 be here this evening. I am not native to Texas, but since Texas is defining the future of America, I guess we'll all be Texans soon enough. So I just want to say that I am grateful for being invited this evening to participate in this incredible production and I want to thank Teresa Coleman Walsh for her creativity for her leadership and of course this is a hometown crowd in part but as you heard earlier she is the founding director of the Bishop Arts Theater and so it is her hard labor and commitment to community theater that makes a production like this possible. And I also want to thank my longtime friend and the director of this incredible production, Gabrielle Kurlander, who you saw earlier. I had I had the good fortune of introducing a lot of people to a term that that I had not heard of, dramaturg, which is which is a wonderful term because it can mean lots of different things. And in this role I had a chance to read the plays to give a little bit of feedback and to contribute to some of the words on stage that you heard this evening. Now I must say I'm primarily a historian and so this kind of creative expression is not my stock and trade but I was inspired by all of you to contribute in this way and this has been a really life-altering experience in many ways for me so I want to thank all the playwrights directly. And so I'm going to do two more things before we jump into it. I'm going to thank Nicole for all that she's done to create this project in the first place. You heard a little bit about the beginning and we're going to talk a lot more about it but let's give it up for Nicole Hannah Jones. And then finally I think the playwrights deserve the opportunity to at least name their plays because we want to we've heard their names but we haven't heard their plays and if they want to make a statement about their work before we get started that would be wonderful so why don't we start and move right to left. Hello my name is Janelle Gray and I wrote The Origin of Freedom. Hi my name is Erin Malone Turner and I wrote Engrained. Good evening I'm Anika McMillan-Harrad and I wrote They Would Not Be Butchered. My name is Terence Brooks Boykin and I wrote The Stand. My name is Aaron Zoberman and I wrote Blacks No Jews No Dogs. All right Nicole so we want all know how you came to create this project. What was the inspiration and any surprises along the way. Hey Clio. Hey everyone. So cool to be here and I also want to thank Teresa Coleman Walsh for putting this all together when I first heard about it I was like I have to be here because it really is an amazing thing to see the different creative ways that people can be inspired by a project and to see it take even another form it's taken a lot of forms already but this is a new form I haven't seen it in so I've been really excited to see the interpretation and just have to give it up to you all it was just it was it was amazing I really really loved it. And I actually I don't know how much time we have but I actually would love to just hear you all talk a little bit more about what you were inspired by in the book as you were producing these plays some of them are more obvious than others so I'm just really curious about that and then I just have to correct for the record I'm not doctor anything I have not earned a doctor I know I'm not I'm not claiming the honorary doctorate I just look people work really hard to get a doctor in front of their name and I'm not taking credit for anything that I haven't done but I appreciate the upgrade in my credentials for sure. So I'll just I'll just be quick on the origin because one if you if you buy the book you can read it in the preface and also I've talked about it so much and I really I really do want to hear y'all talk as well but in many ways you know I talk about being a high school student and taking a one semester black studies course before black studies courses were being banned all across the country and in that one semester really learning more about the history of black people than I learned in my entire life up until then and realizing as a 15 year old girl that all those years when I grew up as a black girl thinking black people weren't in the story because we must not have done much for our teachers to teach us about and then all of a sudden in this class I realized there was a whole lot that we could have been taught and people had decided it wasn't important enough or for whatever reasons that they didn't want to teach it to us so I really became obsessed with learning the history and Mr. Dowell who was my teacher in that class would give me books to read on my own and one of the books he gave me was before the Mayflower by LaRone Bennett and that's when I read the date 1619 so you've heard the story a million times by now Clill but or Dr. Muhammad he earned his but it really you know that date just stood out to me as both lineage because it was powerful to me to know that black people had been here before the Mayflower that our lineage in this country or the land that would become this country went back that far but it also really stood in symbolically for an erasure and that 1619 happened the white lion happened but if you don't learn about it it may as well have not happened and that's so much of what we think of as history is really memory and it's what what are we being taught to collectively remember remember and what are we being taught to collectively forget so fast forward you know five six years since I was in high school and are y'all tired Johnny you get my joke or or y'all really do believe I'm 20 years old one or the other but a few years you know I've I've spent my whole career in some ways trying to get us back to 1619 really believing that so much about America cannot be fundamentally understood if we don't go back to that moment in that decision to engage in African slavery and so no matter what you're writing about today which is really the conceit of the project that you can look all across America and see these institutions that are being shaped by the legacy of slavery we just don't acknowledge it or we don't know it or what's currently happening in Texas and Florida and all kinds of states is we want to suppress that so that was inspiration it was a 400th anniversary of 1619 and we still hadn't grappled with how fundamental slavery was anti-blackness and black contributions were to the American story but wasn't a 15-year-old girl in Waterloo Iowa worked at the New York Times at the biggest megaphone in the world so that's why all right all right so I'm gonna take Nicole's encouragement and open the floor up to the playwrights to say she the first question that Nicole asked me before you joined the stage was what was the inspiration behind the various plays so it'd be great if all of you could share and I'm sure the audience would love it too. Being first is rough guys. Yes hi I'm Janelle Gray I wrote The Origin of Freedom I will say I actually was in the process of writing a completely different play for this project and as I was doing the research I found information about the white declaration of independence that I had never heard about and then I immediately called both of my parents and were like did you guys know this thing happened and so it kind of in that moment of knowing that this was just another thing that had been hidden after having read the book and all of the things and all of the ways that that you know this legacy has affected us and the lie that kind of was the declaration of independence it made me want to go back and kind of challenge what they actually wrote and kind of uncover what actually happened with the hope that we can forge forward and in the way that they actually said that they intended so. I wrote in grain the alien play and when I was when I was reading the 1619 book I there were a couple different parts that inspired me and made me think a lot and then start just writing random notes and then particularly the health care part made me start thinking about everything that our bodies have been through and then that led me to not just my body you know here in 2022 at the time but my mother my grandmother my great great everyone before me and back and back and everything that we carry with us which is why that idea is kind of where some of the lines in the play came from when Nola says you know you're acting like it happened directly to me but everything that our people have been through lives in our DNA today and our bodies cannot forget and they carry I was thinking about the effects of generational trauma and like just everything that this country has done to us instead of for us even though we're the ones that built it and so that's where most of the play came from I wanted to make it funny because like like she says there were so many good things and there are really beautiful things about life and we've become more than what's happened to us but we cannot forget and I wanted to highlight the shock of slavery from outsiders like true outsiders outside of the planet and I love science fiction so I just really wanted to write something strange and quirky and then ground it in the weight of what 1619 is really about thank you for writing 1619 so important and so much of the book resonated with me if you know me I'm not new to historical dramas and writing them but I really wanted to explore a revolution how does a revolution start and that's what truly resonated with me in choosing to focus on and imagine what what a child who had become a part of the revolution 10 years later might be so Cecil Fatima it was dealing with the innocence that was engaged in enslavement a lot of times we don't think children were there or just the innocence of just Africans being enslaved period on the brutality of slavery in Haiti especially you know the lifespan was less than you know maybe 25 years for most enslaved there so I wanted to explore the horror of that but the innocence that might have existed then and then what might have been the spark for Cecil Fatima who was the mamba who helped start the revolution and I wanted to embrace African spirituality and how it's been demonized and how the Haitians have paid the price paid the price for revolution and I've always admired you know those ancestors so it was really an honoring of them and embracing all that we are in our strength so the play that I wrote the stand was really inspired by two chapters in the book dispossession and inheritance those chapters sort of really really give you deep insight into you know just the brutality and the savage way that this land that we sit on right now is stolen from the Native Americans it also talks about just how systematically you know people of African descent you know just the systems of racism have led to redlining our properties and our wealth being systematically taken from us so I wanted to sort of really bring the relationship of the two sister-in-law sort of like really inside to explore how you know racism and discussions about race and empowerment happen in lots of different spaces not just at work and not just in society but they can happen in your family and the importance of listening and the importance of us empowering ourselves to sort of stand around and address injustices you know in housing discrimination so those were the kinds of things that I was you know my intention was really to sort of really just layer those things to address inequities in housing and you know it's really really current right now especially with the way that black families are having to struggle to be treated fairly you know when they for the their home appraisals or you know when they get ready to sell their homes all around the country so that really stood you know stood out for me my play was very much inspired by primarily by the chapter called race additionally the chapter on fear the there was a line I'm not gonna say it like accurately enough but it said something along the lines of we've grown so accustomed to identifying ourselves by race in America that we don't even think twice about it we're asked on so many documents so many forms what is our race and we don't think about it we just fill it out and it's always been a little uncomfortable for me that that process and I've I've sat back and watched and listened to so many people have a discussion about what my race is because I'm a white Jew in America and my white and my Jewish and it what I attempted to do what I wanted to do was highlight the absurdity of the concept of race and how it shifts constantly from society to society from from time to time race changes the concept that who who is what and what their label is so that was my my initial spark and from a personal experience I wanted to highlight the the ongoing dialogue that I've listened to my entire life between blacks and Jews and this this almost love-hate relationship this the resentment the the togetherness the the fear the anger the and there's so much there and so I would say my my primary purpose in and writing this play was to initiate a dialogue I've no I've I've I have upset a few people and that's fine great art does that good art does that and so that's that's my purpose I want to I want to initiate a dialogue on this yeah because I I definitely wanted to have some dialogue about that one I bet this a lot right a lot of people in this room want to have some conversation about that one I mean I'm not going to I just want to I mean one of the things I'm struck by is and I'm this question I'm directing to you Nicole's it's like you create something as you say a kind of record of the past that enters into public consciousness has the potential to reshape collective memories about that past and already the book has moved into playwrights their ideas their experiences their concerns isn't this exactly why the books been banned in so many states already that's a rhetorical question yes I mean absolutely I mean I just think about even in my own origin story of the origin story of the project was a 15 year old black girl who got a class that taught her history and it radicalized her she one day came and produced a 69 team project right so you realize the power of us all having this greater deeper more skeptical understanding is it leads more people to question it leads more people to explore there's a reason that I've been writing about racial inequality for two decades and it was only when I did a project that tried to unsettle our memory right our collective narrative that all of white power like aligned against me in the project right like legislative bands 18 the 1836 project with your governor put in place to I guess commemorate when Texas is formed as a slave holding Republic so yes I think it are y'all clapping for that or they're clapping about the collective outrage I mean look I no I know I know I just crack jokes of this gets tense up in here talking all this all this race stuff I got a I got a crack jokes every once in a while but which is why I appreciated the humor in your sis because it is humor is how we survive dealing with all this ugliness and yes the collective traumas you you have to you have to have that joy and be able to see the absurdity and everything that we've gone through so anyway long story yes right of course to see that we can inspire this type of dialogue amongst people I mean that really is what ultimately became the power of the 1619 project is as you know it's not that radical the ideas aren't really that radical the scholarship is that is built upon has been around for decades but it hadn't necessarily permeated the the collective understanding the the non academic understanding the popular understanding and that's seen as dangerous because then it inspires all types of other introspection all types of dialogue and why would power want that right because the the understanding we have of America that we're all indoctrinated into rationalizes and legitimizes racial hierarchy economic hierarchy gender hierarchy and we know who benefits from that and we know what happens I mean I became a journalist because I believe the narrative drives policy and we have one narrative of America that allows us to support really regressive stingy individualistic policy but if we learned a different narrative of America we would support different policies that would make us a more just society and the people who benefit from the society being as fractured as divided as unequals it is don't want that so yes I think that's clearly why why it's being banned and particularly we are at a very nervous moment for a segment of the white population who feels that they are losing their demographic supremacy which means they fear they're losing their political supremacy and they see what happened in 2020 when for this brief moment because we always knew it was going to be brief right racial reckonings well we're in another racial reckoning but it's in the opposite direction of the one we are trying to go to in 2020 is that you saw people taking on this lexicon of systems that it wasn't just about this one white cop murdering this one black man but about a society that lets this white cop know that I can murder this black man with people filming it and probably nothing will happen to me right society produces that moment and so people were doing this critique and they were using 1619 as a lexicon they were painting 1619 on monuments to enslavers and bigots as they were snatching them down they were saying this is a 400 year old struggle and that's dangerous to the hierarchy wants to say we're all equal so where black people struggle it's because of black pathologies because of black cultural deficit has nothing to do with the system designed to produce the results over you know 350 years so 1619 and then this larger propaganda campaign that we all call critical race theory that's not but exists to push back on that right to to take the white folks who are starting to feel like maybe it's going a little too far maybe maybe this you know I was I was down for the don't kill black people in the street I'm not so much down for the larger structural critique of America maybe it's gone too far it becomes very useful because the oldest wedge issue in America's race were primed for it it was interesting the George Wallace was which one don't call who's that one all that playwrights not here because George Wallace is like he's such a great he like epitomizes that he he wasn't actually that racist right when he when he ran originally he runs as a racial moderate and he gets his ass kicked and then he realized though I know how to win I run as a racist and then he wins and you see this you see this with Nixon like you see this again and again where politicians understand if you want to win politically in a polarized society all you have to do is go to race and so yes all these bands are coming from that that was a long answer no great answer I mean one of the one of the things I'm struck by and Nicole touched on this is that the the project in its earliest days had a direct impact on how people made sense of the George Floyd moment and I know in this moment and I can certainly speak for myself it is hard not to be discouraged by the unrelenting way in which each week brings new legislative efforts to destroy any any effort to achieve equity in this society in the 21st century to to make good on whatever failed promises didn't happen in previous centuries or decades for that matter but if we want to lean into I think what this play suggests to us and the power of performance and creativity and imagination then the 1619 project even in its earliest days showed that power also people were quoting it from Congress Cory Booker mentioned it in a discussion about reparations there were school board hearings around the country not the ones to ban it but the ones to adopt it and I think I mean for me in this moment and I'd be curious Nicole how you think how at least how you advise others I mean this to me is a moment literally of standing your ground it is a moment not to retreat not to be silent I am beyond frustration frustrated with this notion that the way out of this moment is to keep solving for what resentful hateful white people need in order to be okay with us not really a question in there but a response so I wanted to share that stand I'm terrible with names so the play right of Stan tell us your name Terrence Terrence so when I when I saw I performed tonight I couldn't help but remember the the New York Times news story of Nathan Connolly and Shawnee Mott two professors at Johns Hopkins you want to tell this story Nicole no okay so so you must have written this play before that because okay so some of you know this story but here is a black couple in Baltimore in an upscale neighborhood they have two small children he happens to be a historian his wife is also an academic they are very committed to educating their own children about black history and black diaspora history they start a family YouTube channel during COVID to sort of have something productive to do and also to share these stories at some point they decide we also want to renovate our house they get an appraisal company to come out they get pre-approved for a loan up to a certain amount but the appraisal has to happen in order to make sure that there's enough equity in the house for this future loan the appraisal comes in at something like four hundred and seventy two thousand dollars which doesn't actually mean they're gonna get the loan because it's not enough the value of the house they're confused troubled by this and suspect that the appraiser had made an assessment based on their race they decide to do exactly what your play suggests they're gonna whitewash the house they remove all the black art all the black books they hire a colleague who's white and by the way dr. Connolly happens to be a historian of racist real estate practices so his suspicions are well informed by experience and knowledge the appraiser comes in they're not home white guy stands in house is scrub clean all right first person to guess this correctly gets a free book from me what's the appraisal come in at all right I haven't heard it I haven't heard it but but you're you're all right in that a lot more the amount with seven hundred fifty thousand dollars oh you said it oh good Lord all right give that sister her book right there all right we'll exchange information seven hundred fifty thousand dollars the tragedy in this is obvious but even more so than that the moment for them to capitalize on the market when they set in motion this meant fundamentally that wealth was taken from them because the interest rates had changed they had to go through legal maneuvers they can't actually get the money that they were would have been promised had they been white in that moment when they initiated the transaction and just in case anyone's wondering the justification that the appraiser came back with initially was that a black neighborhood proximate to where they lived was more appropriate a comparison for their home than the white neighborhood they actually lived in you can't make this stuff up that's America I mean I would just like to point out that the fact that not one person in the room offered a lower number on the appraisal seriously though right this is how we know race is real because we're in a society that tries to tell us we're just making this shit up right it's not it's not actually real but we all know how it works and we all know not a single person in here thought that when you made the house appear like it belonged to a white person versus a black person that the appraisal would go down we all knew it would go up significantly that's race right that's caste and this is what black folks are up against I mean this is why I even talks of reparations when people are like home ownership that's not gonna work for us our homes in black neighborhoods are worthless our homes don't appreciate as quickly unless white people start moving in the neighborhood right like we still have dual systems and that's the whole argument of the book is that the greatest thing that white people in general achieved after the civil rights movement is to now act like races about individuals and that the systems have been banished without actually banishing the systems which is why they don't want to talk about critical race theory because that's literally what critical race theory says which is actually just common sense but whatever so I have one last I have one last question and it's it's open-ended for Nicole and I'll give anyone else an opportunity if they would like to share something so many of you probably know that the 1619 project has now been transformed into a docu-series that's running on Hulu and it's been several episodes so how many people have seen I'm gonna need some more hands to be raised by the time we ask this tomorrow we need we need those streams so so really it's a pretty straightforward question Nicole now that you're also a filmmaker what have you learned about yourself and the importance of this work in translating the book to this format and I'll just I'll prompt you by saying I knew about your father I didn't know about your mother and your grandparents and I thought it's very powerful a reveal and and I don't want to get too personal here but I'll ask the question I mean it's in the documentary now no no but it's not about the fact that your mother is white and all of that I mean that's in the documentary the question was the extent to which you intentionally chose not to write that into the democracy essay either in its first or second versions because I think it changes it certainly doesn't change how racism works right because black people are by definition of people of hybridity but but the power of it in in that episode of the series I think is it's a race the episode on race is even more powerful and I just I wanted to know how intentional you were about leaving it out or putting it in I never even considered talking about that in democracy because democracy was really about how black people make sense of the country that we built in our place in it and in the race episode well actually let me let let me go back I that narrative arc of the race episode where I talk about my father's mother being born in 1924 in Greenwood Mississippi my mother's father being born 1924 white man in Iowa and how everything about their lives would be determined by the racial categories and the gender categories on their birth certificates that was I wrote that into the preface of the book but the preface was ended up doing too many things and we ultimately took that out of the preface because part of it as I was you know the the preface is an origin to the project but it's also like my origin how did I come to do the project and certainly growing up in a biracial family and having intimacy with race in that way and seeing one how false it was but also how real it was at the same time and seeing that you know my white family was not working harder than my black family and they were also working class but they had land they own their home so working class for them didn't look like working class from my black side of my family so all of that was shaping my understanding of race in the world and where I fit and you know having a father who's like your mom is white but you're not you're black you're gonna be treated like it was very clear so yes it wasn't I never thought about it for the democracy essay it was originally going to be part of the preface so as we were doing the race episode I shared those sections with the producers and I was like this is how we have to get into this episode in that way so yeah it's incredible it works really well not just because it's your story but because it's a powerful intervention and also just simply reminds people that race was always about power and so it did it never had to make sense it just had to work so any parting thoughts folks and share well we have not thanked the actors again so I want to thank I just want to say thank you all again for coming out tonight I want to thank the All Stars family all the folks from all over the country who support the All Stars who are producers and contributors to this production this is a real treat and I'm grateful for having had the chance to be here tonight I want to thank all of the playwrights I want to thank Nicole Hanna Jones and our lovely wonderful host Teresa Walsh thank you so much okay guys if you have your books we'll meet you in the lobby I'd like for the actors to join us on stage we're gonna do a quick photo op really quickly can we give Nicole Hanna Jones and Dr. Khalil Mohamed and these beautiful playwrights and the cast a round of applause