 Actually, when we hosted another weekend-long festival called The Conversation on Hope that we did with the great Cornell West, who was in fact our first board member. So I'm really happy to be back here tonight in this room with these ghosts to continue the conversation, I guess, on Hope, what did I say? There's a couple of things I wanted to share with you, so I wrote them down. When I started The Foundry in 1994, I did so in hopes of building a conversation with as many people as possible about how we make the world together every day. And so I'm kind of obsessed with the nature of the invitation. How to invite as many people as possible to this conversation, what are the ways that conversation might be initiated. And so The Foundry makes theater that some colleagues are, and some will say, is this theater? Which actually makes me feel like we're successful. Antis pieces reach for a new language of inquiry and attempt to start new kinds of conversations. And since our inception, we've also hosted dialogues, small ones, large ones, town meetings. We had a town meeting on here on the subject of genocide war crimes, from Hope to genocide war crimes. I also stand up here, actually, because I'm so grateful that everyone who is here tonight is meant to be here tonight. And that we are here tonight. And that all of us are we all here tonight. And so if you just take a second to look around the room at who we are, I think it would be kind of delicious. And look for somebody you haven't seen yet. And if you want to kiss somebody, you can. Sing out the names of all the people who have made this event possible. They are smart, and generous, and glorious, and loving, and legion, which means I can't name them all. But there's two names I want to say that I must say that I'm proud to say. And one is Sharid Asad, who is our unsinkable associate producer at the Foundry, and she keeps us vertical. And she kept that, and she kept you all out tonight. And had to deal with that. So thank you to Sharid. And then there's one other name that I still have to talk. And then I have the pleasure of calling out the other name. And that name is RJ McConaughey, who is one in. And with that RJ, this event wouldn't have happened. So RJ, where are you? You need to come up here. All of this is how we do it, because we literally wanted to make you watch how we set up the stage, and bring everybody in. You know, to kind of lift that curtain, give you a little bit of a labyrinth process that is an event like this. I'm not here. This is my hologram. Yeah, especially when I thank my co-worker Sharid. And it takes a ton of people to do something like this. And there are a ton of people that did work to make tonight happen, and to make this whole weekend happen. And for those of you that are able to be with us for Saturday and Sunday, I think it's going to be a really rich exchange. We have a bunch of amazing practitioners who are sitting with us here in the front couple rows from South Africa, from Argentina, from Brazil, from throughout the US, from throughout the city. So let's give them a hand. You have pieces of paper in your programs. Hopefully you have much more heavily based on listening to stories from some elders and an elder of the future. And that's what a lot of memories of the future. And so in order to try to kind of walk that line between being a passive audience and being an active participant in dialogue, what we're trying to do is actually we're going to take a break halfway through. And we're going to come through the aisles and collect those slips of paper. And by that time, we hope that you've written a question that you would like to ask one of the presenters on that paper. So as you're listening, if that question, the burning question that you want to ask pops into your head, write it down. If it's directed to a specific person, write their name on it. During our break, we're going to collect these and share them with Amy Goodman and try and bring your voices in as we're making as much time as possible for them to talk with each other and talk with us. Without further ado, I'd like to welcome our moderator and host for tonight. You may know her as the spearhead behind that amazing force of alternative journalism, democracy now, Amy Goodman. So looking forward to tonight, to the wisdom of years of experience, next week marks the 75th anniversary of the bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica. I think our first speaker tonight, Gracely Box, was something like 21 years old when it happened. But this was a seminal moment. Pablo Picasso was so enraged in what had taken place as he spent three weeks in a painting frenzy and he painted outside of Paris the famous painting Guernica that showed the horrors of war, the angst and agony of war etched in the faces of the people and the animals. And that painting, Guernica, has become a worldwide symbol against war. He refused to allow that painting to return to Spain under the fascist general Franco. And so we have weavers make three tapestry reproductions of it. One of those tapestries is hung at the UN Security Council for decades. When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 in the lead up to the invasion, there that tapestry hung and it wasn't lost on the UN and U.S. officials when, oh, U.S. officials like General Coleman Powell and Secretary of State were making their pro-war announcements in front of this anti-war backdrop. And so they shrouded the Guernica in a blue curtain. What we will try to do tonight, what you'll be doing all through the weekend, I think what activism, what journalism is about at its best is pulling that curtain back to show the realities of war. Whether it's war or abroad and places like Pakistan and beyond or the war at home, environmental racism and many other issues. Tonight, we're gonna hear three remarkable people tell their stories and what motivated them in their lives and what their visions are for the future. I think that's what makes all of them great. Not only looking back, but continuing to look forward and guide us all. Tonight, we begin with Grace Lee Box. A new strategy for transformative social change. This activist philosophy has been a witness to the tumultuous change. She's been involved in a hugely influential... I'm not sure why I... I think it does have something to do with the fact that I was born in the past of civilization. You don't get the city like, like, perspective has grown longer, I think more in terms of centuries. Whereas eight or nine years ago, I was talking about decades. How did you... I'm sorry, I have a huge question. I know you said philosophy. Well... And even though I was not an activist growing up, I needed to take place. Detroit is where the work is on. That's where we need to change the city of Detroit. Why does it remain to get to the end of the United States of America is not the most... See, oh, a variety purpose for my coming was political. But what I had to do here, I started pursuing, do you mean, almost immediately. And I had never been like you before. And that's why it is so challenging to me in the day to think about what we could do. Being revolutionary means as a response to the taking of all humanity onto another planet, onto another... We hear Malcolm's noise the way that he tried to get inside the minds of his own ginsers. To think differently. It's not a big thing about Tracy. She's a woman who's not only willing to go to the blue things trying to understand it, but she gets up every day and opens her eyes anew. And on the other hand, I have changed. That I've done both. I think that's very important. I can remember bowing, swearing, pledging, betraying revolution. And from over, I understood that I should change. And changing is really more honorable than not changing. What a suffering of changing ideas about revolution. How can they do... They should change from sort of a verticalist nature of state power to people from the grassroots redesigning what it means to be a human being. Redesigning what it is to become a city, develop a new kind of society. Redesigning what it means to work rather than just have a job. Redesigning what it means to make a life and not just living. We are very, very fortunate to be living at this time on the bottom of the world, so I am particularly fortunate. I'd like to say what has found in the process of the cultural revolution has far reached you as that from hunting and gathering to agriculture 11,000 years ago and from agriculture to industry 300 years ago. We are redefining, we are re-imagining everything. And that's the enormous challenge. Not only to change the way that we organize, but to change the way that we think in order to change the way that we organize. We are at the outskirts, so possibly going to the Isle of New York. But some concept of what it means to do projects is only since I started living in a city that is falling apart of creating a new kind of organizing that we call visionary organizing. And the opportunity is here for all of us to do that. All of us to transform. I've just written a column about that. We asked the union to be a few weeks before it does. And he said, according to his child to take up what Goldwater has said, a generation from the 1964 invention, extremism in the pursuit of justice is no crime, is no vice. And oppression in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. So that's where we are. Let's change the way we think. Let's change the way we organize. Let's make a new world of the opportunities here that sees us. Now, from that sort of silence, speaking, we're worried about this new story. And the thing that I noticed most about Goldwater's honesty was his gentleness. The only thing he did was to chide us for being too dependent, for not standing enough on our own. And that, I think, the last time I saw Malton was after he had broken with his Bahamas. We met in a world she had never known, or had never known. We arrived right up, right at the time. And he said, that's what encourages you. You don't want to lose your rights. We asked him to come to Detroit to organize Black Power with us, since he was no longer originally from the Bahamas. And he said that he wasn't able to do that. He would think about it. And he had to be kind to us. He wanted to travel and make the hard. And out of that hard, what he concluded was that we need not think in terms of race anymore, but to think about revolutionary. That what color you are should not be decided in how you decide to change and be hard to change. And it was a memory. From the man's transition from the faith and to watch him undergo this transformation was a privilege. What are all of us to think about? Things are now making a transformation and the transformation is as easy as this. You start to think of yourself as an animal. You start with a, I was, I had no PhD. And I was working for $10,000 a week. But in those days, even the barbersaws would come right out and say we don't hire all of you. It was worth the $500 a year at that time. But it wasn't much money. So I was very lucky that a Jewish woman at the University of Chicago, the night was playing in the basement by the tree. It would be difficult even if I had to face them in the barricade of Francis in order to get to the basement. And that made me very unconscious. Like the real thing, which was also very unconscious. And that's changed my life because I started to do the washing and part of the stuff by myself. And I was lost for lack of preaching to the good black planet that's been around me for two weeks. And then, but then, what happened was A. Phil Prasnov, a label leader, proposed a march on washing. And thousands of people, and I was sitting across the country, were ready to join in the march. And Roosevelt thanked Prasnov to Polaroff. And even Mrs. Prasnov thanked him to Polaroff. And Roslop was scared to death that 50,000 people would show up at Washington protesting racism. And he was preparing for war. And so finally, when Prasnov went out, gave up a march, Roslop issued a virtual order to ban discrimination in the best way possible. And that changed my thinking. I said, if I wanted to do something like that, I would become a movement like that. Not a problem. That was not the important one. That was what we were doing. When did you meet Jimmy? I met Jimmy in what we call a certain layer school in the 1950s, too, before. Well, I didn't really meet him until we had us in the school that where we brought people from what we call the Irish Sheets, who were pianist from Westridge, to a school. And I asked Jimmy to dance, and he said he didn't come around the room to get no water. So, a few months after that, I came to Detroit. And I did what I usually do when I go to a city, I want to come, I want to come to that all, but it's not me, it's not me, it's not me. And I would drive him to and from me, and he would sit over in the passenger seat as close to the door as he could. And then the middle of the night, he came, he didn't like when I prepared. He didn't like the music that played, because of the cost that he gave me as a burial. Jimmy grew up with a lot of kids and people, and he had this conviction that he had kept after learning this hopeful through centuries of slavery in his grove that you could make a way out of no way. Remember that, you could make a way out of no way. That's where we are, we could make a way out of a wonderful, beautiful way out of what seems like another way. And so, talk about how he affected your life as you organized and how you affected kids. How do you change as you talk about changing right through until today? History came together, I have a sense of history that goes back to the millennia, I mean, not just strong age, but higher generation, encapsulation, the age between 700 and 92, like the 18th century, when all the great religions were born, some form of bone rule, and every one of them. Jimmy did this way, that way he was, he thought in terms of that, in the cultural age, they took cotton, industrial age working in the plant, and the post-industrial age, when automation or architecture, and he had such a sense of history, and my sense of history came together, and we were able to organize on the basis of that. And talk about how you're organizing in Detroit as changed, as Detroit is changed. Well, I think the most important thing to understand as an organizer is that human beings are very, very different. They're very each one is different. We're not like the school of fish that is far from scoring one direction all at once. And every time there's a crisis, there's some people who respond as victims, and some people who seize the time to do something new, to add so much of the power they have to create the world new. We all have that power, and that's why we like growing our souls. I think this is the time of the world that's cold, that growing our economy has been at the expense of the Earth, and it's been at the expense of other people, has been at the expense of our own selves, our own stories, that we're all very damaged, and we have the opportunity to transform and become better human beings who allow people to hold the stage and at the same time save the planet. I love a little bit too. Quite a couple recently in talking about how we have to move from a protest politics to a visionary politics. What do you think about that? Well, what do you think about that? We have forced the black power in Detroit for a long time, but we've been putting simple things, more blacks in all of the city hall. And then the old people rebelled in 1967 because they saw themselves as becoming expendable that the blacks were all arriving and giving jobs to young people. And as a result of that rebellion, we have a black man, because the white people realize that a white day after the war would be ticked or a war. And then, Colin Johnson was a very smart man, found himself in office. No, the other thing was to create jobs and he decided what we need is a casino industry. That casino game would create 50,000 jobs and that would reduce crime and violence in the city. And we decided to oppose it and we said there's an alternative to continue. We can enlist young people in rebuilding, reviving, and reserving our city from the ground up. And by projecting that opportunity for people to do something to change the world, we didn't get a whole lot of people, but we've got enough to put people in the city indifferently about the earth. The elders came up and they get worked with the young people and that started communities out of need and an urban agriculture movement. The young people that are allowed to create a whole new concept of education as community-based to involve the energy of the young people that we saw in current problems and not just in comparison, but in the sense that we're in a system where if you make the proposal that gives people the opportunity to exercise their own internal power, you are made for that. And they're not going to succeed. But there are many opportunities. We have lots of crises, lots of opportunities to tell people to be felt atrocious and lots of opportunities to give them a chance to do something to themselves. We talked about Angel Brando in the greatest community. That story about Eleanor Roosevelt taking to meet with FDR and describing the condition of black people working people in this country and FDR sitting quietly through everything he said and saying, I don't disagree with anything you've said, you'll just have to make me do it. This is a story that President Obama told when he was still senator running for president. He was in the backyard of a new Jersey hall, speaking to about 100 people, and someone at the end of the evening raised their hands and said, what do you need to do better than the least? And he told that story about April Brando talking to FDR and responded to the person who asked, make me do it, make me do it. Do you think movement, social movements can accomplish that? And what is your sense of the Obama administration today? Well, I think the 1930s are very different from what's really happening to you. We were, as a French people in the United States, the United States of the United States of the world, and Europe would be in tatters. Today, the United States is dying again, but it's going to take a lot more than maybe some about 100 years. And thinking that that doesn't defeat that question today, I think it's a great mistake. We've got to create alternatives that are not dependent. I think that we voted for a number of reasons, because I think it was time for us to have a black man with the white outfit. But I think we also have the illusion that we could do what most belts that we should do, that we could just have demonstrations, that we are very good at having a black man in the world. The United States could die in empire. Do you think that America could rise to new greatness as a result of being a dying empire? Do you think America could rise to a level of greatness as a dying empire? I mean, you don't have to talk about a peace study that said the fall of the US empire could mean the blossoming of the US Republic. We have to change ourselves. We have to recognize that we have to make a very different kind of revolution. That the American people have made another country for more things. They have been the best in the past, but a lot more and more applied to what they know of everything. We have to do more something from the level, and we are so distant to them. Finally, and this is the end of our conversation with this portion of it, but before we go into a joint conversation, we need our other guests. Your thoughts on what has taken place in the last year from the Arab Spring in the Middle East to Madison to the Occupied Movement here? What you think it represents and where you think it might be? Well, I think as a great opportunity, I think what the Occupied Movement did in terms of breaking the silence and changing the conversation has been a very important thing. Were you surprised by it? Were you surprised by it? Well, I don't think so much either. I'm just saying that I think that people who are too much of a load to sleep, I think that the Occupied Movement does not begin to pre-evaluate and propose more services, that they will end up with 70% of the total. It'll end up, what? It'll end up, what did you say? It'll end up in itself. Do you think the encampments were kind of the beginning of a reimagining? Well, we're trying to do a little bit of that. I think there are people who are beginning to think of that right now, but I think all of us need to recall that in the mid-50s, I'm sort of saying imagination is more important than education. We have to think of all of you in our arms. Imagination is more important than education. We get reimagining education. We get reimagining work. We get reimagining demonstrations. We get reimagining everything. Grace Lee-Vox, thank you. To which five people were killed, 10 were wounded, and this name will always tower on us. This is about Martin Luther King's provoked law protection of radical revolution. And we decided that we would issue a statement, which has had these other times, to grow our souls. And this is people who are creating a lot of pressure. And among those we've been to them were Joyce and Theresa and Nelsie, who were people. Most people have seen that iconic picture of the four students, black students, sitting in that little wood spot that was first managed in Sydney. Well, Green's War is the city of university and field of capital. And the KKK had a field there at Cardinals. And in 1999, Nelsie's group organized a demonstration against what they came with guns, shot and killed five of his associates and wounded Nelsie. And once they started, Nelsie went back to his country, where his country was. I don't think the country was some way like the countryside where he was with him. And he went to seminary. And he started to create a loving community and started to choose and write a story about what was in the youth world. And they wrote a story to help the city face the race and class of the KKK and also to help them transform. And they had the truth of that association process in Green's War, which Desmond Newton came from. And it was just incredible how the revolution of this place and this period requires transforming ourselves and giving others an opportunity to transform. The American Revolution did not invite other revolutionists for who was in the city. The video we just saw, I met especially young people and maybe even older people, which we all live in very different worlds that are not necessarily connected through geography and also through time. They've been completely shocked, never hearing about this story. Explain what it was you were doing in the 70s that led to this moment where there was a permit for this march. What was that? Thanks. Just let me say it's an honor to share this space from the place through high school. In the 70s, well in the late 60s, we had organized something called the Greensboro Association of Porking, which was a network of neighborhood groups. It really had more power than we do now. But gradually, we came to see that at the time, I would say that the problem of black people is white people. Was that something wrong to them? And as we grew and understood and studied the Marxism, we felt a need to build relative with our white people's insistence. And given our study of Marxism, the place to do that was one of the production factors. So we went into the textile business and actually had done quite well. Jim Wala was the president of the union at Paul River between Sandy Smith, was the lead organiser at the Plants and Corn Court in North Carolina about 30 miles from Greensboro. William Samson was the organiser and the leader of the movement building movement at the largest dental business in the world. And that was the work that we were doing. Well, the client passed out flyers saying that this whole business of unions is nothing more than black people trying to get in charge of and dominate white people's lives. And we had a conference. Well, first of all, we joined the ballet in a city nearby called Chinatown. And then we called the conference to bring together black and white workers, the black community, to discuss how to engage racism in the community and in the factory. We didn't know this, but the Greensboro police had given them the great momentum that we had to the climate masses. And then they went to lunch early and these caravans, caravans, caravans, caravan and what we saw on the film was a massacre. They simply killed the leading organisers and wounded 10 people. And the community you saw on the film screen is not the community that was there. There was a public housing project. Little children were playing. People were planning for the wedding inside. When bullets right now ricocheted off the wall and five different were killed. And 10 were wounded. And you were marching forward. And we were marching really for the unity between black and white and the struggle in the textile industry. And the people who desired the work. They were a group that had recently named themselves the United Racist Front. They was a merger of Neal Nazis and Klansmen from across the state of North Carolina. People went. The police were, the story they put out is that they went to early lunch. And what we found out is that they knew the Klansmen Nazis had come into town. People were not aware of that. They knew what they had to practice. They videoed them, not videoed, took pictures of them taking the guns from various costs and concentrated those guns. And all the shooters were in the car behind the gun. And they followed the caravan for about five times across town that day. But once they was caught, there were no other police officers in there. You were injured? I was injured. It was not a life-threatening injury. I was walking. Another police person was later identified as a Nazi. He was trying to stab on this section and threw my arm out. And I didn't do it. So how did you let them do that? Well, this was when I looked at my friend and a dear sister who had been the president that was doing the government at Bennett College, one of two all-life, primarily black colleges in the nation. She lived with us, and her mother, and she was slumped with a bullet hole between her eyes. And she was trying to get the children back. I was the person who secured the parade. So I sat across the pass from Captain Gibson and had a discussion with him. And he said that it's our job to ensure the safety of this march. And I want you to sign the statement that there will be no arms and no bullets. So I ask him, why are you saying that? Is this normally public place? He said, it's more than that. Sign the statement. And when I saw what happened, I knew in the way that people know that that didn't happen without maps and charts that this could not have happened without the active process of action on the way through the race. So I stood up in Gems Park and I started to say that these two were just about in front of me to shut up. And I said, I'm not going to shut up because this mayor and his police officers have planned the killing of my friend. At that point, I was the person who came. The police chief put his foot on that and I was arrested. And they would not give me a bullet because they said that if I got out, that I would be in danger. So that's how I spent that time. At the time, I didn't know all of them. So it was an anonymizing night. I was taken to the hospital and I left the hospital and went to J. And late that night an FBI agent and a police officer called me down to Lussel where they imagined me about becoming and that the only life I had would be cooperating with them. Pushed to this day, I don't quite remember. Were a number of plans when you arrested that thing? There were seven plans. Of all the one car was stopped and they arrested, I think, seven people. What happened? The community was traumatized. It was shut. There were different developments around the city. So I heard I wasn't in the capital. But the head vines of the medical department said that the work of reform organization which was the name of the group I was part of which later to change this name was members of that plan. That's the last time the press said anything on it. The marriage has not changed to that of a shootout between the extreme left and the extreme right. The era was just a sight where people who were not related to that time came to have this fight. That became the major one. Let me just point out November 4, 1979 the embassy in Tehran was seized by the students and that's at least part of the reason that this era was pushed off. Shaw, Land, Ayatoga all this was the national news and it was convenient for this not to be published. Grace mentioned the truth of reconciliation. How did this play out over the years? I mean, now we're talking about more than 30 years ago. Let me just say that that city became so homo, that the city in the United States could become as bitter than the violent in that city and have been in court and people got up and went to the side of the road. The question that I raised is how did you convince the people that what they saw with their own eyes they didn't see and that something else happened and that is largely a level distortion and fear that was opportunity and it resulted in a clan and Nazis being acquitted in a case brought by the state of North Carolina and in federal case on civil rights violations they argued that Grace was not the reason even though they shot two Jewish men a black woman and a Latino woman an African American and they were able to put both the argument that Grace played an overall clan and Nazis in what they did So let me just say we had a civil suit and it's the only one in which any person could come on the street the acquittals were all black and all blacks were purged and on that particular civil rights case the jury found police officers and Nazis a lot of the clan and Nazis collectively out of a run for them for one person and that brought that phase of that case too So talk about developing the community sector You asked the question and I really didn't answer of how the truth process came capacity I thought I was a good organiser and when I became isolated in my own suit unable to make things happen it forced me to rethink everything I started getting out of churches and I was received there, I went to seminary and while I was in seminary the clan and Nazis made a decision to march again in Greensboro 1987 it would have been the first time that they would have been back and when I came home the SPI, the state bureau of investigation would ask what might you want to do with the question organization they held a rally and they were setting up the scenario again of the extreme life of the extreme life I talked with people in Richmond and I made the decision that I was going to visit the clan and have a discussion No I didn't call I wrote a short note and I built a house near the foot of the mountain and I found this trail and the Grand Dragon lived there and I went out there and no one was there so I slid the note on the door and I called him that night and told him that I had been to his house I wanted to talk to him but I'm not talking to Greensboro and he just started cursing and just went off and I said well I went to my G.D. house and I said I'll go back to your house so you go look under the back door and you find the note on the door and he found it and came back and actually to make this short after exchanges of first person and so forth I said listen I'm very serious I want to talk to you about not coming to Greensboro and he shocked me and agreed so I made the trip there by myself he said nobody would shoot and we met at a service station and he said look for a pickup truck or a ganky cattle and I stopped about 15 miles out of town because I got scared I prayed and I went to meet this person we went to a hotel and I thought it was going to be somewhere more cool and we had this discussion and actually it was a hard discussion but again and after that I shared with people later about the end of the war he said I just told him this is why are you doing this and he said we break it up and he told us that's not be serious have you ever looked at the back door and see how he tells me what do you think he did and um and he finally he said we are going to come to Greensboro but the war and I just got back and um that ended that and I left Seminar and I felt that I had to find even with the most evil not to become so dead in our own internality that we lose the little humanity that we have and so I wrestled with this out of my faith tradition King was the kind of person I looked at most and this notion of the love of the military where the dignity and worth of everyone of all groups is affirmed and that we strive to create a society that builds that are like with our own concepts um and so I came back with that notion of how to take the work that we had done in that city and to begin to fold it into this concept of the love of the military and treat the reconciliation commission well um that was 1999 when you pour some of the ground that we use love connect is that all of us constantly believe the service and people don't know why they can't get along and it loses its affinity it gets in the ground and people start to train on it uh so how can you build unity in a city that's actually captured by this part of its past so we decided we were trying to figure out what to do uh and how to um create a process and it really was suggested to me that maybe we need to look at some of those suggestions we got together of some people entity here that oversees truth commissions around the world and we started this long process of building a community reconciliation process the effects of now called being assassinated in 1965 Dr. King the assassin approaches I was in Europe when love was assassinated I was a follower of King but I really didn't understand anything I was trying to be a good person I loved hearing talk I made that word safe what did you see in Greensboro I was scheduled to actually be able he was coming to Greensboro to give a speech he actually was coming from Atlanta but he sent a note saying that he had to go back to Memphis because things had gone on by but he was scheduled to be at Trinity and the church in Greensboro and I had a nice spot where the students lived and we were going to cheer them to the airport it was my chance to really ask him because I didn't at this point I had come to disagree with them but love helped me respect them I respected him because I was thoroughly convinced that he believed that this would work but I couldn't see how it was going so this was my opportunity to talk to him what did happen so I was caught up I was angered I was a bar the people who were saying that there is no hope for us building anything they killed our best person our best conflict but that graduated me to a different understanding it wasn't a quick thing it took some time and I want to borrow a racist term to kind of grow yourself in a culture that specializes in making people public you know now it's Russians now it's Jews now it's blacks now it's gays now it's women we have no sense of who we are except in some kind of otherwise a relationship and so we have a quality that we struggle through is that we have enormous potential to grow toward the possibility of affirming every single group every single person barred down and we have the possibility of going the other way the choice is which one do you assault which one do you want to come into being so all of this was part of what was driving our thinking around having a process that would bring the Nazis the Klan the officers the neighborhood present that day our children two of them looked at all of this and we wanted a process that would bring some truth and some appeal to what had happened in the city and so today we named our work building a foundation to build community it is how you do what you do so we run a homeless hospitality house and we build a community out of that we build community gardens by the fact that the homeless people do the garden we engage this unresolved problem of corruption and double standard waste department and we do energy efficiency on homes but all of that is an occasion to build a community the most typical thing after recently is North Carolina has up on the balance on the 8th of May what they call amendment one which is to oppose same sex marriage meetings for the last three weeks with African-American clergy to struggle with this issue and it's really the most difficult problem that I have with my peers but I happen to say that we made some significant progress because it's just so new to people at times punishing people because of your views so we've had to go around in some struggles and I say that because that's the last thing I did while I was in New York actually I was pretty happy without a doubt with everyone I wanted to bring up our final speaker and participant tonight you ended this book The Revolution will not be better than it does to a complex N organized the boarding school healing for 20 years I was a woman of color with the National Coalition to get sexual assault and had seen how a movement in violence had basically completely co-occupied a state since that we were essentially an arm of the state and a network of social service providers but we were actually not a movement trying to end violence so consequently our programs were funded directly by the state and our programs were located in police departments and our solution to ending violence was to work with the apparatus of state violence through the prison industrial complex law enforcement etc and in all this desire to become mainstream we never asked ourselves were these strategies actually working and of course they were not working because all these laws being passed and our lives more safe such as mandatory arrest laws relating to situations were now bad were now going to the public police first and people were being battered when they were getting arrested but even larger than that it became a situation where the state is able to come in and say you know if you were able to use this violence against women's provision on a very repressive anti crime bill and now call it feminist legislation and it does not get questioned by the anti violence media when I was in Chicago when I was against this and they said that's not a gender violence issue so this is possible issue oriented but also how much we had become in bed with the state so we traced this as the problem was when 100% of our funding was coming through the state the state was dictating solutions that we could come up with for a foundation which we'll figure later to go to a trip to meet activist India which was very informative but we met and gave the non funded who said well you think you're so great just because you're not taking money from the state well why are you taking foundations funding you know so they were giving us a hard time and we thought we were so smug and self satisfied but they brought us down a naturally too funded because our state was poor in Palestine so we had an idiot tour which is another story three weeks ago we had $60,000 organizing such that we thought we need these blossom brochures funded by so many residents maybe you can take off your coffee or to keep those or something else it would be a little more creative as many people are struggling with these things not just the anti violence movement we don't have a solution to it but we can start a conversation about ways we can keep the organizing not just briefly mentioned though I think what we realized with that process though is that the non profit is just the tip of a larger iceberg it's not just enough to say we won't do non profits but we've seen in many movements it's not that they don't have non profits they just don't organize the movement through the non profits they have independently funded based movements that may use the non profits to serve as a particular task but the non profit answers to the movement it's not the movement itself so it may not be non profit we all know non profit but what is the profit role of a non profit but also even if you don't operate with the non profit we don't change the capitalist way if you live together we end up in the same situation like if we're going to resource our work we all have day jobs to share our resources but some people have much better paid jobs paid jobs than others then we end up just replicating a classic in our organizing work so the critique of the non profit and our individualistic capitalist all of organizing and living together that stops us from developing a really collective way of doing the work that can actually be inclusive of all people whatever the resources they are what is the important physical healing coalition is trying to build a movement for native peoples and their descendants who have been subjected to the US board of school policies and just to make a long story short and I'm going to end with this basically in the 1800s the US government decided that the best way to solve the Indian problem was not to just kill them because that was too expensive that would be more inexpensive if we took native children from their home to the age of five turn them in boarding schools till they're 18 routinely sexually, physically and emotionally abuse them and then return them to their communities not even able to speak the same language to their communities so the result of this is this is where we see beginning of sexual abuse alcohol abuse, all these other things that native communities that didn't exist before because prior to colonization most native communities were not future artful they were not built on these structures of social hierarchy and I think they'll slightly over generalize but clearly what happened with the boarding schools they completely changed the way native communities worked with each other but also you have generations that they would never love and then they passed that to future generations how many went to the boarding schools? about 100,000 most people are affected by that even if they were directly affected by that in their communities did you go? no I didn't go to the boarding schools but I should say there are still boarding schools going on now they're not mandatory but even so in some areas there are still ongoing allegations of abuse that are not being addressed at this moment but the larger issue is that this is a history that has been no acknowledgement of I mean in Canada there's been a huge movement around which has actually settled that which is very problematic in many ways but at least it's acknowledged as happening whereas in the US there's just no acknowledgement of this history that has such a devastating impact on native communities and just no mention of this has even happened so this is basically the movement that the group started with a woman who actually used to live in New York to meet up from the Rosebud Reservation and she just saw this one line of candidates that we need to have a similar understanding of this happening in the US so she brought together people to kind of start this movement and it's been a very slow process because we start to do kind of a documentation project of these abuses and what happened is for instance we might have a meeting in a certain place in South Dakota and people don't have a lot of resources and they would take a lot of effort to drive it 200 miles to get to this meeting and people would get to mean that they couldn't walk into the door because of that level of trauma and the big thing I learned from that experience is that we often have an idea of an organizing model based on being these cool badass superstars rather than building movements around the sick, tired, busy, depressed people that actually are and we have to integrate healing into the movements rather than go heal on your free time with someone from the MSW and then when you're healed between the movements right now and you want to be a Christian you can be we're curious to support you so then I would spike on movements on the left or actually it must be something that you want to be part of right and that's what I realized we have to go to the movies and that's as important as a business meeting like we actually have one of the things that we've organized before which is instead of doing the usual boring conferences let's start having kind of multimedia arts and cultural projects that kind of spark your imagination in a different way and make you want to be part of those think about how you can do the work rather than kind of just boring talking heads, getting ready but find new ways that you want to be part of the work so that's talking to my organizing staff who came from the US who came from also in Latin America which I think are rethinking what indigeneity means and in particular I was very influenced by the 2008 World Social Forum the indigenous people in Latin America they made this collective statement that said with the number one question they want to come and take a look at the question of the nation state so the nation state hasn't worked in the last 500 years so I don't think it's going to start working now right but what they put on the table is in a different way we can think of how we would live together but there are different forms of governance structures that we can imagine and of course if we decolonize our imagination we know that things do exist because they did exist prior to colonization but with that I think and I think Grace has spoken to this about how we would think differently I think in order to do this what they put on the table is the fact that we have to rethink who we even think we are right because if we kind of go kind of the western model of self that sees oneself as over and against other people then the nation you build is a nation over and against other nations right so consequently the track we find ourselves in the current structure is if people encroach on your land the only thing you can say is it's not your land, it's our land but you can't say well why is your land anybody's land why is your land a commodity that can be bought from a relationship to a all people's all creation and your land and when we see ourselves in this radical relationship with all things the nations we build will also be in this relationship all of the way that it's not about why struggle is against your struggle but rather our struggles only work when they work together and then consequently they were saying real democracy not kind of just big pro-democracy we have here in the US but a real democracy in which we all get to participate in creating a world of peace and harmony which is a great way to lead into both great and dumb questions or comments you have and as Andy talks about having some fun and raise some culture into this let's pause for a moment to celebrate the celebration of our peace to turn around and introduce yourself to the people around you who else is here who else is sitting right there to state that persistence is one thing structuring it in such a way that you bring the various components of the community and spiritual conversation in some way affirming the humanity of the other we would be glad to share more extensively videos how you structure it and each one has to be done to fit the particularity of the situation that you're dealing with this question came in from someone in the audience would you be curious to hear why Andrea Smith's organization focuses on women of color what are their particular concerns beyond those of women who are traveling kind of informing insight actually deciding to rethink what women of color politics is before we kind of operated around this inclusion model we would be part of this larger anti-violence movement we would spend all our time yelling at them for being racist if we yelled very eloquently they would pay us to yell at them but it didn't really lead to any results so it would just be kind of this compete every year of yelling at them on being racist so then we thought politics is not around inclusion so we said if you take kind of the history in life's women of color seriously what does that tell us about the world and when we do that we see that we cannot look at gender violence without looking at state violence simultaneously because if we look at the histories that we've been through it's the state that's been the primary perpetrator of violence in our community if we do that not just for women of color but for everybody right because the approach for all people of all genders trying to end violence from state violence is not an excellent idea so having the women of color analysis is not an insular analysis it's actually an expansive analysis that can be liberatory for all people so that's the sense by which I see as a women of color politics he says that three women of color are very, very important he says there's three brains the matriarchal brain the patriarchal brain and the childhood brain and that's the we have to be united suddenly and overcome the domination of all our institutions by the patriarchal brain and I think that's a huge challenge to know ourselves and to know our institutions and to know what their culture is and to know that we have the power within our minds within our brains actually to exercise a more matriarchal culture and create women our reliance on things like a marriage or hate crimes to addressing a heteronormativity is just a great book that means spade and a book that's called one of the great works it functions often that there is a radical separation of the human from the rest of the earth and life systems and in that sense the human see everything else as an object to be explored for our lives and we have to develop communion and intimacy with all the other aspects of creation both living and not living I found that powerful and energizing because of the fact biblical Christianity has played an awful role in facilitating the radical separation of humans in a way that is just destructive because we do not respect everything else and if we see ourselves as dominators then we get enough dominating each other as well as abusing the resources of the earth and I think Barry does a good job in having us to see that. Michelle, that's Andrew's book the new community in four years having three kids at that time and she was dealing with she was a clerk who was Supreme Court Justice Hartman Blackman she was dealing with a racial justice project in the ACLU and just started to come around to see the criminal justice system in this country, the number of people were incarcerated, put it together in a way we have rarely seen from slaves of the 19th century who could not participate in the electoral process of choosing their leaders to their descendants in the same situation today not enslaved like they were but now because of voter ID laws or because of laws regarding people who have been in prison not being allowed to vote now are similarly have lost their right to vote and participate in the election process also my colleague is Augusta and I really recommend this for all the people the epic story of race in the American media which has this remarkable it's a total of love but you see the beginning of media in this country newspapers who they were written for always about who owns the presses in the early days it was about giving out information to white settlers in the United States about where the Americans were it's an incredibly comprehensive look at the lens through which we have seen ourselves from the founding of the United States to today I wanted to ask Nelson Johnson this question about electoral policy especially in the age of president the movements that got him elected in 2008 and then what has happened the goals of all these movements whether it was the closing of the war to the ending of war which has not happened to deal with the economic downturn and president Obama surrounding some very important problems bankers or as some say bankers I want to make two points the first thing I want to do is to join with Grace in saying that how we look at politics and electoral politics in this group is different from how we look at it in a different group in the 60s for example where the great struggle was to join something to be let in give us a slice of the pie count us in and that was a necessary struggle but now I think the issue is that the aggregate systems and institutions of the nation and so the whole question of getting in so I want to say that first and therefore ought to be that we cannot think of the allegiance to the U.S. Constitution the U.S. Constitution was created in 1978 all along the former organization and I think particularly Native Americans are raising the question about the land as to how we can structuralize the nation re-imagining democracy re-imagining the Constitution re-imagining government and I hope people come to enjoy it from July 1st to the 15th where we will be re-imagining the revolution and everything get really to look at the question of race as it related to sentencing and particularly capital punishment where the numbers are going to show a tremendous imbalance toward black people of color as these laws come up and the same sex amendment all these things have consequences in terms of creating a culture of division and a culture of hate and a culture of oppression what's your suggestion on how well I think we have not yet decided what value do we have a little bit but I think that this debate that's why my speech of 1937 is called a lot of value value and material value and material and material and I think that we have almost that that's where we are in the heart of the world we are not so much greater than we are based for a while I would like to make this division either you're for the revolution or you're going to be short term strategies that you need for basic needs that you need to work together and I think the reason is that when we do things like electoral work we don't give up our investment in the United States because we need to exist so consequently get disappointed with a president of a settler state you know down the line genocide and slavery doesn't work out like we hope if you learn the U.S. settler state nobody can lead it and do anything good so you can do those short term things as long as you realize that's a goal but it isn't short term things just to give one example when the Obama thing was going on in Michigan I found it before inside we found it very helpful because we joined it and it got the map of the whole city and then used that to get to your organization and never showed you that it's short term informed by the long term so that you're doing short term things that take you closer to where you want to go and not farther away but some people understand this didn't come as a result of our pride we weighed the facts of the case clearly that led us in this direction and that was to hand out the indictment but what was the sense clearly it would not have been within her purview to do this if there wasn't this vast uprising that led to the appointment of a special prosecutor very much led by trade hunts parents who have been a remarkable model but the hundreds of thousands of people perhaps millions of people over the country weighing in in all different ways you see that making the justice system work ever so slowly we'll see what happens but what about that power were you seeing that I think to go back to the trade bond it's absurd that the indictment would have come down without after the protests but I think that in the process of doing that people have to as our sister said work on what's the long term goal that we're seeking because there are trade bonds in every city there are trade bonds in jail all over the place and they're going to continue to be until there is the dismantling of that apparatus and the replacing of that with something fundamentally different that's movement and justice and love and so forth and help to build a pressure that grows so rapidly look the same and the second is the solutions are not the same let me put it this way people talking about ending the war how can the people need war I'm saying that I don't want to say that there's no difference because that would be spitting on the struggles of people years ago is to transform the whole system and in that process transform ourselves talk to me a little bit let's begin understanding that the people who are supporting and sponsoring the standout bound things are the emergence of prosperity of a lot of corporations and that the power that we use is building and let's begin to develop a more total the solution I just said and don't keep it with us in the race that we are really using ground you know it's interesting you raise that whole way to stand with ground laws or another school to shoot first laws that have been challenged we've seen something more remarkable not only this grassroots movement of law that has led the family that has led this movement saying he is our son he is our son but that has led to this destabilizing of a bright organization called ALEC the American Legislative American Legislative Exchange Council how many of you have heard of this group ALEC is an incubation for legislation in states around the country the standard ground law is being passed to state after state and what happens is conservative legislators are invited to these meetings they are often secret conservatives are a number of corporations many of the multinational corporations and the laws are written and that has been blueprinted to pass in state after state but because of the standard ground laws and the backlash against it and the voter idea laws and the backlash against it and the work of groups like Color for Change which is calling for boycotts of companies that are for millions into happening these corporations one by one are pulling out because they are being coal-fining pexicola pulled out coca-cola pulled out the Gates Foundation pulled out which is putting their money in which for privatization of education that old agenda when these pulled out the latest was Young's which owns Pizza Hut and Taco Bell and now Alec has announced they are dropping their social agenda of pushing for standard ground and the voter idea laws when these laws actually when you look at them they are almost identical each state that passed the actual legislation down to the tight loaves in the legislature and it is really exposed the center for media debate and the marketing is showing how those working for the website Alec exposed Color for Change is a very important organization that has been organizing boycotts and at least it doesn't of the major corporations of this country when these and others have now said they are not going to support them but quite some I welcome the boycott of all of you who can be weakening about but I think the analysis is still too limited I think that the fact that this country has lost to war the fact that we are coming in the channels I'm constantly in the channels all I think that we are that we have to make a very much closer to what there really was in the last few years understanding the depth of the president of the revolution and therefore the depth of the president of the revolution we have to make I think it's a challenge time is smiling and we're now wedged they said that one in two I'm going to direct this to an advantage one in two Americans are now four four year not one in three, not one in five a hundred and fifty million Americans which goes to your mission how do you address this? well I was going to speak on the previous thing I was going to speak a different moment or maybe not too many here I think speaks to what Nelson has said could this be a moment for creating an alternative in this case the obvious alternative is the alternative to the president industrial complex that we can't think of another way to uphold that we're going to account for other than this kind of system that we can't really think of another way to do this other than to demand a system do justice and that we haven't figured out how we can do justice ourselves now of course when we think of president abolition it's a positive project it's not a negative project it's not about tomorrow it's not if you're under attack it's rather why don't I know other options but to call police and can we start to create the alternative that's squeezed out the current system such that we've been having true justice and accountability so I think maybe the other thing we talked about the counter-revolution is is there a different mode of accountability of working with the quote-quote counter-revolution that's not expecting the state to solve the problem and I think when you were giving the story that was a model of what that might mean that we looked at it's not going to be immediately the state it's something we're going to have to keep on doing so just that there's a lack of what that race group is and I don't think we're going to be able to face so many other convictions that we have to read them and so on and so forth and that's where we are and so almost there's something we've wanted to be able to get that suggested as a way to explain it it's much more that our educational institutions are pipeline-sufficient our economy the lack of jobs for young people for a lot of young people has made people stabilize our economy there's a sense which as the whole corporate state entity declines the whole energy of making people other intensifies the historical basis for making people other one of the strongest ones in the United States is race so you would expect that to intensify as it is intensify that the whole social order is collapsing and very brief aspect of it that should be read or imagined and reviewed so I want to see these things pitted in a way that perhaps they don't have to be pitted I think Michelle and Xander documents when you see that problem you can't say it's not happening more than it's just it's all that's the point that she made what do we call that what is that does not in and of itself create and the creation of black together if we look at the struggle against semi-colonialism that's not just about being nice to Indians that's about the normalization of the nation-state form of governance that's actually there to create a destroyed alternative form of living not just for Native peoples but for everybody's if we look at kind of the war on terror which as you noted will be viewed as war it's about the normalization of war as a state of being so the anti-racist struggle is a struggle against semi-colonialist logics and capitalism and war but that's what a racial justice struggle is it's not simply discrimination although I would agree that in addition to Michelle and Xander we don't want to forget to regroup in Gilmore's excellent work I mean as we discussed in our video the difficulty is that we have not recognized that each of the struggles that we carry on and as Native Americans at this particular time in the modern world when we have to make such total changes needs to be to revolution to the American revolution and not just the Indians how is the play that I think is what we call beauty based education is recognizing that the law created between the school and the community that we prepare the children eventually to succeed in the system is a backup and that's responsible for much of what we have is to engage the energies and the creativity of young people and the solving of the problems of our lives is to change the relationship between the school and the community to involve the parents and teachers and the students in creating the community an academic an academic abolitionist vision we are hurting them too we only think about how to make sure ethics are cut but we don't ask ourselves why do we think the university owns ethics but it's in the first place that they can cut so it seems like now there's movements developing with high school radical teachers saying we want to go beyond just calling for higher wages we want to create the educational environment we want to say we're no longer just about making sure our department does not get cut but actually relocating the department outside the academic industrial complex it is right for a new place of a new political imaginary about what education can look like we don't have some education to get as a commodity that you buy and sell in the academic market what is your struggle do you think the occupying 99% I think that's an incredible thing I think one of the issues is the kind of assistance we have in the U.S is that we don't necessarily have a global analysis that even if things are like we get a pay cut we still have a lot of stuff we only have because we've extracted it from people in other parts of the world so if we actually have true economic justice we would not have we have even less than we have now so I think this is a little bit of a problem and that we're wanting more rather than thinking of a real actual global redistribution and what would that look like but also I think that this is more important why we need to think about building a different world because I think one of the reasons why we have this counter-revolution is that people see change and they think of what they're going to lose like people would say well if we end global oppression because I still watch this program we're not worrying about structural violence or we know that someone's going to have our back when we need it but we know we are respected we know we have power over our lives and we change people only see what they be giving up but they don't see what they be getting so if we don't start creating these alternatives now whether they're waiting for the revolution to occur people will never have a sense of that and they won't have the desire to actually bring that so I think not quite as great in terms of what it's sparking but I think we can build on this we're not running for ourselves now we're dreamless and I think that couples with that each of you just pulled forth on this what gives you the most hope for the future that human beings as I say create a world of new and that the time is right to create that world of new to promote our planet and not just to protest because we want to have enormous potential and possibilities scarred wounded hurted and in need of healing I think the context of healing is community we have to build what we call the love community on whatever level of you exists five of you, three of you on any road it's in that context that the transformation of our internality can best occur where we're loved and nurtured and supported and challenged to be different you introduced me to a book called the blessed unrest I don't know what's going on in which it's possible that tens of thousands tens of thousands of small groups are forming right now and I think the question of connecting those and creating alternatives that are more locally based is where I think the movement needs to go I think this whole national thing of one of two superstars is yesterday's things comes in I think we got to envision how to build local food security local transportation local clothes I think that the visionary organising cause us into that and I just like to end by the street that we do our work on and sometimes people would be drunk and laying by the side of the wall and I challenge everybody around that you have an option one is you take a snapshot of that person and freeze it there and then you name the person a drunk here's somebody who is drunk and laying by the side of the wall but I think he knows I may not know this ball side so I'm all the way he said well progressive so go to it thank you so much for being here