 Hello, and welcome to your National Archives. My name is Rodney Slater, the National Archives Foundation Board Chair, and I am honored again to welcome you to your archives. We have in the audience this evening Ambassador Jim Blanchard and his wife Janet. Ambassador Blanchard is the immediate past chair of the Foundation Board. And so we are very, very pleased to see him. The National Archives Foundation is the non-profit partner of the National Archives. We work to generate support for the National Archives mission to provide public access to the agency's vast holdings. As part of this effort, the Archives Foundation is proud to assist the National Archives in its national exhibitions and public programs, much like tonight's program, this important conversation, as well as the National Archives national civics interactive programs that engage educators and students and the general public to learn about our past and to illuminate the future through their participation in our republic. We have a wonderful program planned for you this evening celebrating 10 years of the David M. Rubenstein Records of Rights Gallery. David Rubenstein is a man who almost needs no introduction. He is an American lawyer, businessman, and of course a philanthropist, and most recently a Major League Baseball owner. A former governmental official, he is the co-founder and the co-chair of the public equity firm of the Carlisle Group, a global private equity investment company based in Washington, D.C. But perhaps more important is the impact of the support that David has offered that has been demonstrated over the years to civic and cultural institutions and museums like the National Archives. He calls it patriotic philanthropy. We thank David M. Rubenstein for his support, his support of the National Archives and the Records of Rights exhibit. This effort has welcomed nearly 8 million visitors to explore the National Archives of Records documenting the ongoing struggle of Americans to define, to attain, and to protect their rights. The interactive exhibit helps to illustrate how we as citizens have worked to realize the ideals of freedom enshrined in our nation's founding documents and how we have to continue to debate the issues, issues such as citizenship, free speech, voting rights, and equal opportunity. Anchored by his loan of the 1297 Magna Carta, which serves to reinforce the precedent for the concept of freedom under law, this gallery for the last ten years has been a catalyst to engage Americans of all ages with programming and educational initiatives around our collective rights, our individual rights. Since the opening of the David M. Rubenstein Gallery, Records of Rights exhibit, the National Archives and the National Archives Foundation have hosted 252 rights related programs in Washington, D.C. and online. With many more programs presented by presidential libraries nationwide. Not to mention the impact the gallery has had on archives programs such as the Young Learners Program, which has reached over 34,000 children and students. The Record of Rights.org, which has engaged more than a million page views and has visited and has been visited by more than 350,000 individuals from nearly 200 countries around the world. All seeking to gain a better understanding about how you might define and attain and protect the rights that we hold dear. DocsTeach.org, the rights in America landing page, which has created rights related activities to reach a variety of grade levels on different topics. From African American rights to Native American rights to women's rights. And this site has received a collective 686,000 page views. So you can see this investment by David M. Rubenstein has been tremendous. It is a commitment and a contribution for which we are most thankful and most appreciative. For David's generosity, millions of people across the country and around the world have been able to explore a more complete story of America's history. And as he notes, the good and the bad with the recognition that there is nothing wrong with America that can't be cured by what is right with America. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my honor to introduce to you David M. Rubenstein. Thank you. Thank you all very much. So let me acknowledge the presence of our former chief archivist, David Ferriero. David, thank you very much for returning. And our earlier chair, Jim Blanchard, thank you very much. And all of you who are here who care about these issues, let me try to make two points briefly. First, why do we have an archives anyway? Why do we really need to preserve all these documents at the moment because of digitization? We can digitize everything. So why do we need this big building and other buildings to keep all these documents? Let's put everything on our little computer and that's it. We don't need it anymore. Maybe at some point human brain will be the same such that everything digitizes the same as seeing it in reality. But the truth is the human brain has not fortunately evolved to the point where when you see a historic document it's the same thing as seeing digitization of it. So that when you go to see, let's say the Magna Carta or another document here, when you know you're going to see the original, you're more likely than not going to prepare a little bit about it and might read about it. So maybe you'll get a little educated about it. When you come you're going to have a curator tell you about it. And when you leave because you've seen the actual document you're probably going to be more intrigued about what you saw and you're likely to read about it later. So it's likely that you're going to learn a lot more by seeing the original document than just by seeing a digitization. Now digitization is important for sure but we need to preserve the original documents as well because by preserving the original documents we're more likely to educate people and get them excited to see something. When school children come here and they see the Magna Carta or the Bill of Rights they're more likely to get excited about it, learn something and we certainly could use more civic education among our young people. It's a very sad situation now that we don't have as much civic education as we should. So I really want to thank the archives for preserving these documents and for David for pushing this through. I remember we talked about it for quite some time and David was very persuasive. So I would say I'm very pleased with it and I'm pleased that people have a chance to come here and see the original documents that are preserved here including obviously the Declaration of Independence, the original Bill of Rights and the Constitution. A second point I'd like to convey is this. When you think about the Bill of Rights and think about the rights that people come here to talk about and read about, it is amazing how most of human history did not have these kinds of rights. So all of us here share more or less DNA to some extent. We're all Homo sapiens with maybe 2% Neanderthal blood in there but about 98% of our DNA is Homo sapiens. And Homo sapiens came out of caves more or less about 400,000 years ago. And so for most of that 400,000 years there were no such things as human rights or rights for women, rights for people that look differently. And it is amazing that we've gotten to this point where now maybe only 50 years away from when the real serious effort was made in the United States to have everybody be treated equally. So think about it, the original Constitution obviously allowed slavery, didn't permit women to vote among other things. The Bill of Rights so-called, as great a document as it was, did not do anything relating to slavery and didn't actually have anything for women to have the right to vote among other challenges with the document. And it's amazing that as advanced as we are in civilization today, we think we're advanced, we still don't have a perfect situation where everybody is treated equally and everybody has the same rights under law. And I'm not sure why that is. It is a funny thing that the human brain is an incredible thing that can come up with a Picasso painting, a Shakespeare play, a Beethoven concert or symphony. And that incredible creativity and brilliance has not yet translated into one flaw that the human brain has. And that flaw is that if you look differently than me, if you are different gender than me, your skin color is different than me, your sexual preference is different than mine, we treat you differently. And it's still the case in most of the world that that's unfortunately the reality. So we've made progress in the United States in the last 50 years or so, maybe beginning and the latter part of the last century, but made some progress in this century. But really when you think about it, it's amazing how for most of organized history, humans were not given basic rights. The rights in the Magna Carta, for example, were really only to the barons. It wasn't to everybody. Later on, it was supposed to be for other people who owned property and who were men. Even in the United States, our Declaration of Independence did not do anything for women, didn't do anything for slaves, and the same was true of the Constitution. And I think that's about the human flaw that is in the brain that just says, if you look differently than me, you think differently than me, you talk differently than me, or you have a sexual preference different than mine, I'm going to treat you differently. I wish that one flaw in the human brain could be someday evaporated so that everybody could be treated the same, and everybody can have the kind of rights that everybody should have, and everybody can truly be treated equal. We haven't reached that point yet, but I hope we can. So one final point is that one man wrote a document, and we're going to celebrate the 250th anniversary of that in a few years. And that was Thomas Jefferson. He was 33 years old, given the assignment to write a statement about why we were going to break away from England. And like most humans, he had more time than he probably needed for it, so he put it off to the end. He had about 14 days, and the last two days, he finally got around to it. And he wrote three parts to it. One was the preamble, which nobody paid attention to, really. The second was the sins of King George, and everything under the sun was blamed on King George, maybe unfairly. And the last was what we're doing about it, breaking away. And the document got a lot of attention, as it should. And now it's seen as the birth certificate of the United States. But a sense in the preamble, which didn't get that much attention at the time, became the most famous sentence in the English language. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And think about it. The man who wrote that had some slaves with him. He owned several hundred slaves during his lifetime. And he didn't say all men and women are created equal. He said all men are created equal. And that's because in those days, even Thomas Jefferson, as brilliant as he was, recognized you couldn't eliminate slavery. You didn't think politically you could. And the idea that women could be treated equal was never in his mind. So that sentence, though, is so famous because even though it's been reinterpreted to mean all people have equal rights and equal opportunities, and therefore it's been going around the world as the embodiment of what humanity should be about, and it's really the creed of our country, we still have a long way to go to live up to it. So I hope all of you will, from the conversation we're going to have later, think about how far we've come and how far we still have to go to make sure everybody is given equal opportunity in this country and all people are treated equally. Thank you. Another round of applause for David, please. And to be sure, some ways to go but not as far because of your leadership and your support. Now, I have the honor of introducing our panelists for tonight's program. These individuals will examine how rights are defined and how they have been defined over time in our participatory republic. Moderating the panel is Dr. Colleen Shogan. Dr. Shogan is the 11th archivist of the United States, having followed David, and she is the first woman appointed to head the agency. By the way, she and her team have completed a wonderful effort over the last few days, bringing up to date all of the military records that were backlogged when she came on board and they're doing just a wonderful job. And so we commend her and the team for that. Dr. Shogan is recognized as a political scientist with expertise in the American presidency, political rhetoric, women in politics, and Congress. She was the senior vice president and director of the David M. Rubenstein Center at the White House Historical Association. Other panelists, Juliana Richardson, the founder and president of the History Makers, the largest effort to record African-American experiences committed to preserving, developing, and providing easy access to thousands of African-American video oral histories. She currently sits on the Honors Council of the Lawyers for Creative Arts, the Simmons University Dean's Advisory Council of the Gwen Eiffel College of Media Arts and Humanities, and the James Madison University Flowering Advisory Council. Elizabeth Griffith is a historian and author, and she is an expert on women's history, politics, leadership, and education. She teaches courses on women's history for the Smithsonian Associates and at politics and prose. Elizabeth graduated from Wellesley's College in Hillary Clinton's class and their dear friends, and she has earned a doctorate from American University and was a Kennedy Fellow at Harvard. Mark K. Uptegrove is the president and CEO of the LBJ Foundation. He is a presidential historian for ABC News. He is the author of five books on the presidency, including incomparable Grace, JFK in the presidency. Early in his career, he was the director of the LBJ Presidential Library and publisher of Newsweek. He has interviewed seven US presidents. Please join me in bringing to the stage our archivist and the other members of the panel. Please. Good evening. Welcome to the National Archives. We're going to have a terrific conversation this evening, talking a wide-ranging conversation about the history of rights in the United States, its origins, where we've come, and really where we're headed. And we're going to reserve the last 10, 15 minutes of the program for questions. So save them up for the very end, and we'll try to get to as many questions as possible. So I'd like to start off our discussion, and thank you to all our panelists for joining us this evening. Of course, thank you to Mr. Rubenstein for all of his support throughout the years to make this exhibit possible, to make these conversations possible. So we're going to start out this evening, really, at the beginning, which if you've been to the exhibit, you know what the beginning of the exhibit starts with, of course, with the Magna Carta, originating 1215. And I'm just going to ask a very basic question. The Magna Carta was written in the Middle Ages. It wasn't even written in the Enlightenment, which we typically associate with the origins of individual and human rights. It's one of the most influential documents on the American history of rights. How does a document written in 1215, how does that relate to what we conceive of rights in the United States today? Why is that an important place to start? Who'd like to kick us off? The Magna Carta declared that the sovereign was subject to the rule of law. That was a big deal. It codified parts of the common law. It represented resistance against oppressive authority. And of course, it enshrined a bunch of privileged white men, the barons and the king. And from that seed, that seed really caught root. I hadn't, until I studied more, realized that it had been revised over several decades. But because this country was explored and settled by Europeans, Northern Europeans, people from Christian Judeo backgrounds, they brought with them the seeds of the Magna Carta, the idea that the government should have some connection to representation of the people it was governing. And a lot of attitudes, I returned to patriarchy about who was going to be in charge. If they'd come from someplace else, we might have ended up with an entirely different kind of government. Because every civilization would have had seeds to some governmental plan. But that's what we have. And it's remarkable that we have it here. Speaking for every historian and every person who loves history, archives are enormously important. Saving these pieces of paper, being able to see them. And whose papers we save have a lot to do about whose history we recall. And because white men were privileged and educated and could afford pen and paper and had the leisure to write and thought they were pretty big stuff, so they saved their documents. We have a lot of those records. We're very fortunate to have Abigail Adams, one of those pieces of correspondence, but we might not have had them had her husband, first of all, been away, not been away. And then became famous because then she's related to a famous person. She's not the only woman writing, although it would have been much rarer because of the literacy, the privilege, and the leisure. None of that. But we've lost so much. We erased Native American languages, so we don't have records of those. We don't have enough women's records. I'm so grateful for the original slave narratives that were written by survivors and then collected by Fisk University professors in the 1915s, continued by a WPA project in the 30s, and now you're continuing that legacy without building locks. If you all are not printing out your emails, there's gonna be no work for people like me. Oh, there'll be work. Well, anyone else on some of the early origins, not even necessarily limited to the Bacta Carta? Well, we were, when we were talking about this panel, and I wanna say, first of all, David Rubin's thing, you've done an amazing job for civics education and archives in drawing attention to that. I don't know if you have not been here where we would be as people who are dedicated to the preservation of records. I do wanna say, and we were having this discussion about the time of the Magna Carta, because I was saying, well, what am I gonna say about that because I can talk about the scrolls of Timbuktu that UNESCO did a major save, sort of like movie-like, of taking the scrolls out of the country because of the tax, but those were at that point in time, which is the same time the 13th century, the Magna Carta is being written. There is what we find in Africa, Timbuktu is the center of learning that doesn't have things about rights, and I don't know what those scrolls even talked about, rights or if in African society there was even the concept of rights. Let's go forward to the Declaration of Independence. Some fascinating words are used in the preamble of the Declaration, the notion that these rights are unalienable and that the truths that undergird these rights are self-evident. This is what Jefferson and his co-authors, he did have a couple of co-authors that helped him with some of the wordsmithing in the second draft. What does that mean? Why does he use those words to describe the origins of rights and what impact does that have upon how we think of rights in the United States? Mark? Yeah, thank you. First of all, I want another nod to the great David Rubinstein, our patriotic philanthropist for what he does, what he has done for our country in preserving not only our documents, giving us some of the documents here at the National Archives, but some of the sites that he has preserved, we've seen in recent years that our democracy is not an inherent right. And the more we know about our history, the more we understand our need to preserve it so that we understand how we go forward. And David Rubinstein has been instrumental as a patriotic philanthropist in bolstering our history. I would say, of course, it's good to be home. I was an employee of the National Archives under the leadership of David Ferriero when I was director of the LBJ Presidential Library, and it's always wonderful to be back to this institution and in the hands of such a capable leader as Colleen. Inevitable means that you can't take these rights away. They are unassailable, they're irrevocable, they are inherent. And the founders come to that document with that conviction. The fact that they are self-evident, these rights are self-evident, goes back to, I think, the documents that they were looking to, that the founders, the Magna Carter, the 1688 Bill of Rights, they were evident by virtue of English history and the rights that had been enshrined in those documents that moved English society forward and gave ordinary English people, in the case of the Magna Carter, as you pointed out, Betsy, it's like the Declaration of Independence. It's to the privileged white men, but it evolves over time. It's a start. And that's, I think, what this conversation is about, that we start with a kernel of an idea and that idea evolves to be more inclusive, to be more diverse, and to create a better society. Brilliant revolutionary idea. I just, I wanna add, historians always wanna add footnotes, but this idea about declarations, whenever some underrepresented group wanted to gain recognition or make a statement, they issued a declaration. In 1833, William Lloyd Garrison found the American Anti-Slavery Association with the Declaration of Sentence. Elizabeth Cady Stanton follows that idea in 1848 with her declaration of rights and sentiments, and she replaces King George with all men and says all men and women are created equal, are created huge for her because everybody in America could recite the preamble and knew that those words were not the words that had been used. And then in 1905, when W. E. B. Du Bois and 29 African-American men are starting the Niagara Movement that will segue into the NAACP, they issue a declaration of principles. So this idea that you can root back to the declaration, that the Gettysburg Address counts back to the declaration, it's an empowering idea that you might not have been included in the first draft, but you can rewrite your draft. And I wrote, I read that Jefferson didn't admit that he'd written it for nine years because he was so annoyed by the edits, by the committee. He thought that his words were exactly right and they shouldn't be messing with it and any author can tell you that that's exactly how they feel. That's right. I would say that, because I represent the black experience here on this panel, that it didn't matter whether there was a declaration or there was maybe aspirations, but we had to go from being property to even being human beings in the first place. And that's a pretty big fight for some time. We don't really, you know, I'm very interested often in the area of the 1700s in our nation's history because there's not such a great demarcation at that point or we don't know maybe the archives can tell us. But there's not this great demarcation between us black people and indentured servitudes at that point. We don't know that, but at some point that turns and what we know as our history here is often embellished in the antebellum self. I'm, you know, we have to look at the, you know, when you look at black history, rich black history in the early days of the country, you have to look at the northeast. So the first black lawyer in the United States is Moses Simon. He is a graduate of Yale. He's mixed race Jewish and black. He's a graduate of Yale, but goes to the first law school in the country, Lickfield and starts his practice in New York in 1816. But he goes to and has a burgeoning practice and then he goes to a dance and someone calls him out of his name and then he's disbarred. We also have to look at the first black politician in the United States that is, he's at the Vermont House of Representatives. His name is Alexander Twilight, but that's in Vermont. But I just want to say that for black people, this is aspirational. We have to go first, we have to prove that we are human beings and that construct is a complicated construct even as we speak today. So we've identified many of the contradictions that exist within this document, just, you know, on the about face, slavery being obvious one, women, other people that are excluded, so much so that we know that there's a civil war that's fought to resolve at least one of these contradictions and we know that the civil war, the primary cause of the civil war is slavery because Lincoln tells us this in the second inaugural. So this is something that we understand to go forward. So why does it take a whole civil war being fought over primarily over this issue, but yet it takes at least another 100 years for the articulation of basic civil rights for African Americans? Why is that the case? I'm not sure the civil war. I mean, I know we say that, but the civil war was about property in many ways and who was going to, you know, I mean, you have the North and South, it's an economic issue of what is economically a viable and splits up the country. I don't think really, I mean, I know that we, you know, black people were freed and the abolitionists and many black people played a role in that, in the freedom, black people being very active in that. There have been lots of instances of resistance movements that are not really talked about and in the public. I said our knowledge said, but I really, it does take 100 years. I mean, they're in the state of Illinois where I live, we had one of the first nations civil rights legislation passed in 1877 by our first state legislator, a man named John W. Thomas who was born a slave and he was elected to the state and passed this. But the problem is, is that, you know, it's not in the DNA and so it's always aspirational, it's always beginning and most of the precedents, I mean, this is the thing that you have to look at who's leading the country and most of them are still either slave holders or at a point or they're opposed to the rights of black people for the most part and a lot of the policies coming out of the federal government are actually that. I think it took more than 100 years because I will accept that the Civil War was fought over property but the property was people and it was about the extension of the right to own those people into the West. But the deeply rooted racism of our country, the fear and resentment and resistance to any change, the clinging to the myth of the lost cause and to sort of wrap yourself in white supremacy because even if you had never owned slaves gave you a sense of superiority and people don't like to give up power and change so it would require endless efforts, resistance, met with violent repercussions and we're still seeing evidence of all of that. I do think we've made a lot of changes, there's been a lot of progress but we have more to go and without fact-based history curriculum, a lot of civics education, people not being afraid to see the flaws in this country. We are a great country and we'll be greater if we address the dark parts of the history and make changes so that we don't repeat those mistakes. John F. Kennedy said it very succinctly, he said, change disturbs and when we take leaps forward as a society, as a nation we inevitably fall back by inches or steps. We never go back to where we were and the arc of progressivism in our country, David might appreciate this, looks like, to my mind, the Dow Jones Index, it goes up but there are capricious bull and bear whims as we get there as we go but we never go back to where we were, we didn't go back to owning slaves but we were set back by reconstruction, we didn't go as far as we could have because reconstruction brings us back but we have the 13th amendment to reshrining the fact that we cannot have slaves in this country, we have Lincoln's emancipation proclamation stating essentially that slavery is immoral, we have his words on that count. So you can look at that, again it looks like this through history and we've seen that recently, we had the first African-American president in 2009 who served two noble terms in office and then we get sort of a backlash through the movements that we've seen in recent years. It is almost an inevitable aspect of American history. Excuse me for rolling my eyes but the remark about the forward and never going back I just wanna say Dobb's decision. Well fair enough, that is a particularly potent example. Right, and others, but the risk remain, Coretta Scott King said you have to fight for your rights in every generation. You cannot pretend that we want it, we have to keep fighting and the fight's getting pretty fierce. I mean but sometimes people get tired of fighting, right? Exhausting. Exhausting, right, I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. But we've seen even with Dobb's that you, and this is a lesson for all of us I think, particularly with our democracy I think in large measure in the balance right now. You have to stay engaged. Martin Luther King, this is engraved in the stone of his monument, said famously, the arc of the moral universe bends slowly toward justice. But that doesn't mean it bends on its own. What he essentially says is we've gotta bend it, that's what the civil rights movement was all about. You've got to, you can't take your rights for granted. Social movements is what moves policy in this country always happens. The truths are self-evident, but they're not self-executing, right? The self-evident is different than self-executing. So I wonder if you could, so what happens in the night is starting the 1940s, the 1950s and the 1960s with civil rights. There has been resistance all along. It's not as though there is not articulations of resistance going forward. Why do we start to see some actual effectual change in this particular era moving forward? Why is that? As historians, can you? TV played a role. TV really played a role. I mean, it's the same thing as George Floyd seeing a black man really killed live on television. TV played a major role. Emmett Till? Emmett Till. I wanna start earlier than that. It starts at the end of the Civil War when the majority of African Americans are illiterate because it was illegal to teach anybody to read or write. So between the efforts of the HBCUs and the Freeman's Bureau, this push to educate people in the black, right? All of those. So you have to educate, then you agitate, agitate, then you vote and you march. But you can see that when you get the first generations of educated, high achieving African Americans who are taking advantage of these opportunities in the 1890s and the 1900s, then you've got the conflict between Booker T. Washington who says, oh, let's keep the peace. Let's not stir anything up. We'll just educate blacks for what they can safely do, farm, cook, be housekeepers, be nurses. And WB DeBoys who's saying, no, no, they're gonna learn Latin and Greek and history and science. We are capable of all of this. And that tension will result in the NAACP which will lead to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund beginning to challenge separate but equal in the Plessey decision in the 30s under Thurgood Marshall. And it's those cases, case by case, that will build into the 50s. So you have public people agitating, you have action in the courts, and you have a bunch of African Americans in the South whose names we will never know because it was so risky to come out of a church basement or to function as other than an agricultural agent or a teacher because to do anything you would be beaten up hung. The Klan put signs on black churches. If any member of this congregation registers, we will hang you in the sanctuary. You know, we talk about the records of the National Archives and we tend to think of paper records, but there are other records too including at the LBJ Presidential Library, 693 hours of taped telephone conversation of Lyndon Johnson doing the business of his presidency. My favorite of all of those tapes is a conversation between Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King on January 15th, 1965. Martin Luther King's 36th birthday. And they're talking about, they understand that they have a symbiotic relationship here and they need each other. And Lyndon Johnson realized he wants to get voting rights through, but he realizes the movement is a very powerful tool for that, a civil rights movement that Martin Luther King is leading. And he says to him, if you show the worst of voting suppression in the South and get it on TV and get it in the newspapers and get it on radio, get it in the pulpits, and this is a direct quote. He says, there isn't a fellow who doesn't do anything all day, but follow or drive a tractor who won't say that isn't right, that isn't fair. So that television stuff, the fact that we have mass media at that time plays an enormous role and you have to give Lyndon Johnson credit because he realizes that Americans are basically decent. And they don't want to see injustice in their country. That they want to see justice done. And of course that's exactly what happens. We get the brutal, the Alabama state troopers brutally thwarting the march from Selma, Montgomery to the capital of Alabama. Sorry, from Selma to Montgomery. And the world sees this. And soon thereafter, we get voting rights enshrined in the wall. It's amazing that the American people are basically fair, but they have to be exposed to what's wrong in order to do what's right. The black women who made that march from Selma to Montgomery had toilet paper and toothbrushes in their purses because they weren't sure they were gonna make it and it was equally likely they would end up in jail. I think about that there was a lot of work really leading up to what we know is modern day civil rights movement. I remember once someone told me I was trying to get involved in my project. I interviewed black people about their lives and we've interviewed like 3,600 people and 451 cities and towns, but they told me that black people hadn't done anything before the modern day civil rights movement. So I think that this, I go back to this issue of this taboo issue of slavery because I really believe that issue has, white people don't wanna feel guilty, I wasn't here, I didn't do that, and black people don't wanna be embarrassed because it's what was a slave. And I think that we've really as a nation acted in unintended complicit to cover up this wonderfully rich history that really I think that if we look back and there are a lot of records here at the National Archives. 13 and a half billion. Yeah, you have, but you have, you have, let me just say this, you have a lot of material on the black experience here. Probably more than any other archive does in terms of volume. And so I really am hoping because there are all these different alliances that there are people helping people in different places around. And there's horrific things that happen as really to black people, but there are also a lot of heroic things. And I really think that if we can get into the National Archives and really expose them, we're gonna see, we're gonna learn our true history, not the fictionalized accounts that still permeate our society. And really I believe that until the United States can raise up other voices that we will never have the melting pot that we were intended to be. I also, because of your work, women are not recognized well, they're not documented well in society, period, black people are not lots of other entities or not the archives have been the province of white males. But within the archives hold really a lot of the truth. They're prejudicial things, but there are also a lot of truths there that I think if we see them and explore, we will become the nation that we're intended to be. Betsy, there's a whole segment of the exhibit that covers exactly that. It's a really great segue of women's rights and the history of women's rights. Women, at least white women are considered as citizens throughout the history of the United States, but without rights, without the rights to divorce, without the rights to property, financial independence rights to their children. So when do women start to realize that they need to also clamor for their rights and claim back the rights that have been denied to them? When did that start? I think the question of women and citizenship is complicated from the beginning. They are counted for body count, they are related to taxes, inheritance taxes, but nobody ever thinks because of common law, Anglo-European influence, that women are independent legal entities. They are owned by other people, not in quite as dangerous and violent a way, but you're the property of your father, you're the property of your husband. The only time you really have a chance is if you have been widowed and you're not poor. If you are a widow and have inherited, then you have some chance of some life. As early as 1645, I think it is, Margaret Grant is appealing to the Burgesses, the governor's council in Maryland, because she is the largest property owner in Maryland, 2,000 acres, but she's single and she says I should be represented in this body. They say not a chance, no woman is gonna be represented. But in 1745, Maria Chapin in Uxbridge, Massachusetts has inherited the property of the wealthiest man in town. So she is now the wealthiest person in town, the highest taxpayer, so they let her vote because she has property. So the link from the founders of power to property when women didn't have a right to property, that lasts for a long time until their fathers decide they don't want their money being inherited by wasteful sons-in-law. So in the middle of the 19th century, you begin to have some property rights agitation. I would say that women always wanted some rights, they just had no way to get them and they were in a somewhat parallel position of very little education and exhaustion. Women are dying from multiple childbirths. They are valued in certain circumstances. Women who were partners on farms, on the frontier, and when we were an agrarian society, had value because they converted products into marketable goods, midwives were valued, teachers would be valued when in the federal period we decided people needed to be able to read, even if they couldn't vote, they should be able to read the newspapers and debate. But the right to vote issue comes out of the abolition movement. Black and white reformers are deciding that they need to address black issues and that prompts some women to think, wait, wait, maybe we ought to also talk about voting rights for other people. And what motivates women is that they want to contribute. They are community builders. They want to change things, reform things and you cannot do it if you have no power. If you only have moral suasion, you might be able to close down a brothel, but you may not be able to actually, were you allowed to sign a petition against slavery? Could you get clean sewers for your street? Could you create a kindergarten system? You couldn't unless you could vote. So after the Civil War, you have a lot of people who were slowly, black and white women both, agitating for the right to vote because it's gonna allow them to change the lives of the people they care about. And something that both Mark and Juliana talked about was the idea that television helps, that the media helps to draw the plight. How about the suffragists? I mean, they don't have television, but they're pretty close. They figure out a way at the very end to catch attention. And I used to say for the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission that they were the original tweeters. They had the original social media, although there was no social media, but they knew what they were doing. So how did they do that and it kind of proves consequential at the end? Alice Paul was a social influencer, but she didn't change very many votes. But suffrage passes in 1920 because Alice Paul had stirred the pot and by marching the day before, Wilson is inaugurated on March 3rd, 1913, filling the streets and they are attacked by drunk guys in town. So the riot actually makes the news, but she draws attention to a federal amendment. And then she's the person who pickets the White House. She had lots of good ideas, women and airplanes, women driving automobiles, but she's not a vote counter. For that, you need to carry Chapman Cat head of the National Association of Women's Suffrage. And she is running this two-tier campaign. She's getting suffrage in the States. So if you could vote in the States, you could vote for members of Congress. You could vote for president. You have impact on the Electoral College. And she's trying to influence the Congress. You need two thirds of the Congress, three quarters of the States. So Cat's a brilliant- She's got her no cards. A brilliant, she does. She's got the no cards. She does, she's a brilliant strategist. Wilson was opposed for six of his eight years, but because women contributed to the First World War, he could say it was a war measure. So he goes to the Senate and says, we have to give women the right to vote. Shouldn't all be sacrificed. He leaves the Senate. They vote against it. They dismiss him. But by the time it finally passes in June of 1919, women are already voting in 27 states. It's one of the reasons it passes because those people in Congress know who's voting at home. So then they have the ratification fight. Very hard fight comes down to one state, Tennessee. It's the only state that's even got a prayer of calling a special election. They strong arm the Democratic governor because it's a presidential election year. And Cat goes, Paul's not there, Cat goes. And the first vote, and so do all the liquor interests go. So they have a 24-hour hospitality suite in the Hermitage Hotel and the legislature is drunk. Kerry Chapman Cat says, they're reeling around the hallways. Will they sober up? Senate sobered up. They're definitely freed that women are gonna bring the end to. People were afraid that women would reform factories and force prohibition to all this stuff. The Senate sobered up. It passes suffrage. They have 35 and a half of the 36 votes they need and they don't have a whip count for the house because people keep changing sides. Harry Byrne, 24 years old in his first term from East Tennessee, goes in wearing the red rose of the opposition. He's got a letter in his pocket from his mom. Dear Harry, not sure how you're voting, but I certainly hope you're supporting Mrs. Cat in ratification. Be a good boy. Harry changes his vote. Because of one vote, 27 million women got suffrage and it never would have happened if they hadn't won that vote. It wouldn't have happened in the 20s. It wouldn't have happened during the depression. It would have happened at the end of the Second World War. So it takes, I'm all for marching. I've marched a lot in my life. I have a friend here I met marching in 1972 for the Equal Rights Amendment. But marching isn't enough. You need to vote. You need to lobby. You need to be able to count votes and you need to be able to influence the legislature. Go ahead, go ahead, Julianne. Yes. Thank you. I have to say, I couldn't help but think about like what would have had the suffragists movement really been integrated? Like if Susan B. Anthony had not been so horrible to the Black suffragettes. You know that, what direction that would have had in terms of power now? I think that that would have been frightening, but we were spurned and so the rights, you start seeing the fissures that continue even into the- Oh, the fissures are deep. Let me give you a quick fact correction. Just an additional point. The schism starts between Black and white women with the passage of the 15th Amendment because Stanton and Anthony were vehemently, rabidly racist in their response to that. They wanted white women included not just Black men and they wanted Black women included. They wanted universal suffrage for which there were seven votes in the Congress among radical Republicans. But CAT has, by 1915, CAT has created a biracial, multi-ethnic, class-wide coalition. She's working with Mary Church Terrell. She's working with the National Association of Colored Women and the NAACP. The last killing amendment on the suffrage was for it to be white only from the guy from Mississippi whose name I've forgotten and they've taken his name off a building at the University of Mississippi so we won't have to remember it. But she calls on the women of the NAACP to lobby. And so the Senate resists the white only and they would have liked that a lot because the Senate was controlled by Southerners. But the bill that passes is not a white only suffrage. But once suffrage is earned, then they turn their backs because while Black women are included, of course, in the suffrage, in the 19th Amendment, no protections were offered. So if you lived, if you still lived in the South, you were suffering the same kind of violent reprisals of Black men. There was not going to be much voting until you moved out of the South. But everybody, I mean the entire suffrage coalition splintered because everybody had their self-interest and rather than see strength and coalition, they went in every direction and they succeeded at nothing on account of that. Matt, just to go back to the story you were saying, Betsy, you were talking about how suffrage got passed and so frequently you see history turn on the thinnest of margins, right? Just one vote or a handful of votes or a few people standing up for others changes the course of history. You see it time and time and time again, which is why we all need to stay engaged. History begs us to remain engaged in our country, in our affairs, to pay attention and to act accordingly. Another part of the exhibit, the other part of the exhibit, besides civil rights, women's rights, there's also a very nice segment of the exhibit about immigration in the United States. And this is, of course, a very important topic that we're all thinking about today, which you can really understand when you look at the exhibit is the unevenness over time at immigrants coming to the country for the pursuit of happiness, for the exercise of their rights, but hostility throughout targeted different groups. Since this is a country made up of predominantly of immigrants into migration into this country, why do we think about the origins of such hostility to these groups over time? The groups change, who the hostility is targeted towards. It's not the same groups, but they change over time, but the hostility is there. Why is that? Why is that tension? You're from Texas, you get it. Well, I'm not from Texas. But I got there as soon as I could, as they say in Texas. I think it goes back to what David Rubinstein was saying earlier, and that is, I think we are inherently, as a species, we're inherently tribal. And consequently, our base instincts are often to be nativist and xenophobic and suspicious of others who don't look like us. We've only evolved in recent years, again, as David alluded to, to thinking about equal rights for all Americans. I mean, that's something that we just put into law 50 years ago, that's amazing, right? So, but that is, and so immigrants are easy for demagogues to call out as the other, and so that we can be fearful. LBJ put so many things well, but one of the things, one of my favorite quotes is he said, any jackass can knock down a barn door, but it takes a damn fine carpenter to build one. And it's easy to strike a match and to burn something down and to stir fear and anger and indignation, and that's a really powerful political tool. So frequently throughout our history, although our nation has been built on the backs of enslaved people and immigrants, they are often those who are damned and subjugated and exploited for political purposes, and I think that's humanistic. I read something interesting that suggests that immigrants, to this point in our history, are less damned than they have ever been in our history. We are exploiting the immigrant card less than we ever have throughout the course of our history, which is somewhat encouraging. I just want us to reflect on the expression nativist, because who were the natives and what did we do to them? Again, fear, fear of the other, but I'm recalling that one of the charges against King George in the Declaration of Independence was that he wasn't allowing us to grow our population, he was limiting immigration into the country and we wanted to have more people come. That must have been short-lived. I recently learned that the expression white replacement is not a new term, but it's rooted in the 1850s, it's actually rooted in the history of abortion, which was legal in this country, not even called that until the 1860s, but an enterprising graduate of Harvard Medical School, her racial store, was worried about competition from midwives in his obstetric practice, so he said that these native women, by whom he meant white women who'd been here more than one generation, white middle-class women, needed to stop white middle-class married women, needed to stop limiting the size of their families because we were gonna be overrun by the Irish Catholics. And just this fierce antipathy and whites, native whites would be replaced. It just struck me that that term keeps coming up whenever we wanna be hateful towards somebody else. We kept bringing in immigrants because we needed workers. We needed cheap workers and exploited workers. We pitted them against freed African Americans. And what I don't get about the current crisis about immigration is we still need workers and we're resisting the need in so many occupations that could be filled if we could solve this problem. What I find interesting about the fact that the thing that we view as the strength of the United States is all the diversity and bringing in all people from different places and what I really love myself about being an American, that it's a struggle because you put all those things in one place it's not gonna, and they're already conflicts before you're coming into the states between different nation states. I find that fascinating, but I keep hoping that we can hold on to the foundational principles, which I call aspirational because at the best it brings out the best of us and shows what it can be possible. But we have this problem right now with the migrants. I mean, we're calling them migrants, not immigrants. So what's the difference? That is what I'm saying. Our asylum, yeah, what is the difference? At the risk of being Pollyanna, I have to say we are more accepting of immigrants than most countries because of our origins. Madeleine Albright used to tell wonderful stories. Interviewed her seven years ago at a summit that we did at the LBJ Library on race in America and she was talking about being an immigrant into this country. Her family fled Nazi Germany, first went to England and then went to America. And her father would say the wonderful thing about America versus other places. When we settled in England, people would ask, how long are you staying? When we settled in America, people would ask, when are you going to become a citizen? And the fact that our secretary of state was relating this story about her life's experiences is truly remarkable and a testament to our country. It's one last question before we go to the audience. As I walked around the exhibit, there's many themes that struck me, but one of them, and we touched upon it here in various answers, is the role of resistance? So I'll just ask a simple question. When is resistance justified to secure rights in a democracy? It's a toughie. No, not for me. I like to go, not for me. I think it often is when there's no other option that you see resistance taking hold, but resistance has not always been successful. But it's often the last option in terms of it being acceptable, the last option. I'm for resistance. I'm a veteran marcher. But it's resistance, resistance against oppression. Resistance to expand rights, not resistance, not, and I wouldn't even call it resistance. I'd call it insurrection, when you're trying to oppress other people, when you're trying to change a government to do something else. Resistance to influence your government, to show how passionate people are, to object to Jim Crow law, to object to racial violence, to object to Supreme Court decisions you don't like. I think that's part of our democratic process and we should embrace it. So sort of educated, informed resistance is good, but we need to find where the line is. I worry if our country is unable to protect its institutions. If, I mean, we all sort of cling to the hope that everybody will be sensible and remember all the strengths of our history and the aspirations of the declaration and we'll be okay. But should we not be okay? Who's gonna resist that? John Lewis called it good trouble. Maria. Good trouble. And I think we have to get into good trouble when we are not living up to our highest ideals. Necessary trouble. Okay, terrific. Do we have questions from our guests, from our audience? Oh, we have two microphones here. Okay, sure. I just wanted to add that it wasn't until 1924 and Snyder Act before natives could be citizens and on top of that this still had to be implemented by the states and it wasn't until 1948 that the Supreme Court of Arizona declared that the clause in the Constitution which prohibited natives from being able to vote was unconstitutional. The issue was that because Native Americans, indigenous people were members of their tribes, they were thought of as foreign nationals. That's why they aren't included in the Constitution. That's why they had to be granted citizenship but it was a hollow citizenship because it did not come with voting rights. And while 1948 was the beginning of those lawsuits in Arizona and New Mexico, they lasted all the way until the Voting Rights Act because there are 16 states, think about from Maine to Idaho and then down the Rocky Mountains and into the Southwest that had very large populations of indigenous people. And one could say indigenous tribes' voting rights are not protected now because of how far it is to get to a voting place, how you have to have a street address and reservations do not have street addresses. There are many issues we should be paying attention. Thank you for saying that. You're talking about 1924 and it bears mentioning that that was a particularly nativist xenophobic period when we instituted the National Origins Act which restricted non-Western European immigration for 50 years until Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Immigration Act of 1965 which fundamentally changed the faith and heart and soul of our nation by opening up those, by taking away those restrictions and I'm looking at the woman there whose grandfather signed that into law, Lucinda Rahm. I just need to add that there were two women who pushed that 1924 Indian Citizenship Rights Act so it was pushed by some of these women who were underrepresented. Hi. So I pick up the paper today and I wind up being incredibly depressed. So I am hoping that y'all can tell me something from your research that maybe personally gives you hope something somebody did. You've actually told a lot of great stories tonight but I'm gonna go for even more. Something that inspires you and thinks yes, that is sort of what we need today. That is what we can do again. Anything, Juliana Betsy Mark that maybe is meaningful for you that makes you feel like yes, this is a story that gives me hope when I read the paper and I'm thinking oh boy this is not a good day. Lucinda Travis and Taylor aren't enough for you? That's not, I mean you have to sort of cling to hope wherever you can find it. Years ago when Lucinda Rob worked at the archives and I was teaching women's history she was putting together archival materials for classroom teachers to use and she invited me to come visit the archives. It was my first time to go into the vaults and she's casually opening drawers and I'm seeing treasures and then she pulls open this drawer and it's Franklin Roosevelt's typed day of infusion speech with his penciled changes. You could tell I have never forgotten that moment for a historian. I thank you for that. I thank the archives. I'm an optimist. I mean we fought a civil war and we came out of it and we attempted reconstruction and we messed it up but we got there eventually. People are offended by acts of racial violence I think now, I mean I think since it's just people are outraged by those actions now. The Black Lives Matter marches those were biracial marches all over the country. I cling to the hope that there is goodness and common sense in the American voter and that we may pull through yet but today's paper other than the football news was not great. I would say that well I worry, I'm worrying right now except I live in my archives for this all these wonderfully rich stories but I would say that I really worry now about losing the documentation of the 20th century with Black people and I literally, David here, I remember coming to meet with you in your office when you were a national activist but I worry about the lack of documentation of the 20th century with every death that's going but I also, when you talk about positive I think the Black experience is pretty somewhat amazing because a lot of people on Rodney Slater who's one of our history makers, when you hear their stories, you hear about and just a generation or two that people are going from memories of an enslaved state to in this case, President of the United States or having tremendous success that would not be conceivably thought possible in a lifetime and so the fact that there are lots of incidences of people really accomplishing against great odds, I'm hopeful but I'm still worried. I'm worried about this time period we're in right now. I would say, listen, I am an optimist by instinct and experience in my life and reading about history makes you an optimist because you do see how we get better over time but I would say one of the things that worries me is that Americans, I was talking to Secretary Slater about this in the green room before we came out, there's studies that show that a greater number of Americans are willfully tuning out of the news because it's a depressing nature more than ever before 38% of Americans are willfully unengaged because they don't like what they're reading because everything is doom and gloom and I worry about this too. I worry like I've never worried in my lifetime about the future of our country. Couple of things that give me hope and it goes back to voter turnout which you were talking about earlier Betsy and that is if you look at the election of 2020 more Americans came out to vote than ever before if you look at the midterms where election denialism was on the ballot and the highest profile races where reproductive rights were on the ballot generally speaking democracy and reproductive rights one I wanna be respectful of those who have a different view on reproductive rights than I might but suggest that the majority of Americans want reproductive rights and so our government, our law should reflect in so many ways the majority of the American people so I was encouraged by the fact that we saw a big turnout in the midterm elections and reproductive rights and democracy were elevated beyond kitchen table issues at a time when the economy was relatively poor we're better now so those things give me hope. You know I wanna add though to that just the thought like the role of social media versus the role of TV social media really is tribalism. I mean it's divisive in a way that we never thought. It can expose and can educate but it can also just put you getting more of what your belief structure in a major way that is concentrated and doesn't allow for different views to rise up and that is what I think I'm fearful of I'm also fearful of new technology and just the change that immer... Cause I was thinking when the railroad came or when the airplane was created was there a time that it was just moving so fast that people thought oh my god this is the end of society as we once know it? I don't know about that those times but I do worry about that. That's how people thought what happened when women started to vote. That's right. Julian there was a study that the Obama Foundation did recently that reflected the fact that the majority of Americans believe that the biggest threat to democracy is the fragmentation of our media ecosystem and they also think it's the most intractable issue and I think that that's probably right. There desperately needs to be some reform as it relates to social media in particular where 80% of Americans are getting their news. I will note though that when the printing press came into being there was the same people who said that this was the end because now everybody was gonna have access to books and books weren't just gonna be reserved for the elite and they would be right and so people feared the fact that the printing press was gonna undermine the stability of society and we figured that out so we're in the very early stages of social media so I still remain, I understand, I agree with you that there's tribalism on social media like we haven't seen before and anything else and it completely undermines Madison's defense of an extended republic and the federalist and all the things that we cling to but I still don't think that the end has been written on this technology, that's my optimistic statement, yes. So I'm currently a college student studying history and political science as a double major and one thing that I've always, I've loved history ever since I was little, one major question that I've always had my mind on is ever since last year I read the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Feralist Papers for American Political Philosophy so and we connected those books to the 21st century and with my interest in immigration and history reading guarding the golden door, my question for all three of you is what for someone who's wanting to become an aspiring historian, what is a archived document that historians in the next generation should look at that is vital for our 21st century? Let's just pass that right over to Holly. Well, I mean, you know, I know, so you're looking for the 21st century version of the Federalist Papers or? Just some important historical documents that talk about immigration that we can connect it to today, almost. That historical documents that talk about that. Well, I mean, I will say this for the National Archives, I mean, immigration, but I mean, we are using artificial intelligence to have access to large quantities of information that we never had been able to make available before and not necessarily immigration, but right before I arrived, the ability to have the 1950 census online and searchable because the ability to use artificial intelligence and pattern recognition to be able to read the handwriting and to be able to search and find people in that 1950 census, imagine all of the born digital documents that we will have once we get this hold of AI in a responsible way that we will be able to provide access to those documents and to that information in ways that has never been possible before. So, you know, there is something that we're losing from the value of not being able to see the printed document in front of you, but the powers, when we harness that technology to be able to see across periods of time, make comparisons across time, look at things from, you know, a statistical and quantitative analysis, make inquiries that were never possible before, that's all gonna be real and you're gonna be able to come to the archives to do it. So I think the future in that sense is very, very bright. We have time for one more question. Can I just say one thing? Okay, sorry. I wanna applaud you and your major because we're at a time period right now, not only the attack of the teaching of black history in schools, but in the colleges and universities, there is, the humanities are under attack and we cannot have a humane and civil society and an educated society without the humanities. In colleges right now, it's business and STEM. And we, and so I really thank you because we need a lot more of that. So one last question, thank you. Thank you. My name is Ibrahim Mukman and I was a 15 year old, I got arrested in Columbus, Georgia in 1963. This past spring, I went back to teacher class on civics and they told me that I had to submit what my talk was gonna be about and it had to coincide with the Georgia Standards of Education. And I did that and then they flagged something because one of the things I wanted to talk about was the Southern Manifesto. You were talking about pre-animals and all those other things. And they said, they initially told me I couldn't talk about that because that was not a part of the Georgia Standards of Education. So my thing is that when you talk about the records of documents, you can't just cherry pick the documents. The Southern Manifesto was a document that the Southern legislators put together in order to fight Brown versus Board of Education. It should be required reading of those students in civics in my hometown, Columbus, Georgia. How would you respond to that if they challenged you and said you couldn't use that? I'd insist, I'd do whatever you need to do. We need fact-based history. I was thinking when Nikki Haley said when she couldn't answer the question about the cause of the Civil War, which was not only in Lincoln's Second inaugural, but it's in the South Carolina senator who's speaking after the firing on Sumter why we are doing this. And it has a lot of really nasty things to say about African-Americans and their inferiority and don't, anyway as property. I was thinking, she grew up in an era where we don't know what textbooks the school boards of South Carolina had approved. I'm pretty sure that Texas and South Carolina that a lot of Southern states taught a curriculum that was different maybe than were taught in other places. I do not think any of that education was adequate. I certainly didn't learn enough African-American history in the Middle West. I didn't learn that there were slaves throughout the North and before in the colonial period. I mean, there's a lot that we just have not been taught. You have to be carefully taught and we have to keep trying to teach those things. I bet the Southern Manifesto is in the AP Black History class. I want to give a nod to, you all know about presidential libraries and national archives, but we have educational arms, educational departments in these institutions. And right now in Texas, as you may have heard, there's been some direct draconian measures to prevent a more inclusive teaching of history. SB 17 is the law that was passed. And one of the things that we are doing in our education department at the LBJ Presidential Library is teacher workshops to ensure that teachers can teach history as inclusively as possible without stepping outside of the bounds of what they can and cannot do. There's a lot of fear among educators right now about running a fowl of the state government. So I'm proud of the work that the LBJ... Juliana? Yeah, I just want to add. I mean, this to me, when I'm not fearful, I find it fascinating because we're at a point since the founding of the United States that we see the emergence of state rights. And states are like those laws that are being passed and the laws are being... So these laws about the teaching, like you can't make someone feel bad. Like, I mean, I mean, there's so amorphous that litigation come as a result of that and there will be interpretation. Those laws are gonna be on the book. I think there is an 18 or 20 states that passed anti-CRT laws. Those laws are gonna be in the book forever because it's almost impossible to change that. So I do worry about that because I'm seeing the real instance of people saying to me, just like you, sir, I've had people recently say, you've been asked to speak and I can't use the word black. I go, what, my project is about black people. So how can black people make history? Or keep your comments on the up and up. What does that mean? Don't mention names. So these are real situations that are almost McCarthyists in their effect. And that's what I fear. That's going on over and over again because teachers don't know what to do. Administrators, archivists. I had an archivist who was trying to get the hell out of Florida because they didn't know what decisions to make based on the laws that are there. So we have, there's a lot that we have in front of us, but there are those people who are really trying to do the right thing because this is the thing. When I was a young kid in class in my hometown, which there were a thousand blacks out of 50,000 whites, I was just embarrassed. I mean, everybody seemed to know their background, their history and there I was cowering over not knowing mine and I just don't think it's fair for any child to feel that they don't have a legacy to call their own that is a part of American paradigm. So congratulations. I'm gonna thank our panelists for just a terrific conversation. Thank you for your participation of course. Thank you for David Rubenstein being able to facilitate this types of conversations from the exhibit that everybody can enjoy here at the National Archives. And of course, the National Archives Foundation for their support as well. And thank you for attending this evening. Thank you. Thank you. We should re-institute the freedom story. That's what it's gonna be. You know, they're gonna have. For anybody could be.