after you moved in,

did you have much difficulty in the neighbourhood?

I remember the first week that we moved in,

my daddy sat on the carport right here,

under the carport, in a lawn chair with a shotgun across his lap.

And he would sit there until early in the morning

because he was gonna be ready if somebody came to the house.

I didn't realise that.

I remember it took a while for people to get used to us living here.

The woman that lived right here came over,

the day we moved in, to the front door,

and she had a plate of chocolate chip cookies.

And I am addicted to chocolate chip cookies,

and I have been ever since I was a kid.

And she knocked on the door, and my mom opened the door,

and I had run behind my mom, just to see who it was.

And she said, "May I speak to the lady of the house?"

And my mother said, "You're looking at her."

And she just spun, and walked back to the house.

-Taking the cookies with her. -I was like, "Could I have one cookie?"

And so that was me and Herbert's room. That was Teresa and Michelle.

And was that your room or the bathroom?

-That's the bathroom, then my window... -Your window faces that way.

The yard looks even a little bigger than I remember.

I just remember it being huge...

and having to use those clippers along the edges of the fence

to cut that grass that he never could stand.

With all the shit we were taking about moving in here,

he's like, you know, "My yard will be the best yard."

-The showplace. -Yeah.

There's a cemetery right across the street, and I remember...

Soon after we moved in, I was over there one night.

I'd just come out of the house, I don't know what I was doing,

but I was sitting on the wall, and a police car pulled up.

And the officers got out and asked me who I was,

and they patted me down, and they said, "Where do you live?"

I said, "I live right across the street. I'm just hanging out here."

They said, "You don't live there."

And they brought me over here, and of course,

Mommy answered the door, and they're like,

"Just wanted to bring your son home, make sure he was safe."

I'm like, "No. They were saying I didn't live here. Didn't believe me."

And then I remember Mommy and Daddy always saying,

"Well, we don't have to move far.

We're just going right across the street."

So the cemetery across the street is where they're both buried.

Shortly before my dad died,

he was asking whether he and my mom made the right decision,

saying, "I know it was hard on you and your brothers and sisters,

and living in that neighbourhood had its challenges,

and maybe it wasn't the right decision."

And I don't know what would have happened to my brothers

or my sisters or me if we hadn't come here.

This is part of what made me who I am.

This is what luck looks like.

I have worked as hard as anybody in this theatre

to get where I am today, and I am proud of that.

But I am lucky.

I was not the smartest kid in my neighbourhood,

and that ball that we saw rolling back when King got shot,

the only reason I didn't get crushed by that ball

is that I had unicorns for parents,

who figured out some way to get their kids into a situation

where they had a better chance to succeed.

And if that's what it takes

to have a legitimate chance at success,

having unicorns for parents, or just having dumb luck...

Is that really a country that you want to live in?

And so when you hear words,

when you hear the concept expressed of "white privilege,"

I am begging you to think about that in a different way.

White privilege doesn't mean that you haven't worked hard.

It doesn't mean that you haven't overcome obstacles.

It means that you walk through the world differently

than the Black and brown people in this country.

It does not take away from your hard work or your accomplishments at all.

It simply says this playing field is not level.

And that's because racism is more than just prejudice.

It is prejudice plus social power, plus legal authority.

And Black and brown people have never had the last two in America.

Not when we were brought here as enslaved people,

not during the Civil Rights Movement,

and not while Barack Obama was in the White House.

So, what did our prison population look like

as we entered the Nixon years?

Looked like about that, just under 400,000 people.

Here's what John Ehrlichman had to say about Nixon's strategy.

"We knew we couldn't make it illegal

to be either against the war or Black,

but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana,

and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalising both heavily,

we could disrupt those communities.

We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes,

break up their meetings,

and vilify them night after night on the evening news.

Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

And when we hear, today, America say,

"My God, the opioid epidemic, it's taking our children.

This is horrible. It's a medical issue.

We can't treat our children as enemies in a war.

We have to help our children."

I'm not trying to be facetious or to say that's not right.

Of course it's right.

But where was that sentiment when crack cocaine

was destroying Black communities?

This is Bill Clinton signing the 1994 Crime Bill,

a bill that did more damage to racial justice

in the criminal legal system

than any bill that I can remember in a long time.

This is not about Democrat or Republican.

This is about America.

Bill Clinton is saying, "When I sign this Crime Bill,

we together are taking a big step

toward bringing the laws of our land

back into line with the values of our people."

And he was speaking the truth,

because the values that America has expressed

up to that point,

and with what that law did,

they were the values of mass incarceration and white supremacy.

So, what happened?

That's what happened.

And it wasn't an accident.

And so here...

are pictures of what I refer to as "snuff films,"

things that we have now gotten used to seeing in America.

The killings of Black and brown men and women.

The ten cities with the largest police departments

collectively paid out $1.02 billion

between 2010 and 2015 in police misconduct cases,

which include alleged beatings,

shootings, and wrongful imprisonments.

You can't pay a billion dollars for police misconduct,

and not have criminal activity.

So we now know that to some Americans, Black Lives Matter is a hate group.

And what I would encourage you to think about...

is that the things that they're saying about Black Lives Matter activists today

are the exact same things they were saying

about Martin Luther King in the '60s.

Martin Luther King was arrested 30 times in 12 years.

We have a word for that. It's called "thug."

That's what we refer to activists today as, in America,

because they're in our face.

They're making us look at things we don't want to look at.

They're interrupting our football games.

We've gotta give ourselves to this struggle until the end.

Nothing would be more tragic than to stop,

at this point in Memphis.

We've gotta see it through.

America was at the point

where we were going to move from who we were

to who we could be, and who we always wanted to be.

And I remember thinking as a kid, "Well, who's going to lead us now?"

The leader that was going to make this movement go somewhere

had been taken away,

and I think that's a lesson to be learned about this work,

and a lesson that the women who established Black Lives Matter

have learned clearly:

You can't kill one person and stop the Black Lives Matter movement.

And the three women that set it up that way did it on purpose,

so that there would be leaders in small communities all around America.

-Say his name! -George Floyd.

-No justice. -No peace.

You are seeing Black people, brown people, white people,

people from every race in this country,

demonstrating together.

That has never happened before

on the scale that it's happening right now.

-Say her name! -Breonna Taylor!

The possibility of radical change is in the air.

-Whose streets? -Our streets!

-Whose streets? -Our streets!

I want to tell you why you were invited here tonight,

and it really comes down to this:

50 years from now, somebody,

maybe in an auditorium like this,

is going to be talking to a group of people

about what happened in this generation.

Did we turn up the volume on our videos and our TV

and just let that ball roll back, like we have every single time

we've come to a tipping point?

Or did this generation decide to do something different?

And I hope and expect that each one of you

will be out there with me pushing that ball to a new direction.

Thank you very much and good night.

Well, I woke up this morning with my mind

Stayed on freedom

Woke up this morning with my mind

Stayed on freedom

Woke up this morning with my mind

Stayed on freedom

-Hallelu -Hallelu

-Hallelu -Hallelu

Hallelujah

Well, I'm walkin' and talkin'

With my mind stayed on freedom

Oh, yes, I'm walkin' and talkin' With my mind

You know that it's stayed on freedom

I said, I'm walkin' and talkin' With my mind

You know that it's stayed on freedom

-Hallelu -Hallelu

-Hallelu -Hallelu

Hallelujah

Oh, well, ain't no harm with your mind

Come on, now! Stayed on freedom

Oh, no, there ain't no harm with your mind

You know it! Stayed on freedom

You can sing along, now

Ain't no harm with your mind

You know it! Stayed on freedom

-Hallelu -Hallelu

-Hallelu -Hallelu

Hallelujah

Come on and walk, now

Walk, walk, you better walk, walk

Come on and walk Walk with your mind on freedom!

Walk, walk

Come on, now Walk, walk

You better walk, walk With your mind on freedom!

Oh, oh, oh

You better walk

Come on and walk

While I'm singing and shoutin' With my mind, yeah

Stayed on freedom! Are you stayed on freedom?

Singing and shoutin' with my mind, yeah

Stayed on freedom

You know, you're singing and shoutin' With my mind

You know that! Stayed on freedom

-Hallelu -Hallelu

-Hallelu -Hallelu

Hallelujah

Come on and sing!

-Hallelu -Hallelu

-Hallelu -Hallelu

Hallelujah

One more time!

-Hallelu -Hallelu

-Hallelu -Hallelu

Hallelujah