 On behalf of Ford Fund, the philanthropic Arm of Ford Motor Company, thank you for joining us as we honor and recognize the important role of African Americans in our nation's history. For more than a century, Ford has put the world on wheels, fostered innovation, and stepped up in times of need. From our historic $5 day wage, regardless of race, to our contributions to the war effort during World War II, to the production of urgently needed medical equipment and PPE supplies to help combat the coronavirus pandemic, we are starting to build a better world for everyone, every day. That is why we are proud to partner with the National Archives Foundation and the National Archives and Records Administration to connect, educate, and inspire Americans to celebrate our shared history. We are especially pleased to support the Archives Fund for Rights and Justice and Black History Month programming, which brings known and lesser known stories of people of color to citizens across the nation and around the world, including how they have shaped our country's history and are laying a foundation for the future. We hope you are enlightened, encouraged, and inspired to share what you learn. For more information on Ford Fund's broader community investments, visit Fordfund.org or follow us on social media. Thank you. Greetings from the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to tonight's panel discussion on the Black Family, Representation, Identity, and Diversity. We're presenting this program in partnership with the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and we thank them for their support. The theme of tonight's program, the Black Family, is also the theme of this year's Black History Month. Family is the core unit of our society, and those seeking family history documentation compose the single largest group of researchers here at the National Archives. Indeed, the greatest boost to genealogical research here was the publication of Alex Haley's roots and the subsequent miniseries in the 1970s. Family research was no longer only for the elites. It was something we could all dive into. We could all fill out our family stories and share them across the generations. Now it's my pleasure to welcome our panel and begin our discussion of the family as the foundation of African American life and history. Our moderator is Ida E. Jones, University Archivist at Morgan State University, and our panelists are Allison Parker, Author of Unceasing Militant, The Life of Mary Church Terrell, Darius Young, Author of Robert R. Church Jr. in the African American Political Struggle, John Whittington Franklin and Karen Roberts Franklin, Managing Members of Franklin Global LLC, and Barbara Spencer Dunn, Vice President for Membership and Contributor, and member of the Black History 365 Professional Development Team for the Association of the Study of African American Life and History. Thank you for joining us today. Good evening and thank you Dr. Ferriero for the warm welcome. As the moderator, I want to share a statement so we can contextualize our conversation. The Black Family in America is one of the oldest institutions created by formerly enslaved Africans. Cattle enslavement complicated the formation of nuclear families while spawning kinship networks to provide communal ties. In the narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, he wrote, my mother's name was Harriet Bailey. She was the daughter of Isaac and Betsy Bailey, both colored and quite dark. My father was a white man. He was admitted to be such I ever heard speak of my parentage. My mother and I were separated when I was an infant, before I knew her as my mother. He modeled his life in two separate biographies during the course of his lifetime, from enslavement to self emancipation. Throughout his life, he became a husband, father, abolitionist, feminist, ambassador, and statesman. Clearly, his life served as a prism through which the light of the Black family's representation, identity, and diversity is refracted. Tonight, using the life of Douglass as a prism, we will explore select aspects of Black family, to politics with the church siblings, to marriage and familiar legacy with the Roberts and Franklin Union, to researching ancestral plantation in Cushing, Texas. All of these aspects of Black family life were expressed by Douglass in his autobiographies. Also, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, utilized Douglass as a prism, bringing all Americans into consciousness of Black history by selecting February for Negro History Week in 1926. Bookended by the birth dates of Abraham Lincoln on February 12th and Frederick Douglass on February 14th, Douglass himself stated, genealogical trees did not flourish among the slaves. However, today, we, as descendants, continue to seek understanding and celebration of how familial ties are organisms expanding and collapsing in each generation. In brief, the two church siblings represent a family from Memphis, Tennessee, and they worked independently and collaboratively at times to enrich the political voice of African Americans in bipartisan politics. Two recent biographies recover the personal and public lives of Mary Church Terrell and her younger brother Robert R. Church Jr. These siblings represented blended family born in enslavement and during reconstruction. They represented the aspirations of African Americans seeking voice and citizenship in national, local, politics, government and society. The idea of power couples lends itself to being highly visible and power broken in select circles. However, in the African American community, power couples are broadly defined through partnerships that unite legacy and vision. The identity of the Franklin Roberts family is a living legacy of a power couple formed from the educated elite. Their ancestry in medical, legal and academic professions spans a greater part of the 20th century. Inspired by their ancestors, the Franklin Roberts family demonstrates aspects of how identity is crafted, curated and transferred throughout the community. With regards to plantation life, harvesting rice, cotton, indigo or wheat were all cultivated by black hands. The enslavement period morphed according to its staple produce, region of the country and proximity to port cities. Barbara Spencer Dunn embodies this aspect of diversity through sharing her ancestral roots from Cushing, Texas on the Monteverdi plantation. This story recognizes how the Dunn family survived. Their genealogical research sheds light on how plantation life was experienced differently in eastern Texas. In essence, the black family continues to refract the light of history, inclusion, patriotism, heritage, travail and triumph. Tonight's discussion will present a cursory introduction to aspects of representation, identity and diversity. For additional information and for further programming, please visit asalh.org as well as the National Park Services Frederick Douglas National Historic Site and as you heard from our audience in the United States, narah.org. Thank you and enjoy. I would like to introduce our panelists once again for your discussion. There are three groups and there are going to be three topics. So our first conversants will be Allison Parker, Chair, Department of History at the University of Delaware, author of Unceasing Militant, The Life of Mary Church Terrell. Followed by Darius Young, Associate Professor of History at FAMU in Florida, who's the author of Robert R. Church Jr. and the African American Political Struggle. I'll introduce the next set after they finish. Thank you and enjoy. Allison? Thank you so much for the invitation to be here. I'm going to try to share my screen now. Can you see it? Yes? Okay. I'm very happy to be part of this and I'm going to give you a brief discussion of Mary or Molly Church's family history and its connection to her activism. Mary or Molly Church's father was Robert Reed Church and he was born to an enslaved woman, Emmeline, who's in slavery. Dr. Burton allowed his friend, another white man, the steamboat captain, Charles B. Church, free and open access to her. Emmeline gave birth to Robert Reed Church in 1839. After she died at age 30, the Burton family sold 12-year-old Robert to his biological father. Decades later, Burton's daughter offered additional details to Robert about how and why he was sold. Captain Church, she claimed, had promised Emmeline he would buy you and emancipate you and put you in school in Cincinnati. But Robert's father and slave never followed through on his 1851 promise to the dying Emmeline who had hoped against hope that her son would become a free and literate young man. Later, during the Civil War, the still enslaved Robert Church courted Louisa Ayers, the enslaved daughter of a white Memphis attorney, T.S. Ayers. Robert and Louisa wed in 1862 in a ceremony attended by both of their white and labor fathers who served as the witnesses. Their daughter, Molly Church, was born enslaved in the middle of the Civil War in 1863 in Memphis, Tennessee. I emphasize all of this because some members of Robert Church's family later tried to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the notion that their revered patriarch had been a slave. In contrast, as a civil rights activist, Molly Church Terrell always drew on her family history to critique white nostalgia for the system of enslavement, a nostalgia that never acknowledged the harm done to enslaved families who were separated, humiliated, and treated as less than fully human. When her father, Robert Church, was an adult, he learned more of his family history from letters he received from the Burton family and described how they sold his grandmother Lucy away from her child, Emily, as a simple economic calculus. In the changing scenes of commercial life, grandfather was forced to send 100 Negroes at one time from Virginia to Mississippi to pay a debt. Among the number was your grandmother Lucy. She was bought by a very rich planter in Mississippi who gave her the same liberty of action our family had. The letter in life was she treated as a slave. This event separated your mother and grandmother. Without empathy or irony, the letter writer could not see that this permanent force separation was a searing illustration of the power of the institution of enslavement. Robert Church shared this 1901 letter with his daughter Molly, who was by then a mother herself. She was haunted by this matter of fact recounting and in public speeches pointed to her family's history to condemn white Southerners for their hypocritical nostalgia. When slavery is discussed and somebody rhapsodizes upon the goodness and kindness of masters and mistresses toward their slaves, it is hard for me to conceal my disgust. The anguish of one slave mother from whom her baby was snatched away outweighs all the kindnesses and goodness which were occasionally shown a favored slave. In speeches to white audiences, she condemned white men for raping and assault vulnerable black women under their control. For instance, the White National Purity Association invited Terrell to give a talk on purity and the Negro in 1905, in which she highlighted the vulnerability of black women to rape by white men. She charged that even in the 20th century, colored women have been regarded as the rightful prey of every white man, and they have been protected from the wiles and luxury of their destroyers neither by public sentiment nor by law. In spite of having spent her first two years enslaved, Molly Church grew up in a privileged household. She learned to use her class privilege, education, light-skinned color, and cross-class and cross-race connections in tactical ways to work on a wide range of social justice and civil rights campaigns. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Allison. And I'll go ahead and share my screen as well. I want to thank Ida again for inviting me to participate in this conversation. And I know we have a limited amount of time, so I will introduce you all to the person that I wrote about, Robert Church Jr. and the African American Political Struggle, which was published a couple years ago in the University Press of Florida, which really looks at Robert Church and his contributions to organizing the black vote in the first half of the 20th century by the 1920s. Church is probably the most influential black Republican of his era. Again, the son of Robert Reed Sr., who is a very influential real estate magnet, businessman, arguably the richest black man in the South during the height of his wealth, right? And so we talk about those issues, but today I want to talk about really his family and beginning with his second marriage to Anna Wright. Anna Wright, over here to your right is a phenomenal story as well. Anna was born free. Her father was a Quaker abolitionists in Pennsylvania, who would later move to Memphis, Tennessee. She attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and also went to school at Oberlin as well to study music. This marriage produced two children, Robert Jr. sitting down and his baby sister Annette, both of whom also following their big sisters footsteps, Molly, and attended Oberlin. Robert from there would go on to continue his studies for a year in New York at the Packard School of Business, really with the intention of coming back to run his father's company and in particular the bank that his father owned. In the book, I kind of talk about the child-rearing strategies of Robert Sr. and Anna that even though they were born into this privilege, even though they had access that most African-Americans did not have during the height of Jim Crow, very much so they were deliberate in the way that they approached, and Molly talks about this a lot too, Allison, in terms of how they were concealed really from the realities of racism. Instead of writing in second class cultures or in a black culture with trains, father would purchase an entire car. They went to these private schools up north and things of that nature with the intention of grooming activists who once they became a beige that they would confront racism when they were met with it, right? Robert marries a school teacher from Washington, D.C. by the name of Sarah, also known as Sally Parotti, church-born Sarah Parotti Johnson. She too comes from some privilege, went to the minor school in D.C., which is now UDC, also is a graduate of the famed M Street Colored High School, and as they were courting each other in 1909, 1910, Molly would often write Robert because Sarah would eventually come back to M Street and serve as a teacher, and Mary would kind of write him and keep him up to date with some of the things that she was doing and say hi for and things of that nature until they got married, Francis Grimke married them in this elaborate ceremony in D.C., and then they would eventually come back to Memphis. Their daughter, Sarah Roberta, church named after both their parents, too would have a very influential career in politics in the 1950s and beyond, a very significant figure as well in Memphis and Tennessee. When you're going through the church records, you know, she was very protective of her parents' legacy and did everything she would confront historians oftentimes if they said anything disparaging about her father, one of my mentors at Memphis, knew her very well, and I was very pleased to have access to those records when I was a student at University of Memphis. This was the church family house on Maudeville Street. There were other prominent black families who lived along that street. I wanted to show that house, not only because of how significant it is when we think about African Americans being able to achieve the amount of wealth to purchase a house of that scale, but to also talk about why it's important for us to continue to write these books and to tell these stories because that church, the church's house no longer exists as does none of the houses of the black, quote unquote, black elite in Memphis. It was destroyed a year after Robert Church Jr. passed away by a person by the name of Edward Hull Crump, Boss Crump in Memphis. He decided to light that house on fire in order to test the new fire nozzles that the fire department received. So that legacy is really a race in the city even though there are other markers of things available. So I'll go ahead and stop here to have more conversations about church and his contributions to the black freedom struggle during his era in the early 1920s and 1930s. Thank you. Thank you, Darius. Our next group will be Karen Roberts Franklin and John Whittington Franklin of the Franklin Global LLC, both managing members. Karen. Thank you. Good evening. Pictured here are my paternal grandparents, James Knox Roberts and Sally Jane Dangerfield Roberts, both born in Hume, Virginia in 1873 and 1878, respectively. They married in 1901 and moved to Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania where he was a mule driver in a coal mine and she was a homemaker. Next slide, please. My father, James Elvin Roberts, born on July 27th, 1903, seen here at the upper right-hand corner on his Hearst High School football team was the eldest of eight children. It was expected that he would become the foreman in the coal mines, but he wanted to attend college. Next slide, please. Following his high school graduation, he moved to Washington, DC to attend Howard University where he obtained his BS in 1931 and his MS in Zoology in 1933. Next slide, please. My father is pictured here having received his MD in 1937. He specialized in obstetrics and gynecology. Next slide, please. Here, he is after establishing his private practice near Howard University. His brothers followed him to DC and he established the Empire Laundry Diaper and Linen Service to employ them. Next slide, please. My mother's family is from South Carolina. My mother, Sevesta Othrin Viola Roche's mother, Hattie Viola Williams is pictured here in the center of the second row with her siblings and grandparents, circa 1900. Next slide, please. My mother pictured here on the left, she's around six years old, with her cousin Edna came to Washington, DC to finish high school at Cardoza Business High School in 1927. She returned to Columbia, South Carolina to attend Benedict College, her parents' alma mater. Next slide, please. She returns to DC to work in her aunt and uncle's store in Arlington, Virginia. She subsequently works as an executive secretary in the Department of Army of World War II. Next slide, please. She met my father in the 1940s. This photo of them dancing in the early 1950s was probably taken at Cai Delta Mew Medical Fraternity's Christmas dinner dance. Next slide, please. And this last image, they moved to Silver Spring, Maryland in April 1959, five years after their marriage, breaking the color barrier. Thank you. My father's family arrives in Indian territory in the 1830s as slaves to Chickasaw Indians. Born in 1820, David Burnie, owned by the Burnie family, frees himself and enlists in the Union Army as David Franklin. My grandfather, Buck Colbert Franklin, born in 1879, like his father, is a rancher and black cowboy. He goes to Roger Williams University, a black Baptist school in Nashville, where he meets Molly Lee Parker, my grandmother-to-be. Here he is in 1899 and 1901. These photographs are taken in the Calvin Brothers Studio in Nashville. While they're in college, petroleum and natural gas are discovered and Tulsa becomes the oil capital of the world. They marry in 1903, and he and my grandmother are farmers and teachers. Grandpa apprentices with other black lawyers in the Ardmore, Oklahoma, as admitted to the bar in December 1907, one month after statehood. The next image, please. On February 20th, exactly 100 years ago, 1921, he moves to Tulsa to establish a law firm with IH Spears, leaving his wife and two youngest children in Rentusville. May 31st to June 1st, 1921, the black community of Greenwood is destroyed by Tulsa race massacre. Pictured here on June 6th, he, on the right, and his law partner, IH Spears, on the left, receive their clients in a red cross tent with their temporary secretary, Effie Thompson, and my grandfather's college roommates. Next slide, please. My grandparents are not reunited until 1925 when Greenwood is still rebuilding. In the next slide, here is my grandfather, here's my father on the left with his brother, B.C. Franklin Jr. in the early 1940s. The next slide, please. My mother is from Goldsboro, North Carolina, pictured here with her brother before 1920, and in the next image, with her sister, Bertha. The next slide, please. Dad's brother goes to Fisk before him and my mother's sister follows her to Fisk. Here are my parents with my maternal grandmother at their college graduation in 1935. Next slide, please. Dad goes on to grad school at Harvard and mom to library school at Hampton. They marry in 1940 in Goldsboro. Their first jobs are in North Carolina. Dad at St. Aug, St. Augustine's College. You see them there in the middle of the front row. Before moving to North Carolina, College for Negroes in 1943, where he teaches history, and mom is the librarian. Next slide, please. They moved to Washington in 1947, just as from slavery to freedom is being published. Dad is a professor at Howard and mom in the next image, is a librarian in the last image, is a librarian in the Prince George's and D.C. public schools. Thank you. Thank you very much for that presentation, John. Our last panelist before discussion is Barbara Spencer Dunn. She is currently the vice president of membership of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History and a contributor and member of the Black History 365 professional development team. Ms. Dunn? Ms. Dunn. Every child should have a village. And my village was my community. I now understand the commitment my parents had to community was in their DNA. Their village was their community. So they grew up at a time right after slavery in the early 1900s. And so the pictures that you will see flowing behind me are just family photos that depict my family. Recently in 2018, my family joined many family members from around the country at a celebration when the state of Texas erected a monument to my family. Those who were enslaved on the Monteverdi plantation in Russ County, Texas, they were survivors. And that is why I know that we are survivors. I think a lot about the narrative of Frederick Douglass when he asked the profound question, why am I a slave? I'm going to answer that question today for the sake of this conversation because there is a root cause for slavery. The root cause is greed that created a system of slavery and that system of slavery has a clear, harsh, brutal logic behind this root. They created a false racial construct that empowered an entire culture of people to brutalize and inflict crimes against the other culture. This brutalization was against the humanity of this culture that still exists today. So what we have to do is the truth must be told. So what did my family do? That takes me back to Monteverdi. Even in the midst of slavery they found freedom in enslavement because they were free in their minds. They were able to grow their own crops and they kept the money when they sold the crops. So they had money when slavery ended. They worked together in that community. And when slavery ended in 1865 my great grandfather, Green Lewis and his wife, Phoebe donated the land that started the first school in church in that community. And what is very empowering to me is that my family when they were told they needed surnames they did not take the surnames of the slave owners. They did an African tradition who says to me they held strong to their African traditions even in the midst of slavery. I come from a long line of ministers and preachers men and women of God. And that is what really kept our family together. And in these photos you will see in 1987 we attended a family reunion and that was the start of us collecting information from our elder in the family at that reunion and we had our family research and we've been doing that ever since we cousins across the country. The community that my family grew up in was a village. They took care of this children in that village and when my parents got married in her parents' yard in Anadarka, Texas they left there and went to Borga, Texas and Borga was a strong community as well. The church was always in the lead in the community and my parents' old my parents moved me and my sister to Amarillo, Texas and my third sister was born in Amarillo. Amarillo was a strong community and the churches again were in the lead in the community. My father was a pastor for 36 years and I can remember my father being in three piece suits with his fellow ministers and they'd go downtown and bail people out of jail. They were very much the head of the community. They would come home weekends and they would end at midnight and we walked home without fear because our village took care of us. I can remember the bookmobile coming to my home and it was a night until years later that I realized we could not go to the library which is why the bookmobile came to our neighborhood but our families, our communities fought for us to have those bookmobiles so we could have the same things that other people had. And my family our community was strong nobody was hungry in our communities and when I go back to Monteverdi in 2018 the state of Texas erected a monument that really honored those enslaved on the Monteverdi plantation and it was the first time those enslaved were honored with a monument and my family's name Spencer and Ball are on that monument. This is the school where my parents grew up they grew up in a Rosenwald school that was built in 1925 and 26 but it started in 1868 when they started the church in Outer Darker we had a strong family community my parents had a strong family community the black community has been the moral base for strength in this country and we continue to do that so I say to you as Dr. Woodson said Christianity in this country we know what Christianity is the Negro was a Christian himself and he did not doubt the power of the principles denunciated by Jesus Christ but the religion that was practiced at that time he doubted if there was actual Christianity that ever existed in Europe and he said if it did it died an untimely death on his trip across the Atlantic the church must be strong as it was during my time it's time for us to take the lead again in order to save this country and what will save this country is the truth the enemy is not the individual who has oppressed him but the evil system which has permitted the individual to do so so let's question that system that still exists today by educating all about the truth of our history and I look forward to this discussion thank you Ida thank you Barbara very enriching so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to have questions and I think I'm going to start with Karen because I have an affinity for Washington DC and Howard University and I would like you to discuss about the empire laundry business as an MD and OBGYN for your father to have opened a business to be parallel to that in terms of wealth or notoriety in the community well it changed my family because his brothers his younger brothers were still in Pennsylvania and they weren't able to complete college and my father did not want them to have to work a menial job I worked for white men and so he had the means to be able to obtain a loan from industrial bank of Washington and to create the laundry service and one of his patients had complained to him about how there wasn't really a good diaper service in DC and he knew there was a new theater as well as Howard University was one of his one of their main clients as well in the limited service so he created that business because he did not want his family to be dependent on working for white men thank you and that would lead me back to Allison in terms of how her mother talking about Molly Church and her mother how important was Louise Ayers Church to terror in her personal life and then her own issue with motherhood as you describe in your book about various medical health issues yeah Louise Ayers Church was a business owner and she was able to set up a hair shop that sold hair extensions and wigs for elite white women in the era in Memphis Tennessee after the Civil War and from what we can gather her white father who was also her enslaver seems to have either given her a loan or money to start the business but she was able to leverage that to buy the first family home and their first carriage and so this was at a time when Robert Church was having his own series of troubles because he had challenged the basically the black codes and tried to open up his own business and so Molly Church Terrell always looked up to her mother as someone who was an independent businesswoman thank you we have a question from the audience which I'd like to post both Darius and Barbara and I'm going to start with you first Darius the question was how do the stories of the persons that you're talking about compare to those not as advantage to have left documentary evidence or photographic evidence how do you view that in terms of scholarship and how you capture stories well I'll kind of talk about just my introduction to Church I actually was a student at University of Memphis and I planned to write about race violence in lynching and I in my first research seminar started to I wrote about the lynching of ill persons in 1917 and from there I really saw how close politics were to understanding race violence in the south and I came across this guy Robert Church Jr and when I was there the collection from what I understand had recently been open so I was in a very advantage position Allison probably has seen the collection as well where I mean there's dozens and dozens of boxes and papers from Church senior from junior from Roberta and the entire family and from that you think about really for me it was black politics but I wanted to use Church and place him into the conversation of black leadership and really develop a narrative that intertwine those two where we're talking about him as this black political leader who's close with James Wilton Johnson and interacting with WB Du Bois and all these Titans when we think about the black freedom struggle but also to talk about the people organizing the black vote and him really teaching and talking to folks not only in Tennessee but throughout the United States about the importance of that and you know I was just able and really lucky to be able to do that with the access that I had to that collection and I hope I accomplish that in the book as well so Barbara can you also answer a question similar along the lines of how does the stories that you're talking about compare or how would someone who has less documentary evidence tell their story or be included in that narrative of American history? That's a very good question Ida because my family was very surprised when in 2010 we found out about a book that was written by Norman Winfrey. He did his PhD at the University of Texas and these records were left by the slave owner to the University of Texas we would not have known all the information we know but I am really asking people to do and which is why I really address the brutal root of slavery we have to come together as the human family because most of our records we have to get to the rest of our records by connecting with the white family that enslaved us and if we don't do that all we will know is what we get from our family history, the oral history and through our DNA connections I am connected with cousins who have found me, a cousin in England who found us through DNA but I have a cousin that is really working hard because he found his cousins through DNA he is working hard to help other people find their relatives through DNA so we have to really come to a reconciliation in this country because we're not going to get to the end if we don't come together as the human family. Thank you and that's a perfect segue to John. I would like to know how your mother's career as a librarian will you facilitate your career as well as your father's kind of person in the stacks to be an assistance to him? Well you know that to avoid rape black fathers sent their daughters if they could to college before they'd send their sons to college so my grandmother and her sister went to Livingston, their daughters of an A.M.E. Zion Bishop so they go to Livingston College in Salisbury, North Carolina at the turn of the 19th to 20th century and they graduated in 193 and 194 respectively so my mother grows up in a household with college graduates her father and mother college graduates she and my father become freshman sweethearts through college and she decides to go straight from Fisk in 1935 to Hampton and I asked my parents about when did they first come to Washington, when did they first come to the Library of Congress and my mother comes in her first year at Hampton to Washington with her class to visit the National Archives and the Library of Congress and she's committed to being a librarian by that time and so her first job in Goldsburg as an English teacher but when she and my father marry she then goes to a series of librarian positions in Raleigh in Durham as I said at North Carolina Central Law Library at North Carolina Central and then when she comes here to DC she has the same experience that my father's mother had she's working for the Prince George's County school system as a librarian but she doesn't have sufficient tenure in the system and the superintendent and Karen and I found this letter in my mother's meticulous files at the Duke Library the superintendent denies her maternity and so she leaves the Prince George's County system takes care of and has me and then as soon as she's able joins the public library system in Washington and is the first librarian at Spingard when it opens then she like Karen's mother when we come on the scene and are living in predominantly white and hostile neighborhoods they stop working to usher us through elementary school when we come home if a crisis calling us whatever at school they're home to support us before our fathers get home so after I leave the nest at least after I leave elementary school she then begins to be involved sometimes as a librarian at children's hospitals but she becomes deeply involved in Illinois family and child services and she's on the board of Illinois child services and so she's concerned with children and their welfare she's also very concerned and her sister becomes a librarian and Karen's mother at one point also is a librarian she becomes concerned with the dearth of materials for African American children because children's books published in the United States are primarily at that time for white children so there's a movement among black librarians to make sure that their children's books written for and geared to are available to black children in libraries that's a very fitting question I would like to ask both Allison and Darius to talk about this relationship of books for children it's my understanding in reading Darius's work that Molly would send her brother books and kind of encourage his literacy as a young person and give him a global perspective so if Darius and Allison kind of talk about a familial relationship between sister and brother almost could have been his mother because of her age difference with him what did that mean in terms of the sense of the sense of agency and the sense of responsibility to community right in many ways Church follows Molly's footsteps in times of going to Oberlin and things of that nature but yeah when she was studying in Germany she would send him these coloring books children's books that were written in German she would sign her letters using German language and the kicker to that was Church was like three he was just this kid but that was very much his introduction and I mean it gives you a lesson so what education meant to that family and she challenged him as a three-year-old, four-year-old in those letters to constantly read and to learn other languages and to really be abreast of the issues of his day as a toddler and so she has this very profound impact on him not only in terms of his pursuit of education but even as he's trying to come into his own and he's trying to emerge on the political scene you know he is very much a victim of his day in some of his early work when he first comes back home from college and you know evidently he was espousing ideas about women should not have the right to vote but his big sister is Molly Church Mary Church Terrell right and so I mean she wrote this four-page letter she said in title you know it starts off my dear sweet little brother and that was the nicest thing about that letter from there but from there as he develops the Lincoln League Mary plays a role, Ida B. Wells plays a role all the church women are registered to vote, help start the NAACP so she really shaped and molded him as a political activist and I think she may have been one of his largest influences in terms of his political activism as he matured into an activist of his own right yeah thank you for those stories that's really wonderful it is true that she was very smart and really precocious child and so her parents both thought that she needed to leave Memphis which at the time only had a very very inadequate so-called colored school that they didn't think that she would thrive in and she was from early on reading children's magazines and entering little contests and very very interested in things having to do with writing and even though she became a speech writer and a journalist she always had hopes to be a fiction writer which she didn't really entirely achieve so that was something that she regretted but she did really it mattered to her that her father had not been emancipated in 1851 church senior he didn't really know how to write he could read but he had somebody often Anna write church his second or technically actually his third wife because he was married much earlier during the period of slavery before Louisa but in any event the real issue for her is that he was not fully literate and she was so proud of what he achieved but it bothered and upset her that he had never had that opportunity because he was so brilliant and her mother was taught French by her young mistress who was also her sister and so she learned some French but she also was kind of barely literate in terms of her ability in some ways to write so it was a strange mixture of being able to speak French but not and so it was Louisa who paid for her German lessons when she was in elementary school because her mother wanted her to truly be literate and fluent in multiple languages and she ended up being fluent in five so her mother's goals were reached so Thank you and I'd like to ask John and Karen to kind of chime in about the idea of how do you stewarder legacy of expectation from an educated elite background what is the intentions or is there an intention or is there a responsibility to raise awareness such as your great grandparents or grandparents might have had you feel some kind of compunction in the contemporary to kind of continue to hold that torch in that regard John why don't you start first I'm new Mr. This being the centennial of the Tulsa race massacre I've been deeply involved and concerned with the way that story is told you remember that the Tulsa massacre was suppressed for decades and some white journalists trying to do research about it in the 70s received death threats because the children of the people who destroyed our community who looted our homes burned the homes, bombed them from the air was still running Tulsa and when you read Tulsa's history by 1925 no white person is talking about the destruction of little Africa as they called it and when I took a delegation to Switzerland from Tulsa of people who should have known each other but didn't know each other and we showed the silent footage of the smoldering black community the international audience assumed it was world war Europe after world war two that's the result of white supremacy in the United States in 1921 and when a country like ours made practically no recognition of the centennial of the red summer of 1919 we realized that we must tell the history of 1921 and after January 6th I remembered my grandfather's words about being in a white mom and I've read those words in various talks so we have a responsibility to make sure that people do not forget we are a country that loves to forget and as my father called it likes happy history so we are forced to bring this to the attention of white tulsans I accused white tulsans the great extent of being holocaust deniers and I found it very interesting that as we approached the actual centennial in May and our spread planning for the 12th annual John Hope Franklin Reconciliation and America Symposium that one of the groups that reached out to us is an African-American Jewish theological group out of Chicago who are watching this history want to come and witness the centennial and one of the leaders of the group drew my attention to the fact that the Yiddish press June 1 June 2 1921 talks about Tulsa in the exact terms of pogrom that they used to describe the pogroms in Europe and they will be doing a panel at the symposium looking at the chronicling of attacks on black communities in the Yiddish press and Yiddish literature so they knew about it in London they knew about it in New York but the people in Tulsa growing up black and white have basically not known that history so part of the centennial purpose is to make sure that every child learns this history and every adult learns this history I think that it's important for us to document our family's histories and that's why John and I both plan to write about our lives as well as I want to write about my mother and father I think that's most important while we are able to and we have such rich images as well as documentation we also have found both, John and I both have found that while growing up a lot of people are just whites but a lot of people are not aware that African Americans that my grandmother my maternal grandmother and grandfather both were college graduates from Benedict College my mother was a graduate from Benedict College and my father came to Howard and received his medical degree and most people most particularly whites are not able to believe that I attended a reception with John and his father I don't recall what year but it was probably in the early maybe 2003-2004 and a lady told me that it wasn't possible that my grandfather had graduated from college she asked me what year was he born and I told her she looked at me and actually amazed me like I was blind that's possible because she couldn't imagine that because most whites did not graduate from college in the early 1900s in the early 1900s where my father graduated from college in 1931 my mother graduated in 1935 so I just think it's very important to educate everyone about our legacies thank you as we get ready to close and I'd like to give you all just a brief moment to think and how you learn a phrase is to think about what does the legacy of the black family representation, identity and diversity mean to you in terms of the lay community those who are simply just passing by and in terms of our young people the millennials what does that mean to them and then thoroughly to those individuals who might not know that their family did something because there's no documentary evidence there's no wealth of photographs or old tradition or even geographic stability so how would you speak to either one of those communities or all three of those communities in terms of what does the black family representation, identity and diversity look like from a millennial perspective a lay person's perspective or someone who does not feel that their story warrants research and I will start with Ms. Dunn Thank you Ida That is a really good question because the first thing that I think that the millennial community needs to understand is how important history is, how important knowing the past and how to understand what your present is and as we work together with an intergenerational flow of information what we have to do now is correct what's happening in our school systems that's one of the reasons why I'm very excited about BH 365 because this textbook is really an interactive textbook that reaches the millennials in a huge way not only do they have the truth and they start in Africa they also have music that goes along 41 songs that go with the units in the chapter and what I found from the young people that are engaged in this book they are really blown away with the information that they do not know and so for the lay community for the millennials even for the elders who got through life and still didn't get the truth I think all we need to do now is tell the truth it's documented and Dr. Woodson's work made sure it was the association for the study of African American life and history who is the reason why we celebrate Black History Month every year the documentation is there for us to get so I tell everybody start today doing your own self study don't wait for people, don't wait for us to fix the school system which we are working on but let's all come together and start a plan to learn what the truth about the history is that will really solve the problem that John is having with the 1921 Tulsa Massacre and everything else because we have to tell the truth and the truth does exist Thank you I'd like to Allison Yeah, I think that we really can communicate this idea that everyone has a history and everyone's history matters and telling the stories of prominent Blacks and elites who went to college and did all of these things is fantastic but it's not the end of it and I do think that saving records even you know if it's emails that people can be aware of the fact that their stories and lives matter and I think that oral histories do have a role to play in this because most families know something about their family histories and the projects that have you interview your oldest relatives and the story core type of ideas you know that's a really accessible thing you can do it on a phone and a lot of people do have phones these days who can record a conversation so it's really encouraging people to do that and to work with the libraries and archives to think about whether it's possible to save some of their family's documents in a way that feels meaningful to them with the full cooperation of the families rather than feeling like their papers are being taken away and one thing we did with Terrell's family when they donated a portion of the last papers that they had to Oberlin College is we also made sure they had copies of every single thing that they gave in multiple forms so that they could access it anytime they wanted and didn't feel like they were losing that family history when they gave those last papers to Oberlin recently. Okay Karen I'd like to go to you next. Well I agree with Allison I believe it's important for the younger people to start off interviewing their elders even if they do not have the papers or they don't have a collection of photos they could still start off with talking with their elders and getting to know their elders and finding out what their story is and I agree that everyone has a rich history it doesn't have to be where you have to be a college graduate to an order to have had a rich life but you certainly could start off with interviewing your elders and give most people take the time or when they do they wish they had there's so many things I would have liked to have asked my parents that I did not and you will find that that you're unable to do so so I would start there and then to educate our children I really don't think that they know their full history and that's what's so important and I think if they knew their rich history they would know that they are playing an important role in the society. Thank you I'm going to go to Darius next we're saving for last John. Alright so real quick again I agree with everything the panelists said before me the first thing I wrote down was to have conversations with the elders and your family but also when you think about the theme that Asala has came up with this year it forces us to think about family outside of just the context of these blood bonds and to think about it in terms of community and kinship and that some of us may not have access to our elders anymore in our own personal families but if we think about family from a community perspective and understand that all of our stories whether we're from the families like Mrs. Franklin just said or from working class families whatever that all of those stories are important vital and are all connected and I think that's what we're trying to do ultimately with our work is to not separate and divide the elite from the masses or so on and so forth but to really talk about the collective black experience and how rich and diverse it is so to think about family from a community perspective and to be interested in learning and telling those stories as we move forward so Thank you Ida It's been a great discussion I've enjoyed being with all of the panelists My father said that everyone's life is important and everyone's life story is worthy of a book regardless of where you are in the social hierarchy we're such a stratified society that we must realize that we actually have family members of different social classes and we value them whether they are as aunts, uncles, children, cousins so within our families we have a range of experience and we need to know not just the experience of our elders but if you have two or three generations children need to know about their parents and their cousins lives if you have the opportunity now with telephones and we can talk to each other across the country we don't actually have to physically be in the same city to learn from each other so in the museum community as echoing my fellow panelists we encourage young people to learn the skill of interviewing and once you interview someone you know and realize that they are repository of knowledge of all kinds of things that you haven't experienced then you can take that skill and ask your neighbors and then you can even ask people to let know about their lives so you can delve into the richness of the human experience and then share those experiences with other people that's what makes us able to understand one another but I do have to put in a point this has sort of been a binary black and white community discussion right now and one of us who consider ourselves freed the descendants of people enslaved by American Indians are battling with the tribes who want to deny they enslaved us and this is current law yesterday the Cherokee Supreme Court announced that they were no longer considering relations by blood so that people who were enslaved by them have rights to citizenship in the tribe if you go through the court system now there's a Supreme Court case dealing with the eastern half of Oklahoma so these are issues between Native and African American people that have yet to be resolved and we are being denied citizenship and access to our rights as citizens of those five alleged civilized tribes I get off my soapbox it's a lovely soapbox and I thank you so very much of course like I said this is going to be a sweet conversation and I want to thank my panelists Allison, Darius Karen, John and Barbara for a lovely conversation from the vantage place of the black family representation identity and diversity I would also like to thank the National Archives Foundation and a generous support from the Ford Motor Company fund for their sponsorship of this program I would also like to thank the partnership with the Association for the Study of African American Life and History the Association or a solid mention throughout all of this please do visit us at asalh.org we'll be having a conference in September we'll be going into greater deeper dives with a national and international audience on the black history theme the black family representation identity and diversity I'd be remiss if I did not thank Susan Clifton of NARA and the NARA IT community that have been very supportive of making this some seamless and making me a temporary engineer clicking buttons and I'd also be remiss if I did not thank Dr. Betty Gardner and Barbara Dunn for their planning and strategizing this collective conversation with our panelists once again thank you so very much please support our sponsors and like our panels have said start to investigate with the self going outwards into your community thank you all very much and have a good evening