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Sushma Raman:
I’m Sushma Raman and this is Justice Matters. This month’s special episode for Black History Month focuses on the historical legacy of enslavement, the periods of progress followed by rollbacks, the promise and peril of the current moment, and how we build more inclusive just societies in the future. We’re featuring conversations with a range of experts coming from academia and activism. While each of our speakers have very different life trajectories and personal motivations, I’ll start this episode with my conversation with Wade Henderson, the interim CEO of the Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights, a leading coalition he previously directed for two decades. Here, Wade describes a formative moment that motivated him to become concerned with civil rights and social justice.

Wade Henderson:
I was born in Washington, D.C. and I actually live in my old neighborhood, which is now gentrifying and becoming a very chic place to live, but for many years it was not. I am an individual who transitions the period of segregation. I spent the first 15 years of my life in a fully segregated world. And then I happened to be a part of the change that I had hoped to see come to America. And it was the experience of growing up in segregated Washington that motivated me to pursue a career of social justice. And that’s what I have been fortunate enough to pursue my entire life.

What really motivated me to become a lawyer and to pursue a social justice career were, of course, the circumstances of life in segregated Washington. And while I don’t have, fortunately, horrific experiences to talk about in terms of how segregation affected me, it was the small indignities—the humilities of growing up as an African-American in a segregated, largely White world—that motivated me to become a lawyer and to seek to change the system that I chafed at as a young man.

I had an incident when I was a junior high school student that really stuck with me and really highlighted the indignities of growing up in segregation and that too was a motivator. I was graduating from junior high school. I had a job as a paperboy in Washington and had earned enough money to buy a suit of clothes. It was the first suit of clothes I was buying myself and had gotten instructions from my father, my sizes, all the information I would need to make a wise purchase. And I’d gone to what was then the most exclusive department store in town. And I’m walking around as if I know what I’m doing and I’m looking at clothes on the rack and I noticed that I’m being stared at by some of the personnel of the store. But I didn’t think anything of it. And I picked a suit of clothes, I measured it correctly—it was the proper sizing—, and I walked over to the salesman and I said, look, I need to know where your dressing room is. I need to try on this suit. And the salesman looked at me incredulously and said with a sense of irony, you know, Negroes can’t try on clothes here at Garfickles. And he states the store. And I was so humiliated by the moment. There were several people in the store who burst out laughing, who burst out laughing. And I was so humiliated by that moment that I literally dropped the suit and ran from the store. And when I ran from the store and got outside, I was angry with myself because I had failed to confront this indignity in a way that I felt was appropriate and should have been done. And I didn’t do it. And I was so furious about that experience, so angry. It stuck with me in ways that today seem almost inexplicable. But that humiliation...

Sushma Raman:
Wade Henderson goes on to describe the transformational effect of being part of the March on Washington, also referred to as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. A quarter of a million people marched and gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963 to draw attention to long-standing racial inequities and disparities. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous, “I Have a Dream” speech was delivered at the march.

Wade Henderson:
Now, I came of age at a time when the world, and particularly the United States, was going through a powerful transformation. I attended the March on Washington and I went defying, actually, my parents’ desire because they were fearful that the March on Washington would become a violent exercise. They had been warned by federal and city officials that the March on Washington would be dangerous. Unlike anything that had ever happened in Washington before, all of the liquor stores in the city were closed and there were National Guardsmen that were invited to come into the town to protect the great institutions. Unlike, by the way, at the insurrection of January 6th of this year, the National Guard was invited to come and to sort of police the city along with regular police force. 

And yet, for me, it was important. I was 15. And I thought that, you know, I needed to be here. I needed to be at the march myself. And I rode my bike from my home down to the Ellipse in Washington, and I was so dazzled by the numbers of people who had come from all over the country. I was so taken by the dignity with which these marches, mostly Black, but not entirely; this was a more multiracial audience than one might think in 1963. And you could feel change in the air. You could feel a sense that the people who were there were exuding a dignity that would ultimately affect the entire movement. And that inspired me. I finished high school in ‘66 and I went to college, and I was there at a time of this incredible awakening in the Black community and it compelled me to go forward at each step to learn more and to immerse myself into the change that I wanted to see come about.

Sushma Raman:
Wade Henderson’s experience in Washington, D.C. mirrors the experience of millions of African Americans during segregation. And while we can certainly point to the efforts and successes of the Civil Rights Movement to ensure equality, we must also look further back in U.S. history to understand the roots of racial discrimination and violence, as well as the movements of Black resistance. In particular, we see a long tradition of Black internationalism and Black women’s leadership in creating and sustaining movements for change. Dr. Keisha Blain, an award-winning historian of the 20th century United States and Carr Center Fellow, describes these foundational developments.

Keisha Blain:
One of the things that I noticed, I think, very early in the process of studying African-American history, and certainly writing African-American history, is that we do tend to focus a bit on the 1950s and 60s. And that’s not surprising just given how important the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements were in U.S. history. At the same time, what I try to do in my work is to get us to see how activists were really coming together in an earlier period to lay the groundwork in many ways. And I think focusing on the ‘30s and the ‘40s is just a prime example of how that works.

Even if you think about Black internationalist movements, you think about solidarities that took place in the ‘50s, in the ‘60s, and in the ‘70s, one of the things that I argue is that none of that would even be possible were it not for grassroots activists across the U.S. really doing this kind of work decades prior. So in the context of Chicago or even a place like Detroit in the ‘30s and ‘40s, just seeing the ways that working class Black folks came together to talk about the importance of having a global vision, to talk about the importance of Black people aligning their interests with other racial groups at the time to challenge global White supremacy, all of that is important for us to understand how we actually get to the 1950s and ‘60s, where we see the kinds of collaborations that tend to take center stage and certainly tend to be the movements that we focus on in our writings and in mainstream historical narratives.

Sushma Raman:
Author of a recent book on Fannie Lou Hamer, Dr. Blaine also describes the role of Black women in freedom struggles.

Keisha Blain:
Well, one of the things that I study is Black women’s political activism in the 20th century. And my first book, Set the World on Fire, looks at Black women involved in a number of Black nationalist organizations, including one that I focus on that’s based in Chicago called the Peace Movement of Ethiopia. because it’s one that drew thousands of Black people who were very interested in political self-determination and economic self-sufficiency. These were people who were primarily from the U.S. South
who had relocated to Northern cities during the context of the Great Migration. And they worked extensively during the 20th century, particularly in the ‘30s and ‘40s, to make connections with activists of color across the globe. So, for example, they were writing letters to people who lived in Japan, they were reaching out to activists in Liberia. And so that’s one example of the kinds of political movements and organizations that interest me.

Sushma Raman:
Dr. Blain goes on to describe what some of these movements have to offer for us today as people mobilize on the streets and support a Black Lives Matter.

Keisha Blain:
Well, I think we can learn a lot from these movements, especially when we look at how people organized. It’s striking to me that the activists who I study were able to accomplish so much with so little. And you see that within the context of a group like the Peace Movement of Ethiopia, for example. This is an organization that drew primarily working poor individuals, people who were struggling to make ends meet. So they didn’t have a lot of financial resources. Most of the members of the organization had limited formal education. So these are people who were not necessarily tapped into certain groups and circles that would have had access to the funds that you would find in other spaces. So they were truly operating with very few resources. Yet they were effective because they were truly committed to the cause of Black liberation. They were committed to doing the slow kind of work that we describe as an organizing tradition. It was not about being seen. It was not about the fanfare. It was all about how to get people mobilized, how to go simply door by door, knocking on doors, to get people to join the movement, to get people to use whatever resources they did have, to use their skills and their talents to help the movement.

I think that story in and of itself is inspirational, because today we have so many other tools at our disposal, just something like social media, for example, becomes a powerful tool that we’re able to use. And in the ‘30s and ‘40s, activists didn’t have that, right? I mean, they had to still rely on letter-writing campaigns, for example, to get their messages across. And I think their stories are inspirational when we see how much they were able to accomplish with so little.

Sushma Raman:
Key to the success of movements and their ability to build political power and social capital was the institutional fabric that provided the research, policy, advocacy, and organizing functions essential for social change. These include the less well-known grassroots organizations highlighted by Dr. Blain, as well as more prominent organizations working nationally to influence policy. Joining us to discuss the trajectory of one major organization, the NAACP, is Dr. Megan Francis, a Carr Center Fellow and Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. Dr. Francis specializes in the study of American politics with broad interests in criminal punishment, Black political activism, philanthropy, and the post-Civil War South.

Megan Francis:
My work initially, especially coming out of graduate school, focused on the Black freedom struggle in the early 20th century. And for me, I was really interested in the NAACP—which is the oldest civil rights organization in the United States—and their work around racial violence, mob violence, and lynching in the first quarter of the 20th century. There was a story about the NAACP focused on lynching and mob violence in the first two decades of the 20th century. And I was like, what? Huh? I was like, I knew the NAACP through Brown v. Board and education desegregation. That’s the story that I knew about the NAACP. And I was like, what? What is this other story about them trying to protect the right of Black people to actually live full and productive lives.

I was like, this is a longer story about how we get to Brown v. Board, the longer story of the civil rights movement. And I was researching this between 2005 and 2011. So this is before kind of the heyday of Black Lives Matter gets formalized as a term. And I was really interested, at least in this first book, in telling the story about the NAACP and their work inside of political institutions as well as their work in the streets. The question I always got was, why did the NAACP shift? We believe you, but what happened? Why did they move from racial violence to education? And I never had a good answer until I went back into the archives and I realized that part of the shift is attributed to a funder. And it got me really interested in thinking about the role of philanthropy, the role of White funders specifically in the Black Freedom Struggle and in Civil Rights Movement. And I just realized, I was like, if you are talking about movement, you are also talking about money. Whether it’s like you’re going to fundraise from your peoples and/or you’re looking for outside funding, movements need money. And there are people with good intentions who want to contribute. Sometimes they don’t know how to do that without harming and undermining movements, but they sometimes do want to contribute.

Sushma Raman:
Megan Francis describes the role of the Garland Fund in influencing and funding the trajectory of the NAACP. The Garland Fund funds a number of different organizations in the 1920s.

Megan Francis: 
However, and this is their words, not mine. They are feeling quote unquote uninspired by the results. Because it’s social movements, right? It’s labor and education. Things don’t change in like two years. But they’re feeling uninspired. So instead of receiving grant applications, their idea is to propose new ideas of initiatives. And they propose, one of their ideas is to combat segregated education in the South. They’re like, this is going to be something that could change things for everyone. It could change the country, which is obviously true and was something that many Black groups were working on at the same at the time, including the NAACP. They approached the NAACP. They want to fund the NAACP to do this type of work. The NAACP is yes, like, yes, education is important to Black people, but what we really are focused on right now is racial violence, is mob violence and lynching. Because if Black people can’t live, they can’t go to school, they can’t vote, right? This is the first civil right. The Garland Fund, though, feels compelled that this is going to be the issue and this is really important and is not persuaded enough by the NAACP to make racial violence the priority issue. And then over a number of years, what happens basically is that kind of racial violence, at least in terms of the grant, is on the sidelines, but it then gets pushed out. And the NAACP then, as we know, launches one of the most important litigation struggles in American legal history that produces Brown v. Board. So in the 1930s, 1940s, they’re litigating cases. It’s being bankrolled by the Garland Fund and then they get the big case in 1954. And this is part of, I think it’s really interesting that there’s so many things that we get out of Brown v. Board that are really great. But there’s also in terms of there’s wins and losses associated with this case, right? So the win is, of course, this landmark case from the Supreme Court that fuels and energizes a movement of people, right? And which in so many ways is part of the mobilization in the ‘60s. But what’s also lost, I think, is a larger conception of civil rights and a civil rights movement that could have perhaps placed racial violence at the center of it in the ‘50s and in the ‘60s.

It’s also true that for many Americans, especially White Americans, the way in which that they still think about, even in 2020, right, even to this day, the way that they think about the promise of civil rights and the responsibility of American politics, of the American government to civil rights is education, voting, access to the ballot, and integrated schools. For many people, especially for many White people, that’s the responsibility. That, if we get that, we’re good. Like, this is what Black people fought for, and this is, that they define their responsibility by that. This is part of the reason why so many attempts and so much work and so much funding around racial justice and social justice is focused on education still today. There’s an obsession with education that is not completely attributed to Brown v. Board, but is partially attributed to Brown v. Board. If we can just integrate schools, then we will have done something major in the area of civil rights. Me and many others are like, if we can just stop killing Black people, then we will have done something major to civil rights. But for many people, in terms of political elites, as well as everyday citizens, White citizens, they don’t consider the right to live, the right to be free from White vigilante violence, the right to be free from violence from the state, to walk and be Black. They don’t consider that a right that they should actively work around and fund.

Sushma Raman:
We are currently experiencing rollbacks that are threatening to erode decades of hard-won progress on a number of fronts, from voting rights to police accountability to freedom from racial violence. The work of academics, activists, and advocates goes on. In the words of civil rights activist Ella Baker, “we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.” I asked Wade Henderson if he can share his insights and recommendations for the next generation, and for people who just want to get involved in making their communities and societies a better place. Where does one begin? And secondly, I asked him, what gives you hope for the future?

Megan Francis:
Actually, those are two great questions, and the answer, interestingly enough, may be the same for both. Young people give me hope. The youth of this country and the youth of the world give me hope. The history of transformative change in this country was carried on the backs of young people. We can think of instances where the youth of this country who have been courageously speaking truth to power for generations, continue to do so. They continue to raise their voices in defense of an America as good as its ideals. They are people who believe in American values. They have embraced the story of what those values mean both to themselves, and to the country and globally. And they are attempting to reconcile the contradiction between what we say we are and what we are in actuality. And they are attempting to perfect our union. They are attempting to perfect the America of today.

Young people give me hope. I wouldn’t presume to tell them where they should use their voices and influence. They know and they do. I certainly know, however, that being true to oneself, being true to a vision of what this country and world can be inspires me. It encourages me to continue pursuing the goals for change. I’m so impressed with the Black Lives Matter movement. I’m so impressed by the young people seeking to enact reasonable and modest gun reforms in this country. I’m so impressed by students on college campuses who express concern for cafeteria workers and those who do the jobs, the hard jobs for which there is little recognition and an adequate pay. I am very much impressed by those who are concerned about the rampant growth of technology and a desire to avoid it. So I think young people and this new generation of leaders that are emerging hold many of the keys to our future. I hope they remain true to their commitment to the values that we share in common. I think at the end of the day, that is our best hope.

Sushma Raman:
This is Sushma Raman, host of Justice Matters. I’d like to thank our guests for today’s episode, Keisha Blain, Megan Francis, and Wade Henderson. This special episode of Justice Matters features three prior podcast guests, and if you’d like to check out their complete episodes and other episodes, you can download them wherever you get your podcasts. Please visit the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy page to watch our webinars and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to learn more about our work. Thank you.