welcome my name is sandy berman's and thank you all for coming it's so great to see so many of you here i just want to give a big thank you for the enorm outpouring of support from all the areas in the university and in the community it has been a truly humbling experience i also want to give a shout out to our sponsors who made this all possible i'm going to list them there's twenty seven which is amazing and it's also going to take me a minute to go through all of them but that's how this event was able to happen the music center for students of color lancelot's the next the center for health and wellbeing the women of color coalition the peace and justice center the and programs of asian languages and literature anthropology classics critical race and ethnic studies economics gender sexuality and women's studies geography geology german and russian global and regional studies history the miller distinguished professor shipper holocaust studies the humanities cen political science psychological science religion and theater the college of arts and sciences dean's office the college of nursing and health sciences dean's office united academics executive coun and there are so many individuals who came through for this and went above and beyond to help out and to promote this event there are too many to name but thank you all so so much i want to thank the davis center staff for helping me pull this off and for channel seventeen back there for taping you were all appreciative and just an aside those friends or family who couldn't make it this is going to be taped and you'll be able to stream it somewhere i don't know where yet but the channel seventeen website i don't know what that is but google it and i want to let you guys know that the funds for the honorarium for the speakers are going to be donated to two amazing organizations the beloved community center frankie and the center and the african roots library so the beloved community center is in greensboro north carolina ran by two survivors of the greensboro massacre nelson and joyce johnson and it's dedicated to organizing for justice a quality dignity worth and the enormous potential for all people the african roots libraries in kingston new york it's a newly established independent community library that promote literacy  learning and teaching about the african roots experience including history and culture through a dynamic exchange of information ideas and creativity without further ado i'd like to give a little introduction of my parents my heroes college of new york where he became involved in the movement to end the war in vietnam he went to duke medical school in north carolina where he became a revolutionary he studied pulmonary disorders and psychiatry graduating with a citation in community medicine he organized to oppose brown long a disease of textile workers in one nine hundred seventy nine he was an organizer of a demonstration against the k which was attacked by the k k k and nazis five people were killed and paul was shot in the head you can see pictured right there he remains partially paralyzed from the assault he is now retired from the practice of psychiatry after almost forty years during his career he conducted extensive research into the diagnosis and treatment of schizophrenia publishing numerous articles and a book on his work he now lives in the hudson valley with his wife sally burns on sally grew up in new york in the one nine hundred sixty s and  earned a ph d in political science at the city university of new york and for two decades taught at brooklyn college cuny there she chaired the political science department for eight years now professor emeritus and a grandmother she resides in the hudson valley with her husband cats and chickens she writes historical fiction and this year she published in the an enneagram other story i i thank you for coming in we're going to start with a videotape that's about ten minutes long and i just want to say a couple words about the videotape because it gives a bit of the story it's a remarkable thing to condense as much information as a video does it to just ten minutes the guy who did the video on jim waters was a camera man for channel twelve noon in greensburg he was there and much of the videotape is what he got and he was also a hero in the story because after the murders took place there were a succession of trials the local authorities made it their business to be sure that they had a strict line that everyone was supposed to follow that line was that this was a shoot out that there were two sides arrayed against one another and that the the communists and the klan were just shooting out you know it's like  anti matter going against one another jim waters during the trial was one of the few of the reporters who refused to go along with that he said no this was an attack this was an assault and he was he lost his job he was bitterly attacked over many years and many years later in one thousand nine hundred ninety the twentieth anniversary commemoration of the massacre jim presented us with his video which he had made he's an emmy award winning videographer and i'm still quite astonished at the condensed nature of the thing and i also want to mention that after you've seen the movie you might want to buy the book sally's book through survivors eyes have a few copies here it's the best movement book i know so i'll leave it at that and we'll just start the video been in the in the civil rights and i think we were young and angry we had been civil rights activists in the civil rights movement in from the one nine hundred sixty s through the one nine hundred seventy s when the movement died down in the mid seventy's we found marxism and communism to us it meant equality of all races black white brown every every everybody a quality of men and women and a method to end capitalist exploitation i'm not a communist anymore but i still believe in equality and i still believe in ending exploitation hundred seventy s we were brash and loud and full of rhetoric we organized against police brutality and poor neighborhoods for good schools and decent healthcare we got jobs in textile mills and hospitals and organize unions in a very anti union state of north carolina in one nine hundred seventy eight there was a strike wave across north carolina from the dock workers on the coast all the way up to the sanitation workers in the mountains of asheville we did strike support one of our members jim brawler led a textile strike in her river in north carolina in the middle of all this union activity the klan reem reemerged they had been they had disappeared during the night the civil rights movement but they came back in the late one nine hundred seventy s especially when there was a union drive going on and their a t m what their focus was was to split workers black and white and brown from each other so that you couldn't get workers together unionize we developed an anti klan campaign in response to the resurgence of the klansman burning crosses you could see in the video having meetings like that burning crosses planning processes on people's lawns who were blacks moving into a white area and we we focused on exposing the supporters the secret supporters of the ku klux klan people like frankly today donald trump you know who secretly and he actually very openly supports the far right and and we thought it was very important for people to understand it isn't the klansman it's the people behind them who are getting them to do their dirty work to divide people so in one thousand nine hundred seventy nine we as a klan reemerged we protested the klan in the china grove north carolina and in the cater alabama and in greensboro we planned which is where we were most of us live we planned a march and a conference to educate people about the secret supporters and the history of the klan and this conference in march was to be held on november third one thousand nine hundred seventy nine unknown to us the greensboro police got their agent in the klan paid agent in the clan name eddie dawson to organize klansmen to attack our demonstration i mean the klansmen probably wouldn't have even known that we were doing a march in a  conference without eddie dawson going around to them and trying to get them to attack us i known to us the bureau of alcohol tobacco and firearms sent their agent bernard buckets to join the north carolina nazis and to urge these nazis to join with the klan to attack our demonstration and the klan and the nazis had not been working together this was the first action that they did together was to attack us that day and then since that time they have developed closer and closer relationship so you saw what happened in the video today just now and there were no police the police we had a police we had a parade permit that where the police said that they would protect us and but they didn't they weren't there they had been sent to lunch by the police brass right as the police brass knew and had been following plan a nazi getting together in the edge of town and the caravan of klan and nazis with  police car the last car in the caravan coming towards our demonstration and as they approached our demonstration the police officers who were supposed to protect us were sent to lunch so it was it was a set up the klan and nazis opened fire on us knowing that there were no police around to stop them they murdered five of us when did another ten in full daylight and in front of your t v cameras and that's why that video was able to you know that's the footage from those four t v cameras the police blamed us for our own murders and the media went along with them they went along with the police in spite of their own t v footage to we were communists the epitome of evil kind of like muslims today or elite so called illegal aliens the impact of this attack crushed the union movement in north carolina union activists got fired from activists all over and all kinds of issues were harassed for the region was affected because people were afraid understandably the klan and nazis meanwhile grew not just in north carolina but that all over the country and that militia movement led to the oklahoma city bombing in one thousand nine hundred ninety four that killed one hundred sixty eight people and this is the same clan and nazis the same type of mentality in the same some of the same people that has been that marched through charlottesville where those tortures chanting nazi slogans like blood and soil and where one of their people drove in a car into the anti klan prop protestors killing heather heyer but this year the public reacted on a massive scale against not only the klan and the nazis but also their secret their not so secret supporters in the high places particularly donald trump the massive protests in boston in tennessee and other places led to the klan and nazis canceling a whole bunch of their demonstrations and that is a true very important victory so there is much more to be discussed about fighting and resisting white supremacy that will get into the sea evening and paul will be talking about some of that but what i wanted to talk about is you recover from this how do you get your life back together how do you get beyond the fear and so i want to just tell my story about that process first of all we mourned the dead the five people who were killed i just want to tell you a little bit about them they were very close friends of ours they were all activists they were all involved in union drives as well as other community issues this is a picture of sandy smith who was the chairperson of the textile union organizing committee in greensboro north carolina she was a dynamite organizer this is  who i mentioned led textile walkout and strike in the hall river north carolina he was the president of the textile workers union there this is bill sampson who is a shop steward and who was actually running for president of his local when he was killed in greensboro north carolina cesar cow say who i was a was also extremely involved and then finally mike nathan was a doctor he was supportive of the union drive he was very good at getting people to sign union cards he was really wonderful that way but his job was as a doctor as a pediatrician in a poor black community in durham north carolina so these were these were who were killed they were wonderful vibrant talented wonderful people and so here are more casual pictures of him of them and i really specially want to my favorite picture is this is sandy smith and so she was not just a tough union organizer she was also a wonderful warm person and she lived with nelson and joyce johnson and was like a big sister to their daughters and here she's holding a baby now it's not her baby but we all love we were all part of each other's lives and we all love to hold each other's babies this baby is mike nathan's baby and this baby he was this baby  months old when he was killed so she her name was leah and nathan she never never got to know her father she was six months old but i want to tell you that nathan has been part of our lives ever since then we went to her paul and i went to her wedding and just the summer we went and visited her and her husband and she has two little kids now and so we're still very very connected so for me well the one nine hundred eighty s were really really rough time i thought i was basically depressed for at least a decade after this happened i had two little children but i was the lucky one because my husband paul had survived whereas there were widows that had lost their husbands and and so i was i was lucky but i had my hands full i was pregnant at that time with a certain young lady who did a great job organizing this event i was i wasn't even three months pregnant so this happened i was kind of assumed that i would miscarry i just couldn't focus i had been so focused on being pregnant and then suddenly i forgot that i was pregnant you know because so much so much happening  she's a tough one so you're she is so but meanwhile my husband who had been shot in the head in the arm and was on the critical list he went t five hours of brain surgery that day into that night and then he was on the critical list for several weeks and so he had to really learn how to walk he was in the hospital and rehab center for like months and we and he obviously couldn't work i had a two year old as well and was pregnant and so i had to take care of him so we had no money coming in we were like any way we're like people today we're just working you know paycheck to paycheck and so i got on welfare back in the day when there was a defanged lease with dependent children you know way back then also we got on food stamps we wic program the things that were available and they really helped us eat so that was really important at but most important to us in our survival as a family kind of and socially as well as physically was that we had this circle of survivors the people who survived the attacks and we shared everything we shared our houses we shared our cars we shared taking care of the kids paul and i moved into a friend's house because i couldn't live alone with all that we moved into the basement of our friend's house i gave away paul's car to another friend  we shared taking care of our kids we shared we had potlucks we shared our food and so six months after the murders i gave birth to say andy and we were still hanging in there and she was a joy to us ever since then so and by this time paul was out of rehab and he was very slowly painfully learning how to walk meanwhile that plan nazi trial the first trial was going on and our pictures were in the paper newspaper every day and we felt extremely vulnerable you know wouldn't have taken anybody you know  somebody you want to hurt us could have very easily hurt us and so we decided to move back to new york where both of us had grown up we thought it would be a better place to rebuild our lives from scratch and so ten months after the murders we moved to brooklyn where we lived for thirty years but our circle of survivors continued to be our closest friends most of them still living in north carolina and we would visit them at least once a year and often more than that our kids became very close to our survivor you know that circle of all of our children that we had became close to each  other they could talk they could share stuff with each other that they could with nobody else they called themselves the second generation so they had their own activities and their own discussions of we don't even know what they were talking about so but for me even though we lived in new york my heart was still in north carolina over the trials that went on for over five years there was no basically no justice and we continued to be dehumanized in the press and i wanted to tell our story of us as human  beings and people who wanted a better world so over the decades several decades i kept on going back to north carolina and i talked to every single person i could find who would come to that demonstration planning to protest the klan and i taped fifty three different people in interviews asking them how they you know how they grew up how they became interested  being activists and what how the murders the massacre it affected their lives and what they thought about what they felt politically and their involvement and so this meant that i relive massacre over and over and over again and that was hard but it was also healing to go through it and it connected me even more strongly to all these different individuals i learned and i learned a lot of people from many  walks of life especially what it was like to grow up poor and black in north carolina and the other thing that it really taught me is the importance of storytelling how important it is to he as well as to tell your own story and i think that's a really important way to get to know people and to have a bond develop between people so so anyway i  wrote this book and there just happened to be more than a couple copies over there so feel free you know to purchase one but anyway what i want to say is  what i did how that the way i did it because i had interviewed fifty three people but you can't write a coherent story with fifty three characters so i chose six people just trying to get a sense where you could go into depth so one of them is nelson johnson who sandy mentioned heads the blood community center now with his wife joyce and he had been there he was the leader he's basically been the leader in greensboro north carolina since the one nine hundred sixty s and powerful man who eventually became a minister and so he was one of the people will lean a cannon is another person who grew up in south carolina the daughter of sharecroppers and so she had a powerful story really understanding of what it was like to be poor victim victimized by claire terror even as a child her son kwame was also at the at the massacre as a ten year old and he he as a teenager was just really infuriated by these trials that kept on letting these murderers get off scot free and so he got into robbing people not a good idea but you know you but anyway so he got caught and he got sentenced to two life sentences basically they were trying to punish his mother and the rest of us for you know he was carrying a hot head a heavier sentence than anybody ever had in north carolina for for robbery and know his mom really organized a campaign to free him and he was still in there for thirteen years but he did you know come out and he still now is a really good guy so his story is also in here plus marty nathan who it was mitt married to to mike nathan and she became a very strong vocal leader in the fight back you know that we went through and then paul and i are the fifth and sixth person so that gives you a sense it's all that's the book tells their story by story through their own eyes it's their words that i just put into a story so so i just that so the main point i want to reason i want to say all that is that it was very healing process it really was to get it you know kind of pull things together and relive that pain but also come out through it so so that was really important so then the other thing that was very very healing was there was a truth and reconciliation commission in greensboro north carolina that published this report and it's the first truth commission that held hearings and act you know like based on the south african truth commission the first one to operate in united states and in fact in north america and it was a very powerful thing it was largely it was the person who did the most to get it through you know had to happen was nelson johnson he's a real hero throughout this whole this whole thing and so this is the this is what the report of that one day you know and but it really goes into what the police role was the role of the courts all this and it also and it criticizes you know it really like lays the blame and stuff it also you know in terms of the police and the higher ups in the courts and stuff in the media but it also criticized for our our language and our harshness and stuff and you know i agree with it but it's really  the there is still a struggle going on there is a struggle against white supremacy there's a struggle against or exploitation of of demeaning people oppressing people and  the violent racists are still out there they disappear when people stand up like in charlottesville and also when the during the civil rights movement when it got powerful but under trump repression is still really heavy and and arrested demonstrators face heavy charges and we need to support them but there are many other ways as well to fight white supremacy demonstrating is only one and many are fearful of it with good reason and so i just want to say that i think a very important way to fight white supremacy is through community building and with a lot of ways that's very important whether you're demonstrating are not no matter what you're doing to build communities across racial class ethnic religious boundaries it's a very important thing to do to so that people can talk to each other hear each other's story tell each other their stare out their story get to know each other so i just want to you know one of the things that we do because that's what we are involved in where paul and i live and call potlucks because when you have a potluck everybody shares and it's a basis for getting to know and to talk to each other and work on projects issues even if you disagree with each other or have different religious views you know work together on something you can agree then build and so i think this is what we call building circles of trust and what and i think that is a very important way to fight white supremacy of building understanding communicating based on understanding and differences and then being able to reach out ever broader and to more people so that's my thank you wounded and they say that's the largest mass killing in american history which of course is complete nonsense because that totally leaves out all the people that were killed in the oklahoma city for example hundred sixty four people were killed and the many indian massacres that took place in the development of u s history and how many people died in the middle passage so one of the things about the media and i'm very glad people  because one of the things about the media is there is no history history does not exist it's not even worth talking about god forbid you should think about it you might get upset don't get upset i'm going to talk about two things may get a little upset so forgive me i'm still a little upset i am i want to talk about two things i want to talk about the event itself my experience of the event itself everybody wants to know what's it like to get shot head you know that kind of thing so i'll tell you a few things about that maybe more than you want to know and i also want to make give some reflections on what happened there what it all means and how i see things today thirty eight years and what is it six days later we just had the thirtieth anniversary on november third we have reflections with a lot of began cers but hopefully it can stimulate discussion and hopefully i won't talk too long to to prevent discussion now i want to give you a bit of background on the day sally did we were doing a lot of union work and we were doing all of our union work is wide open communists it was really quite striking people knew where we stood in spite of the opprobrium that's heaped on this label we were very clear that we believe that we needed to have a socialist revolution destroy capitalism replace it with a dictatorship of the  the whole drill we were out there with that and in spite of that we had lots of success sally was mentioned with there was at least six union locals in the textile m were about to elect members of the c w p s presidents of the locals think about that in minot north carolina an anti union open shop state now you also see a few gray hairs in the audience so people may remember that there used to be a textile industry in the united states that really sounds like ancient history i'm sure to many of you but there was probably at least a half a million textile workers in north carolina the strike going on and the media of course continually tried to slander us in the local press the problem was that the more they slandered us the more they discredited themselves because the quality the people the quality the work that they were doing so on a certain level you have to feel some sympathy for the local bush was easy they had no choice in how to deal with us so they chose the the preferred solution that they use all over the world when there is revolutionaries conducting successful work  the the run up to the day we applied for permits we were very scrupulous about applying for parade permit which would entitle us to protection by the police don't i don't count  lot of protection from the police as it turns out we we were disarmed which was a great variance from the usual north carolina law which holds that you can carry weapons openly i think that's the law in north carolina but a provision a stipulation of the parade permit was we were not to carry any arms a number of people had the presence of mind to violate that and several people did fire back but there was you know one guy had a two shot d small it was a small response all things considered the other thing was there are parade permit which is usually a pro forma issue of just you know fill out the form they give you a parade permit and you're on was delayed continually up until two days before the scheduled march so we had a press conference on the steps of the police station demanding our parade permit because it was being delayed unnecessarily and it was disrupting the activity that we were trying to organize not to mention the fact the police were tearing down our posters the whole time that one of the things that happened at this sally gave you a bit of the story already there was a guy who is mingling around during this press conference and you know the people that were there who came over and talked to me he was a white fella little taller than me talked with a southern axe a northern accent very strikingly northern accent and a little bit of a lisp seemed like a quiet gentle fella he said he was a business made painting in stuff in the area and he was shocked that there was such a thing as a klan in greens were in this day and age and i thought this is a pretty weird guy because the klan had been getting built up in the press locally for several months several years by that time  their comeback after their period of underground existence following the civil rights movement and force them underground this guys there was eddie dawson and dawson i'll tell you more about dawson in a little bit keep the suspense going one of the things that happened also in the run up to the demonstration was that we had a demonstration against the clarion and the nazis at a little town called china grove very forceful confrontation and the the klan and the nazis formed a coalition after the china grove demonstration they formed a group very seriously very similarly named to the the group that was operating in charlottesville the name that they organized under in north carolina they were in lewisburg october twenty third one thousand nine hundred seventy nine just two weeks before the greens were massacre they organized a group called the united racist front something i can remember exactly the name was of the united front was the name of the group in charlottesville the united races front was the first time that the k k k would touch the nazis after world war two the k k k prides itself on being one hundred percent american right and the nazis of course with the enemy of the united states government of world war two so the klan stayed away from them even though they agreed on most things that are important to them so they organized this united races front and they were very incensed by the fact that we had burned their confederate flag in china grove so they vowed revenge these  all things that were going on many of them escaped our notice during that day the day itself remains in my mind a a time of the most profound confusion i mean it was really quite something we were gathering our people together as you saw you know getting our signs up and setting up the soundtrack and so on and i was standing there were a little bit i have a little checklist you know a clipboard and things which i could well be sure this is done that's done and so on and standing on the curb just looking around and a few feet from me about as far as her picture is now said the smith is standing there she is very wise woman very alert and aware person she says it's weird i said what's weird i don't know if she's talking to me so what's weird so no cops here and no cops here and she was right there were no police on the scene and we were used to having demonstrations we've had hundreds by this time and the police w harass us in every possible way as long as they possibly could but there were no police there and i didn't have much time to think about a reply because then a group of cars just drove in very slowly very slowly and in the second or third car this guy is leaning out the window yelling at me it's eddie dawson right you know we us from oakland you got it little did i know dawson was a paid police informant for many years inside the k k k and he had been actively going around north carolina organizing and recruiting and that day he was in charge of leading the caravan to to the site with the burgers took place on the day that we had our demonstration to get the parade permit which we did get it turns out the dog who was there because he got the parade permit our parade permit before we did and the morning of november third he and several other fine characters in the k k k drove the route of our planned march presumably to ascertain what was the best place for our encounter to take place eddie dawson he made his testimony made it quite clear that he threw him the top officials of the greens were police department intimately involved now i didn't know any of this at the time of course i mean it's you know retrospect makes things a lot easier to put together but these were things that were going on behind the scenes and you know the only thing i saw was dawson in the car it was very strange and then very shortly after that a few feet down the street the lead car in the caravan that pickup truck this young guy leans out of the pickup truck with a long barreled pistol he waves it around a few times a fires a single shot into the air and there are several things very weird about that pistols make a noise very sweyn they're fired make a noise very similar to two rifles it's a crack it's kind of a crackled ois but this gun that went off made a noise much closer to that of a shotgun sort of i thought like that and there was a black plume of smoke that hung in the air there for a little while now as you can imagine we have a crowd disassembling the probably seventy five maybe one hundred people there by that time it was about a half an hour before we do to begin and as soon as people heard the gunshot they split people started running trying to take cover trying to find someplace to seek safety i was among them you know you hear a gunshot you want to get out of there so rare ran back there was  a it was in a housing project a black project called morningside homes which has since been demolished it's greensburg's guilty conscience they they had like a line of houses it was it was a car that was fairly wide but it was a fairly contained space ran back into that and i was carrying one of these one of these signs on a pick it stick so i ran back i found a place and i looked behind me and what i saw was caesar cow say standing with a stick and he was surrounded by a bunch of guys with sticks who were hitting him and he's hitting back so there's like a stick fight going on i don't know what was happening but i saw caesar was there with a stick i had a stick so i you know i did the whole of baseball bat thing a few times and i ran back to help cesar where i know and i took three or four steps and then zip zip i was hit in the head and in the arm i have no idea what happened  nose down and i must have been in and out of consciousness a little factoid for those of you interested in such things neurologically forty percent of all open head injuries retain consciousness i learned something from medical school you see that so when we were i'm on the ground and i'm just lying there i'm quite confused i don't know what had happened to me i looked up i saw a dory firing back i thought that was the best thing i had seen i heard gunshots i didn't know what exactly was happening who was firing what was happening but dorie looked like she was doing something good the  i looked at the grass and there was blood on the grass and i thought it must have been mine i don't know what i was i don't know what i thought maybe hit by a stick all i'd seen at this point was that one pistol in the front and stick fights and stuff going on and the um on the ground there's all this noise i mean there's people yell and there's people scream and there's gunshots this sticks cracking could make any sense out of it how much how much more confused i was because my head was all mixed up from the injury i have no way of knowing but the sally came and she calmed me down and and then shook right around when she came it suddenly got quiet very quiet the strangest thing you know putting it back together looking at the videotape obviously these guys took off at a certain point gunfire stopped it got very quiet there was just a few isolated voices yelling different  of these dead james dead you know i was one of several doctors on the scene and i thought well i need to go take a look at these people because you're going to have somebody who's considered dead by somebody who doesn't know and they're not going to receive the kind of attention that they could be kept alive with so i'm trying to get up sally's trying to calm me down very strange experience because i couldn't get up and the most compelling image i have in my own mind of what happened to me that still stuck with me was that somehow i had been turned into a hundred year old man i couldn't get up this was years before my generation you know the sixty's generation the boomers people say that we're the generation they can still get down when i have trouble getting up but this was before we had the trouble getting up so it was a kind of an unusual experience at the time now i was very confused it was extremely extremely disorienting all of it and what happened from all of this confusion i have to tell you the confusion i had that day as i came back to myself over time it's an assumption i'm making a back to myself or something like that that i realized that my political confusion was at least as great as the confusion about events that i was experiencing that day an enormous amount of political confusion i had a great deal of time to reflect on what's happened and what it all means and what we were trying to do what we should be trying to do and how to proceed now in the course of the in the course of the last thirty plus years i made an interesting discovery that is helping orient myself a little better i realize that i was actually a historian trapped in the body of a psychiatrist that was an important discovery for me because it's a different kind of a perspective psychiatry plays an extremely bad role in a lot of these discussions that we can and should be having that we're not having because psychiatry says well he's just a crazy guy you have to worry about that don't talk about what's happening in the society you know that the conversation about all these mass killings that are going on now is completely  talk about is gun control the only reason this happens is because this crazy individual's right and we know from the d s m five which is what we're up to now that insanity is a product of the individual brain a large group as being crazy even the whole country has gone insane you can say that not officially right so these are some of the things that enter into my my thinking about this i was a communist at the time i'm no longer a communist for a lot of reasons one is i don't think it's really radical enough it's just change at the top and you know the wealth is redistributed but it's redistributed wealth that's made by workers who still exploited and the and the the other thing is communism really failed in russia and china i think it's been a very distressing failure but a failure nevertheless but capitalism still needs to end it's an evil and destructive system and we're experiencing some of the most pernicious effects of that today i want to say a few words about that i want to also give what i call my portable definition of capitalism lot of people can talk about capitalism without referring to marx as for volume or capital now if you need to refer to four volumes in order to have a conversation that's not portable that makes it very difficult to have a serious conversation i think we need to have a precise and clear definition of what we're talking about i think it's a fairly simple thing capitalism is a relationship between owners and workers it's a relationship characterized by the fact that the workers make things the owners take what they make and sell it on the open market as commodities for as much as they can get away with while paying the workers as little as they can pay those workers in order to keep the arrangement going that the two main considerations they have of course are that workers shouldn't starve although they violate that many times over history and second that there should be no rebellion those are the real considerations in setting a wage so that that to me is capitalism the racism by keeping people divided is central it's a pillar of the capitalist system it's an essential pillar if that's not too redundant racism grew out of slavery you can't change capitalism without defeating racism and you can't defeat racism without transforming capitalism and for people who are involved in the struggle against white supremacy white people the key is not to just become guilty and guilt ridden the key is to take up the issues of black people as your own because no one group alone can do what's necessary to transform the capitalist system as it needs to be transformed and another observation on the problem of racism a lot of people i would even venture to say most people consider racism to be an individual sort of in the heart it's an individual prejudice it's what's in your heart but it's really much more than that it's a much bigger thing much more insidious much more widespread and in some ways more vulnerable the i've been reading recently some of the afrocentric historians people like shake and to d up fascinating stuff and the the fact is that much of history perhaps most of history as it's written in the west african people are not a part of human history that's racism that's an integral part of racism so the struggle against racism is not just in the streets and demonstrating the struggle against racism is a very important part of that struggle is a struggle an intellectual struggle an academic struggle a struggle to honestly look at the reality of people i mean black people are dealt out of history even though black people built this country and built so much else of the west but that's the way the thing is set up because of intellect your point is fresh intellectual academic racism which is rampant they we see the effects on the us population of this kind of racist culture that pervades the society young black kids are killed in the street videotaped and people don't see their crime was committed i've been meeting for a few months with trump supporters i've been blown away it's like you know some of them who are a little less racist you can push them a little bit to say you know what was really wrong not to cho that they choked erroll garner in the street in staten island a blatant outfront murder committed on the screen right there and you know she had to be pushed she's one of the better ones that i've been talking to you know saying but it's like this is not a crime because the human connection has been severed i think that's a key thing that's happened as a result of american capitalism human connections have and i think that white supremacy is the legacy of dehumanization in the united states and that dehumanization has gone through several successive phases that have resulted in the route remarkably dehumaniz condition in which we all find ourselves today you know first was the extermination of expropriation of the indians and the enslavement i should add there's a very large in the in slavery that went on prior to the kidnapping and slave and black africans which is the thing that we're most familiar with perhaps but the extent the scope the depravity of that continues to shock me as i read more history and finally the importation not finally i shouldn't say finally the importation and repression of generations of european immigrant workers is another form that dehumanization is taking place in the united states and today we're still undergoing the the commodification of everything everything is for sale including everybody everybody has their price anybody to get that expression everybody has their price that's all that there is is money it's a totally modified culture and the human connections have been severed to the point that it's everywhere i mean i've been astonished at these killings that are taking place repeatedly i mean the police killings of unarmed black youth have been remarkable and i've been even more stunned by the extent to which scores of people are killed by the shooters and what really amazes me is the media you can only talk about gun control and you can't talk about the one question that's important to me i mean maybe somebody  question it's always possible is not the do that morning did he have an argument with his mother in law how many how many bullets did he have and the what i call as things the clip they take get lost in these extraneous and totally ridiculous details the only question that seems to make any difference to me is why does this keep happening and my my best understanding at this point and again i'm sure that i can be corrected but my best understanding at this point is that we have become a dehumanized society as a result of the fact that all of us have been reduced to the level of commodities by capitalism and it's my view that we need a new kind of revolutionary movement to address this the old revolutionary movement has failed at least as miserably as socialism failed in the soviet union and china we need a whole new rethink of all this stuff that's my my take on this thing thank you very much for listening thank you for coming illegally want to have discussion so that means questions but not just questions people have comments if you're making denunciations keep him at least a little short hi my question is what your view is on progress because to me it seems that the more i learn about history the more depressingly cyclical it seems and along those lines if you want to start a new movement to me it seems that every movement we try to make is flawed because humans are flawed and how can we make a movement that's going to has that ever happened and can it ever happen  heavy question a very good one i think that i think there has been progress in in there's you know sort of starts and stops and stuff like that there's been some progress there's certainly been progress in terms of recognizing gay and lesbian and transgendered people as human beings you know that's something that has been moving forward although also accompanied by violence you know that a lot of people of color  experience transgendered women particular so i think that there is and i also think that there is progress in terms of i mean as a person who studied history in the academy unlike paul who is a recent convert convert to studying history so i think there has been a lot of progress in terms of more and more serious scholarship on you know african history african american history and culture a native american history in all those in a relationship so that i see also as progress but as far as but you can't say well everything's getting better because it's not you know environmental issues are getting worse the violence is getting worse the economy is getting worse there are more and more people have a heart i mean your generation of young people have a hard much harder time when we even when we were and in college you know getting a job i mean i had a lot of low paying jobs but i never had a hard time getting a job where you know there's a lot of difficulty just getting a regular old job these days much more than before so i think there are a lot of serious problems that are going on and and just i just want to say two more things because i think that question we could go on all night just on that one question but i just want to say that i think that nonviolent demonstrations and and you know political movements that are especially demonstrating that that needs to be nonviolent we need to have the police do their job protecting demonstrations and speech and that we really have to because i know that there are some people who are very angry and think that and even we did back in the day you know if like well we're going to carry arms and that'll protect it's obviously it didn't for us and and i think that if that that whole idea of carrying arms and stuff what it does is that narrows the people who will demonstrate together that the broader these broad based demonstrations that are which martin luther king he began that movement you know very important to build on that and so i think house trying to right wrongs in terms of demonstrations that nonviolent protest is really important i also think that as far as like sharing and community building which i mentioned before that's really important because we can't just have the academy and a couple of good professors here there and every place share their wisdom i mean i was a professor so you know it's really great to teach but it's got to be much broader than just the classrooms and so that's why i think if people if all of everybody here just gets out into has this conception of community building and crossing barriers and reaching out and asking people not just telling people what they should do and how they should act asking them their story you know and telling your story and just sort of connecting on that human relationship and that's how we're going to be able to move followers and help each other and you know things will get tough you know and there will be hard times but that's how we can get through it and so that's just  some partial response to your question hello thank you for coming so i have a couple questions so sally first day of them a question for you about something you had mentioned so the truth commission report that you had mentioned you mention that there is criticisms of your language in it that you at this point in time agree with and i'm wondering if you could go into what those criticisms are so sure i agree with them now my second question paul if you'd like to answer this is around based on your  the future of the policing system looks like in an anti capitalist i guess revolution and and based on the roots of policing within the slave patrol and slavery and racism if you would advocate for   we at the demonstration that we organized was it was titled death to the klan and so we didn't mean that we want to go out and kill klansman that was not at all what we meant what we meant i mean you know there's like in demonstrations there give i have seen things that have say you know death to taxes or death to this or that you know it means i'm against that but clearly that was not a very good slogan to organize a demonstration around and we paid for it dearly because the public you know didn't see our intention regulate themselves is really what what the whole story needs to be about and right now the united states is going through one of the worst repressions that any society has ever gone through i mean people so people nodding yes i'm talking about the mass incarceration of people of color this is on president of the numbers of people that are in jail for basically nothing is astonishing the whole genesis of the mess incarceration people of color was nixon's attempt to crush the black movement of the sixty's in one thousand nine hundred sixty eight that he made it very clear that in his words the problem is black people what we need to do is figure out how to do that how to deal with that without looking like that's what we're doing that's a direct quote from richard nixon and hold the men's diaries page fifty seven check it out very interesting the the scope of this repression from my reading of history i can think of no place where any society has tried anything similar on this scale even as a percentage of smaller population only thing i know that matches it is the repression under stalin's gulag where the percentages and the actual real numbers are actually fairly similar but and also very important the gulag repression was conducted for the same reason as the repression of african people in this country and that was to prevent an alternative a political alternative from forming that was what they were concerned about in the repressive soviet union and that's what they're doing here the movement in the sixty's was incredibly powerful and dynamic whole sections of the army went into detroit newark harlem during these uprisings and it was a it was ted for tat for days and weeks in some cases so we're talking about a very powerful movement that has been crushed and now people are going to prison because their grandparents there to stand up like that and it's ongoing and frankly i don't see how they're going to deal with it i think this is an integral part of the whole question of how do you deal with the police system the policing system i think it's a very large question i don't i think we need to find ways of managing ourselves and and building a society where people actually have the power my problem with communism is that it's just another centralized state with people more committed to redistribution at the top i don't see it as a really fundamental difference where everything in society is managed by people who have real power over the the welfare the wealth and the the doings of society more generally huge difference in my view because i think the police i differ with sally i don't think the police's job is to look after our demonstrations i think their main job is to make sure that a political turnitin does not gain power  even gain momentum i think you know when i look around the world and see all these police dressed in the same black intimidating uniforms it tells me this is a global system and these guys are out to keep us where they want us they want us to be workers and consumers and that's it that's satisfactory answer i don't think there is one i guess that was what what what decade i don't know but it was so he was he was i think was the sixty's and i am he was standing up on a podium he'd come to visit it was a big break through to the iron curtain he was here i guess and he picked up a she took us the shoe and banged it on the podium part yeah ok ok so he said that america was essentially so stupid that we were like an apple tree with the apples on the tree that were rotting and were going to fall off into the hands of the communists and you could sit there and say well how bizarre and cruel and stupid a thing that is to say but actually i think it's what we're doing whether it's into the communist or whatever i feel that our penal system our prison system is the worst one in the world and i it's it reminds me of in the garden of the beast when we were in the in the book where where where germany had no idea what was rising upon them  and we have no idea we have little idea except for people coming in doing this kind of who we do not know and we don't know how terrible the situation is and i think that our our prison system is is  just sitting here having afternoon tea and i can't believe it it's just so bizarre and i'm so glad you're here  just feel that we're in very grave danger we're just sitting here watching this nation destroy itself well we comment on it in the news media and it i i i don't know what to do i don't know what to do but i  feel that to some to attack this is the last places to attack it in the prison system but but how am i going to get myself killed with that help if it will do you know i really i don't know what to do we are a nation of sadists we are a nation of ignorant murderous terrified is just and i just have to talk i but it's so and it limits your fact of this but i do think that you know people need to find a way to connect to this thing and talk and find better ways and better ways as you continue to talk and explore i mean my my favorite images the the three blind guys and the elephant were all one of those blind guys trying to figure out what this thing is and we're all working on that and the more we work together we can figure out even better that's my take on it so thank you and i think you know the desire to do something is a very precious thing and i'm sure you'll find something very very positive to do you not  problem yourself but at least you have a chance of making a contribution in the right direction but a revolutionary movement is like a rain storm and we're all individual drops one drop is of no significance but taken together it can erode mountains so please more hi it's so nice to finally see you guys speak so my question for you guys that oftentimes an academic space is like this i feel as if the conversation becomes about systemic change and everyone in this room we all come to these things and we like to feel is there for me leaving walk through the door that we're doing things but the reality is in our daily lives resistance looks much different and i think that's the beauty of your story is that it's kind of shedding light on how we can resist in our daily lives so my question is what tools to resistance do you guys find the most successful in terms of interpersonal connections and relationships  the generous support that the sponsors have given us we're going to donate it to a community library in kingston new york in new york near where we live that is a african roots library and and the thing that's wonderful about this library it's not part of the public library system it's totally independent and and it's an up bits  historically black community that's now quite a diverse community and and we are you know we open our doors to we want to we want to it and it's the director of it is a man who spent over a decade in prison for for you know nonviolent drug sales i mean he was a pusher and but he never you know he never he didn't use violence and he paid for it he was part of this rockefeller drug laws and new york city a new york state and and so where do you know they're the people who are involved in the adults who are involved in it include formally incarcerated people who are really trying to shared lessons who don't want to see these poor kids in that neighborhood go through that same experience they want the kids to have something positive to aspire to and so this is something that's been a wonderful project that we've been involved in and and you know it's just we're trying and so and then the another project we're involved in which is i know there are things like this around here  burlington and vermont is a farm that's that this is a socially oriented farm that tries to bring the community there has a big c s a has lots of projects has a very native american aspect of teaching  native american culture so we've been involved in both of these and kind of brought things together so that we've well the most the best example is we just had a halloween festival that was organized by young man that has gotten involved with both the farm and african roots library and he's a dynamite organizer and he basically brought they were a thousand people who came to this halloween festival on this farm that what looked like kingston and kingston is a very diverse community a large african american population a large latino population and everybody came to this festival it was free it was he and it was like so that's an example of community building that has been very exciting to me because there are now people in that that people are starting to cross those barriers to talk to each other and to do things together and so that's just one example observation if you think he's not highness person in the world it's not going to go well for starters but i do think that you know talking to people with whom you disagree is very important i mean i mentioned that i met with for a while i've had several meetings with these trump supporters and things going pretty well one guy who was quite racist much more than i expected made the statement of black people should be glad they were brought here in slavery because it did so much to improve their prospects for doing something they escaped african slavery in so on it was a combination of ignorance and malice i was frankly kind of ok thank you and you know the next meeting i want to talk to about that and he all he wanted to talk about was race some of the people they want to talk about class type issues and he changed his whole story he said i didn't say that i was some i read a newspaper in boston i would never say something like that he said so i figured there is no point talking to this guy because he's dishonest so you know the one thing i've learned and this is a crash course in psychiatry the one thing i learned from forty years in anyway i think your dialogue is always good and you do the best that you can but you also have to make decisions about how to prioritize your time and this guy i'm not meeting with anymore what he showed me was he's dishonest so there's no point in having a discussion is not going to go anywhere that's all i can say on  that i'm just a visitor to this campus for a few days from the united kingdom so i ask this with the greatest of humility and with with genuine interest and i absolutely take and i mean aspired by call to community building and rolling and some people have the temperament for that other people may not and not everybody has to do everything but i'm just thinking two days ago hearing  about the signs of mobilization of groups that are normally represented in legislature or in state houses and so on the success of women women of color i politics a polity there are people in this room who might be considering just going into politics and i thought quite the community building it's slightly different type of task so i'm just wondering what your view is is that a waste of time is it deluding ourselves that people can do any good because the system is so stark through the finance of political parties and this sort of thing or well i'd like your opinion on that in  i just before you answer the question i just want to let everyone know we have about a little less than ten minutes left and then we're going to have a reception in the fireplace lounge so we can continue out there when we're done in here  think it will depend some i think that some people will be wasting their time doing that i think some people can make a very positive contribution using the record the bully pulpit and using the political platform to let people know what's really going on i think the most radical thing anybody can do is talk about what's actually happening because you're not going to get it from the media so there's no one answer to that i think some people if they're just going into office and then when they get into office they're very happy to be there and that's it it's a waste of time i wouldn't support that you can't tell in advance of course but i think anything people do in the direction of awakening folks to what's really going on is a good thing that's my view  is you know nazi or right wing or you know you know something like that and it is true if a person wants to change that then you can have a dialogue but and there happen there's some interesting work by people who themselves have been in far right groups and who have learned and who are reaching out now to try to talk to other people who like themselves  who and so i think that and one of the things is to a lot of times people who them's who are brutal whether it's against no matter who it's against you know have themselves experience violence and so that if you can if there's some way you can hook into having a discussion and see that it's sort of the storytelling thing there are people who have really painful stories and if there's some way of hearing that story of a building some and you know not everybody can bring out a you have to have a trusting relationship before you're willing i myself before i went further i went for ten years of being depressed and i went back to school and i got a whole master's degree without talking to anybody not one person not a professor not another student about the greensboro massacre i couldn't talk about it and so you know it's it's it's a hard thing and but then eventually i was you know able to start to talk to people about it and then i ended up writing a book about and writing a dissertation on it you know and it was kind of like  being announced to of course but one professor who disagreed with me on many things told me that i had a worm's eye view of the world which i thought was really interesting  but anyway the point is that it takes different i mean some of us have skills to be able to reach out to people some of us who have experiences being in prison or are having family members who are in prison can draw out those painful experiences from people who you know are in prison or coming out of prison and so i think it's i think there's so much to do and community building in this kind of relationship building is so vast i mean all of us can benefit from it and all of us can find our niche in it and i mean we have a friend who is a great cook and she that's her thing she feeds people you know people bring her food and she creates these delicious meals out of that's her thing you know i mean so every but there are all these different things that people can do and sort of trying to figure that out i think is a challenge for each of us but i'm just saying that it's been very rewarding to do that to thank you so much both of you for being here and cindy is really one of my favorite people we had a grad school teacher going to casa so yeah what an honor and thank you for your perspective so i want to this might not be a favorable topic but here in vermont you know this concept of the the white supremacy or the nazi right but what i experience as a woman of color is so many well intended white people not doing anything things happen all the time in many times as many times as i was going to rallies after black community members in the united states murdered brutally murdered for nothing absolutely nothing and hardly anybody showed up in till trump was elected and it made me feel like people there was in there was police brutality it was police brutality i'm here in new city where a person was killed but he was a white man and nobody showed up are very few people showed up and it makes me  think if you if you are going to shop for your own people how how are you going to show up for anybody else and remind how you really showing up for people of color so how do we talk to the individuals who are not the supremacist but right the willing to know why people who are booing individuals on the patrick gymnasium floor for not standing up right but who who's having those conversations with those folks and i think that is what i have the hardest time with here in this area so i hear you and one of the things that i think is really important is when somebody has a family member who gets hurt or killed that that's even if you can't go to a demonstration about and i think it's really important to realize that there are a lot of people who really can't they have they can't do that they can't demonstrate it's just too scary for whatever reason so i i think it's a matter broadening and also it's all of us pushing ourselves to do things but even if you can't go to a demonstration like that take food to the family reach out to the family here reach out to them talk to them ok that and then also if you have like say a group of people hurt or killed i'd like to supply out support that but i don't want to go by myself and maybe five or six people could go so i would just try to find creative ways of you know but really when people are hurting that's a very important time to reach out to them and even if it's not a demonstration but just to connect with them and hear talk to them