 One of the things that I wanted to do, wherever I was, was to not just carry out my research and writing and publish and teach, you know, in the classrooms, I wanted to be involved in programming, scholarly programming that bridged the university and the community so that we could take this knowledge outside academia and let people, everyday people, enjoy, benefit from interact with scholars and learn from the work that we're doing. And so at Davis before I left, I went to the department chair and the dean maybe of the college. I said, I would like to hold a conference because I was feeling like I also needed to connect with my colleagues, you know, in different places and to come together and create this notion of a mission. We're on a mission to really make African-American studies visible and especially now we want to make Black working class studies as visible as Washington Booker T and W. E. B. Du Bois and all those leading figures that so much history, we want to make ordinary people more visible in the study of African-American history. And so I said, I'm a historian of the North so far, you know, I studied Milwaukee and I've got friends who study in Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, Salt Lake City. I said to my department chair, I said, let's bring these scholars here. And I know that people living out here in the West, they must be very interested in learning more about Black Western history. Because so far most of what our images are about Black Western, about Western history is about white cowboys and Native American warfare, you know, not much about the Black urban experience in the West. And they said, okay, put together an agenda, a budget, some objectives, you know, what you want to achieve. And we'll see what we can do to get some money to make it happen. And we put on a conference. And it was an extraordinary conference. My wife helped to really publicize and get all that stuff done. And it turned out to be a really good conference. That conference was probably in 1983. By 1984, and after I left for California, I decided wherever I go, we need to be doing these things. And if we're not doing them, I really want to be a part of trying to make that happen. So that's part of why, you know, we decided to do cause. But before we did cause, we did what I would consider a unique program in 1989. It was a program based upon the Smithsonian Traveling Exhibition entitled Field to Factory. And it was a major exhibit in Washington, DC, curated by Spencer Crue, an extraordinary curator and museum public historian. The Smithsonian made the decision to create a traveling version of the larger exhibit. And I said to myself, we ought to try to be the first visit. And we were. And guess what? Your library was a partner. And a woman named Sylvana Ford was on board there as a librarian. And she and I worked together to bring that exhibit here. But we transformed some floors of the library into exhibit spaces. And from that exhibit, we brought a lot of people to Carnegie Mellon and we did a major conference. And we brought several young scholars who were beginning to really make an impact on the field to give lectures on different facets of the Great Migration. We went forward and put together an edited volume of essays called The Great Migration. And it ended up being one of the most influential edited volume that I've been connected with. We had to work with the authors to produce revised essays. We had to find a publisher, which ended up being Indiana University Press. A press that Darlene Clark-Hine had a lot of relationships with. And so in 1991, it came out. And that's a really nice turnaround, you know, in terms of these kind of books. In that interim period, that's when Peter Stearns and I started to have our conversations about creating a center for African American urban studies. And then my own promotion to full professorship took place in 1990, you know, within that time frame. And then there was a lot of discussions about whether I would stay or whether I would leave. I decided to stay because Peter was very forthcoming and trying to make it possible to get some new hires, get the center up and running, all kind of things were falling into place. And I just felt that this was not a time to leave Carnegie Mellon because there's a lot of potential here. And so within four years after we published that book, we launched the center. And there was a lot of work in between, you know, trying to conceptualize the center, figure out, you know, what kind of programs they'd be able to develop, building bridges with the Heinz School, you know, relevant departments, especially Heinz, you know. And when we launched that center, we had Earl Lewis come back to give the keynote address. 1995, we opened the center. And you know, the center never had a building or space of its own. It's pretty much been a kind of in-house center in which we use the resources that we have to do a number of things. I think one of the major things that we do is speaker series that we've brought in lots of speakers over the years. We've been bringing in roughly four or five speakers, sometimes more, now for over 22 years. But then we've also had a post-doc tour fellow for most of these years. People who have studied the African American experience in a lot of different contexts. Third item is the oral history project, where we very much indebted to the Falk Foundation, not only for helping us start the oral history project, but for helping us start the center. The Falk Foundation was our first funder, outside funder for the cause center. The Falk Foundation put in an extraordinary amount of resources in enabling us to hire a director of the oral history project and to keep that person on board for about four years to really coordinate not only the gathering of oral history, but the teaching of oral history to graduate students to enable them to develop expertise in that area. His name was Ben Houston. And I think the other part is graduate studies support. Any graduate student who has a project that falls within the framework of cause, we provide some modest research funding to help them get to all kinds to work on their dissertation and research project. So that's another part of what we do. And the other thing is that we do a lot of special programming. When Hurricane Katrina hit, people were interested in talking about the issue. And so we organized a forum to talk about Hurricane Katrina. When Obama became president, people were interested in talking about the issue. And we helped undergraduate students organize a forum to discuss the implications of a black president. And then there are a lot of people who just come to us and say, will you support this or will you support that? And when we can, we do, like the International Film Festival, we all, historically, we've always supported them in some kind of way with films that would diversify their offerings within that context. So yeah, so this has been exciting for cause. And it's been exciting for me personally, because I get a chance to invite young people here who may not be known beyond their university and they produce, especially the postdoc one, they produce a book that eventually makes them household names. And then we can look back and say, we helped to make some of this possible. And they always graciously acknowledge that they got some fuel for their work when they came here. We're really happy about that.