 That was pretty spectacular. Or a name in lights. I once spoke at the National Trust before, when it was in Minneapolis and it was at a theater where Cab Calloway once performed. And so my name was actually on the marquee and then there was a picture inside of the historic theater with Cab Calloway's marquee, name on the marquee. I thought, I was really impressed with myself. But this was pretty good too. I have a task today to bring together two ideas. And you'll tell me at the end if I succeeded. The one idea is that this is the 400th anniversary of the first landing of Africans at Jamestown. And I'm part of a project called 400 Years of Inequality which has called on the nation to think about the impact of this. We lift up inequality in the title of our project because we believe that inequality is the great lingering harm of slavery. That the lie that some people were inferior to other people justified both slavery and taking of native lands to create the great plantations of that era. The point of this project is to invite everybody into observance. The second part of my charge this morning is to talk about saving urban neighborhoods. And what I would like to suggest is that these two things come together and that this observance of Jamestown gives us a key for saving threatened neighborhoods. I'm a psychiatrist as you saw and have studied cities with a very renowned French urbanist, Michel Cantal-Dupar who taught me that the great harm that was challenging neighborhoods was fracture in the city. We have fractured our city along lines of nationality, race, class, age. We don't all live in the same city. We live in different segments of the city. And that if we wanna have vital cities, this is the problem we must solve. In the course of my studies, I thought it would be good to try to figure out what were the principles that people were using, people who were trying to bring cities back together to undo this fracturing of the city. And there were nine that I have identified and I thought of these as elements. And I went to medical school, I had a lot of science classes. So one night late, I was working on the book, I was like, I need a periodic table of the elements of urban restoration. So this is the periodic table of the elements of urban restoration. There are many more elements to be discovered but this is the starter kit. The first one that I wanna talk about, I'm only gonna talk about two today, is called city and mind. Because living in pieces of the city, we don't actually think about the whole city. The problem of segregation is that it gets inside our heads and we each live in the piece that's accorded to our race, class, gender, religious, blah, blah, blah, little tiny piece of the world. So how do you start to think about the whole city? My research team and I, we didn't know how to do this ourselves and the way we started was that the photograph that you see was hanging on the wall in our office and it shows Northern Manhattan. You actually can't see in the photo that there are two neighborhoods there. One is Washington Heights, one is Harlem, never the twain shall meet. 155th Street is the absolute separator. Obviously looking at the photo, this is imaginary. There is no such demarcation. You can see, however, that on the redlining maps there was such a demarcation. And redlining maps are one of the manifestations of the separation of our cities into pieces. Redlining maps were created by surveying neighborhoods and looking for old buildings and poor people of color because those were the things you didn't wanna have. And so this forum this morning is actually about the redlined neighborhoods. In that neighborhood at that time, there was a terrible violence epidemic related to a crack epidemic, which was related to the AIDS epidemic. And so we were trying to understand this flurry of epidemics in the late 80s, early 90s as well as what it was doing to the neighborhood. One of the things it did was that it led to the abandonment of the parks. We became very interested in a park that was about four blocks over from our offices called Highbridge Park. And we also realized that Highbridge Park was a little sliver park on a cliff side and that it was connected, almost connected, to the Fort Triune, which is where the famous Cloisters are. And then going south to Jackie Robinson Park to St. Nicholas Park to Morningside Park to Central Park. So we got this idea that we should make a trail as part of our effort to make the parks which had been abandoned a site of reinvestment. These are all historic, beautiful parks where the people feared to go. This is something that we found this quite amazing drawing in a homeless shelter that people had created in Highbridge Park. This is the ruins of a historic set of stairs from a terrace down to the bridge which I'll talk about in a moment. And this is what people thought. I think this park is scary because you might find something poisonous and it can get you poisoned and you can die. That's how people felt about the park. That's how terrifying it was. It was a site of death. To change this, my colleague, Lourdes Rodriguez, said we have to actually take people into the park and we have to do an exorcism of this spirit of death. The first people we took were ourselves and we had many great adventures. And one of the things we found was how extraordinarily beautiful these parks were. And we brought other people. We do an annual festivity called Hiked the Heights and this is our first Hiked the Heights and having balloons and magicians and food and good things started to change the feeling. One of the projects we did was called Climb Double Take. We went with some great photographers and took pictures of things that were in the park so nobody had ever seen them and we made huge giant banners with the idea that when people saw these things, they would do a double take. They would say, I didn't know that was in there and then they would want to go into the parks and see the thing. These are two of the photos from Climb Double Take. We also asked some teenagers to make a movie which is called Road to Recovery and it's a beautiful movie of their thoughts and feelings as they spent a summer exploring the parks and trying to think about what the parks meant. Our trail is in the shape of a giraffe or so we think and so another thing that we did with arts organizations was to teach children how to make paper mache giraffes. Every year it was a new style of paper mache giraffes and these would be placed out in the parks for Hiked the Heights. The trail eventually became known as Giraffe Path and I just want to say this is a community project. We never had any money. We just loved the parks but we just kept working at it year after year after year and we were quite delighted this summer when the New York Times came out with an article on five hikes you could take in New York City that would make you feel like you weren't in the city and one of them was ours and I just want to show you this little video of our path. The little red line is the path and so this leads us to the ninth element of urban restoration which is that you have to celebrate your achievements and one of the things is you have to actually celebrate all the time because these, as all of you know, are very long and very hard struggles and if you didn't celebrate all the time you would just get weary and go do something else and this is some of the things that we're celebrating. The stairs that I showed you were restored. We were part of the coalition to reopen the High Bridge which was the Historic Aqueduct which first brought clean water into New York City and this is a celebration where two of the leaders were meeting in the middle and having a big hug and our thank you banner for the workers who actually restored the High Bridge. Moments of great and deep meaning that these abandoned parks could be brought back into the life of the community in places that felt safe, that felt joyous, that felt useful and that where their essential function of connecting the city, connecting the parks to one another, connecting the neighborhoods to the park, connecting us to nature, connecting us to other boroughs, this essential feature of connection was restored. This is what has to happen. This is what urban restoration is. If you want to save urban neighborhoods it's all about restoration which brings us to Jamestown because the issue is how did we get so divided? Where does it come from? And as I mentioned at the beginning this comes from Jamestown. Jamestown is a peculiar and little understood moment. The official literature from Jamestown about the anniversary from the powers that be said that this was an anniversary of democracy, discovery and diversity and the diversity was that the Africans landed and so we thought that that's really quite a distortion of the story and the source of the problem. One of the first things that we did was ask graduate students at the new school if they would make a timeline of the 400 years. We actually started, did I do that? I don't think I did. You saw it, right? Brent says it was magic. I'm so discombobulated. I was telling this terrible story and all of a sudden this magical light. Okay, back to my terrible story. The Americas are not a tabula rasa where people from England, France, Spain, land to bring civilization and religion to nobody who's there. They're a place where people are living. Millions of people are living here and they have a way of life. In 1607, when English landed Jamestown and declared in the name of the queen, maybe it was a king by then, the Pohatan nation is there, is living there and so they are literally taking the land. They don't come to say, oh, you've got a really nice place here. How do we join you? Could we live here? Could you teach us how to hunt? That's not what they were doing. They wanted to create plantations and they wanted to send wealth back to England. That's what they were sent for. So we're immediately in war. The war is on several levels, a war between the English and the native people but it's also in a war with the ecology. Within several decades, not that many, the ecosystem has been completely altered. An interesting fact is that there were no honeybees in the Americas prior to the English coming. And so as the English and the French and the Spanish as settlement would advance, the bees would start to show up and the native people called them the English flies and saw them as harbingers of disaster because settlement was coming. It is, the natives from Africa are brought over in chains to work on plantations. Where do the plantations come from? They come from taking, usurping the land of the Pohatin natives. It is a very chaotic, very troubling period and part of the response to the chaos is to invent rules. And how do you invent rules to do something that's immoral, illegal and dangerous and horrible? One of the rules that they invented was that Africans were not fully human. And native people were not fully human. They were savage brutes who needed to be civilized and would be helped by having white people take care of them. Neither the native people nor the Africans ever believed this. Women were treated similarly, the women didn't believe it. Nobody believes it except the people who are telling the lie but they tell it often enough and then they write it in important documents so that it becomes how things are done. If you look at this timeline closely and it's on our website 400yearsofinequality.org and you're welcome to download it, to print it, to show it to people, to examine it, we welcome that. You see women getting hung for witchcraft and Hutchison being chased out of Massachusetts because they don't like her religion. There's all kinds of ways in which the struggle for domination is being enacted with inequality at its core. Inequality, as I mentioned about the redlining maps, is literally mapped onto our cities. The United States government sends out surveyors to look at neighborhoods and to rate them for the presence of old buildings and undesirable elements. It's too far away, I can't read it and you can't see it either. But this explains the system of rating. They didn't say that people who had limited means were happy to have these buildings and were creating communities, which is the story of every poor community everywhere in the world. They said these were undesirable elements and they gave the places where they lived a D rating, those are the places colored red. And the point of it was to say don't invest in these neighborhoods. Any rational person would think the oldest neighborhoods with the most problems in the housing stock would get the most investment, but quite the opposite. The investment was to go to the green areas which were for white people in new buildings and with restrictive covenants, covenants that kept out the undesirable elements. One of the questions on the survey asks is there infiltration? Infiltration, who infiltrates? Is it somebody looking for a house? It's a spy infiltrates, a disease infiltrates, not people. All of historic preservation is taking place in this context that old buildings are condemned as are undesirable racial elements who might infiltrate into the pure white who live in new places. All of your work, though you may not have conceptualized this way is about this map. But the opposite of that work is the work of so many movements, the civil rights movements, the gay liberation and gay rights movements, the women's movement, all of the movements for religious freedom which have countered this and have been a constant voice in American history saying no, this is not true, this is a lie. And so this 400th anniversary which brings us face to face with the ways in which this lie has been told and is being told over and over and over and over again and has condemned us to be people of no history and no respect for humanity. Molly Rose Kaufman who's co-chair of our project said our urban problems arise from the lie that starts at Jamestown, that some people are better than other people. If we can face the truth, the truth that the founders lied and the truth of our shared humanity, we can survive and prosper. Our project, our call to the nation has reached many, many, many groups and I'm very proud to be here today talking to you about it. And this year, this month of October, we had particularly identified the 12 days from October 12th which is when Columbus discovered America. To October 20th when there'll be a major observance, a solemn occasion at Riverside Church. As the time of observance is and in particular, we called on people to think about the story as it hit their own place. We were inspired in this by the New York Times which you might not think was a beam of light in the struggle for equality, but they looked at their obituary section and they studied it, they counted and they said 80% of our obituaries going back almost 200 years are of men, white men. And we're gonna change that, we're gonna change it going forward and we're gonna have a section called overlooked for obituaries that we forgot to do. And we think that each of us lives in a place, is part of institutions in a place, has a history in a place and is part of the history of the place. And that by examining those stories, those place-based stories, we can find the practices of inequality and we can shift, we can liberate, we can change. If we don't do this, dire things are gonna happen because we have to come together to solve the problems of climate crisis. So I think that I'd like to just end by saying that in Orange, New Jersey, which is my hometown, we have an annual concert called Remembering Rosa in honor of Rosa Parks. We usually do it on December 1st which is the day she did her act of civil disobedience. This year we're gonna do it on December 5th because it's a Thursday. But it turns out December 5th is also a day of incredible historic significance. And those of you who have read Martin Luther King's Stride Toward Freedom know that it's the first day of the boycott and that at 6 a.m. all the leaders of the civil rights movement stood on their porches and watched to see what would happen. Really nervous, would people boycott the buses? And there was 100% boycott, 50,000 black people boycotted the buses in Montgomery to make that great leap forward in civil rights. And we have commissioned a special chorale called The Day of Days in honor of what he called The Day of Days, the first day of the Montgomery bus boycott. This 400 year arc of history starts in something terrible. We must learn this history and we must think about how it has brought us to this moment and to this place. But from this place we are free to go in any direction we collectively choose. And we can in this moment choose to be the history of a just future. Thank you. I'm honored to share the stage this morning with social justice leaders and the historic preservation movement including Anna who is working to preserve historic Chaco Bottom in Richmond, Virginia. You have Sam who is leading efforts to preserve the leasing convict and labor project in Sugarland, Texas. And you have Denise Gilmore who is leading efforts on behalf of the city of Birmingham to restore and preserve the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument. So I just wanna start in context to Mindy's contribution about the 400 year arc of the American experience. And pose this question to each of you. The historic anniversary of 1619 has sparked a national conversation about race, place and identity. And it's fueling new forms of commemoration and interpretation while confronting the miseducation of America. How can the observance of this anniversary help us in our work saving historic urban neighborhoods? Anna. Thank you. And thank you Mindy because you really provided the context because I'm in Virginia. And in Virginia we are in this year sort of consumed by all of the contradictions of trying to acknowledge what happened in 1619. And in the work that we have been doing in Chaco Bottom which was two parts to claim an African American cemetery. Actually it was an African cemetery. And the story of Gabriel's Rebellion which is one of the sort of pivotal stories for Richmond and Virginia that contributes to what we later come to understand or very quickly come to understand is the racial nature of slavery. And by telling the stories of Gabriel's Rebellion in the place where Gabriel died as a result of their attempt to claim freedom in Chaco Bottom. We have created a place and a moment every year where people can reconnect with that history can come to understand that they have somebody to look back to who can begin to unpack the truth of what happened in that period. And so by doing this event that we have done we call it the Gabriel Forum and Commemoration of the African Burial Ground for 17 years that we have been doing it has we have gotten the feedback from the community repeatedly that this is a touch point that really matters and helps them sort of connect to what's happening in the contemporary community and part of that is because along with the education component was actually having to defend this area from inappropriate development because big developers saw that this was a landscape that didn't have anything on it and therefore was entitled to be super developed. So a tiny group of people fought a $385 million project presented three different times. So the connections we were able to make evident through those practices. Power of grassroots activism. Yes, big mouths repeatedly, relentlessly. What about you Sam? One of the things that this anniversary gives us is an opportunity to expand the narrative about our shared history. I said to the group earlier last year the number one movie in the country was Black Panther and everyone was excited about Wakanda, Wakanda forever. But we have communities all over this country and stories that need to be highlighted with superheroes in our families, in our communities, in our states and those stories need to be highlighted. So the 1619 anniversary allows us to highlight those stories to show that we all have a contribution to this American history story. And I'm working on the convict leasing story in Sugarland, also working with the Texas Historical Commission with the Levi Jordan plantation, with the executive director of that site, Chris Elliott and Shannon Smith who are here today that are working to expand the narrative of plantation sites so that we can tell a more complete story and go from just having footnotes to this history to paragraphs, chapters, books that tell the entire story. The National Trust has a hashtag, tell the full story or tell the full history and this is our attempt with this anniversary as the light is shining on the 1619 date that we don't stop with this one year but we continue going forward to tell a more complete story. Denise. Thank you, Brian. It reminds me that while 400 years ago, those more than 20 enslaved people came to Jamestown, primarily to provide free labor to help build wealth for colonists that if we fast forward 400 years, you still largely have black and brown people working at under living wages to provide wealth in a capitalist system. And so through the lens of the work that we're doing, looking at social justice and equity and what does that really mean when you put in practice and to develop our sites in a manner that really lifts up black and brown people, our case in Birmingham, which predominantly lived in this space. Any thoughts, Mindy? The heart of this is, in my view, that inequality is a practice and that by looking at the history, we discern what the practice is and then we find those links in the chain that we can break. Historians try to teach us to be very precise and not just emotional. All my students just want to be emotional but to be like really what exactly did happen? So when you read the story of what exactly did happen at Jamestown, I mean I think the first revelation to me was that they were stealing the land from the Pohatan tribe. And so how do we expand the history? If we're gonna know about African American history, we have to know First Nations history as well. So it's this precision so that we can break the chains. So let's talk about the role of preservation practice to advance equitable revitalization and economic development in urban communities across the country. I'm thinking about the revitalization plan that was recently completed that's looking at preservation efforts in Miami's Little Havana or the equitable development plan that's forthcoming in Chaco Bottom in Virginia or the work to preserve the Hill District in Pittsburgh. So activity all across the country. How do we leverage practice through the lens of equity and social inclusion to bring more resources and support to the efforts that you all are working on? What does that look like today? In Richmond, our group, the Sacred Ground Historical Reclamation Project became a partner with Preservation Virginia primarily because we are not a nonprofit and they are but it allowed us to take advantage of the initiation of the African American Cultural Heritage and Action Fund and so we applied for a grant to do an economic study of the proposal that we had done with community engagement process called the Community Proposal for Chaco Bottom Memorial Park and it was a way to designate, protect, articulate and then work through development process so that we could tell these stories and tell them truthfully in this space and do some of the physical development as well. But the study, we had put out the proposal. The proposal included an aspect of economic development. How would this project further equitable development in the community? And so this grant allowed us to do what we call the two-part study. One was to basically do the work to find out what kind of benefit would be generated by doing this memorial park and its inclusion of a museum on that site. And the other part of it was specifically to seek out people who'd been working around the community on successful equitable urban development projects. So we could say that our intention is that the development of this place would specifically benefit the descendants of those whose benefit was gutted from this site. And so we are in the final phases of the study and pulling it out and what they did was they brought case studies forward, case studies for projects that have worked around the community but also helpful is to have the lessons learned for what doesn't work because it intersects with some of these traditional practices that have their origins in the redlining policies that literally are still ground, the foundation from which all development projects still work. So we're very pleased with what's happened with that so far and look forward to being able to show that this was the next phase in the development of this proposal which came out of the community saying what it wanted for this site and how it wanted to tell this history. I think it's important to have a more inclusive table to allow individuals to speak to their own value too. Too often communities, individuals are devalued and for me personally I share often with individuals that I want not to be seen as more important than you but just to make sure that you don't see me as less important. That all humans are equal in the sense and all of our stories are equal. So in these communities and neighborhoods and even take for instance in Galveston the most famous native son is Jack Johnson but he was not celebrated as the most famous native son. I think when you come onto the island that should be a 70, 80 foot monument to Jack Johnson but the power structure in those individuals that live there didn't see value in his accomplishment and didn't really celebrate that until more recently but it's because of individuals like myself and others being involved and many of the individuals that came before me that had been ringing the bell that Jack Johnson is an important individual not only to the story of Galveston but to the story of America and what happened during the early 1900s and 20th century of his accomplishment at the time. I think going back to that Black Panther example that all children could be inspired by the story of Jack Johnson wanting to just be the best individual boxer that he could be. Would I have wanted him to date my daughter? No, okay, so let's get that on the table but if I was a gambling man and he was in the ring I would be betting on him to win because he was just that accomplished. I think every teacher, historian, garbage man, lawyer, CPA could be inspired to become the very best in the world because that's what happened to Jack Johnson and he became the very best in the world so we shouldn't just celebrate him because he was an African American that became the best. He was a native Galvestonian that became the very best that could inspire all of us and is he a flawed individual like most of our founding fathers and others? Yes, but it doesn't mean that we can't celebrate his successes and see the value in that success and in our communities. Too often speaking of my background is finance, I'm a financial advisor, but I see neighborhoods that have the infusion of the cash of redevelopment and it's like for many communities of river that runs through a community, if you redirect the flow of that water away from the village, the village dries up and dies. The same thing happens in our neighborhoods all around the community that if you cut off the resources to the community, it's gonna drive, you cut off the jobs, you cut off the money, the healthcare, those things are gonna drive the community and of course you're gonna have blight. So what we need to do is our job is to blow up the dam and let the water flow back through the village. Denise, I wanna pivot quickly and build on what Sam was talking about. The challenges that we see, the structural racism that Mindy talked about has resulted in redlining insufficient funding, lack of recognition of diverse urban spaces. What are the challenges that you see in Birmingham and how are you and the city working to confront the structural racism and disinvestment? The challenges in Birmingham is probably not unlike in most cities because again, I'm gonna tie it back to Mindy's point about the land and displacement and in most cities, the heart of the black communities were devastated with the interstate system, with urban renewal and you can see the vestiges of that even now and so the challenge, quite frankly, becomes you really can't have a conversation about preserving and saving and I do take issue with saving urban neighborhoods. Bren, if you allow me to talk about that a little bit. Without having a conversation about displacement and gentrification because most of these neighborhoods now, particularly in Birmingham, the Civil Rights District is located in the center city. And so what happens in order to preserve or save these neighborhoods is through the lens of the person that is outside looking at this and deciding that they know what's best for these neighborhoods. And so my approach and I'm looking out over this audience, audience full of well-meaning preservationists, I know you are, right? Right? Yes. But in your communities, I urge you to connect with local folks in these neighborhoods that have been working for years. The Civil Rights District has a history of 65 years or more. People have been laboring for a long time to save these places before the larger preservation community quite frankly noted that these black spaces were worthy of being preserved. And so it would be, I think a little arrogant to go into an urban neighborhood and say that you were here to save them. But I do think to help transform those neighborhoods, to work alongside, to help create jobs and spaces that respect the historic legacies of these neighborhoods is exactly what those stakeholders in Birmingham are working to do and have been doing. Mindy, with your inequality project, you highlighted the importance of public parks, public spaces, nature, but also the kind of oversight of old historic buildings. What's the big dream for the Inequality Project as it relates to bringing greater awareness to the preservation of diverse urban neighborhoods? Is there a link? The first project that I talked about is actually called Climb. City Life is Moving Bodies. And it's our project that made the draft path which when you come to New York you must visit. And so the 400 years of Inequality Project comes out of many experiences we had working at Washington Heights in wood. One of which was that we were, as you know, in 2001, a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Everybody was in shock. There was a great focus on what they called the heroes and the victims and the rest of us were just supposed to go shopping, we were supposed to go to the theater, we were supposed to get over it because there was closure. And that wasn't how anybody was feeling. So we started working together to figure out how could we take care of ourselves. And one of the things that happened at that time was a crash of a plane going to the Dominican Republic. Washington Heights is very Dominican. Basically everybody in the neighborhood was bereaved. So there was a big coming together of the neighborhood for a novena, a community novena, nine days of prayer that everybody went to. So the Climb Project comes out of our work on that anniversary, on that event. And then we all worked together around the anniversary September 11th, 2002, which really freaked everybody out. And so we worked together to try to create a day that would benefit us. And it was really a beautiful day, many community events to try to ease the sorrow, the grief, the fear, all those emotions that were raised for us. Out of that project, which is called NYC Recovers, came the Climb Project. But we remembered the lesson of the anniversary, which made us think when we started 400 Years of Inequality in 2016, that it was worth it to lift up an anniversary. We think it's worth it to lift up an anniversary for purposes of healing, that there needs to be a pause to say, this is an anniversary. We need to pause. We need to be together. We need to reflect. We need to meditate. We don't want to bring this history into consciousness, I say as a psychiatrist. We would rather call it diversity, democracy, and discovery. Diversity, the Africans landed. We'd rather say that. So what does it take for us to open our hearts and to tell the truth? This is not easy for people. It doesn't matter what the truth is. This is a big lie, but even a little lie. It's hard to say, oh, I lied. So we think anniversaries are that time when unresolved work gets done. Yeah. If it's unresolved and we do the work, then we can save the places, because it's the lie that's going to destroy the places. Well, I love how your work is building our cultural competency through truth healing and reconciliation. I now want to talk about the role of partnerships. You heard Tom Paul Edmondson, our new CEO and president, talk about the importance of partnerships and innovation to help reimagine preservation practice. Given that diverse historic urban neighborhoods have had so many challenges, the ways that we bring greater resources and attention is through partnerships. I want to hear from each of you, and I'll start with you, Anna. What kind of partnerships have helped you to move your efforts forward at Chaco Bottom? And what are the missing partnerships that you need to be successful? Most of our partnerships, really from the beginning, were grassroots partnerships, meaning we worked with other either not-for-profit organizations, community groups, and tried to build a momentum. And again, those annual events were really critical to that, because that gave people a place to come and click with what we were describing about this burial ground, but also its relationship to what was happening in the city in the present moment. And so eventually, and really in part because of having to fight big Goliaths on a regular basis, it's just really odd. But we end up in partnership with organizations that finally recognized that even if we were small, we were right. And so in 2014, both the Preservation Virginia and the National Trust for Historic Preservation acknowledged the work by designating Chaco Bottom as one of the most endangered sites in the country that year. And that brought us to the attention of other people. But at the same time, we ended up getting, in that moment, also partnerships with environmental organizations, with civic organizations that were focused on voting rights, with organizations, many, many more preservation organizations, and people, I think most specifically and most importantly, were groups around the state and to a degree around the country that were working on other cemetery projects, reclaiming African-American history from these invisible spaces and these marginalized stories. That really began to bubble up, and we began to see it in the academic world. And all of that created a space and a momentum for us to be able to really face the big dogs, as we were saying before, face the big dogs and say, we were right. We knew we were right, and you know we were right. And now you have to actually come to the table and help us make this thing happen. So it's an interesting space to be in because there's a lot of reluctance on the one hand. But on the other hand, the forces are sort of finally being garnered that are gonna push this up. And that's a fraught dynamic too, and we can talk about that another time. One of the things with regards to partnerships, those individuals that are in positions of power and authority inside the preservation community think it's very important that you take a proactive approach to seeking relationships and involving individuals outside your current network. For example, Marsh Davis was one of the individuals that nominated me and Betty Massey to be on the Board of Advisors 12, 13 years ago. Without them reaching out to me and pulling me into the National Trust Organization, I wouldn't be here today doing the work that I'm doing. That domino effect, I often use the analogy of a salad that most of the stories that you tell in your communities are like the lettuce and tomato. Not that they're more important than others, but just the ones that we tell the most often. But there's onion, bell peppers, hot peppers, and other things inside that green salad. So the thing is, like Marsh took this pepper, me, and threw me in the salad. So somewhere somebody bit into this pepper and said, whoa, we got a spicy one here. But the point is to add the flavor, these stories all over the country add flavor to our shared history. But until somebody invites you to kind of be in the bowl, oftentimes you're on the outside doing the work as she's stated. Many individuals have been doing this work. Mr. Reginald Moore and Sugarland there have been studying this convict leasing in history in Texas for 30, 35 years with the Texas Historical Commission and the work that Chris and Shannon are doing. If they had not proactively reached out to me, I wouldn't be as involved with what they're doing at the plantation site now. So if you're in a position to hire someone, reach out to some of the HBCUs and other universities to expand even in, I went to Texas A&M, so don't forget the PWIs either. So reach out to bring in individuals that may have a passion that's just not tapped yet. I didn't know I was gonna be bit by the preservation bug, but once I did get bitten by it, I started volunteering for many, many years in different projects. And then finally, it became kind of like a profession, but my last words would be to you to look for those opportunities and proactively go outside of your comfort zone, because if you just look around the room, we need to invite more people to be at the table to talk about this history and tell these stories. I wanted to share some anniversaries because as you said, it's important to use these anniversaries as a way of helping our collective memory. So this past summer in the city of Birmingham, we celebrated the 65th anniversary of the official grand opening of the A.G. Gaston Motel. We celebrated the 56th anniversary in September of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing where four little girls were murdered. In two weeks, we will celebrate the 40th anniversary of Birmingham electing actually two things. In June of 1979, 40 years ago, a 20-year-old named Benita Carter was murdered by a white police officer in Birmingham. She was not part of an altercation. She just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And that was in June of 1979, which was the basis or actually the catalyst for Birmingham in November of 1979 electing its first African-American mayor, Mayor Richard Earrington, which will celebrate that 40th anniversary in just a couple of weeks. Just to talk about partnerships for a moment, for the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument Initiative, it is a collaborative partnership between the National Park Service and the city of Birmingham. And so we work collaboratively with the stakeholders in the national monument and the broader civil rights district as well as the broader community to help actualize and to stand up the national monument. But I will say that the individual sites within the civil rights district, they've certainly benefited from a number of partnerships where the National Trust has invested in the physical preservation of their buildings and their sites, the National Park Service. In fact, we just celebrated three of our sites being the recipient of the National Park Service Civil Rights Grants. And then in the local community, the community foundations and the corporate community that also embraces and works with the individual sites. So the partnerships is, you can't do anything by yourself. And old African proverb says that if you wanna go fast, go alone. If you wanna go far, go together. Thinking about academic partnerships, and the way that you are engaging students and the understanding of some of these issues, what advice would you give this audience for cultivating developing partnerships with academic institutions to bring more learning and education to the study of historic urban redevelopment? It's a really good question. Academic institutions are often the enemy because they always need space. President Lee Bollinger of Columbia University, when he was meeting with a group of community people about the plan to take Manhattanville by eminent domain and expand the campus, said that universities needed to expand very bad at numbers. But it might have been a million square feet every two years, in which case that the university will eat. The New York Times yesterday had a big article about MoMA and its new building, and they talked about it as the museum that ate the block. So the university is often the big gorilla that's gonna do the historic destruction. Jane Adams Hall House went before bulldozers for the University of Illinois, Chicago. So as institutions, universities can definitely be the enemy. But there are people, it's not a monolith, and the faculty and the students have different views. So really the key is to find the faculty that are interested and you actually never know who they are or why they're motivated. They could be in drama, they could be in biology. So it's about making friendships. And I think the key there is just to, you know, it's sort of like we all have connections and it could be that your one degree of separation from the local university start there and then it will grow. And if you're not one degree, then just ask in your network who's connected to the university because universities have tremendous amounts of resources. I would not say Columbia University is a friend of any community except itself. But while I was at the School of Public Health there, we were able to do many things in partnership with the community. And then the vein I mentioned in 2001, the president of the university and the Dean of the School of Public Health went on to remain in the neighborhood to mourn with the community. So that I think is the key. You've got to find the people who care and don't think of it as a monolithic institution. It will often be your enemy. Don't forget that. Thank you. In our last few minutes, I want to discuss the role of innovation and preservation practice as it relates to saving, preserving urban neighborhoods. What are the missing tools? What's the innovation needed to bring more investment, recognition, attention, to creating vibrant, thriving cultural districts that honors the black experience, the Latino American experience, the Asian American experience and beyond. What does innovation look like? Getting the people in the room that represents all those people that you just named. Because I think that for preservation practice to be successful, it has to be a people-centered practice. We know that, right? It has to focus and really look at people and look at, unfortunately we have to also look at the trauma and the harm that some of the communities are faced with. Because it's not just that building or that space, but you have to look holistically what's going on in the community through either crime or access to healthcare, a number of things, grocery stores. And so all those things start to work together. So a lot of the missing pieces are those voids in the neighborhoods that needs to be addressed in order for a successful revitalization and restoration to happen. Part of my personal story is, December of 2005, I saved an old historic home that was built for a Confederate soldier Henry Morton Stringfellow in December of 2005. And at the time I had the plan of just restoring it and moving my family into it. But as I reimagined the space over time, eventually it became my office space and it became part of the city center in Hitchcock where we have community events. So while I was saving the property, the property was also saving me because I worked for a couple of corporations I won't name as a financial advisor. But in 2012 I left the plantation, I mean the corporation. Did I say that out loud? I left the corporation and started working for myself out of the historic structure. So the historic structure became kind of home base, not only for my primary business of my financial services, but for community events where we have community gatherings. And also as part of a comprehensive plan where we're creating a 20, 25 year comprehensive plan through Texas A&M's Texas Target Communities program where they help communities to recover after natural disasters like Harvey. So they're working with Rockport and they're working with Hitchcock. But saving this one place has saved so many other things, including even with my family personally, giving me a space where I could work freely. And there have been opportunities for me to move and go back and work for other individuals, but the freedom that it has given me has also saved me because it's no longer, I use my money to get more time, not my time to get more money. And that's a lesson that a lot of us need to learn and understand. And this historic structure has given me the opportunity to share that passion of saving this place and also the stories of how it helped to save us also. So it helped to save me, my family, community of Hitchcock while we were saving it at the same time. That's great. Anna, what's your one kind of tool of innovation that's needed in your work? I think the most helpful tool has been that the people that we have come to work with have not traditionally been involved in either preservation or social justice. And that as a result of the intersection of our project, which is, again, like you've been describing, a project that we didn't start, but that we joined and became part of and carried it forward, were, again, environmental groups who didn't think they had anything to do with racial justice and had something to bring to the table. We had academics, in particular, anthropologists and archeologists. There was an organization that formed, as a result of this work called RVA Archeology, that is literally responding to social justice dynamics with the scientific material that archeology can bring. And so I think that if there's an innovation, and I actually can't stand that word, but if there's an innovation, it would be that people who have thought that their work didn't have anything to do with somebody else's work that thought they were in these very narrow fields of discipline and practice have a role to play in social justice and that this kind of place-making and commemoration are places where they can bring what they do to strengthen the pot and to add to the voices and to make sure that we can roll forward. The symposium that we're gonna be doing in December is a reiteration of one that we did in 2002 and it's gonna bring some of the same people, but new people to the table to say, academics can be activists, scientists can be activists, doctors can be activists, financial advisors can be activists. And people who think that they are locked into an electoral political system and the sort of constraints of that can also be activists to serve the larger picture and the longer picture. Mindy, I wanna give you the last word. If you were directing a call to action to pass forward and more broadly to the US Preservation Movement, what is that call to action? I believe that pausing was a tremendous urgency when I was fielding historic preservation. I know when I was sharing before that the main street of my hometown is under threat and it makes me very nervous. That it's important to pause and to put it in context. We have found over the past three years of this project that getting people to take the timeline that we made, print it out, and lay it on the table, lay it on the ground, and ask people to reflect on it, ask people to write a poem, write a letter to somebody that's on the timeline, do a piece of art, to interact with the timeline is an extraordinary point of getting the big picture. It's a timeline that we included timelines of African-Americans, Native Americans, women and working people, so it's not everybody. And then you can, if you want, make your own timeline. For example, the group called Staff on Race at the New School made their own timeline of what was the history of black people and brown people and all people of color at the New School. So it's that pause, let's look at this thing. This is a long, dense, difficult history and we've never looked at it. So if I were gonna say one thing, I would say in this moment in 2019, print the timeline, look at it, think about it, write a letter to somebody on the timeline, share it with your friends, and then say, okay, what do we wanna do next? Yeah. Let's hear it for our panelists. Thank you all. And you have heard that our charge is to advance preservation practice as a form of social justice. It's our social responsibility to preserve diverse historic communities all across America. Go forth, be successful, and honor the full American story. Thank you.