 My name is Robert Sellers. I'm Vice Provost for Equity, Inclusion, and Chief Diversity Officer. It is my great pleasure and privilege to be a member of the Planning Committee for this panel. And I think I speak for my other committee members in saying that this is a panel that we were particularly excited to have the opportunity to help pull together. This is an opportunity for us to hear voices, particularly student activist voices, across 50 years of this university. As all of us should know, if we don't know, much of the progress that this university has made has been the result of voices of student activism, as well as activism in staff and faculty levels as well. And so this is an opportunity for us to examine those experiences both as the efforts have built onto each other. We have an opportunity to share experiences, lessons learned, new strategies, new ways of analyzing the problems that we face today. And I think this panel is most appropriate in the context of our celebration of Reverend Jesse Jackson's 50 years of commitment to civil rights contributions. Reverend Jackson, as you all know, is the founder of the Rainbow Push Coalition, is one of the foremost civil rights religious and political figures. Over the past 50 years, he's played a pivotal role in virtually every movement for empowerment from peace, civil rights, gender equality, and economic and social justice. So I think this panel is quite fitting as a representation and celebration of his work. Today, our panel is going to be led by our very capable moderator, Dr. Austin McCoy. He is one of ours. He is a recent PhD graduate here in history and is a postdoctoral scholar here as well. Austin is the epitome of an activist scholar. He has made tremendous contributions during his time here at the university to make sure that this is a better place, not only for himself, but for the generations of students that have come afterwards. As we were trying to pull together this presentation, we could not think of a better person to moderate and lead this panel. So without any further ado, I'm going to turn it over to Austin and enjoy our conversation. Thank you, Austin. Good afternoon. So I think Rob just framed the panel really well. So like in interest of time, I am basically just going to talk about, you know, how the panel is going to go, give really brief introductions, and then ask a few questions. But first, for those of you who may not know by now, Students for Justice, which is an independent and POC-led student group, is planning to walk out today for 3 p.m. So hopefully, if you're around, you can participate. And I want to make sure to acknowledge the three activists who are here, who are organizing that. So if everyone could give a round of applause for LaKyra, Jamie, and L'Oreal sitting here in the front. Also, they're trying to go on a trip to DC with me, so if y'all want to go ahead and donate some funds, you know, send it over there. But no, like they have taken the mantle of activism here on campus for this year. And as you'll see on this panel, like there's like these successive waves of activist work around racial justice and other issues. So regarding the panel itself, like I'm going to ask a series of a few questions, and I will keep track of time. And I think we're going to get, can we go a little over since the first one went over a little bit, or are we really pressed? You can go a little bit over, a little bit over, whatever we define that as being. Then that will be fine. So like we'll go a little over, but I'm going to ask a series of questions. I want us to take, you know, maybe 20, 25 minutes. We have a big panel to like have the panelists address the questions. But then also give about 20, 25 minutes for Q&A. So like I said, I'm going to give really brief introductions because everyone on this panel is esteemed and all of these bios are very long. So I'm going to shorten them up a little bit. So, and I'm just going to start based upon like the program. So Brittany Williams is a first year student here at U of M in the School of Social Work. And she graduated from the university this past spring with a Bachelor's of Arts in Sociology. As an undergraduate, Williams was a very active member in the Black Student Union serving on the Political Actions Committee and chairing the Community Outreach Committee. Next, we have Tyrell Collier. He graduated from U of M in May 2014 with a Bachelor's of Arts in Sociology. As an undergrad, Collier was an active member in the Black Student Union, ultimately serving as Speaker from 2012 to 2014. He was also a part of the hashtag being Black at the University of Michigan, which was the Twitter slash protest movement that occurred here on campus. And that's how I got involved as well. Byron Maxie is a student right now at Rackham Graduate School and a project coordinator in the Office of Academic Innovation. An avid student of history from young age, Maxie finds unwavering inspiration in the narratives of his family and the deep history of his community where accounts of resilience, pride and triumph serve as successful models for overcoming past and present indignities and injustice. Stephanie Johnson-Roley received a PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Virginia in 1997 and joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina that year. In year 2000, she moved to the University of Michigan's Department of Psychology. In 2008, she had an appointment in the School of Education. Roley is the Psychology Department and the School, sorry about that. She's also the Associate Vice President for Research here at the University. Her research, her portfolio includes research centers and interdisciplinary projects in the humanities and social sciences. She was also an undergrad here from 1988 to 1992 during that time. She was heavily involved in the Black Student Union with various positions on the executive board, including a termist speaker. Judge Cynthia Diane Stevens is another panelist and prior to her appointment to the Court of Appeals in 2008, she served as a general jurisdiction trial judge for 23 years. She was appointed to the 3rd Circuit Court in 1985 after service as a 36th District Court Judge. An Emory Law School graduate, Stevens has been admitted to practice in Georgia, Texas and Michigan. She is a former chair of the Association of Black Judges of Michigan, a former member of the Executive Board of the National Bar Association and the Judicial Council. She has been honored with many civic and religious organizations including the inaugural Woodrow Smith Community Service Award from the Shrines of the Black Madonna, the Golden Heritage Award from Little Rock Baptist Church and the Susan B. Anthony Award from the City of Detroit Human Rights Department. She was awarded the State Bar of Michigan's highest honor, the Robert P. Hudson Award in 2005. I really did graduate from this university. She wouldn't be on the panel, right? So, with all the bios out the way, I'm going to ask the first question and it's pretty basic. You can address it however, which way you want, but this is sort of also for folks to understand your roles in the racial justice movement or activism here at university. So, can you talk about your involvement in the racial justice movement here? What inspired you to get involved? What type of roles did you play? And, like, what specific movement did you participate in? And I guess we can start from left to right so we can start with Brittany, if you don't mind. So, to contextualize before I sort of explain my involvement, I, even though I graduated this past April, I was 28 when I graduated because I was a non-traditional student who was a returner. So, my span of time here was very long. I started in 2005, had a lot of difficulties. My mother was diagnosed early on, said Alzheimer's disease and struggled, ended up leaving the university, came back in 2015 and finished up. So, at very different points, I've been able to be involved with racial activism on campus. Initially, my sophomore year was when I really got started getting involved with the BSU and at the time Proposition 2, which was seeking to remove affirmative action, was on the ballot. And that was really what spurred me getting involved with the BSU and the work that they were trying to do around encouraging people to vote no onto. Obviously, ten years later we know that didn't happen, but that was a lot of the work we were doing. So, we were organizing rallies, protests, we were reaching out to voters in the area, we were reaching out to students after the measure was able to pass. And we did call-outs at the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, basically asking students who were considering the university to still come, students of color, despite the ruling, and just sort of encouraging them to still come here. In retrospect, I kind of struggle with giving that advice because of the current campus climate and the continued decline of students of color over the years, but that was a lot of the work that we were doing with the BSU. And then as it sort of ramped up, from 2009-2010, I was on the e-board as a community outreach chair. And so I did a lot of work around getting community members involved because at the time there was a weird kind of discord between the BSU and the NAACP where people felt like the NAACP was a more acceptable and appropriate organization who were going about trying to make change on campus around race issues in an appropriate way. And the BSU was just like out of control and too radical and doing too much and so people didn't really want to be affiliated with us. So as chair, I was really just trying to get us to come together on common ground to do the work regardless of how you felt it should be done. Still, there was a lot of backlash with some of the things that we were doing. There was a similar climate at that time to what's going on now, not nearly as extreme, but there were a lot of racialized issues going on, things being said to people on campus, intimidation that was going on. And so as an act of protest, which it was really funny when BDUM went on to black out the posting wall and use that for people to write their feelings, we... Oh, a podcast. We actually had blacked out the posting wall to exemplify the fact that we were feeling silenced on campus. And that received a lot of backlash from folks and made them feel like we were doing something that was absurd and disrespectful and we shouldn't have put that over all the things that people from organizations usually post. So there's a lot of pushback on that, but we just continued to do what we did. So we did a lot of fliering, chalking, getting out and getting engaged with the community. And I think that in that sort of period between Prop 2 and up to 2010 was sort of a moving forward to people basically being fed up and having BDUM come into play. Since I've been back here, I would consider myself to be more of an infiltrator, that's the term I like to use. I don't consider myself to be a person at this point who's like super front lines. So I will do something like get onto a student advisory board or sit and talk to professors or get with students who are doing front lines work and say, how can I assist you? Because a lot of the conversations we've had around diversity, equity, inclusion, racial justice, activism, one of my major comments is I'm tired. It's been so many years and I had a really hard time coming back here and seeing not enough change in my opinion or things getting worse. And so at this point with kind of feeling like an old lady on the campus, I feel like my position has shifted. I feel like I've just shifted from being like very, very super involved like right out there in front of everybody to being in the background saying how can I help you? And in some ways it was the same with Tyrell, my little baby. I'm going to be as you baby. Like how can I help you? How can I be there for you? And I really think that that's the best role for me at this point. So similar to Brittany, my involvement or introduction to this work came through my involvement with the BSU. When I got involved with the BSU, I really wasn't looking to be an activist or looking to do this type of work. I really just wanted to put on programming for our community, positive programming and things like that. I sort of really got my feet wet in beginning in the summer of 2013. And I think that's really a reference point for a lot of people when you think of like the modern movement for Black Lives is when after Trayvon Martin got shot down in Florida and his killer acquitted in July of 2013. I think that's really when I really started to recognize that something needs to be done. I think the country as a whole, the racial climate in the country as a whole was very tense at that time and that was reflected on campus. That sort of coupled with declining enrollment numbers. There was a report that came out in the fall of 2013 that I believe said Black enrollment here at the university declined from about 4.6 to 4.2 percent, if I can remember correctly. In the year since affirmative action 2009 to 2012, so a four-year period. And that to me really further, those declining enrollment numbers further marginalizes an already marginalized group as further isolates an already isolated group. And not only that, but it sort of emboldens the majority culture to do things to engage in acts of cultural appropriation. And so that sort of showed itself with the fraternity Theta Z in the fall having or attempting to have a party which was just covered in cultural appropriation and racist rhetoric. So once that happened, of course, the campus was in an uproar then, especially Black women, because there was a lot of degrading things about not only Black people but specifically Black women. And of course the Black student union is traditionally mostly Black women. And so everyone was in an uproar. It was just sort of the last straw and we came up with the hashtag BBUM movement. And of course BBUM itself isn't something that was created in 2013. That experience has always been here. And so we created the hashtag movement. And it was something that we really, really didn't know what we were doing because sort of Black Lives Matter was sort of getting started at the same time. So there really wasn't a blueprint for this sort of social media sort of type of activism that we looked to. But we created the movement being Black at Michigan. And we just asked the community to voice your experiences, whether that be positive or negative, of being Black here. What do you go through on a day to day? And it just took the campus by storm, took the nation by storm. A lot of schools from around the country contacted us in just asking for advice and seeing how they can implement things like that on their campus. Because I do believe that this experience is not just unique to Michigan, right? I think it's a unique Black experience at predominantly White institutions across the nation and even across the world around the globe. So we, yeah, we did the posting wall again. We blacked out the posting wall. It was just sort of a week of activity that we engaged in to sort of get the campus talking and thinking about what diversity really means here on campus. A few months later, we released seven demands to the university on MLK Day right after the MLK symposium where Harry Belafonte was speaking. Demands included increasing enrollment, affordable housing, new scholarships, race and ethnicity courses, increased funding for Black organizations. We sort of spent that entire, the rest of that year working to get those things implemented or as, you know, working to implement as much as we could before the year ended. That was when I graduated. And of course, they continued the work after I left. Just to clarify, I'm also a U of M alum. I know the bio didn't quite clarify that. So my affiliations were with the Black student union. I was also started at the same time as Brittany 2005 to 2009. And also the NAACP on campus who can attest to that at that time and kind of the mid 2000s that there was this kind of strange kind of divide. But having been in both organizations on campus at that time kind of felt in both organizations that that there was a role and almost feel that that the role that the Black students union and I'm not sure of the activity of the NAACP at this time. But it was one of those necessary kind of, I don't want to say, well, no, necessary tensions because I even look at, if you look at some of the great leaders of Black activism, you look at the NAACP on campus kind of serving the role that Du Bois had and the Black student union to me almost being like Garvey. And those are two sides of the same coin that all move toward a similar struggle. So just looking at some of my experiences as an undergraduate as Brittany attested to the proposal to was the major issue of our day. And it really bisected that experience because we, you know, coming to campus and the references to my kind of family and background, being kind of politically minded and active was something that I had from my youth. And so coming to campus, I'd actually identified those organizations before I'd even arrived as once I wanted to be a part of. And knew from one of the first meetings that this was coming. MCRI was what was called Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, the biggest kind of false name that you can think of. But we knew what was coming. And this is one of those cases where you know you're fighting a fight that has not a good chance of winning. But it's still something that's necessary to be fought. And one of the particular actions that stood out most to me in that time was when we did, for National Take Affirmative Action Day, we had this silence voices where we actually wrapped our mouths and we didn't speak the entire day. We actually got a lot of flak from various directions for doing this because, oh, well, you're going to not do well in your classes. I'm like, one day y'all skip class all the time. Like, it's really not a big deal. But the point being, it did make a message. And it's even more pressing today because literally if you probably kind of the number of people that did that action, I'm sure there's more, even more not represented today on this campus than there were of us at that time. And that's only 10 years ago. And I'd actually just kind of reviewed some of the numbers since then because I also continued on with this case as a litigant in the Supreme Court case that just passed. And unfortunately against our favor in 2014, and I understand that this is a political issue, but I'm representing as myself, not the university right now as I'm speaking. So I'm biased and I will gladly say that. But the point being, this was a case that had a certain importance in terms of voices being represented in spaces that are shared. And now in the state of Michigan, those voices have a whole other bar to have to meet for the voice of black students, of women, of anyone else that has an identity to be represented here. And that's just true, unfortunately, legally in this state. And these are things we have to contend with in a different way than someone who is from a geography that's not represented or someone that's from alumni status, whatever have you. And these are the challenges we faced and we still face today. The other things I wanted to quickly just touch on in my experience was also the Gena 6 case was another major kind of watershed moment for us. Six young students for those that are unfamiliar, six high school students in Gena, Louisiana, they were charged with attempted murder for a school fight where they had been intimidated for weeks and weeks by other white students for sitting under the quote unquote white tree in this town. They were totaled between the six of them and 100 years to their sentence. And we, as a nation, as a black community, didn't get a lot of national attention, but we organized, we fundraised, and this is where I actually had myself shifted roles as a frontline person before that had to move into saying, long story short, fatherhood came. So I had to move from being a frontline activist to being that kind of roll shift to support. How can I get funds to get everybody down there so I can handle responsibility back home? We sent a bus down there, we had people wanting to go, we couldn't fit everybody that wanted to go. But it was a protest and things changed. But these are just examples of some of the things that were happening at my time. And I don't want to take up too much of the panel sign, but it was a pretty active period. And I'm excited to talk more about other things. Interesting that Spence walked in at the moment that I'm starting to speak. So he was one of my close colleagues back in the 80s and 90s. I was here from 88 to 92. And as Austin pointed out, I was ultimately the speaker of the Black Student Union, but I also was the chair of the education committee and communications. And so heavily involved while I was here. So it was an interesting time that I suspect we won't see for a really long time, which was, and I think that we didn't especially appreciate at the time. So 87 was the BAM II strikes and a range of different resources for black students on campus came out of the BAM II strikes, including some funding for the Black Student Union to serve as sort of an umbrella organization to co-sponsor various programming on campus, including just a range of other resources. There wasn't a particular issue that we were facing. So we weren't facing proposal two. We weren't facing the anti-affirmative action backlash or the sort of national political pressures in the same way. We were about seven and a half percent African-American students on campus at the time, which we were actually pressuring the administration to increase our numbers at the time. Who knew that this was going to be nearly twice the number of black students on campus now? There was certainly an air on campus of reasonable cohesiveness. And so that was an interesting time to step into the Black Student Union because our work was very differently focused. And we actually had to take a step back and say, okay, whoa, we got some of the things that we want. How do we build a further agenda? And then also how do we become good stewards of the resources we've been given? And so a lot of our initial work was around building core facilities and resources, so things like educational materials, and we had a variety of speakers in town and things like that. So I don't mean that there weren't particular issues that we were agitating around. So certainly we also had a list of demands that we took to the president. So there was an incident at the union where there was a black fraternity who had a party and afterwards a group of black students were maced. There was an interesting incident where, so this is only interesting because of where we are historically now, but we were pushing a TV across campus. One of my black colleagues was pushing a black male, was pushing a TV across campus and was actually stopped by the police. And so there are a range of things where we felt certainly threatened on campus, both physically and in terms of our well-being. So there wasn't the air of the external pressure so much, so we were more inwardly focused. So a lot of the demands that we took to the president at that point was really around increasing the representation of black students and faculty on campus and then also of increasing pressure around the safety and well-being of black students. But it certainly had a different air than I think some of these other eras. So we can come back to the challenges associated. I will say also there was also still that the questions around appropriate activism on campus. So as a black student union we were viewed as the more radical group and we did a lot of, you know, meeting with the leadership around the university and certainly lots of protesting versus the United Coalition Against Racism which is a much broader group of students who, you know, so there was a bit of tension around what activism should look like on campus and what is appropriate. I was here back in the Pleistocene era. I'll start out with what was interesting. One of the colleagues was talking about the dichotomy between Garvey and Du Bois and I'm a granddaughter of a UNIA member so that was a constant conversation in my house. But I was here during BAM1 and to contextualize that for those of you who were not born then, clearly, we came here, I came to the University of Michigan in 1968 right after the red hot summer, long hot summer of 1967 where there were 159 uprisings and I used that word quite intentionally. I don't think that they were riots. They didn't have enough programs to be rebellions but they were uprisings and within that context I came to a university where SDS had just been founded where there was a lot of activism. When I came here, within weeks we finally gave our... One of the things you've noticed is the name of the organization of students of color keeps changing and it keeps changing just as many other things do but as of that point we had all sorts of informal names and we actually had a debate about whether it was going to be called the pro-black organization or the black student union. And that debate was about the issue of people perceiving that to say we were the black student union meant that we were anti-white students. And after a vigorous and interesting debate in which it was close to civil, the overwhelming majority agreed that we would be the black student union. Because there were so few of us and because of the nature of the society at that point, when we got around to the point of getting to the BAM strike, I was the vice president of the black student union and the community outreach person. I was also the vice president of the sorority and on student government council and none of that was seen as a contradiction. And in fact every American born black person on campus was perceived to be a member of the black student union. It wasn't just group think. Everybody spoke to everybody. You were so happy when you saw a black person when my mother would call me and ask me how many people were in my class, I'd say three. So there was a heavy sense of identity. When we got to the point of the BAM strike, it was a point after a series of conversations and then conversations and the conversations didn't seem to be going anywhere and there were small protests and then ultimately we discovered amazingly that the black students over in the med school, all 12 of them, the black students in the dense school, the black students in the school of social work, the black students in all the various campuses had a similar set of issues and so we had to form a coalition amongst all of those groups and it was in very real sense a coalition. The majority of us were undergraduates but the persons in the law school, the med school, etc. who did have a higher level of experience did not deal with us in a paternalistic way. It was in fact a coalition and they offered what they could offer. For example, when we finally got to, we were writing the demands, Dave Lewis who was in law school said, well let's look at the founding documents of the university which gave a tuition waiver to all Native American students because of course the land was stolen from them and it was part of a treaty and so he suggested that we put a tuition waiver program inside the original BAM demand. So people were offering what they had. The faculty were offering their ideas. We had a serious inside man with Dr. Moody who offered us protection, secret information and an occasional scolding. The BAM strike came about after finally we got, when the provost at that point, I believe it was Dr. Alan Smith, told us the university would never, and the regents would never negotiate. Well the one thing about young people is if you tell them no long enough and you tell them in public, it kind of galvanizes people and that galvanized us to actually form a formal organization and we began a strike that was more successful than not. I will put it that way. And it was not successful because solely of the black students but the black students were the nucleus and the leadership. We had a coalition of other organizations including the student government council who supported us even with funds but they were supportive because it was our fight and they thought that that was the appropriate role in a coalition. It was an interesting time again because the general nature and tenor of the country was one in which there was a great deal of activism. And we were fortunate that despite the extreme conservative nature of the Midwest that we did have at least a president who thought that the local police didn't belong on campus. Because if we had been eastern just up the road, we would have seen Doug Harvey and they had a lot more violence and problems there and in fact one of the people that came in to visit the people at Eastern was the Reverend Jesse Jackson. We had support here from our local politicians from very importantly the labor movement. Ultimately when the workers of the university decided they weren't going to work that meant the university was closed. We didn't close it. The people who do the hard work, those service employees who we sometimes forget to speak to they did the hardest work. And they were the key thing in allowing us to get the university to at least agree it was going to try to meet the demand of at least 10%. Analyst for answering the first question it is 103 right now. I'm thinking 140, you know we'll shoot for that. So I'm going to trust that someone might ask a question about the election and how it might affect student activism during the Q&A. So I'm going to strike that question and then I'm going to give the panelists two minutes. If you didn't get a chance to address the question about what the challenge is like you might have faced while organizing. If you want to address that you can for a couple of minutes and then after that we can do Q&A. So anyone can start. One that came to mind immediately, excuse me, when you just asked that question was just and this is not pessimistic but just for the proposal to anti-front of action bill in 2006 kind of knowing with pretty clear certainty that it was a losing fight to begin with was pretty discouraging but so that was one of the challenges in doing the work. In hindsight and even during one of our ways of pushing forward was having some consolation in the fact that the counties that we canvassed in heavily did show some care and support and if anything that just kind of goes back to saying you know the whole notion of politics is local know your support local relations with those who are around you and I was washed in our county in Wayne County obviously. I think one of the biggest difficulties during that time was like was previously said that sort of knowing that we're fighting a losing battle but also not feeling as if we had the support we needed. So at the time President Mary Sue Coleman was very openly in support of the proposition and that sort of rattled the alumni base and upset a lot. As a president that was very supportive you've got all these alumni who are furious that we're eventually going to join this alumni base that have no interest in supporting us as students of color and that was really rough and I will never forget at the time I was working for Telefun and which is a we have a whole panel about the struggles of that but essentially it's a fundraising division of the university you're calling out to alumni asking them to donate and at the time that Prop 2 was coming up on the ballot and just after President Coleman had publicly spoken out in support of affirmative action at the university I happened to be calling through a list of older alumni and I remember speaking to a woman who had graduated maybe like the late 40s or early 50s and she didn't really want to talk about fundraising or why we needed money she wanted to talk about how ridiculous she thought it was that we were keeping affirmative action for those people who didn't really deserve to be there anyway and I've had for almost my entire life people make a lot of assumptions about my race when I'm on the phone and so I really think that she thought she was talking to a white student who would agree with her sentiments that you know folks like me didn't belong and that was really hard for me to have school pride to keep pushing toward graduating and joining an alumni base of folks that weren't seeking to protect diversity in general I think another struggle and that also is part of a larger struggle with like kind of burnout that comes when you're trying to do this work and also be a student which sometimes you're just like not because you're so invested and the other piece that was a major struggle I think was harkening back to the idea of this divide between what's the right way to go about things is having constant criticism where you can't really win so if we're doing something like blacking out the wall writing messages on the dyag, posting flyers to educate people about the black action movements they are doing too much and you're being disruptive but then if we're going to the office undergraduate admissions we're doing the call-outs to black students well that's too soft and often the people who are offering these criticisms are like okay well what do you recommend crickets there's something that you're adding and so there's constant criticism and you're feeling like you're working so hard for a community that is perpetually telling you that whatever you're doing is either too much or not enough and it's hard to keep the momentum and keep feeling like it's worth it to fight when the people that you're fighting for don't even think that what you're doing matters the biggest challenge was well I was impeached as chair or as speaker so at the time that I was speaker we had an all women executive board and so there was a faction of men who got together and impeached us and it was really challenging so my students are here looking at me so I think that part of the issue with being here at a time when things were relatively okay and I literally mean relatively because we certainly had many issues that we were facing and where we had access to a lot of resources and we were young I think that we were easily swayed in some ways and part of the argument of the folks who were moving against us was that we weren't doing enough which is probably true so you know if we had 2800 African-American students on campus and only 100 are biggest crowds ever but only 100 were showing up to our meetings then clearly we weren't doing enough if we were only 8% or 7. whatever percent of the population here we weren't doing enough outreach so kind of the same kinds of sentiments but part of me also feels like in the absence of a big external threat we turned on each other and certainly my experience as a black student on campus during that time was it was very warm it was you know everyone spoke to each other and while everyone didn't feel necessarily part of the black student union I think there was a sense of community that certainly coming back in years directly after that was really absent and part of what happened was well you're impeached and we said well who will take over and there were crickets and so it was really you know it was really a painful experience in a lot of ways and you know in talking to those folks afterwards about what happened I think a lot of it is they feel like felt like they had there were some you know a couple influential people and again a sort of a lack of clarity on what our goal was as an organization so that was difficult and I you know and I think that a lot of it was obvious sexism you know I think that we have to face in terms of any activism so who's at the table and the decisions are being made and who is viewed as righteous or worthy and what kind of tools do we have to be either supportive of one another or destructive and unfortunately in that case things didn't go well so whenever not just here but in the African Liberation Support Movement Free South Africa Movement consistently the organizational challenge that I have seen that stands out is how to manage internal conflict and how to resolve disagreements and part of that has to do with the tone that's allowed and having a conversation about how unity of purpose doesn't mean unison and having somebody who's willing to stand up and say I don't agree with anything you said but I understand that you honestly feel that way and one of those things in an organizational dynamic is that in every organization there's a second strata of leaders they don't have titles but they are leaders because they're the people who have figured out how to chill everybody out a bit and in the 70s and the 60s believe it or not at the University of Michigan there were three black men to every black woman I know it was another time in life before they stopped apparently black men stopped graduating from high school for a whole lot of horrible reasons so we had a different dynamic and it was the women who tended to be kind of like okay you're having this argument you're having this argument let's just summarize this and this is what we can do together coming up with the BAM demands and keeping them at 11 required constant retooling and constant conversation much of it however was not honest meaning that somebody would just say like we all do in our marriages okay honey you win but that was because at the time that was what was important to maintain the family you know the fact that you cannot put the toilet seat down should not be the reason why the kids have to see parents every other week but what happens at the end of organizational surges is that's probably the time to start to talk about the conflict and to start to talk about the rules and we often don't do that how are you doing it and who's doing it I think a lot of that comes from the e-bos and when you're here how are you doing it again and why are you on the news or a bunch of things and so that led into a lot of internal conflicts within the group that's something that I really didn't know about I didn't know how to sort of navigate those conflicts other than just taking the ego out and taking the eyes of what would be and that focusing on the work but I would say that the criticism from the community really affected how it was obviously we got criticism from the majority and a lot of misinformation about oh if you want to have 10% enrollment we're not qualified actually I can attend the university so we go with that but I think the criticism that I've had has affected us differently and often followed by To the panelists for answering the question about the challenges they face it is 1.15 we have given permission to go until 2pm I think we should still open it up for questions so if there's anyone who wants to ask a question we have a microphone over here to my right on your left and we have someone with the mic in the back and I think this is a time especially for students who are involved right now to ask questions or even share any of the challenges that they might have faced while they're organizing Hi everyone It's a pleasure to sit here and listen to activists who have been doing the work for decades I consider myself part of this work right now I'm involved with a student organization called Students of Color of Rackham and just today I put out a statement on the election what are some action steps that as students we can take and I'll be honest I used some harsh language about our president-elect and what that means for the strength of bigotry in this country and I got some feedback from our constituents some very supportive some of the mindset that that kind of language perpetuates divisiveness and I'm wondering how you have in your own work kind of navigated that line I'll start out my life is easy when you're a judge they give you this box they want you to stay in and so there are a lot of things you can't say but one of the things that I've tried to figure out in conversation and even as a lawyer two things is it true and will it help and if all it does is make me feel better for five minutes you know I am glad that I grew up in an era before tweet snap and all that you had to literally write it down and reflect on it and my suggestion is that say what is absolutely true and no more and no less I've got to do with kind of making it clear that everybody doesn't have to do the same thing and that if everybody's doing the same thing nothing else is getting done and so when that comes to tone there are some people who are going to be super eloquent and I'm going to write you a beautiful op-ed in the times and you know whatever and there are people who are going to stand on the stairs of Hatcher and set it off on a microphone and those people are needed in both of those spheres and it's this and that's with activism in general and I can't remember who I was speaking to at the time but it was probably Mama Beth because she's so wise but I was given this sort of metaphor of activism is like this ecosystem and so there's all these things that are going on that come together to create this ecosystem and it's okay to have different parts because it all comes together to get the work done so for me I kind of as I said earlier I'm kind of like a person who might get into positions and do more of the quieter, chiller side of things now but I would never like I just really admire students for justice a lot like so for me right now that's where I'm at but they're in a very bold and radical place and I'm not going to tell them what to do because I'm doing something and they're doing something and they're different things but we have the same goal so keeping that in mind and understanding that everybody has a part is really important and even someone else there's so many wise people around me we're just talking about the simple things that people did even during the Civil Rights Movement so someone might not have been frontline picketing someone might not have been out in the streets being hosed down and they are you know feeding the protesters like someone was talking about almost every you know activists during that time had come through this particular restaurant so you might be out here giving a speech or rallying or canvassing you know or you might be making greens like whatever it is it's for the people like if it's for the people then do it that's how I think touching question for me partly because Michael's my student but partly you know so as an administrator this has been a really hard week for me because I realize that one that I serve multiple constituencies that they're that I have to think about how other people will interpret my words and anything that I write that there are people in some of those constituencies for instance who voted for Trump and so I have to be mindful of that at the same time I have also felt like as an administrator administrator people are looking for you know cues about how to handle this and I think sometimes when we are constantly wearing the mask then people begin to think that that's what's expected of them and there are moments in time when outrage is appropriate and so I had a moment when we had a psychology event to talk about the election and you know we were talking about all the wonderful things we could do and you know we as psychologists have all these contributions to make and and I said you know but I'm angry I'm really mad and frustrated and and I don't think we've been here before and this is something new and different and so sometimes I don't want to hear people say it's all going to be fine and so for those of you who know me well you know that I tend to be you know sunshiney optimistic you know and and I think that also gave permission for those people who were around to say yeah sometimes it is okay to be really angry and frustrated so I think that we're dealing with that tension all the time so knowing you Michael you know you don't use harsh language and so coming from you maybe that said something about the particular position we're in right now and that can be helpful to other people in moving forward at the same time I think we also want to be mindful of defining who the community is and what our responsibilities are and you know the potential lasting vestiges of our words and our deeds and so it's sort of a tightrope that we have to continue to walk at I would just add one thing briefly to that and that is just to second what Judge Stevens also mentioned and all that have been shared in terms of if it's truthful on the one hand for sure like that's something that should feel confident in sharing but have an outcome in mind and a method and like a method for yourself it'll help you make that decision on whether or not it's something you're going to share to your constituencies at a given time or it's going to be a subset or your own group because I know it's something that I navigate all the time as a black American, as a Muslim there's some things that I have that I share with certain audiences, some things I reserve for my family some I reserve for my co-religionist some I reserve for those who are in my faith and it's not because I don't necessarily want to share that truth with others but it might be because it's something that contextually meets this purpose and someone else might not understand without having given context so just give yourself a method so that you don't have to always constantly tire yourself to determining is this the right thing to say right now if you have a method for yourself at least for me it helps in making that process smoother I guess I'm not, I don't know what exactly you said but I think also recognizing what about I guess the response that you got is racialized that's something that we dealt with a lot with after we released the demands when we stood on the steps of Hill and sort of yelled we demand one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and then you have seven days to respond or we'll be taking physical action so there was a lot of headlines with this picture of this black woman yelling the black student union threatens violence at the University of Michigan if the administration doesn't respond now what we meant by that wasn't obviously we didn't mean that we were going to set the campus on fire we were talking protests and sit-ins and things of that nature but that becomes that carries a racial connotation when we say it hello I'm Alan Haber I was an organizer here in the 1950s 60s I left in 1968 the question I'm interested in is the relation that each of you felt between the student community and the Ann Arbor community community student organizing has seemed very much in its own bubble and we live in a bigger world and so many of the questions that you experience are questions that are being lived out in Ann Arbor so I'm wondering in your different times how did you relate to the Ann Arbor community and I just have a thought when the black action movement began one of my buddies at that time that may be the judge will remember Charles Thomas Jr. not a student but very much a black activist and he went to the community and he said I'll try and use good language he said we have been oppressed many years it is time for reparations you give us money so we can build the institutions that we need and he did get money and build a center for training high school kids in media architectonics or something went on for quite a few years until he passed on from a stroke or heart attack anyhow that was a sense of moving from the energy of the students into the community seems what we need again how do you see that perspective historically and in the present I agree so part of my impeachers point was that we weren't well integrated into the community we didn't have a sense of what was happening to the black community in Ann Arbor or even in Detroit and much of our outreach was very unidirectional that is picking up kids and bringing them to campus and showing them around and thinking that exposing them to the University of Michigan was the answer to poverty and the whole host of other problems and so we did try to make some attempts at building better coalitions but it was pretty fledgling for sure and I think that I think that's the key particularly as we are facing these big legislative supreme court decisions that until we see ourselves as connected to the larger black community or the larger community you know that we're not going to make sufficient progress about the bubble and I think at this point current activism is doing a far better job than we did during my time with being involved with the black community in Ann Arbor and the surrounding area but I feel like in particular around Prop 2 the fact that it was activism here was so much in a bubble and so much about students sort of backfired on us when we were trying to go out into the community and encourage people to vote no on to and as was mentioned the name of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative like the language is very confusing for a lot of people so there were a lot of folks who were in favor of affirmative action that voted yes on it because they thought it was for affirmative action and not banning it so while we were trying to do that education work while we're trying to get out and talk to voters they're like okay well that's really nice that you're here and all but where have you been because you've been so self interested up until this point and now you're just kind of showing up and I've tried to be more mindful of that moving forward because for me I'm personally very critical of people outside of the community who only sort of show up when terrible things are going on and then are just like often wherever and so doing that to my own community is not acceptable so I'm glad that we've gotten past that but that was definitely a learning experience I don't know of a campus I went to I was in a PhD program at Atlantic University my daughter went to FAM and for a brief period of time to Tuskegee there is town and gown everywhere and the relationship between students who are temporary residents and a community which is consistent albeit changing is always a challenge and it is in bridging that gap in forging those relationships that a solid relationship with administrators who can build long-term relationships that is going to help more than almost anything else we used to have projects we had a community service project all the fraternities and sororities have community service projects and those projects were always very interesting in the sense that we would take a day and go do something we had no relationships with the people so and we would be upset because the response wasn't warm and fuzzy but why should it be paternalistic black people are no different to paternalistic white people except we have less money so I look to the I look to people who are administrators to facilitate opportunities to build relationships institutional relationships individual students will have opportunities when an issue is raised to participate in that for the broader community but frankly two-thirds of the students here don't vote in Ann Arbor they vote wherever their parents live or their guardians live and so while they could join in on community issues that they're not effective voters so again I look to your administration and the people who are in the faculty who are part of the community to provide an opportunity to build relationships I don't know if I'm supposed to stand I'm LaKyra from Students for Justice and I think something that we don't talk about or that I don't know that hasn't been talked about is the emotional toll that all of this especially with like intercommunity conflict at least for me like I mean because I'm pretty much numb to like backlash from white students at the university or non-black students even but I think for me something I like sometimes even like knocks the wind out of me is like the inter community conflict and like trying to repair those and still trying to continue on and trying to like open and have the floor open and be like well this is the truth like we can do multiple things and we'll have people telling you well yeah we can but y'all can't and so like for me I just wonder like how do I personally I'm actually my own personal advice like go about like continuing on and are like not even it's not like I'm like thinking about giving up but like it becomes really hard like it's really it's more emotional than I ever thought it would be I left the University of Michigan in a million years ago I had gotten tied up that I had colitis and it's about protecting yourself and learn it young don't mind it old I spoke to experience I had the role reversal and briefly mentioned fatherhood as an experience all those together with with the climate all those things and then experience South Africa and the racism that still exists and this kind of faulty notion of utopia there and actually had a mental break and had to heal so these are real things and you do have to take time there's a reason why the academic year doesn't go year round some of us do it and we know what happens the same thing it's the same thing with activism you can try and do it year round and you're going to see what's going to happen so just to that point it's take time for yourself and I keep on hard but I just want to have a method but it's because it gives yourself a routine on how to navigate with other people and then also a method for your organizations because at the very least there's some common out here that people can say okay here's the floor here's what we agree on here's how we're going to navigate these things and then when we start to stray bring it back and you do that for yourself as well that's the best advice I can give with that you have to take time for yourself you can't there's nothing you can do for your community if you're not healthy yourself if you're not physically and mentally and emotionally healthy taking time for yourself is is you have to do that one thing I will say is be as inclusive as you possibly can in all of your efforts I think a lot of the criticism that we got from the community was sort of grounded in them feeling like they weren't included in the things that was going on surrounding the demands and so just be inclusive as you can but also take time for yourself I think as far as the emotion peace goes it's important to keep around you people who are going to sort of push back on that and affirm you on a regular basis and it's hard when you might have like eight people around you are doing work and then you have 200 people on Twitter that are like I don't like what y'all are trying to do and it's stupid and so like that's rough but surrounding yourself with people who affirm those people need to affirm you and support you but also need to be able to tell you when to take a break and when to take care of yourself when you can't see it and so the judge had me over here in my feelings because the year that I was on the issue eboard like I mentioned previously during my time here my mother was diagnosed early on to Alzheimer's disease and during the year that I was on eboard was when she first really started to decline in a way that was having a really profound effect on me and it was very very hard for her to not know who I was to not be speaking correctly she forgot my birthday all these things were going on and it was hard I refused to pull back in the way I needed to and ultimately ended up attempting suicide and it was just so I can look back and laugh at this point but I remember being here in the hospital at the university hospital in psychiatric emergency on my computer drafting an email for the BSU to be sent out for an event that we're trying to organize I think probably around racial injustice or possibly just getting us together but regardless of what it was like that wasn't the time for that I'm in a position where I'm thinking about taking my own life but what's on my mind is the BSU and the work and I can't stop and the people who were there with me were like if you don't give me this computer we're going to fight and so like that those people around me to pull me out of that and to support me through that time was really really important and I just can't stress enough how important it is to not only have that mindset but to have people around you because sometimes you're just so invested that you cannot see that you're going to break and having those folks is really really crucial now to be at the department of Afro-American and African studies I didn't always make all the doctor's appointments because I had to see a student I had to do this I had to do that it ends up it can take your life and you really really have to pull back and breathe because if you are committed the work I did with BSU when I was an undergrad it's followed me all through my life so if you want to be able to sustain yourself and be nourished you've got to do it now you've got to take deep breaths now because then you'll be able to continue swimming and you won't drown hi I think I just have a kind of part two to the choir so we can really relate to the pushback and just like alright we'll step back and then look around like somebody want to step up so I know that's something you are faced so this is something like we're in a moment of how does y'all get past that is there a way to get past it or just finding a resolution to work with people we've created spaces where we were like I might I'll give you we're not fine to have a seat at the table but I might I will step back so you can have your voice heard okay meeting the president is cool if you want to meet with him I'm okay like I'm here to help us make space but then also it's a two part of like I'm black so I also have a voice here but balancing like having my voice but not being the voice of the people but then also allowing other people to have a say how do you like balance that so it's like five questions but just answer whichever one so like we have we actually only are going to have until 150 so like there's a couple of the people who had questions so I would ask for them to ask their questions as well and then y'all can address all of them so we had someone up here and someone in front of me I'm going to write them down so we can remember hello my name is Nkemka I'm a student in Developmental Psychology and Social Work so my question is kind of similar to the sister is thinking about how does your work translate after undergrad so I had similar experiences where I was very involved in campus and I was tired I am tired still right but I recognized the importance of utility of my skill sets and empowering my people so I waver between this position of being this fatigue but yet this desire to make change and then also thinking about myself as a graduate student and recognizing the way that I engage in my community is going to be a little bit different so how did the work and activism you were engaged in as undergraduate students translate to after you graduated alumni and being here obviously you're continuing to support students but I'm curious as students how active you were engaged with alumni and what role can alumni play and how can that be facilitated it seems so many of these movements since the nature of student life is four years here and gone in many cases the stop and start nature and succession planning in organizations keeping them alive and going so I was just curious if alumni have a role to play in that if they do and where that stands now so to think about all three questions at the same time I so we failed at repairing the relationships and there were many years after our situation that were dark and when people didn't speak on campus etc what I wish we had done would be to have enlisted our advisors so we did have people on campus who were advisors to us who we did not bring into the fold including graduate students including faculty and staff around the university and including alum and I think that if we had some mediation in those situations I think that we could have managed and I do feel like the current BSU has done a great job of enlisting faculty on campus I'm excited about the work that the faculty and DAS have done in terms of standing up for and with students the graduate advisors who were here when I was a BSU an undergrad were critical in my development as a scholar and an activist and then the last thing is those folks are still in my life and so these are not Beth is here the way that the work has translated for me is to remain connected to those communities but also recognizing that even beyond these four years that those circles remain and we from time to time will take up particular issues that we want to address even as alone on that same note thinking of the broader community so faculty, staff, students something that I jotted down when I found out about the invite to come to this is just kind of the whole concept of intentional community building in itself and that is you know I wrote down the word grooming and I know that's not the best word to use but like looking at who's coming next distributing capacity to those who will be coming next sooner than you would like to just because yeah when you're there doing the work you know what you want to do and you don't want to pass it off but eventually it's going to happen so do you want it to happen when you are a senior the most engaged and know the most and when the person that's coming after you knows nothing or do you start that process sooner do you rely on folks like Beth and I'm staff here as well so if you want to email me rely on those of us that can support you in these efforts and whatever capacity we can do that as well distribute that work in the ways that are appropriate that are some of the ways to handle these you know you build community around whatever issue whatever and it doesn't have to be an issue like I'm thinking of the issue Unity dinners, the Umoja Barbecue those are the times when hey when you need to take a break from the stuff you got to take a break from the stuff you got to take time to come back build your community and and rely on and that included alumni one of the most powerful retreats we had was when we had Juwan and Panther came back they kind of like shook us up and you're like I ain't doing enough y'all but like get out there and make it happen whatever we were we came out charged and we you know just pulling an alumni they were alumni of the BSU and it charged us so just thinking of how to pull on your community those that are younger and those that are older but I listen to this was as we take on a role think through what the goals are what it is that you need most to have accomplished and it resonates within our community way beyond we have churches that don't survive the next generation after the founding pastor because the founding pastor knew everything and controlled everything and she wouldn't teach the next person we have organizations that are similar and I tried to learn and I am still learning at 65 is whenever I invest in something what am I investing for and who am I investing with so that you go on and you say okay I'll chair this committee because you know you talk about diversity fatigue trust us it doesn't get better as you get younger you're always going to be one of the few black women in the room so when you take on a role it needs to be something you want that you believe you can accomplish something in and you set a time limit for it and during part of that time limit you try to find one or two people to be grown and the thing that I've also figured out really recently if nobody else wants to do it after I've done it as long as I can it must not need to be done have any more responses to those questions question about the alums we had a lot of alums that stepped in and stepped up when we were we had some that came down and helped us you know write them out we had Glenn who ultimately got us on CNN but I think what I remember the most I don't know if Lester is still in the room was a email that he sent to Beth that Beth forwarded to us offering words of encouragement and it came exactly at the right time because it was we were in the middle of negotiations which were stressful we were getting all this criticism from the community he simply said you know there's gonna come a time where you're gonna go at each other and you're gonna wonder if you're doing the right work or if you should be doing the work and it's gonna come a time where you know people are gonna question the work that you're doing and there's gonna come a time where you feel like the movement is gonna crack but know that you're doing it for the right reasons you're doing it for younger black students who because of you will be able to attend the university and so words of encouragement and I still reference that email today I read that email this morning I think that's the easiest thing an alumni can do questions around getting people to step up and alumni have been answered really well and I agree with those sentiments I think for me as far as how the work translates post grad I'm in grad school right now and I haven't really had like a big girl job because I went straight from graduation into grad school but in sort of the weird period where I was out of school and hadn't finished my bachelor's degree I felt kind of empty and I didn't know who I was or what I was doing because so much of my identity was wrapped up in the work that I had done on campus I'm like well how do I translate that and so ultimately I was able to use the things I learned doing the work on campus and use that same passion for my community to put that into Alzheimer's advocacy and activism because Alzheimer's disease disproportionately affects the black community and so being able to speak powerfully on that issue and have passion for it and read up on the policy and get people you know moving the BSU is even super helpful with that like one of the very first walks I did the whole squad was just like we're here with you and so being able to translate that to different things is a really good way of making you feel like okay I wasn't just here for whatever period of time into this work and now it's all over like there are different ways to continue to do work in different capacities using what you've learned as a student activist oh it is 151 we are out of time let's make sure we give everyone on the panel a hand