 Good evening everyone. I'm delighted to welcome you to tonight's event, heading to the point, A Journey Through History, Exploding the Black Urban Experience in Pittsburgh. I'm Keith Webster, the Helen and Henry Posner Jr. Dean of University Libraries. Here at the libraries, we are committed to recognizing the importance of representation and diversity. We have a number of initiatives centered around growing diversity throughout the campus community. One of them is this annual event, which we are pleased to present for the third year. I'm grateful to those at the libraries who've been working hard to prioritize this important work. Tonight, I especially acknowledge Sonya Wellington, our events manager, looked after all of the logistics for this evening's event, as well as the many others who contributed. It's now my pleasure to introduce you to this evening's host, Dr. Wanda Heading-Grant. Dr. Heading-Grant is Carnegie Mellon's inaugural Vice Provost for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer. She also holds a faculty appointment as Distinguished Service Professor in the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy. Throughout her 30-year career in higher education, Dr. Heading-Grant has established programs, policies and practices fundamental to the advancement of inclusive excellence. This year, CMU received its first-ever insight into diversity, Higher Education Excellence in Diversity, also known as the HEAD Award, which annually recognizes colleges and universities that demonstrate an outstanding commitment to diversity and inclusion. This is a testament to her leadership and the progress she and her team have moved forward in just a few short years. Joining Wanda this evening in conversation is esteemed scholar, Dr. Joe William Trotter-June, the Giant Eagle University Professor of History and Social Justice. Professor Trotter is a former Chair of the History Department at CMU, and is also the Director and Founder of Carnegie Mellon's Center for African American Urban Studies and the Economy, CAUSE. He is also President-elect of the Urban History Association and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Trotter teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in African American and U.S. Urban Labor and Working Class History, and has served on the boards and committees of numerous professional organizations, including Services Vice President of the Board of Trustees, of the H. John Hines III Regional History Center, a Smithsonian affiliate, and past President of the Labor and Working Class History Association. His latest publication is Workers on Arrival, Black Labor in the Making of America. Professor Trotter recently delivered the presidential address at the Urban History Association's conference in Pittsburgh, and he has just finished work on his next book, Building the Black City. He was honored earlier this year with the John Lewis Award for History and Social Justice from the American Historical Association. The University Archives is currently processing Professor Trotter's academic papers, and they will make his research accessible for a new generation of scholars working to build a more equitable future for all. Thank you again for joining us this evening. Without further ado, I'll turn things over to Wanda and Joe. Thank you. Thank you so much, Keith. I really appreciate that warm welcoming and also opening us up to heading to the point. So thank you for your partnership and your leadership. I am so pleased. Hey, everyone. Welcome. Welcome to the third annual heading to the point event and collaboration with the amazing, amazing team of Shannon Riff and Sonya Willington at the libraries. You are in for a treat. You are in for some enjoyment and this important conversation that I'm going to have with this wonderful, engaging and brilliant person. I am so glad that you can be witness to this. So I am especially excited to introduce even further our guest, the great, the brilliant, the accomplished and cultural changing, Joe Trotter, to talk to you about exploring the Black urban experience in Pittsburgh. But first, let me say a couple things about who this man is. From the moment I came here to CMU, when I came in, folks kept saying to me, Wanda, you have to meet Joe Trotter. And after a while, I was like, well, who is this Joe Trotter? And I started Googling. And I'm like, I want to know who this person is. And from the moment things started popping up, I was like, oh, he's amazing. I already can tell. And so it was very early on of my arrival, I had to start to plan with some great colleagues here and partners, our Juneteenth event. And we did not have a lot of time. And someone said, well, I think Joe might be able to help somewhat with that. And I was finally introduced to Joe. And when I was introduced to Joe, Joe made himself not really knowing me from, you know, the pin that's on my desk right here. He immediately made himself available to introduce me to some folk to talk about how the program could look and align it with our values and our goals. And I quickly learned that this is why folks thought Joe, and is, and is certainly thinking he is amazing and the person that I should have known a long time ago. And so I'm very excited about being able to have this conversation with Joe and to have him open himself up even more to everyone. So not only is Joe is brilliant and accomplished scholar and author who has published multiple books. He has also created the Center for African American Urban Studies, aka Cause, C-A-U-S here at CMU. And not to mention that he is nationally renowned. He's a nationally renowned figure and is filled and has played a vital role in shaping national organizations. And I'm sure we're going to hear some more about that. He'll be talking to us more about his recent and incredible honor that Keith mentioned, that was bestowed upon him by the American Historical Association. Folks, on this call, we are in for a treat. And I'm going to have him say a little bit more at the right time, or I'm going to have a question about winning this award, the John Lewis Award for History and Social Justice from the American Historical Association. This is huge. Yes, let's wipe our eye. I am one of those people, like many people who might be on this call, who have had the chance to not only meet John Lewis, but to really be in conversation with him a couple of times where he has given me, he gave me a couple of tips about staying in this effort to make the world society better for all of us. So I can't wait to ask you about how that feels. But before we get really started, I think it's important that I would like for you, Joe, my guest, my friend, to lay a little foundation for us. Take a few minutes, several minutes, to share an update about what you're doing. Tell us a little bit about what's going on. I know you have a book that's coming out and share some thoughts with us. So then we'll take that and dive into a deeper conversation about Joe Trotter and looking at, you know, when exploring Pittsburgh and the city. So I'm turning it over to you to get us started. Okay. Okay. Very good. Well, thanks very much, Mando, for those extraordinary remarks, introductory remarks. I really appreciate it. But I also appreciate the work that you were doing. I mean, you have made an impact, as Keith said, on our community. And I'm just delighted that you were, you decided to come to Carnegie Mellon. So I've been here for a long time. It was good to see you come on board. Okay. But yeah, let me just say a word about the John Lewis award. I just have to say this to get this out. You know, I've been married John Lewis, like so many of us for years and years. And what really strikes me about his career is that he got into the struggle early. He paid a heavy price in terms of attacks on his body. And of course, you know, you could expect that he might have even been somewhat, you know, dispirited by his experiences, but he never relented. And over the long haul, he continued to be the same determined John Lewis to break down barriers, eliminate inequality to the end of his life. And so I am just delighted to be named in after that award after John Lewis. So it's just a great honor. But there's another reason I want to say I'm honored by this award because when you go into academia and, you know, you go into higher education, there's a way in which the discipline of research and writing can actually take away from time that you might want to spend in the community organizing and working with people one on one. And so some ways I'm really pleased by this award because I had to make a decision about the way I sort of distributed my time between the archives, the libraries, the writing, the teaching and the research and the kind of on the ground community to organizing that I had been engaged in in the earlier years. And for a while back in graduate school, I actually thought that, you know, this might not be the route for me, you know, that I don't know if I can be separated, you know, in the library too much from our people's struggles. So when I decided that, well, this is another front of the struggle and that this can really add to the struggle, then I came to reconcile myself to this career that I cut out, carved out for myself. And so this award sort of certifies me in a way that I feel very good about. So thank you. Yes, it did. Yes, it has. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah. But in terms of things that I'm working on now, you want me to say a little bit about that? A little bit about what you're working on now and what else you would like to share setting the foundation for our conversation about exploring the Black Pittsburgh and as well as your work in terms of in a more of a broader level. Okay. Well, I just want people to know that I have been at Carnegie Mellon since 1985. So I have a long history at this university. And during that time, I have tried to retain a commitment or focus on creating scholarship that addresses not only the academy and learning, but also enhances the fight and the struggle for social justice on the ground. And so in recent years, I've started to do a little bit more on that front. And over the last two and a half years, I want to share later on some work that we're doing on reparations. Because I've been around long enough to know when reparations was a great part of our movement during the Black Power era and how it came into focus and then it dissipated. And then later on, it came back into focus during the late 20th century when Randall Robinson produced that book called The Debt. We thought we were on our way toward a more dynamic reparations movement. And then 9-11 hit. And I think all bets were off for some people who wanted to support this movement, feeling that it was time to really prioritize the nation in some way. So that movement dissipated again. And now in the wake of COVID and George Floyd and all of these changes, reparations is back on the agenda. And it is really moving forward, as you all know, across the country. People are forging different kinds of reparations movement locally. And all of those movements have some role to play in the broader national push for reparation for African people who experience enslavement. So that's where I am now. And I can talk more about that later. Okay. Thank you. Well, you know what? What I'm going to do is set up a little bit of the current. Take us back a little bit. Tell us a little bit more. Where are you from? How did you get to this path? I mean, I've heard a few things from you before about your journey and where you're from and how you ended up in this career. Can you share with us a little bit about your upbringing and what led you down this path first? Yes. I'm happy to share with you. First of all, I want people to know I'm a product of Southern West Virginia coal mining country. I came from a family of 14 siblings in Southern West Virginia as far south in West Virginia as you can go without being in Virginia. And so that experience was pretty informative for me. It really created a sensibility about working class life that I carried forward. But there were some other ways in which that environment, it didn't predict at all that I would ever, ever aspire to be a university professor. That was not in my environment at that time. I want to throw you off, Joe, but where did you fit in those 14? What number were you? I'm number six. I'm number six. There were 10 girls, five girls older than me and five younger than me. And then I have three brothers who were younger than I am. I was the oldest son, which meant that in terms of packing order, I've got a lot of privileges within that context. But anyhow, just to let you know, actually, I intended to become a brick mason, a skilled brick mason in West Virginia as a young person, teenager. We had a trade school that I attended to learn the art of brick making. I'm brick masonry. And my parents decided that my mother decided that she was going to move her family away from West Virginia to Ohio and sort of the northeastern part of Ohio. And they didn't have a brick mason course or training. And so I decided to move into much more of an academic kind of curriculum. But I still wasn't bound for a college. I was planning to go into the Air Force. That was going to be my career. And as it turned out, my mother took me to recruiting station during my 11th, no 12th grade year, about three months before I graduated to sign me up for the military. And that office was closed. And I went back to class that next day. And I happened to have been on a class that my football coach taught. It was a class in geography. I never missed class. And on that day, he said, where were you, Joe? I missed you yesterday. You weren't in class. I said, I know I wasn't in class. I went to sign up for the Air Force. And he had this worried look on his face. And he said, the Air Force, he said, if at all possible, you should go to college. And so between that statement and my conversation with my mother and her conversation with my aunt, they turned my life around. I decided to go to college. And my aunt lived in Evanston, Illinois. And so that's where I migrated the day after graduation, in fact, got on a Greyhound bus headed to Evanston. And I went to school there to a two-year college, not to Northwestern. I know everybody think, oh, Northwest, no, I worked in the cafeteria at Northwestern and put myself through junior college on the edge of the Northwestern campus. So that's how I got into the academic realm. And then I went on to get a degree teaching history, taught history in a high school for six years before going to graduate studies. Why history? Why history? Even as I was studying Brigh Masonry in West Virginia, I was always very, very interested in, of course, they call civics, which had a lot of history embedded in it. And I got interested in that and it stayed with me. And in West, in Ohio, a town called Newcomers Town, that's where we moved. We were the newcomers. There was an extraordinary history teacher there who sort of encouraged my interest in history. And so I did very well in my courses in Ohio. And it positioned me to actually, you know, apply for college, something I hadn't intended to do. And so, you know, I think about the fact that you're here with us. I mean, you were here way before I was at CMU. You're here. How'd you get here and you're still here? Like, I'm gonna assume you really like CMU. Yeah, that is a story to tell. I know it's too long for me to tell you all of it. But actually, I took my first job as a University of California, Davis. I went to Davis after earning my PhD at the University of Minnesota. But that was in 1980 when I went to Davis. I stayed there about five years. I received tenure at Davis and left the year I received tenure for Carnegie Mellon. I'll have to admit to everyone on the screen that it wasn't my intent. My wife, by the way, I want to say my wife and I, we were married for 49 years until she recently passed away two years ago this month. And I just want to say that because all of the things that I might say about I did this, I did that, you guys can read into it that she was there. She may have done more of it than he would ever admit. But that's the way it was. She was really supportive of everything I undertook in my career. And she was supportive and helped to move things forward. But anyhow, we didn't expect to stay in Pittsburgh. You probably kept you in check a little bit too. You probably kept you in check a little bit, that's what I said. But some things changed in Pittsburgh for us and we decided to stay. And let me tell you one of the things that made it possible for me to stay was Carnegie Mellon's history department. Many of you know that during the period that I came to Pittsburgh and just shortly before I came, history was undergoing a tremendous change. And we were beginning to talk about it's time to really look at history from the bottom up. That was the big push. That was the wave of the future. We've had enough with presidents and corporate leaders and all of that. We need to get down into the grassroots and look at life from the vantage point of the steel mills, the lumber camps, the coal mine, the railroad track and all of that. And so that and it was very prominent in our department. That history was welcomed with open arms. And so I found a place to do African-American labor and urban history in sync. And I had colleagues there, Joe Tarr, who was a senior colleague who just retired, was a pioneer in the development of urban history and even later technology and the environment. And he was very supportive in my career here. But also fortunately for me, one of my mentors at the University of Minnesota had moved to Pittsburgh and took a job at Carnegie Mellon. And so there are a lot of factors that played a role in me staying here. But I'll just underscore this. The opportunity to launch a center for the study of African-Americans in cities, that was the real hook that made it possible for me to stay here. And I'd like to say more about that later. But those are the factors. Well, you know what? We're not even going to go with the later. I actually want you to go into talking a little bit, because I'm moving us closer to where we're at. Tell us a little bit about the center. Can you talk a little bit about cause? Share. Okay. Let me tell you, when I got here, I think there was one other African-American historian on the faculty. And he specialized in French history, but was teaching African history. And so when I looked around the university, frankly, there weren't a lot of people doing African-American studies across the board. And so one of the factors in creating this center is that if I'm going to have a life here, then it looks like we're going to have to create some new programs and opportunities. And so the center was created strategically with the idea, well, there was several objectives. But one of the objectives was to launch what we call a speaker series and a postdoc tool fellowship. And what that meant is that although we didn't have a lot of scholars working in this field, we could bring them to Carnegie Mellon and we could introduce them, you know, to our students, to graduate students, faculty, and we would open it up to the public. And so from the beginning, we believed that it was essential that we create a mailing list that brought people to Carnegie Mellon from a broad range of community-based organizations, institutions, and walks of life. So we merged our community work with our scholarship by making this groundbreaking scholarship that all of these people were doing, making it available for everyone to come in, listen to the lecture, and participate in the discussion. So that was one of the factors driving the development of CALLS. But on the intellectual side, though there's an intellectual side, and that is when I mentioned this history from the bottom up, this working class history, that was one reason we wanted to bring the center into being is so that we could really showcase a lot more of this scholarship to the local community. And intellectually, and I'm going to make this point then we can go forward. But when I arrived in Pittsburgh, historians had already started to produce a substantial body of urban research. But as historians, we didn't always take our story forward into the present and help people grapple with their lives on the ground. And because Pittsburgh was undergoing this tremendous change from the industrial to the post-industrial period, we believed that we had to create mechanisms for us to really merge historical studies with more contemporary investigations of the Black experience by sociologists, by anthropologists, and by a variety of other disciplines. And so we were committed to bringing historical research into conversation with people who were working on the ground to understand the changes that were transforming the city and its African American community. Now, thank you for sharing that. And without even knowing it, you have really set me up for my next question and really starting to dig into sort of this exploring the Black urban experience in Pittsburgh. I mean, you're here. You've just sort of teed us up in terms of what was happening in terms of your interest, your arrival, and what work you were working on. Sure. Sure. Sure. We're the folks who are watching and listening in at this moment. What might be some key thoughts or key points that you want to share about the Black urban experience in Pittsburgh? What did you notice? What did you feel? What were people talking about? What do you want us to think about in terms of this topic, this experience? That's an excellent question. I didn't come to Pittsburgh to work on African American life in Pittsburgh. The truth is I came to Pittsburgh to work on Alabama. I had already started a book that was researching the experiences of African Americans in Birmingham, Montgomery, and Mobile during the period between the First and Second World War. It's like war and the Depression years. I wanted to do that in Alabama. Why did I want to do it in Alabama? Because I had just completed my first book, Black Milwaukee, the Making of an Industrial Proletariat, was published in 1985 when I came to Pittsburgh. I wanted to use that understanding of a Northern urban Black community and a Northern urban Black working class. I wanted to use that to understand how it may have functioned differently if we look at the Deep South. I was interested in going to the Deep South and studying those cities and comparing those cities to Milwaukee. But along the way, however, it occurred to me that working on the Deep South would produce a set of results that were based on the Deep South. That might look very different if you looked at the Upper South, Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, West Virginia. For the second book that I did, I actually decided to do coal miners in West Virginia as a way to look at Black life in an Upper South environment. But in this case, I had to come to grips with the reality that life in West Virginia for most Black people was life in a sort of a rule setting, but industrial work, so that you know you got this sort of mix. Coal miners were industrial workers in a real way, but at the same time, they were situated in a rural environment. And so I had thought trying to make sense of that experience. And then the effort would be once I understand better something about the Upper South, the Deep South, the North, I would write a large book that looked at the experiences of Black people in across the United States, especially on the East Coast. I wasn't interested in necessarily going West and adding that Western piece because that seemed like it was going to take a lifetime. So I thought I would let my friend do the Western piece. And by the way, when I was on the West Coast in California, I actually helped organize seminar series on Blacks in the urban West. And so I felt that my colleagues on the West Coast were taking care of that part. And so the national study that I planned to do was going to be a study that took advantage of this research and talk about Black life in comparative terms and not assume that African American life across the nation was the same. Even though we wanted to know the connection between what was similar, I also was interested in what was different. So that I'll stop there. You know, I have another question here that kind of continues with this, but I also want to, this is a great time for me to now just remind the audience to submit some questions. I see some coming in, but it's a good time to start thinking about what your questions are. You don't get every day to be able to kind of have this kind of conversation with Dr. Trotter. Am I correct? You're in the process of publishing a new book? Yes, I am. And, you know, I use that book as the foundation for my urban History Association presidential address. And the book is in preliminary form right now. But I use that address to sort of put the ideals in that environment and larger environment so that people can respond to those ideals before I actually revive this whole thing and put it into the, you know, the public realm. And by the way, the Journal of Urban History, the editor there was very, I would say forthcoming generous. He's going to allow six major scholars in the field of African American urban history to read my address and to respond to it in the journal. And so he's going to publish a form around that address. And it's going to be around the notion of the Black City and how do we understand the Black City and why are we talking about a Black City? You know, as one of my colleagues said, Black people don't control very many cities at all. And especially historically, so the power was always predominantly in the hands of white elite urbanites. So why are we talking about building the Black City? What are we talking about? So that form is an effort to define what we mean when we say the Black City. Many of you already know the term Black Metropolis. I mean, St. Claude Drake and Horace R. Cayton, famous sociologists, anthropologists of the 1930s and 40s wrote this book called Black Metropolis on Chicago. And they defined the Black City in different ways. But fundamentally, they emphasized that the Black City was a city within the city, within a particular space. You know, it was kind of a physical space that they documented at one level. But at the same time, they flipped that space over on his head and talked about Bronzeville, a sort of cultural phenomenon within the context of this creation of a city within the city. And so I'm trying to historicize this whole thing by taking the story from the beginning of the colonial period when cities in America and colonial British America in many ways started and how they developed to this present day. Thank you. Thank you. Well, I am feeling, I want to follow up on that, but I am feeling like my own pressure. I see these questions coming in. So I want to share a few questions from the audience. So some of their questions can be answered. And it might mean we're kind of jumping around a little bit, but we're going to be also responding to the audience as well here. So here's a question that I think that is folks would like to have an answer to. I would like Dr. Trotter to explain his vision of how structural racism remains a crucial strength of CMU's history department, even as the university continues to emphasize science and technology in every college, how the study of structural racism remains a crucial strength. In our department. Yeah. Well, let me tell you, I appreciate that question a lot because Carl has, I think, played a role in this over the years. And I think the one reason I mentioned already is that our department, when I came here, it had actually turned the corner on the kind of history that would be taught here and the kind of scholars who would be recruited into the program. And so during my time here, we'll recruit scholars who pretty much endorse this ideal that class matters. Not everybody endorses it in the same strength or way, but that class and racial dynamics matter and that we should be paying attention to those things in our research. But let me say that the struggle continues even within the context of our own department, but we're doing better now. We've lost a few people, then we recruited some people. Right now, we'll say that we'll position pretty well because our department head, Nico Slade, there's a specialist in South Asian, India, civil rights struggles, politics, culture, and African American civil rights struggles in politics. So we have a strength there, and he is doing an amazing job training on the next generation of young graduate students, and his graduate students are quite diverse. So we know that and now we got a new recruit, Isael Sanford, that came on board a couple of years ago, and Isael is on the cutting edge of finishing a new book that has to do with African American healthcare in historical perspective, focused on Homo G Phillips Hospital in St. Louis, one of those historic black hospitals that played an amazing role in working on issues of healthcare and training of doctors and nurses in that 20th century era before it closed during the late 20th century. So we've got some strength, and we've got Etta Field who works on African history, but who is also shading over into US history, US African American history with her parent's study on Harriet Tubman. So thanks for that question. I think we have to continue to be vigilant and think about the ways that we need to continue to build around this area. And one of the things we lost when Tara Hunter left Carnegie Mellon, she was a leading figure in the history of black women in the industrial period, the Jim Crow era, and we never quite recruited again in that gender capacity. We need that. And I think that probably is one of the things that we'll need to put on the horizon is to really sort of bring that coterie of specialists together at Carnegie Mellon. And I think this could be a really attractive place for young people seeking to go into these fields. Thank you, Dr. Trotter. I also like to think the fact that you're here, and of course, I'm here, and many others are here. So, you know, I'll add that in there, you know? I'm going to take another question too from the audience that's here because I want to be able to get some of them in. This question says, Professor Trotter, I have been so excited about how African American studies have become so prevalent in today's schools and society over the last few decades. Recently, there has been a movement to devalue the importance of African American history to the US. What is your advice on what we can do as individuals, parents, and community members to ensure this does not continue to happen? Yeah, I think we just have to fight to retain, you know? We made some progress, but we, even in the midst of this reaction against what we've been doing, you know, instituting more rigorous understandings of the Black experience into the curriculum. We hadn't gone far enough yet, and then you have to face these kind of challenges. So, I would say take good stock of where things stand at this moment, and just determine not to let it slip any further, and then get on the offensive instead of the defensive, and to begin thinking of ways to advance this project of diversifying the curriculum, making all people's voices visible and heard, and acknowledging that there are diverse communities in the United States that have actually helped to build the country. Thank you. I'm going to pause for a quick second from the audience question, and I want to take us back to something you said in thinking about this Black city and the Black metropolitan, or just thinking about this in the terms of Pittsburgh and the environment, the community that we're in. Is there a Black city within the city of Pittsburgh? Yes, my definition of a Black city definitely Pittsburgh has a Black city, and we are actually collaborating with a number of colleagues. We're working together on a study that we're calling the new history of Black Pittsburgh, and this new history of Black Pittsburgh that we're working on was really inspired by the reparations movement. And so we're looking back at Pittsburgh's Black history from the vantage point in many ways of how were African-Americans disadvantaged, exploited, and exposed to systems of inequality over the long period from the colonial beginning to the present. But yes, I do argue that we, and see, this is the argument. Let me back up. One of the reasons that I'm pushing this Black city idea, and I've got company, by the way, there are some other scholars who have been pushing this Black city idea. That's right, do tell, do tell. Marcus Hunter and Zendriel Robinson, two scholars who are sociologists with a historical orientation. They have produced a book called The Chocolate City, that they say something like the Black map of America. And so they also make the argument that we have to start uncovering the dynamics of this Black city. And the way in which I define the Black city is that there are two things. When you think of reparations, something we need to make sure that everybody gets this. When we think of reparations, and we're trying to make a strong case for redress and for Black people getting compensated for past wrongs, we almost always have to show the most difficult and most painful and the most destructive side of African-American life, right? So what I'm saying about the Black city is that even as Blacks endure all those painful, what we call impacts from racial capitalism, they did not sit still. They marshal the megal resources that they had at their disposal, and they launch movements to build their own city. And the way I define it is that the building of the Black infrastructure and I'm talking about churches, eternal orders, all kinds of voluntary renewal, your enterprise. When you look at the history of Blacks creating institutions, almost all of those institutions set as an agenda item, the building of their own building. And if they didn't build it themselves, they occupied or bought buildings and occupied those. I'm saying that this history of building the Black city is not something that we should dismiss lightly. Building Black churches impacted the landscape. It shaped the way we see the city. And most often we have privileged the large corporate elite kinds of structures, government, business, social service activities. And we have underplayed the degree to which Black people built on that environment and impacted that environment in a way that shaped the lives of many African-Americans. And in fact, the lives of many whites to tell the truth, because we have to think about the resources that Black people invested into building these institutions. And so that's where I am on the Black city. But I argue that it wasn't just the physical building that was important to African-Americans. It was also the virtual dimensions of those enterprises. And in fact, if you look at the church, it was sort of a double impact. They were in some ways rejecting a religion of white supremacy by building their own church, their own independent church movement. And by rejecting white supremacist religion, they were also building a physical infrastructure for their people, which in turn impacted questions of economics, employment, and all of that. And so now I just want to call people's attention to a new book that I just ordered. I'm giving you guys this, this is Fresh Off the Press. It's a book by James West. And it's called A House for the Struggle, the Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago. And it talks about this entrepreneurial impact on the Black city. And so we have, I think, now beginning to develop a literature that allows us to look at the Black community in a different way. And you know, when I wrote about the ghetto back in 1985 in Black Milwaukee, we couldn't even think about the Black urban experience without thinking about all the wrong things that had accompanied Black migration into the city. There was all about segregation of Blacks in the worst housing and all of that. That's true. But then we missed a big picture, how Black people were carving out a space and all of that. That's right. You know? And so that's where I am. Okay. Well, my heart is like, my heart is like beating really fast because so many things are coming up in my mind. Like for instance, you know, I often talk about Trevion Trotter's work and talking about asset framing. And from the standpoint as framing it's linked to how folks describe Black African American men. And I sort of transfer that to the idea or that thinking about how we as a group, and this can be transferred to other groups, but very specifically Black African Americans, sometimes the idea folks are starting with the most negative or the things that don't, you know, feel as good rather than the things that we have done well. And the things that have assisted this society, this country and other countries to flourish, to thrive, that the footprint of Blacks and African Americans are all over this place from whether it's music, food, religion, you know, the sciences, the technology and all those kinds of things in which it kind of goes back to, you know, earlier question about, you know, how do we make sure that people don't devalue history and are unwilling to listen and read and hear about history and thinking about our current climate and how things are going on and what's going on. And so it's all linked and it's also really helping people to have an understanding that this is so important to know and understand in order to get to the place of belonging and inclusion and unity. And it's also important in education for those who don't know to understand how much it has cost them of not knowing about others more than, you know, about others other than just themselves. And so someone wrote in terms of the question, you know, just this, you know, about Black music being important on the scene as you were talking about, you know, the Black church and how important Black music is. And I'm not sure if you, you know, have any thoughts, but I also, in thinking about time, I wanted to also make sure I gave you a moment here too if there was more that you wanted to say about your address that you did. And it may be all wrapped up around the reparations, but music and then it's, is there more that you want to shape your about your work? Yeah, I really appreciate your comments that you just made all of that, you know, music to my ears. Okay. And the reason let me tell you why, because I think that, you know, the reparations argument, we have to keep it upfront, you know, exploitation, inequality, all of that. And I think that some people fear that if you accent all this creativity, and in real ways, success of Black people and doing things, that it's going to diminish the case. So if you were so creative in the context of all this, and you were so energetic, then why do you need reparations? You know, some people on the extreme opposite side of the reparations argument might try to undercut, you know, the, the, the case that we make on the basis of exploitation. But for me, I'm beginning to say all this creativity is just another piece that makes the case for reparations, all that much more powerful, rather than diminishing it. So yeah, so I think that there's a lot going on in there. I'm not a musicologist or whatever, in that respect. But I do believe that it fits into what I would call the cultural dimension of the city, Black city building process. And I think it's also closely tied in with the church at the level of gospel music, but it's also closely tied into, you know, jazz and blues and all the others. And when we think about the venues for these particular forms of music, we're looking at another way in which there's a blend of the physical and cultural impact on the urban environment. Because, you know, these clubs where these musicians played became important fixtures within communities and places where people came to invest with a great deal of value, you know, and so that, so when we reconsider out thinking about the way Black people acted in cities, they were not acted, simply acted upon, they were acting and transforming and shaping and moving the city in a way that was really in many ways out of the control of their, you know, of the capitalist in some way. So they were exercising influence that many people would have preferred they didn't, you know, but they did. And so I just think we need to bring all this into much greater prominence in the way we think about the city. The city wasn't made just by elites and the people with money to invest in large numbers, it was made by grassroots people, everyday people, working people who wanted a church, wanted a club, wanted a business, wanted something else. And they went about using what they had to do it. Thank you. I have two questions. One you'll have to answer really fast because they're probably pushing me to finish. But I thought it was an important question and I kind of saved it a little bit next to the last and, and, and because I've heard you speak before, but someone asked the question related to, you know, you know, I like to talk about getting into good trouble, necessary trouble and those things around John Lewis and his and Rosa Parks quotes. And, you know, someone asked, since you've chosen your career in academia to have an impact, and as we are, you know, kind of in front of us around freedom of expression and so forth, have you had any challenges around that and saying what you need to say and telling your stories of what you need to, to tell? Just want to honor that question and think about what's happening in today's world. You know, I am a historian and one of the things we try to do is ground whatever we have to say in some evidence and try to find documentation to help make, make the case. And so I'm, I'm almost, I feel pretty confident once we research, you know, carefully and systematically as we can, we have to use, you know, our perspective on issues to really say what we need to say. And then, you know, the, and by the way, historians, we are always reading and critiquing each other's up and down. And so I'm willing to be exposed, you know, to the criticism. And I invite it because if people are going to make a case against some of the arguments that you make, then they have to make a case. They can't just say it. They have to do the work. And so I think that's an important part of what I would say to all of us who have ideals that we think are unpopular and that people want to resist. If you make your case, support your case and put it out there. Put it out there. As forcefully as you can. Yeah. Thank you. So here's my last question really quickly because it started back to Dean Webster mentioning in his introductory remarks about the university archives and has acquired your academic papers. What does that mean to you? What does it mean about your scholarship and what, you know, in the foundation it will provide for the next generation? How has that impacted you in the hope for the work that your, your papers are being archived? I am delighted that you would ask that question because in my career, as you can see earlier, I said, I never thought that I would be in a position where I thought putting my papers in an archive would serve, you know, some future generations. But now I do feel very strongly about the work that I've done. And by the way, the work that I've done, I feel like it's part of a cohort of late 20th century and early 21st century scholars in my age group. One of the things we need to keep in mind is that Black people became a predominantly urban people later than the country. So we became predominantly urban by the mid 20th century. And, and just to backtrack it from the Civil War to 1965 was a great migration of Black people gradually transforming from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban population. But we're talking about 100 years of history. Now think about it. Most of Black history, most of the evidence, most of the stories, most of the books, all of the print is based upon that first 300 or 400 years of Black experience as agricultural workers, first enslaved and then germ quote, right? And so this period that I and my cohort work on is an important period. And in many ways, when we look back over our lives, we have to believe that we were sort of doing something that was breaking ground. And so that's why I thought that my papers might be interesting because it's sort of documents a moment for people like myself who are taking the city seriously. Nobody did that very much before the 20th century. They thought they could write Black urban history off as being of little consequence. And now because we know something about urbanization, we're beginning to uncover it for every moment from the colonial period all the way to the present. And that's why I think these papers will be important at some level. At least I hope they will be important for people to get a handle on some of this. Well, thank you. I'm sure I know that they're going to be important. They are already are important. Time runs goes by so quick. At this point in time, I just want to thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Trotter, for all that you have done and all that you're teaching us and will continue to teach us. It has been lovely to speak to you. I want to thank the vice provost for DNI and Chief Diversity Officer team for supporting, heading to the point. And what I would say to everyone is have a good evening. And the next time you're in any kind of deep conversation, get to that point. Head to that point. Thank you all very, very much. Good night. Thank you very much.