 I said I wanted to talk with you about two truly extraordinary men who now had the chance to discuss al-Mairaq, and now I have the wonderful pleasure of introducing you to Professor Charles Ogletree. I have to begin with an apology to Professor Ogletree. When I invited him here and we talked about bedridden, I said, you can leave cold, wet Cambridge and come to sunny Southern California. I said it took him two and a half hours just now to drive from Los Angeles to get here. And I think all of us feel collective guilt in Southern California for what you had to go through in the weather. Professor Ogletree is the Jesse Flamenco Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He grew up in Resed, California. He went to Stanford for college and then to Harvard Law School. After law school, he went to work as a public defender in the DC Public Defender Office, became a partner of a law firm in DC, and then became Professor of Law at Harvard. He's been the Jesse Flamenco Professor of Law there since 1998. He's also the founder of the Charles Hampton Houston Center at Harvard. When I think of who I would regard as a role model, a style for my students, I can't think of anybody better than Professor Ogletree. He is a superb classroom teacher. He's an outstanding scholar, which I think would be selling one of your books outside after the talk. And he's also very much a civil rights lawyer, a public interest lawyer, and an activist. I could spend all of the rest of the afternoon telling you about the cases and causes involved him. But if I would think of somebody who Almyroff would love to hear him be here for, it's very much Professor Ogletree. So it's a great pleasure to introduce you to my law school classmate and your friend, Charles Ogletree. Thanks so much, and I am very happy to be here as late as I am. It was two and a half hours. I heard about the 405 parking lot. Now I know what you mean by the parking lot. It was a very, very long drive. I thought two o'clock, 54 miles, I'll be there in plenty of time to check my email and get some other things done. And Irwin and I were classmates back in the heady days of the 1970s at Harvard Law School. And he's been a friend forever. We've done a lot of great things together. And you're very happy to have him as the dean of this law school. And I just want to thank those who've already spoken about Almyroff. I mean, just the idea of the great work that he did. Always trying to think of something unique and different and interesting, innovative in the law that might make the life better for those who are suffering is his legacy. And I think that that legacy will continue. This is my second time on the campus. I was here a few years ago to speak at the university before the law school opened actually. And so it's nice to see the folks here. How many people are actually law students or, okay, got you a good number. How many people are under 30? Okay, all right, good, good, good. So what's great about it is that it gives a unique opportunity to talk about some of the things that are important to me. And the dean didn't say all of this, but what sort of makes this an interesting and useful opportunity for me to talk about it. It's because I had the great, great pleasure in my 27 years of teaching, of teaching both Michelle Obama, 1985 to 88 when I started teaching, and then Barack Obama, 1988 to 1991. They never met at Harvard. She graduated in June of 88 and he started in September of 88. And they met at Chicago when she was at a law firm trying to recruit him to the firm and he was at the law firm as an associate trying to recruit her to be his wife. So I think he ultimately prevailed, right? And they both are doing great stuff. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about that in terms of where we are now. And I can't wait to take your questions. There's a lot that I wanted to talk about. And it's interesting having taught them both just for the context together. And I'm not gonna publicly say that Michelle's the smartest. I've never done so that, right? But there are two outstanding people about what you don't know about them. Was that Michelle from Chicago? You may know that, her and her brother both went to Princeton. He got his MBA, she got her JD as she went to Harvard. And she was a public interest lawyer even then in law school. Always well-dressed, always well-spoken. Always very successful in representing clients. And the Legal Aid Clinic at Harvard represented a lot of people for tenants' rights and benefits and the whole host of civil issues. I mean, that was her commitment to her parents. She would go and not just be a Harvard law student and a graduate, but someone who would service others who needed her service while she was there. And I think she's continued that ironically and in a unique way in the let's move area. And please don't tell her I'm eating chocolate chip cookies during the break, that she would just, not again, I told you those things are not healthy, all right? So you don't see me eating any chocolate chip cookies. I hope you didn't order any, I saw some veggies out there and some fruit. So I'm going for the good stuff just in case you tell her. But the whole idea of using her power as it is to try to influence the way people think about their health themselves. And I just wanted to say a word about her before talking to Barack and the broader topic. What makes Michelle so remarkable is that as the first lady she's invited young people to the White House, but she's gone into the community. Those who've ever been to Washington DC, it's like two cities. There's a Northwest and Southwest, there's a Northeast and Southeast. There's a largely African-American and largely poor community. And very little happens there in terms of supermarket, in terms of investment. And she went there and talked to young people, young, poor, African-American, Latino boys and girls about the idea of being self-righteous. Particularly young women about protecting their bodies, not giving in to the power of those who are trying to be aggressive and how important it is for them to grow. And then she took a lot of other women that were prominent in art, in sports, in media, in law and medicine. So they could see role models and see who they could be, like Michelle and like these other outstanding women of all, or racist colors and creeds. And then she said, I've come to your house. I want you to come to my house and invite them to the White House. And something very simple. Just think about this of year 8, 9, 10, 11 years old. She says, you see that, this is your house. You see this lawn, this is your lawn. I want you to trust me. If you're young, I want you to dig it up. And I want you to put some seeds in there. And I want you to come back in a few months and you'll see you're going to grow some vegetables and some fruits. And you're going to make a difference. And she wasn't teaching them just about growing something at the White House, but it was about personal responsibility, about health, about diet, about collective engagement. All those things were part of the social messages. And the only thing that surprised me, I mean the idea of lettuce and tomatoes and carrots and all those are great. But when the kids were planning arugula at the White House, it just didn't quite. That's Barak's thing, right? So I knew he had a little bit of influence on it. But that's who she is. And Dean Tamarinsky will appreciate this, that one of the things we love about teaching, we have some great teachers and some terrible teachers. I mean, just be honest about it, right? And they were very interesting and thought-provoking, but they controlled the classroom. We were very engaging, we'd offer our points of view. And I started a class at Harvard in 1988, I think it was called the Saturday School program where particularly minorities would bring them together on Saturday mornings. We started at eight in the morning and they would drag in. I started moving to 8.30, they would drag in, we'd move it to nine. And then at 10 o'clock it was perfect. My sense, get there early, but they came at 10 and we had a great turnout. And Barak was one of the smartest kids, if not the smartest, student at Harvard Law School. He was the first black president of Law Review, very good academically. He would come to the program and he would sit up front. Students normally, you know this, you sit in the back, you're back ventures, right? And you don't sit in the front, but he'd sit in the front. And I would be giving a dialogue or discussion about something. We would have people like that if you'd never met him, Fred Korematsu. You could read the case, but to talk about a Japanese-American, a florist from San Francisco, and what he went through with the intern in the Keps in the Second World War was a remarkable sense about the person, not just about the case, to give the case some context. And people would talk about the law review articles, they were researching and preparing. And the idea was to get students comfortable with engaging with faculty and dialogue, asking questions, giving answers, and that was part of what we tried to do. And what made it so great is that Barak would come and he would say, he would answer the question. I think there is some regression analysis here that's important that you have to take a look at, but if you think about it, what Carol said was right on point, Professor, she sort of put the minutiae together in a way that's very powerful. And Paul, when Paul was addressing you, Paul really understood the concepts of how these things can be conflicts and that you can't resolve them all. And Jerry was, I said, Barak, I'm teaching this class, right? But that's the idea he had, and you've seen that not just as a student in the classroom sharing with others, but as the President of the Harvard Law Review sharing with others, as the President of the United States trying to bring, as a senator trying to bring everyone together. And that may be a failed idea. It's a nice aspirational idea that we're one nation, one people all together. But we see the tension now and it's very different. Now, what's interesting in thinking about the election of President Obama is that I went all around the country many times. I supported him when he ran for state senate in Illinois in the 1990s when he made the foolish mistake to run against the congressman from Chicago for the Congress and got slammed. I think Bobby Rush got 67% of the vote. And then Barak came, said, I'm not gonna try the federal Congress anymore. I'm gonna run for the Senate. I said, that's great. I think going back to the state senate bill, he said, no, I'm running for the US Senate. So Barak, you just got crushed running for the US Congress. But I'm doing much better now, so okay, 2000. How much money do you have less than all the other people? Name recognition, none at all, right? Endorsements, well, the guy who carries my bags, he likes me. So, but the idea was that he had a message that he would go, and think about this, going running for US Senate and having a rally, and you and the guy carrying your bags and two other people showed up. And he would have this long, hour-long conversation. And then after taking questions, why are you guys here? I don't know, we thought you'd give away something for you. We just came to see what was happening. But it finally worked for a host of reasons from 2004. And he gave, as you may remember, the Democratic National Convention speech in Boston. And I want you to just at some point go back and look at it. Because it is a classic speech that focuses on the middle. Not African Americans, not Latin Americans, but all Americans. Not blue states, not red states, but the United States. The whole idea, the Democrats were applauding him. I said, this guy's offering something very different. He's trying to create a world that embraces everybody without regard to politics. And that was his ultimate go when he ran for Senate in 2004. When he ran for White House, it was a little bit different. And for this reason, because he, in a sense, empowered a lot of people to realize that their vote mattered. And that was important. And he says, incredibly, enthusiasm from African Americans, more than ever before, Latinos, Asian Americans, women, who were first very supportive of Hillary Clinton and ultimately came to his side. And more whites than John Kerry had in 2004 and that Al Gore had in 2000. So in a sense, there was something magical about what was going on, that a lot of first time voters were involved in it. But you used to think about it was the rainbow. It wasn't the black vote, or the Latino vote, or the Hispanic vote, or the Native American vote. It was everybody seeing that this guy was different. And it wasn't because of race. And I think it's very important because we've had candidates before. We had Shirley Chisholm in the early 1970s. We had Al Sharpton in 2004. We had Jesse Jackson with Galvanized People in 1984 and 1988. And I said I wasn't going to tell that, but I'm going to tell this. When Jackson was running in 88, you know Dukaka's won the Democratic nomination. And Jackson went to his house for dinner in Brookline in Massachusetts. And I'm going to see the former governor tomorrow. So I hope the paper doesn't report this. But Jesse Jackson goes to his house, has the dinner. Michael Dukakis is a very austere gentleman, very, I'm not going to say cheap. Frugal, is that a better word? Frugal, he's not cheap. He's frugal. He's very careful. Eat lied, spin lied, modest home, small car, environmentally sound, all of that. And so Jesse Jackson went to his house. And I saw Jesse later that night and he says, I need you to take me to eat. I said, you just ate at the governor's house. He said, man, I'm hungry. I was hungry when I got there, hungry when I left there. I don't know what they were eating, but it wasn't very healthy. It wasn't very good, very filling. So we had to go get them some greens and some potato salad and some corn and mac and cheese and chicken. And he said, now, that's a meal. So I just warn you if you're going to go to Dukaka's house, eat before or after. Don't put that in the paper, please, please. So there have been candidates before. And Jesse Jackson won Michigan. He did very well in South Carolina. But there still was a sense that he was not the national candidate. And he had labor. He had some women's groups. He certainly had African-Americans and other minorities supporting him. But it wasn't the same kind of sense that Obama had, but he paved the road. Obama wouldn't be in the White House today if Jesse Jackson and others had not run before. He, in a sense, built on the structure that they created. And here's a small thing about it. What Jackson did, you may remember, he lost a lot of states. Even though he had 38% or 40% or 42% of the votes, it was winner-take-all. And what he did that helped Obama enormously was to change the law so that the person in second, if you got 42% of the votes, that would be important in terms of delegates. And so that had a big impact on Obama's run for Democratic nomination and also the ultimate run, as well. So here's the question. So he gets elected on November 4, 2008. And it's a wonderful moment for the world. And then you start seeing things like, you remember Bobby Kennedy on the assassination of Dr. King in 1968? He says that, in 40 years, I suspect that there will be a Negro elected president in 1968. Started planting a seed. None of us thought it was possible in 2008. It just did not seem possible until we started seeing the people getting excited about the candidate. And what's interesting about him when you talk about race is that he had as much critical race objection to his candidacy from the black community as he did from conservatives who were Republicans. In fact, I would say he had more from the black community. Because the first thing about Barack that was different from Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and Shirley Chisholm, they said he wasn't black enough, right? Because his father was an African from Kenya. His mother was white from Kansas. He's not commitment to her parents. She would go and not just be a Harvard law student and a graduate, but someone who would service others who needed her service while she was there. And I think she's continued that, ironically, and in a unique way, in the let's move area. And please still tell her I'm eating chocolate chip cookies during the break that she would just, oh, not again. I told you, those things are not healthy. So you don't see me eating any chocolate chip cookies. I hope you didn't order any. I saw some veggies out there and some fruit. So I'm going for the good stuff just in case you tell her. But the whole idea of the fusion her power as it is to try to influence the way people think about their health, their selves. And I just wanted to say a word about her before talking to Barack and the broader topic. What makes Michelle so remarkable is that as the first lady, she's invited young people to the White House. But she's gone into the community. Those who've ever been to Washington DC, you know it's like two cities. There's a Northwest and Southwest. There's a Northeast and Southeast. Southeast is a largely African-American and largely poor community. And very little happens there in terms of supermarket, in terms of investment. And she went there and talked to young people, young, poor African-American, Latino boys and girls, about the idea of being self-righteous, particularly young women, about protecting their bodies, not giving in to the power of those who are trying to be aggressive and how important it is for them to grow. And then she took a lot of other women that were prominent in art and sports and media and law and medicine so they could see role models and see who they could be like Michelle and like these other outstanding women of all racist colors and creeds. And then she said, I've come to your house. I want you to come to my house and invite them to the White House. And something very simple, just think about this of year eight, nine, 10, 11 years old. She says, you see that, this is your house. You see this lawn, this is your lawn. I want you to trust me. If you're young, I want you to dig it up and I want you to put some seeds in there and I want you to come back in a few months and you'll see that you're gonna grow some vegetables and some fruits and you're gonna make a difference. And she wasn't teaching them just about growing something at the White House, but it was about personal responsibility, about health, about diet, about collective engagement. All those things were part of the social messages. And the only thing that surprised me, I mean, the idea of lettuce and tomatoes and carrots and all those are great, but when the kids were planning arugula at the White House, it just didn't quite, that's Barak's thing, right? So I knew he had a little bit of influence on it, but that's who she is. And Dean Tomerinsky will appreciate this, that one of the things we love about teaching, we had some great teachers and some terrible teachers. I mean, just to be honest about it, right? And they were very interesting and thought-provoking, but they controlled the classroom. We were very engaging, would offer our points of view. And I started a class at Harvard, 1988, I think it was, called the Saturday School Program. Particularly minority students, I would bring them together on Saturday mornings. We started at eight in the morning and they would drag in and I started moving to 8.30. They would drag in, we would move it to nine and then at 10 o'clock it was perfect. My sense, get there early, but they came at 10 and we had a great turnout. And Barak was one of the smartest kids, if not the smartest student at Harvard Law School, who was the first black president of the Law Review, very good academically. He would come to the program and he would sit up front. You know, students normally, you know this, you sit in the back, you're back ventures, right? And you don't sit in the front, but he'd sit in the front. And I would be giving a dialogue or discussion about something. We would have people like that if you'd never met him, Fred Kormatsu. You could read the case, but to talk about a Japanese American, a florist from San Francisco and what he went through with the internment camps in the Second World War was a remarkable sense about the person, not just about the case, to give the case some context. And people would talk about the law review articles, they were researching and preparing. And the idea was to get students comfortable with engaging with faculty and dialogue, asking questions, giving answers. And that was part of what we tried to do. And what made it so great is that, you know, Barack would come and he would say, you know, he would answer the question. You know, I think, you know, there is some regression analysis here that's important that you have to take a look at. But if you think about it, what Carol said was right on point, Professor, which is because she sort of put the minutiae together in a way that's very powerful. And Paul, when Paul was addressing you, Paul really understood the concepts of how these things can be conflicts and that you can't resolve them all. And Jerry, I mean Jerry was, I said, Barack, I'm teaching this class, right? But that's the idea he had. And you've seen that not just as a student in the classroom sharing with others, but as the President of the Harvard Law Review sharing with others, as the President of the United States trying to bring, as a senator, trying to bring everyone together. And that may be a failed idea. It's a nice aspirational idea that we're one nation, one people all together, but we see the tension now is very different. Now what's interesting in thinking about the election of President Obama is that I went all around the country many times. I supported him when he ran for State Senate in Illinois in the 1990s when he made the foolish mistake to run against the congressman from Chicago for Congress and got slammed. I think Bobby Rush got 67% of the vote. And then Barack came and said, tree, I'm not gonna try the federal Congress anymore. I'm gonna run for the Senate. I said, that's great. I think going back to the State Senate, they'll be like, no, I'm running for the U.S. Senate. I said, Barack, you just got crushed running for the U.S. Congress. But I'm doing much better now. I said, okay, 2000, how much money do you have less than all the other people? Name recognition, none at all, right? Endorsements, well, the guy who carries my bags, he likes me, you know. So, but the idea was that he had a message that he would go and think about this, going, running for U.S. Senate and having a rally and you and the guy carrying your bags and two other people showed up. And he would have this long, hour-long conversation and then after taking questions, why are you guys here? I don't know, we thought you were giving away something free. We just came to see what was happening. But it finally worked for a host of reasons. From 2004, and he gave, as you may remember, the Democratic National Convention Speech in Boston. And I want you to just at some point go back and look at it. Because it is a classic speech that focuses on the middle. Not African Americans, not Latin Americans, but all Americans, not blue states, not red states, but the United States. The whole idea, the Democrats were applauding, I said, this guy's offering something very different. He's trying to create a world that embraces everybody without regard to politics. And that was his ultimate go when he ran for Senate in 2004. When he ran for White House, it was a little bit different. And for this reason, because he, in a sense, empowered a lot of people to realize that their vote mattered. And that was important. And he says, incredibly, enthusiasm from African Americans, more than ever before, Latinos, Asian Americans, women who were first very supportive of Hillary Clinton and ultimately came to his side. And more whites than John Kerry had in 2004 and that Al Gore had in 2000. So in a sense, there was something magical about what was going on, that a lot of first time voters were involved in it. But you used to think about it was the rainbow. It wasn't the black vote or the Latino vote or the Hispanic vote or the Native American vote. It was everybody seeing that this guy was different. And it wasn't because of race. And I think it's very important because we've had candidates before. We had Shirley Chisholm in the early 1970s. We had Al Sharpton in 2004. We had Jesse Jackson with galvanized people in 1984 and 1988. And I said I wasn't going to tell that, but I'm going to tell this. When Jackson was running in 88, you know Dukakis won the Democratic nomination. And Jackson went to his house for dinner in Brookline in Massachusetts. And I'm going to see the former governor tomorrow. So I hope the paper doesn't report this. But Jesse Jackson goes to his house, has the dinner. Michael Dukakis is a very austere gentleman, very, I'm not going to say cheap. Frugal, is that a better word? Frugal, he's not cheap. He's frugal. He's very careful. Eat light, spend light, modest home, small car, environmentally sound, all of that. And so Jesse Jackson went to his house. And I saw Jesse later that night. And he says, tree, I need you to take me and eat. I said, you just ate at the governor's house. He said, man, I'm hungry. I was hungry when I got there, hungry when I left there. I don't know what they were eating, but it wasn't very healthy. It wasn't very good, very filling. So we had to go get him some greens and some potato salad and some corn and mac and cheese and chicken. And he said, now, that's a meal. So I just warn you if you're going to go to Dukakis house, eat before or after. Don't put that in the paper, please. So there have been candidates before. And Jesse Jackson won Michigan. He did very well in South Carolina. But there still was a sense that he was not the national candidate. And he had labor. He had some women's groups. He certainly had African-Americans and other minorities supporting him. But it wasn't the same kind of sense that Obama had, but he paved the road. Obama wouldn't be in the White House today if Jesse Jackson and others had not run before. He, in a sense, built on the structure that they created. And here's a small thing about it. What Jackson did, you may remember, he lost a lot of states. Even though he had 38% or 40% or 42% of votes, it was winner-take-all. And what he did that helped Obama enormously was to change the law so that the person in second, if you got 42% of the votes, that would be important in terms of delegates. And so that had a big impact on Obama's run for democratic nomination and also the ultimate run as well. So here's the question. So he gets elected on November 4, 2008. And it's a wonderful moment for the world. And then you start seeing things like, you remember Bobby Kennedy on the assassination of Dr. King in 1968? He says that, in 40 years, I suspect that there will be a Negro elected president in 1968 started planting a seed. None of us thought it was possible in 2008. It just did not seem possible until we started seeing the people getting excited about the candidate. And what's interesting about him when you talk about race is that he had as much critical race objection to his candidacy from the black community as he did from conservatives who were Republicans. In fact, I would say he had more from the black community. Because the first thing about Barack that was different from Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and Shirley Chisholm, they said he wasn't black enough. Because his father was an African from Kenya. His mother was white from Kansas. He's not really, even from an area of Africa, that was part of the slave trade, the families from Kenya, not from Ghana or some of the other Senegal or some of the other areas where you could see the action. So he had to overcome that. And I can tell you how, talking about post-racial, when we were campaigning in South Carolina in 2007, it was pretty clear that if you put people on a hierarchy of how they would succeed, the Clintons would be first. Why? Because Hillary and Bill Clinton were from the South, growing up and served in Arkansas. And John Edwards, remember, his father was from South Carolina. And Edwards was a viable candidate. And the black politicians in clergy said, we don't know this kid from Illinois. There's nothing about him that makes him appear to us to be a candidate that we should support. And so the idea was that he was the least known. And the strategy was in 2006, not to run in 50 states, he could never beat Hillary Clinton, name recognition, notoriety, familiarity in 50 states. And the idea was to go back and forth. Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina. Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina. Because he knew that if you didn't win one or two of those, you can't be a national candidate. You have to win one or two of those and then have strength state by state by state, which was part of the campaign. But you always saw a very mixed issue. Now that race matter, it did. Remember Michelle Obama's one comment? Is this the first time that I really feel proud to be an American? It backfired. And she disappeared from the campaign because she could not be an asset. And then you had understandable Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Chelsea Clinton being able to go around the country and roll up and energize Democrats. You only had Barack Obama, who could only be one person in one place at one time. He didn't have the family going out the way that we might have imagined early on. But the race issue was interesting. But what changed it is that by the time we got to South Carolina, people were interested. Why? Because they had met a woman by the name of Michelle Robinson Obama. Where did she go? She went to beauty parlorist. What did she say? Girl, my feet hurt. Can I take my shoes off? Right? Yeah, no, don't burn my scalp. I mean, all the things that you think about at a beauty parlorist, they saw his wife as a real person. And they assumed, right? Not having read paper, not watching news. He's from Harvard, Hawaii, prison law review. He must be married to someone other than someone within his race. And when they saw Michelle Robinson, it changed dramatically. All of a sudden, they supported her. Is she on the ballot? Well, she's not on the ballot. But if you vote for him, you're voting for her. But isn't she? She's not running. But if you vote for him. She's not going to be the president or vice president. She's not going to be the co-president. But if you vote for him, OK. So you can see how race played an interesting way, even in states that are almost phenomenally black. And yet, the black vote had to be earned, not given away simply because the candidate was an African-American. And then it becomes very interesting after we get through the primaries and the national election. I don't know how many to remember, but the very first major debate between then Senator Obama and Senator McCain was where? In Ole Miss, in Mississippi, right? And it was actually a very good debate for Barack because he was smart about the way he handled the debate. If you go back and listen, you'll hear him say to John McCain several times, John or Senator McCain, you're right, but, and then explain away. Now, and my progressive friends, my email was burning up. Why didn't he attack him? He had him on the ropes. Why didn't he knock him out? He was smart because who was watching that debate? Not us, not you. Seniors were watching it. And they wanted to know, how is this young kid, who's a first term senator, going to treat this respected veteran, prisoner of war, very legitimate, moderate Republican, how is he going to treat him in terms of the age difference? And the polls that we saw thereafter were quite amazing because people didn't see Barack as a black person attacking a white person. They saw him as a sensible, thoughtful, deferential candidate. And that made an enormous amount of different race sort of went out the window in a way that he was no longer the black candidate. He was a Democratic candidate who respected people who were his elders. And those small things made an enormous amount of difference in his ability to run. Now, what's interesting, and Irwin knows this as a litigator in having argued cases before the state and federal and Supreme Court as well, is that right after he was elected, that's when the issue of post-racial America began to emerge. And the idea was that we have now elected a black president. So, and there are briefs, we don't need the voting rights act anymore. We don't need Section 2 or Section 5 of the Civil Rights Act. We don't need this or that because if we can vote for a black person, how can we say that we're a discriminatory nation? And in fact, even sometimes in a facetious way, members of the court say, well, haven't we solved that problem? Aren't we post-racial now? And that becomes the problem to think that one transformative event can change the way we think about and address the issues of race. It can't. And it should not because the problem they become is that if Barack Obama fails, then it would be very easy to say, well, we tried it with one of them and it didn't work. Black woman, other minority, gay, lesbian, any. Think about how that becomes. You become the symbol for every member of that group that might be a significant part of it. And at the same time, there was an expectation as president that if you're the president, you're the black president. So what are you doing for black people? Because we voted for you. 90%, 95%, 97%. So what are we getting in exchange for? A very legitimate question, but it's an odd question that anyone ever asked Bill Clinton. You're the white president. We're white. What are you doing for us? Or Bush, or Carter, or Reagan, or Johnson, or Kennedy. And so it becomes very problematic that he had to take on the sense that he was not just the president, but he had the president that some people thought he had a responsibility, particularly for the African-American community. And I think it's a good debate. He certainly has a responsibility for the poor. And one of the campaigns I'm on now personally, this is not Obama, this is not administration. But my sense is that I've been talking all this year, and it'll go all the way up through August 20, 2013. And you know what that is. Not, yes, you do know what it is. That's the 50th anniversary of Dr. King's March on Washington, August 28, 1963. And the theme I'm carrying with some other scholars and experts around the country is that King had the dream, now we must have the plan. Because what I say to you, which is part of this issue, is that even though we have a black president, the reality is that, particularly in the black community, divide between the poor and the wealthy is greater than ever before. And if you think about what King tried to do in the 1950s and 60s, it was to take the working class and lift them up. It helped a lot of us. That's what Thurgood Marshall tried in the 1950s at Brown, was take the poor children and put them in schools where they could learn and have the same books and same teachers and same enthusiasm. And what happened, those of us in the middle class, and a lot of us were in the middle class, we first for the first time had a choice. We could stay in the poor black school that didn't have the resources or the books or the teachers, or we can go across town and they could not keep us out of a public institution. Now they tried. They closed schools in Virginia. They closed the pool in Mississippi. They closed things that were public to make sure that it wasn't integrated. But we moved to the suburbs. We moved to the private schools. We moved to a community that had fresh food and fresh vegetables and a good market. We moved to places where they had less crime, where there is paved streets, where there are manicute laws. That was part of the choice of what to do in a post-racial society, a post-discriminatory society. And that was the plan in terms of where people wanted to go. And my sense is that now, those of us who are the gifted, and I want to talk about this more, that we have to think about, what are we going to do? Because someone opened the doors for us. And I've never given a talk anywhere in the last two decades without saying what I'm going to say now is that I would never have been at Stanford University and graduated with honors and member of Phi Beta Kappa. I've never been Harvard Law School and graduated and also a tenured faculty member with the cheer if there had not been for people who'd gone to HBCUs. They made it possible. And I think most directly about the great case of Thurgood Marshall. Thurgood Marshall was taught by a Harvard Law School graduate by the name of Charles Hamilton Houston, whose institute I created at Harvard in 2005. Houston was from Washington, DC. He went to Amherst College. And then he went to Harvard Law School in 1919 after World War I. First African-American to be elected to the Law Review based on his grades. And then he didn't go to Wall Street. He didn't go to a major firm. He came back to Howard to teach the next generation of lawyers. And he called them quite interestingly. And he had a phrase saying, a lawyer is either a social engineer or a parasite. So you have to choose how you're going to use your talents and your gifts to serve your community. You can be selfish and destroy the community or you can be selfless and build a community that's going to be great. So teaching, we don't do that anymore. We teach people how to think, not what to think, but he was teaching them what to think because there was a desperate and critical challenge facing the black community in the 1930s and 40s. He died in 1950 before the Brown decision. But he trained Thurgood Marshall and Oliver Hill. And he had Constance Vickamotley, who went to Columbia and became a great lawyer. The rolls among the thorns of the NAACP. And Judge Robert Carter, who just passed away. And Jack Greenberg and a group of talented people from Howard Law School, as well as Bill Coleman and others as well. So what did they do? And how did they try to deal with the issues of the 50s and 60s? Well, the first thing that Marshall and Hamilton Houston did is that they went to Maryland. Because Marshall was from Baltimore, born in Brazen Baltimore. He went to an HBCU in Pennsylvania by the name of Lincoln University. He then had his sights set. I'm going to go to the University of Maryland Law School, my home public law school, and become a great litigator. They wouldn't accept him because he was black. So he went to Howard. And he became number one in his class. And he tried cases actually as a law student with Charles Hamilton Houston in places like Virginia. And then they went to Sue to University of Maryland in the 1930s. And they found a client. And they said that this is discrimination, despite the Plessy versus Ferguson. It still is not equal. And we want a black admitted to the University of Maryland Law School. And they won. Here's this Harvard trained lawyer teaching this Howard trained lawyer how to be an exceptional litigator. And they won the case in Maryland, emitting the first black student in the history of Maryland Law School. And I have no idea what Thurgood Marshall said when he won the case. But I'm sure he said something like this, how you like me now. I mean, I'm making the point that you may call me a black lawyer. You may call me this, but I'm going to be much better prepared and make an enormous amount of difference when I do that. And so Obama has to reckon with that. There is the legacy of Dr. King and what he had to do to move people on the streets, the legacy of what Marshall had to do to move people in the courtroom, and then to open up the doors. People can vote, get rid of the restrictions on voting. All that is what benefited Barack Obama when he ran. And so a lot of people think we might be post-racial. And I don't even like the term post-racial. I think that gives you one contact. But the term's post-racism, right? When are we post-racism soul that person's color and ethnicity doesn't influence our judgment about their ability until they have the chance to prove it? And what Dr. King said in 1963 was he wanted his children to be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. We still haven't achieved that. So we still have to make sure that we take his dream, the aspirational part of the speech, and make it happen. And here's why we're not quite post-racial. And let me just back up. If I were to ask you the question, a good lawsuit, are we post-racial America? What's the best answer you could give to a law professor? Yes? It's simple. The best answer, the Barack answer is, well, it depends. Haven't you heard that 1,000 times? When you think you've got it all figured out, it depends. Maybe yes, maybe no. It depends. And I think it does depend. But there's some concrete aspects that suggest that we're not there yet. And one of them was brought to my attention when we had a discussion about Obama 2009. Where are we going to take society forward? And a good friend of mine, Reverend Eugene Rivers, reminded us, it's very important to have a black president. There's a lot he can do. But we have to remember, we have one black man in the White House. But today we have more than a million black men in prison. We're not post-racial yet. We haven't reached that point in our history where everyone can be judged equally without regard to race or gender or sexual orientation or class or age or any of those different factors that might make a difference. But we can. I'm not saying that we can't do it. We just haven't done it yet. And I want to see us do it in the meantime. And the final thing I want to say is this. Thinking about Barack Obama, I remember we had this great conversation in 1991 when he decided that he was going to graduate from the Harvard Law School. And we had this conversation. He says, tree, as he called me, I have a bit of a dilemma. It's 1991. And in my three years here, I've done well. And so much so that I was elected the president of the Harvard Law Review. And so I've earned the right, as the president of the Harvard Law Review, to serve as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice. Yeah. And he says, also, I've done academically well. I've got a lot of good grades, some of the best grades of my peers. And I could go to Chicago or New York or Washington. I could work for a law firm. And I could easily make $100,000 a year, because I've earned the right to do that. Yeah, that makes sense. But I want to tell you that when I came to Harvard in 1988, I made a promise to the people of Chicago that once I got my law degree from Harvard, I would go back to Chicago and become a community organizer. And I just want to ask you very candidly, can I, can I go back to Chicago and keep my promise to the people there, as opposed to being a clerk for the Supreme Court or working for a law firm? And I looked at him for a while and said, Barak, yes, you can. Right. No, don't clap. Barak hasn't given me credit once for any of that. But there's a trail there. That wasn't said the first time, right? As much as you might, in a sense, associated with Barack Obama, the idea of being pulse ratio is that for me, it came when I was a kid, 40 years ago, more than 40 years ago, working in the fields here in California, grew up in Merced, California. And I met a very strong Latino man and Latina. His name was Cesar Chavez. Her name was Dolores Huerta. And even the workers that were dying because of pesticides, who had incredibly poor wages, they had this slogan in Spanish that I remember as a child, as a young teenager, see se puede. It's exactly the same thing. And so these things transform us from generations and they transcend generations that they, in their way, without a place to live, without a decent salary, with all sorts of health concerns, without a guarantee of being able to work. And yes, they had this sense, see se puede. The whole idea is that no matter what the barriers might be, we are going to work as hard as we can and live as much as we can. And hopefully our children will have a better life. And that's what they fought for. And I say that to think about what we have to do now in the 21st century. I'm so glad that he is in the White House and what that transformative power may be. And I remember in October 2008, I was doing some campaigning for the president and senator in Florida, a different part of Florida. And my son, oldest son, who just turned 36 yesterday on Valentine's Day, has $3. And the oldest in 2008 was seven. The middle daughter was four. And the baby had just been born in January 2008. And they called me about 11 o'clock on my cell phone, the oldest, Markel. She said, Papa, Papa, guess what? I said, what, Markel? She said, we voted. I said, oh, I said, who did you vote for? Trying to see what she's going to say. Obama, of course. We voted for Obama. And what was significant is that in 2008, I could see some progress through little girls who have no sense about race or class or gender. They have no sense. But they were seeing this. And their parents had the foresight to let them know how important voting was. Not just take them to the polls and watch them vote, but say, you marked the ballot for them. And so legally, but they did it. But the whole idea, these girls have taken their little markers and marked in the ballots who they wanted to vote for president. And for them, it was an important, in a sense, vindication for me of voting rights. So they thought it was something important to do. The parents were taken off a Sunday in Florida in 2008. You could vote 18 days before the actual election and several days during the week. And then churches would go in a group after church services on Sunday morning and go to a polling place and vote on Sunday afternoon. That's now part of the 35 states that have restricted the rights of voting for 2012. But they did that in a very impressive way. And it told me how much it is that they're growing up not in a race list generation, but in a different context of race, where it's not a lever on their neck that's holding them back, it's not something that they're afraid of, they're almost unaware of it. Now, how many of you had to deal with Flat Stanley? Anyone had to deal with Flat Stanley? I just got one from our granddaughter. The parents will know about this. Flat Stanley, your child at some point will bring home a Flat Stanley that you were supposed to take around the country and around the world. And I've taken my Flat Stanley to Celtics games, to Harvard games, to Boston Commons, all sorts of plays. And I took a picture of him with a beautiful painting that looks like Fenway Park. My wife said, Charles, you have to take him to Fenway Park. You can't take him. Well, who's going to know? They're only fifth graders. Charles, somebody will know, right? But the whole idea was interesting because, I don't know why, but they give the children a blank color Flat Stanley. They get to color the pants, the socks, the shoes, the tie. And it was interesting that, on the other hand, both of them used the brown crayon to cover the face, right? Not black but brown, right? And since that they were trying to think of what's the natural color of Stanley, right? And so in the sense that they weren't as the children and the brown dolls looking at rays in a way that it was negative, and I don't want to be that. But there since it was sort of a subtlety that I'm giving this face some color, green pants, blue socks, red shoes, I didn't get that, right? But it's very interesting that the face was, and it had some color to it from their point of view. I don't want people to be colorblind. I want them to be color conscious. And there's a difference between two. I don't think we'll ever be colorblind. And the way I know it makes the difference is that Markel, who is now 10, she called me the next year and said, Papa, I guess what I said wasn't Markel. She says, I'm so happy with President Obama. I'm a vote for him again next year. Now, I can tell that he wasn't running in 2010, right? But the whole idea of the enthusiasm of doing something made all the difference in the world what she's going to do. So how do we pursue this three ways? One, the idea of talking about a post-racial America or a post-racial America, it's not rocket science. It's harder than that. It's harder than that because it makes us get into a zone of discomfort and talking to people who are different than us and trying to understand difference and trying to understand how we can be a greater community. It has to go away from the slavery, from the resistance, the acquiescence, to all the embracing. You have to go from the resistance to embracing to get there to make sure it makes a difference. It also means having these conversations in a way to see the benefits of diversity. It's not a single shot. And you're not completely diverse if you have a drop of pepper and a sea of salt. So be very careful about what you think is diversity. It may not work if you don't really embrace it as a comprehensive way. And you have to be careful that you don't become, in a sense, just like the folks from the past generation. I'm teaching a class at Harvard Law School now. I'm sure our professor turned into Graves Irwin. But it's called Revitalizing American Cities. I'm talking about the plight of American cities today in terms of the issues of public safety, housing, employment, and education. And I have eight cities that I'm looking at Atlanta, Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis, New Orleans, Newark, Oakland, and Washington, DC. So eight different cities that all have some sorts of problems. And so the problem is that I showed a little clip. You might have seen it from Henry Gates, the color line in America from 2004. And it showed this group of prominent African Americans in a place called Cascade. I don't know if anybody's from Atlanta, but it's a very prominent African American part of the community. Big lawns, big houses, et cetera, very successful. And these are the post-civil rights groups who said we've earned the right. We have our own neighborhoods. But they're all black. Prince George's County, very similar, almost all black. And the idea, prominent. A lot of things are going well there, et cetera. But at least I raised the question theoretically because I don't have the answer. But as an integrationist, I'm a little concerned about, is that the answer that now we have a choice? The choice is that I don't want to be the speck of salt and a speck of pepper and a sea of salt. I want to be in a community of people who respect me. And this one woman, an African American, very successful lawyer said, our kids know each other. We have Starbucks. We have an Einstein's, bagels. We have tennis courts. I mean, what she's saying, we have just what they had. And I'm not sure whether that's a full answer or an incomplete answer to the problem of, how do we all become a race of equals? And so my third point, I fear that the success may be that we can all be in our own little, in a sense, silo and not see that the benefit of all of us coming together in some meaningful way, which I hope will happen. And my students are pushing back as they should saying, well, you know, there's a lot of hostility when you're only black in the neighborhood or only Latino in the neighborhood or only gay person, only lesbian, only, you know, sexuality may be an issue in a community in terms of religious community. All of these things might come up. And so we don't want to go through that. We're much comfortable being in million-dollar homes with other million-dollar people who look like us, who act like us, and who aren't going to challenge us. And I don't want that to be the ultimate result. I want to see what Barack Obama said in 2004, not red states, not blue states, but the United States. And I may be wrong. I'm a died-to-war Democrat. There's no question about that. I don't think there'll ever be anything other than that unless I'm an independent. I've been called a socialist and everything else, but I'm a Democrat, right? But the point I wanted to make is that the third point is that how can we really instinctively think about seeing the world as one as opposed to, of many, a very diverse talent. And I think that may be the case. And I say that for this reason and here. What troubles me is that very still Trump's class in so many different ways. I just remember being in New York and the two things that you don't want to ever experience. And it's not everybody has problems, but there's nothing worse for a black man in New York than one in a cab and it raining, right? Because you're not going to get a cab, right? And the thing about it, the drivers who I'm trying to get to pick me up, most of them are immigrants. But what have we taught them already about me? I'm wearing my $1,000 suit. I'm wearing my brand new tie, great shoes. I even have my Colin Powell book up there, My American Journey. Look, look, look, all right? But they just zoom on by. And then it sort of upsets me that a white woman or a man will see them struggling and they will hell the cab and let me get in it. That's not an answer. I mean, that's a temporary solution. I'm very grateful to get a cab, but it tells me that they would stop for her or him on the spot, right? And he or she will make sure that I get in the cab. And that tells me that we've got to deal with that as a society. And maybe say, obituary don't drive, don't ride in cabs, but that's not an answer. How do we create in the minds of people who've been here for less time than we have that we are a society to treat all people equal? So the answer to the question, are we post-racial? It's not yes or no, it depends. And it depends on what we intend to do from this day going forward and trying to address these issues in a meaningful way. And I'll stop there and take some questions. Thank you very much. Any questions? Yes, sir. In the face of an African American president instead of just politics, how much does it do to him as an African American versus the politics that he's encountered? I think it's a lot of both. I think it's more politics than race, but they in some sense are intertwined because they will say things to him that they can't stay, they wouldn't say to anybody else. I can't recall, I'm sure they're having, I can't recall a president in our lifetime who's ever been interrupted giving a speech about healthcare. Right, I mean, you lie. I mean, and so you've gotta think about that, how that works. And let me give you another example, politics. And that's what the book's about. I wrote the book, The Presumption of Guilt. Now students tell me and law professors tell me there's no such thing in law as The Presumption of Guilt, The Presumption of Innocence. And I wrote this book last year about the Gates arrest the year before, 2010 to 2009 because it illustrated to me how politics and race play, right? Cause two things happen. Gates is a prominent African-American professor, a university professor, which is the, I don't mean employing a university, but a specialized, not just a tenured, not just cheered, but a university that's the top of the mark of university. MacArthur Genius Award, written a dozen books, a hundred honorary degrees, a dozen PBS specials. So An Accomplished Man from West Virginia. The police officers, Jim Crowley, white police officer, working class, hard-working guys, admired by blacks who know him, didn't know Gates, and you saw the dynamics of what happened in July 2009. How many of you heard something about Gates arrest 2009? But the book talks about that and unpeels the onion, adds a lot of facts. Let me just give you a little sense of that. Gates is just getting back from China, and he goes to his house, he can't open his door, in the middle of the day, it's 12 o'clock, and his driver tries to help him open, they both try to push it open, they finally get it open. The driver takes two pieces of luggage inside the house, drives off, gets a tip, Gates calls his real estate, said, my door's jammed, I had to break, I don't want to sleep in this house tonight, please have someone can fix it. And he's talking to her about going to China, talking to Yo-Yo Ma, visiting his ancestors, seeing some 13th century documents, and he sees a shadow on his porch, and he says, wow, you got to repair a guy here already. She says, no, for us, Gates, it'll take 10 more minutes. He goes to his door, and it's Sergeant Crowley. He's gotten a call saying that it looks like somebody broke into the house. And what's interesting is that, when you talk about politics of race and race, the woman who called, in my view, most people criticized back in 2009, had not heard the 9-11 tapes, what did she say? She says, a woman tells me, it looks like they're pushing the door, they're inside the house, there are two people who are going in, and she says this, on 9-11 tape, 9-11 tape, I don't know if they work there or live there. No presumption at all, I'm just reporting what I see, you investigate, but I'm not saying they're probably burglarized, I don't know if they work there or live there. The officer says, are they black or Hispanic? She says, excuse me? Or are they black, white or Hispanic? She says, well, once Hispanic, but I didn't get a chance to see the other. Now, the police officer writes in his report that the woman said that she saw two black men with backpacks on the porch. That's a profile, that's a term that's commonly used, because his house in Cambridge is two blocks away from high school. It wouldn't be a surprise to see two black men who were teenagers with backpacks going into a house. So that's what's in the officer's mind. So he and Gates get into it and he tells Gates, I want you to come outside. And Gates says, no, I live here. Call the police chief, chief of police, he said, no, once you come outside. He says, I'm not done, come outside. I live here. The officer has shown me some ideas. So Gates shows him two ideas. Now, this is an interesting class. Do you have any idea which idea he might have showed the officer first? You guess? It's Harvard University. Harvard University, right? Have his picture, name, university professor, Harvard University. And so the class, do you know who I am? And then he showed him his driver's license. Photograph, name, address, Cambridge, all of that, right? And then the officer's looking at these things like, you know, I don't know why I didn't come outside. The officer's just looking. And this is the first thing Gates says. Do you know who I am? That's the first thing he says. Think about the officer. The second is, do you know who you're messing with? He said that. The officer just keeps looking at his ID. Are you doing this because I'm a black man and you're a white police officer? You can imagine the officer's blood creeping up, right? Fourth thing, this is what happens to a black man in America, right? So you can imagine, Gates is enraged since this is happening in his house. The officer's saying, I'm just investigating the crime. This guy's going crazy. And you can see how they're having that difference. And then Gates says the ultimate, I'm going to file a complaint against you. I want your name and your badge number. I heard that, oh, right? I have been teaching 27 years at Harvard criminal law. The first thing I tell my students, never, ever, never, ever tell a police officer if you're going to file a complaint and never ask him or her for her name or her badge. Why? It's right there. Look at it, memorize it, right? And use it later, right? But Gates didn't take my class, right? That's why I didn't say it. And so what happens is you see this is an issue. And then the last thing the officer says is says, he says, Gates continued to yell at me, which is true. Now, everything Gates did was protected by the First Amendment. Now, I wouldn't do it, but it was protected. Where did it happen? In his house. Not in an apartment house, not outside in the streets. No one heard it, but that officer and that citizen, right? But you can see the dynamics begin to crystallize in a big way in the way that happened. And then the officer, the last thing the officer says, Gates continues to yell at me, that's true. And he says, I put in his report. I told the person, if he wanted to continue talking to him, I would speak to him about the matter outside of the residence. So he put that in his report after he resident. Now, why do you think he'd want to speak to him outside of the residence? Anybody have any idea? Well, I guess because then he's not protected. That's exactly right. Right, outside the residence, he's in public. And if he's making those statements, it's a public disturbance. And that's what he used. In a sense, and he said, I'm leaving. And Gates hobbled out behind him, right? Outside, well, I'm not through with you yet. And as soon as he got outside, he got arrested, right? And the charges were dismissed in a couple of days. But what happened when the president got involved? And remember what he said? Gates is my friend, the first thing. I don't know all the facts. And what should you do then? Shut up. But let's edit that, right? And then he says, the Cambridge Police acted stupidly. No, the Cambridge Police acted stupidly when you arrest the man in his own house after he's shown you identification. But what did we hear? First five words. The Cambridge Police acted stupidly. That's what people remember. Then the last thing he said is that there's a history of the racial profiling of blacks and Latinos. I supported legislation as a state center in Illinois to end racial profiling. And so those comments, I send the book blackened him. Now, what do I mean by that? There are people who saw him as the black president when he took the friend of the black professor against the hard-working class white, for example. So race Trump class. Obama was criticized. Gates was criticized. And Crowley was a police officer doing his job. It blackened him in another way that the black and Latino people around the country applauded the fact that he talked about racial profiling and it's a problem in America. And so I was getting all these letters and responses from it. And that's how race Trump's class and how do we get beyond that as part of the problem. So I think in the other context, you talk about race and policies. Let me give you three examples I'll talk about in the book. Remember Joe Biden said that Barack Obama is clean and articulate? You remember Harry Reid saying two things. He's light complexion. And he doesn't use the Negro dialogue unless he has to. These are Democrats. And remember Chris Matthews saying, that was a fantastic state of the union address. I forgot that he was black. What does that mean? And so those are not racist things. These are well-intentioned people trying to be supportive. But saying things that has a racial undercurrent that creates another problem. I don't know what a Negro dialect is. And maybe I do speak it at some times. I know there are different dialects when people talk to different audiences. I talk differently from my homies at home than I do in the classroom. And so that's how it becomes all mixed up in terms of what happens. But it's hard to say it's race because some of the strongest criticisms of Barack Obama now are coming from African-Americans who are not happy with what he has done or failed to do, in their view, in terms of focusing on a particular community. And so that becomes part of the problem. Will it play in the next election? I think it will because some candidates have already said, I'm writing a book that won't come out until after the election. Don't be looking for it because you won't find it before November 6, 2012, but about Obama and race. When Newt Gingrich calls him the food stamp president, that could be a basic policy political issue in the minds of some. It also can be a racially loaded identification in the minds of others. So Gingrich would say 1,000 times and be correct. And as all of my, I never meant race. I'm talking about giving to more giving, really, making people earn their own rights, things like that. And the same thing you can find from each of the candidates saying something that may have something to do with politics, but some people are viewed in the context of race. Let me give you one final example and I'll take the next question. Do you remember Jan Brewer about three weeks ago when the president was in Arizona? And you could just see her pointing her finger and arguing at him and him smiling. And there was a lot of press about that. Now he was smiling and he was saying, he was saying, Jan, I don't like the hell what you said in your book. I know it's, I'm not that kind of guy. You're talking about me, it was very direct, but you saw her as the aggressive one. And the next day you get a story about the Latino community hating Jan Brewer all of a sudden are embracing Obama as a solution. She has an anti-immigration policy. He seems more pro-integration. So it's interesting that there's a racial connection there. The Latinos have seen Barack Obama as the president, but also as someone who is going to help them succeed in a big issue where Jan Brewer is not going to sit. So it's a complicated issue. You're never going to see the president ever say that someone's attacking him because of race. He's just not going to go down that line. And you'll have to be the judge of it. And I think that a lot of these things are going to be protected in terms of politics and going to be acceptable because we will say anything about anybody to get a vote. And it just might work. Yes, ma'am? One more question. Oh, is this the last one? You go. All right. I'll take all of them and I'll answer over one. OK. One is about the affirmative action of students in California now. So I'd like to know what you think, what that does. The other is a private question which I've always, I've never did to ask of a black person. I was very proud that Obama was half white as well as half black. And I don't understand why it is, when that's the case, that one is immediately called black. I mean, it's as if I suppose you took paints and mixed them and then of course, you know, white and black is going to make a brown. But to me, he's wonderful actually because he is both. He had a wonderful, brave, white mother, you know? Yep. I mean, at any rate, I don't know if this is a question that bears thinking about, particularly when you're talking about race, but it always stuck. It just bothered me. It's interesting. In the book, I talk about his mother from that same point. Let me get your question too. I passed through a black church or a church that's predominantly black, and I personally fully support it. I think Barack Obama, perhaps, could have managed the Jeremiah right, I wouldn't call it a debacle, but certainly the thought of Jeremiah right as a well-respected liberation theologian and pastor of a major church that Barack Obama finds himself worshiping. And the assault that Jeremiah right experienced as a result of Fox telling me. And I'd like to hear your reflection on that. And clearly, we know that Tavis and Miley and all the others have a right to certainly do what they must do. But in looking at the black church, which historically offered proof to power and liberation for those who did not have a voice in the park. How do we manage that, particularly from that particular point? OK, and is there one other question? Yes? I'm around to. OK. She purposely chose one. He was just tired of white people. She wanted to see black folks in positions of power in front of the class and all of that. But I do notice that a lot of her peers, and I think she's included in this group, really don't have a sense of the history. And they really kind of have separated themselves from how they are even able to be where they are. And they look at that idea of self-segregation, as we were talking about Atlanta, as kind of the pinnacle. Like that's moving on upstage they want to get to. And I'm wondering, do you see that with your students? Or do you see it as just a way of thought with young folks? They are not necessarily as connected to their past as they could be or should be? I'm going to take these questions in reverse order and answer all three of them in a collective way. And the HBCU question, what I think is great about it. First of all, we wouldn't be where we are if HBCUs hadn't opened up the doors. That's number one that becomes important. The other thing, at an HBCU, you can't make the excuse that race is why you're not succeeding, right? And you can't use that excuse. The problem, and you and I both see it, is that the legacies are not shared as much as they were from the 50s and the 60s and 60s and 70s. Because your daughter, like my daughter and my son, were probably raised in the middle class unlike my mother and my father, my grandmother and grandfather, right? So they knew they'd have a place to sleep. They knew we might even take a vacation. We had a car. We had food on the table. And so they had the comforts of life and never experienced it. And even if you watch a civil rights video that doesn't do the same thing, so it's harder. But they are growing up into a society where the success seems like it's, that I want to be like them in my own community as opposed to I want to be wherever I can be and be successful. And there is still this sense of racial antagonism that a lot of African-Americans feel in integrated communities. When I say integrated, it's the speck of pepper and the salt, or two specks of pepper and the salt. And we have to figure out a way to solve that. It's not going to happen easily. But it's not happening at HBCUs because some are going to criticize it, but there really isn't the sense that let me tell you what the 1930s were like. Let me tell you what this school looked like. Let me tell you what our funding looked like. But let me tell you who were the first doctors and first lawyers and first entrepreneurs and first ministers. And let me tell you that 75 years ago, can you believe, or 100 years ago, that the only jobs were what? Preachers and teachers, right? You couldn't get a job as a lawyer easily or as a doctor or an entrepreneur because you didn't have a clientele. You could, you know, everyone suffered from segregation. And they just can't understand that we talk about there as a fountain that you couldn't vote and you had to pay a poll tax. It just seems unimaginable. And the difference between your daughter and my children who are grown now and my grandchildren is that in their lifetime, in their early lifetime, a black man, I'll come back to this, has been elected president. They see him as black. And so they think that we've solved all our problems. Right? And so that's why, I'm going to get to your question, but that's part of why it is a part of the problem. Let me say a word about Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who I respect dearly and I think is an incredibly gifted black theologian. And what's interesting, the surprise me the most in 2008 is that no one watched the whole sermon. You got the clip and you said, he was talking about poverty and talking about the fact that folks are suffering and no one's giving them the need. It was a remarkable sermon, but if you get just 35 seconds of it, it seems like it is incendiary, right? It blew it up. And the president had to make the choice, which comes back to your government, am I the black president or the president of everybody? And it wasn't Jeremiah's statements, because the president, remember, after Jeremiah Wright made those statements, the president then gave his race address in Philadelphia. As I can no longer just solve on Jeremiah Wright than I can just solve in the black church. He said that. I can no longer just solve in the black church. I can just solve on my white grandmother. He was very clear about that. And then Jeremiah Wright went to Detroit and then he went to the National Press Club. He even did the fraternity solution. Only two people understood what he was doing, right? But some got that, right? Oh, fraternity, by the way. You know, I respect him for this reason, because he could be a thorn right now. Because everywhere he preaches, the house is packed. But he's chosen to say, I'm not going to let America turn me against Barack Obama, even if I disagree with him. Because he still says I'm his mentor. He learned about the Lord through me. And so that becomes an important issue. On the race issue, you ask a terrific question. Let me get to the second part first. He's half black and he's half white. It's interesting, if you haven't read it, I would just read it. I would urge you to read it. Dreams from my father, which I carry around with me. It talks about all that in here. It talks about Jeremiah Wright and how much he meant to me. And I keep trying to correct him. Jeremiah Wright's speech sermon that Sunday was not the audacity of hope. It was the audacity to hope, which makes a difference. It's a fundamental difference. You can see something in a way different than it really is. That's the audacity to hope that a different were. And Barack Obama changed it around. And we'll, at some point, find out. But there was a sense that it was so moving, that's what drew him in. But on the race issue, in this book, he gives nothing but absolute credit to his white mother. He saw his father once. Once in his life. And so the father was absent. And the thing about it, it was his mother who made him think he was black. When he was in school in Hawaii, he was Barry. Because his father had used the name Barry because he says, I'm a foreigner. People won't understand Barack. They'll think he was religious and all of that. So I'm going to be Barry Obama. His legal name was Barack Hussein Obama, senior. But he used Barry when he was doing business because people would say, oh, Barry, Gary, Charles, James. There was a sense of identity. And so Barack was listed in this certificate at the Putahole High School as Barack. But everyone called him Barry. And then what he says is that they were turning me into a white person. That is, they didn't seem to understand that I was biracial. They saw me as like everybody else. I was different from everybody else. I had a different color. I had a different bringing up. And people treated me different. He says I was profiled as a kid. But it's his mother who taught him everything about race. She's the one who taught him about Harry Belafonte, about the great singers, about the great historians, about the king. He says it here sort of like chest highs in there saying, every time a mother had a moment, she would talk to me about this black thing and that black thing. So she was in sense trying to prepare him in the sense for being who he was. Now he may have been Barry from the point of view from the Hawaiian friends who he played basketball with and hung out with. But his mother was saying, you are a Barack. What she was saying, you are your father's son. So, and it was interesting in the 2010 census. You know, he could have gone a different way because if he had checked the box, multi-racial, biracial, a large number of us would check that now, biracial. He checked the box African American and condemned by people who were biracial saying, hey, he's our leader. He's a biracial guy. He's not a black guy. And that became part of it as well. But he's getting the pushback on the black side from both sides, from both the blacks who says he's not black enough and from the whites who says he's not really black. He's really from a different part of Africa and he's really more an African than he is an African American. That's an artificial. There's no America part of him except that he happened to be born in Hawaii. I know some of you still think he was born in Kenya, but he was really born in Hawaii. I think we've proven that. And I think we're out of time. We'll do two last things. One is, Professor Ogletree has graciously agreed to sell and sign some of his books. They'll be right inside the foyer of the Dean's Suite across the hall. And we also have a reception that will help you join us in. Please join me in thanking Professor Ogletree. Thank you.