 and they are all very excited. We had an excellent session yesterday. No, we had an excellent session yesterday and everyone is just is very excited for this as well. I have this question about I have a on the photograph of me. I have a plus on this side and a minus on the other side. To see everybody, do I push the plus? You're on an iPad? Maybe. Millie, is there a speaker view symbol coming up maybe in the top right of what you're seeing? Yeah, that would be the speaker view. Yeah, let's do this again. Share content, participants. Well, I guess it's fine. I can be seen, right? Yep, we can see. I can see people when they come up. So it's fine. Will we hear the questions or will you read the questions? I guess around, you know, four o'clock your time, you're on the east now, you know, I'm in the flyover country. But anyway, around four, four, 10, I guess we'll turn to questions that I can just pop on the Q&A function and sort of distribute those. I'll read those. I mean, I can read those and maybe shape those a little bit and make sure that they, you know, there are conversation flows beyond that. So does that sound okay? Yeah. Yes. Lovely. That sounds great. It's not like there's not anything happening in the news, you know, that will keep you. Is there anyone less than the American power structure does not have COVID-19? That's the question of the day. I want an update on who doesn't have it. So everyone, we are live, attendees can see us. Well, hello to everybody. Hello. Hello. I think I'm going to say we have one more minute and then I'll do our introduction and we can get started. Okay, great. Cool. I think I'm going to make more light. Okay. Okay. We're good. My name is Jenna Crosfanti and I serve as the director of community engagement at the drama skills. Welcome this afternoon. We're so happy to have you join us. The drama skill legal defense fund, the DLDF is a nonprofit organization committed to free expression in the dramatic arts. For more information, please visit dldf.org. Today is partnering with the political engagement initiative of the drama skills of America, a 101 year old trade association, which advances the rights of over 8500 playwrights, composers, librettists and lyricists across the United States. To present this afternoon's online panel discussion to highlight black writers who are censored and excluded from our collective cultural fabric. I would like to recognize Amy Von Masik as the co-producer of today's event, unknown legacies, black playwrights in America. DG and the DLDF are proud to welcome William Maxwell, professor of English and African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis, Mary Helen Washington, distinguished university professor in the English department at the University of Maryland, and William Harris, professor emeritus at the English department of the University of Kansas, to discuss playwrights of Mary Baraka, Alice Childress, Claude McKay, Laverine Hansberry, Richard Wright and many more. And why these eminent writers are not part of the theatrical canon as we know it today. And with that, we will start with Professor Maxwell. All right. Thank you, Jenna. Thank you, Amy, for putting this event together. And it's good to see old friends. I said that in the best sense for all three of us. Really Joe and Mary Helen, we do really know each other and have read each other. And I very much appreciate the work that they've done that's plowed really important ground for everybody who works in the field. I think we'll talk amongst ourselves, as we say, for maybe about an hour, as long as that's interesting. And then we will open it up to a Q&A session with anyone in the audience who's interested in making a point or pressing a query forward. We're happy to do that. We talked a little bit about the event beforehand. And we thought that we would concentrate early on at least on two figures, Alice Childress, who Mary Helen has worked on and has helped to recover in various ways. Anna-Miri Baraka, Billy Joe, has been working on for many, many years. And in fact, the definitive critic and scholar of, I would say. So, Mary Helen, I thought I would start with you. If you could just maybe tell us a little bit about Alice Childress who is returning to historical work and conversation, but is relatively, relatively unknown. She's born in 1916, dies in 1994. And tell us a little bit about what are the forces that may have kept her from being recognized until pretty recently. So we'll start with Alice Childress and Mary Helen. That's okay. Okay, we're not sure when Alice Childress was born, but it's almost... Okay, I stand back. Not 1960, because she altered her age a lot. She said it was very important in a theatrical world. I'm not sure I want to leave her out of the canon because she's kind of slowly, but surely working herself her way back into a canon, certainly in African American literature. Childress was writing plays from as far as I can tell 1949 until she died. And I would concentrate today on the plays that she wrote between 1949 and 1956 because that's the Cold War period. And in some ways, the plays that she wrote during that period, I think, have the most relevance for our topic today because even though I would say that all of her plays are about two things. They're always about race and they're always about the Cold War. At least these plays in this period. So first play is Florence, which 1949 comes out in Masses and Mainstream. And of course, Masses and Mainstream is definitely a Marxist publication. So she sort of makes her entree into the theatrical world through leftist circles. Second play is Goal Through The Trees, 1951. Clearly a very militant, racially militant play. But as I read all of her works, the subtext of every play is the Cold War. And I'll go back and talk about these plays more as we go along. Third play is Wedding Band, 1966. No, no, it's the play in 1955 is Trouble in Mind. Again, she's taking on anti-communism. That's a play that actually wins an award in 1955. And then the last play that I would talk about would be Wedding Band. And even though it came out or was produced professionally in 1972, she finished it in 1963. And again, it's one of those plays that takes on issues, both of race, Cold War, anti-communism, and then in that play, an interracial love affair. So I could go on because Childress wrote novels, she wrote short stories. She's prolific until her death in 1994. But I think her standout period is this 1940s and 1950s and 60s. When I was in junior high school, we read A Hero Ain't Nothing but a Sandwich is one of the most frequently banned books and book libraries to this day, in part because it deals with heroin addiction. But just to follow up a little bit before we move on to Baraka and his basic situation. Harry, can you tell us a little bit about where and when these plays were produced under whose auspices? I know that Alice Childress worked with the American Negro Theater, was an important actress as well early on. And one of the reasons that she turned to writing plays is that there were not a lot of great parts for talented African American actresses in the era. So, you know, her first play is Florence. And as I say, it was published in a Marxist magazine, but it grew out of her work with the American Negro Theater. And at the American Negro Theater, she's working with Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Lorraine Hansberry, and all these other actors. And they formed the American Negro Theater because of the way Black actors and playwrights were being treated by the mainstream theater. But it's interesting that she wrote that first play, Florence, in opposition to or in response to what some of the men in the A&T American Negro Theater said that plays about women were not plays about race. That if you wanted to do a play about race, you had to have a male character. And she wrote it to show that women were just as intricately involved in those issues as men were. Yeah. Another story I've heard about this play, it's almost too good. It must be apocryphal, is that there was a sort of dare or bet among the members of the American Negro Theater. Could a play, could a really good play, a producible play, be written overnight? Yes? Is that true or? I don't know. If Childress was dared to do that, she certainly would have done it. But it is interesting that even though, you know, this is her first play and it's a play that was responding to the Black men in the Negro, the American Negro Theater, all through her life, she was always writing plays in which she had to take on men in the theatrical world as well as whites. Every single play, all the way to wedding band, she had to fight to make the main character a Black woman. Because Joseph Papp, the famous Joseph Papp said, we could take it to Broadway, Alice, if you would only make it a play about the white man and not the Black woman. And of course, she refused to do it. She got all the way to the Shakespeare Theater, but not to Broadway. Okay, that's fascinating. Thank you. So we'll turn back to Alice Childress in a minute, but I thought we might turn now to Billy Joe and his work on Amiri Baraka, a figure who I believe is still better known, had an amazingly varied important influential and controversial career in almost any genre you can imagine. But I think, you know, came to literary fame as a playwright with Dutchman and other plays. Billy Joe, can you tell us a little bit about Amiri Baraka's work as a playwright and how that's been either canonized or not in American academic circles? Yeah, someday I wanted to start with is, he may not be as well known as some people, but he is known by a lot of people. It's just like it may not be absolutely, it's not going to be Broadway, but there are people who know him. There are books appearing on him right now, scholarly books. So there is something called the Amiri Baraka Society, which sort of amazed me. I didn't think Baraka would ever have a society that he was too wild and unconventional. And it turns out to be a really terrific organization, but so he's not totally outside the limelight, but it's always sort of a, it's kind of a problem to get him to get him center stage. And you think about, you know, in this moment of all concerned about race, he's not quoted very much, which really surprises me. And Baldwin is quoted a lot more. And I just think it's, I don't think it's really true, but they find him safer to quote, they're more comfortable with Baldwin, and they're less comfortable, they're less comfortable with Baraka. But he started out and Dutchman is the play he's made him and he won and he won an O before. And that was 1964. And, you know, he was on his way to being this incredibly famous writer. He is a famous writer, but not famous in the way he could have been. And what happened was, he made a trip to Cuba in 1960. And he writes about this, an essay called, I forgot what it's called, Cuba's Libra, right. And what happens there before he is, before he goes to Cuba, let's just do it quickly. He's a beatnik. And he is totally connected in that world. And I write about it. I'm very interested in it. And I think that he profoundly connected. And there are these loving relationships in this world. I mean, it's a very important thing to him. And he thinks himself as a rebel. Then he goes to Cuba. And he finds out he's not a real rebel. And at that point, he becomes politically involved. He doesn't become a communist at that point. Even though it's interesting in the FBI I file, so it looks like they think he is. But he's radicalized. And he comes back to the United States and he's disappointed with the beats. And what starts happens there, as long as he is rebelling as a beat, he's becoming famous and celebrated. What happens is Malcolm X is killed. And he becomes a cultural nationalist, moves to Harlem. So he moves out of the Lower East Side, he moves to Harlem. And so he makes two moves which keeps him from being, let's say, wildly popular. One is becoming a black nationalist. As a black nationalist, he gets involved in anti-Semitic gestures and poems. And as the way Baraka does everything, it's very much out loud. It's put in the most provocative terms. This lasts, the nationalism and the anti-Semitism lasts till around 74. And he gives it up at that point. And there's the thing about it, and he's a guy I'm really fascinated in. I mean, part of his becoming an anti-Semitic this way is I think it has something to do with a certain amount of guilt he felt about being in the white world too long. And it all fit into his nationalist period. Now something interesting in terms of vision if not, vision if not, if not censorship is when Dutchman is performed in 64 downtown in the village, it is a great play. It gets an OB as I said earlier. The same play is produced in Harlem. And when it's produced in Harlem, it's considered an anti-white play. I'm the exact same play. And the Black Arts Repertory Theater, which he's in charge of in Harlem, loses its money. The government money is pulled out of it. So that's sort of interesting. And another thing is just in terms of how this works, a friend of mine who runs much more high-falutin circles than I do was talking to somebody on the MacArthur Foundation, and this is approximately what this guy said. He said, I don't care if that anti-Semite writes as well as Shakespeare. You'll never get a MacArthur Fellowship. And so over, I think, you know, that's one of the most powerful forces of this period were he had taken on anti-Semitic character. There was a later controversy about a poem around the 9-11 events that... Right. And what's interesting about that? Yeah, please. I'll be right back. Please tell that story and I'll be right back. Okay. Go ahead. Am I still here? No. I think on my screen it says Alice Childress. We're still here. We're still here. You can see me? You can see me. Fine. Okay, great. What happens with their two poems? And he's more famous as a poet. And also, which I think is kind of wonderful, more controversial as a poet, because poetry is not... You don't think of something gets in the newspapers, cause trouble. Baraka's poetry does. There's a poem in the sixties called Black Art, which is actually a fascinating poem. And then it's a poem which uses stereotypes of all sorts of it. I think intentionally all sorts of people who are Black and including, including Jews. And they are stereotypes. Now, I think something's interesting, and this is an anti-Semitic poem. But I think something that's interesting about the poem, at one point there's a line. It says, there can't be love poems written until love can exist in this world. So it sort of gives the sort of context about why this poem exists. And so it puts anti-Semitism in a very kind, I think, interesting sort of light. When I was doing an anthology of Black American literature, various people at the publishing house said, we will not publish this poem, because they said it was an anti-Semitic poem. So we moved. We changed publishing houses. And usually I don't think that would have happened. I think it would have happened if you just stay with the publishing house and you cut the poem. So this house censorship worked. The 9-11 poems, Somebody Blue America, was performed at a poetry festival in New Jersey, you know, of course, after 9-11. And the poem caused all sorts of controversy. He read the same poem at Penn State when I was teaching at Penn State before, so several months before. And there was, people were very upset about the poem. But what I think is interesting about that poem is, there are two different threads going in it. There's one which seems, it is definitely anti-Israel. I don't think it's anti-Semitic. Some people make this distinction I do. There's another section of the poem which is talking about Jews and various people being victimized. But what has happened, I was talking to this gentleman. This just happens over and over. And he said, you know, I really can't read Baraka. And he quoted certain lines from the poem. And he knew really nothing about Baraka. So what has happened is, and this is a form of unfairness in life, is people have gotten together, quoted some sections of this very complicated sort of poem, and that's all. And they don't talk about the other parts of it, the rebellious parts of it, the combination of the Nazis, et cetera. Well, thank you. Just before we move back to Alice Childress, a kind of last question in this preliminary round, if we want to call that. I like Brown. Yeah, that's good. Baraka is not an actor per se, not a member of equity. But he is one of the most talented, amazingly powerful readers of poems that you can imagine. There are all sorts of recordings are available. Anyone can go to YouTube to see him. He also did important work with free jazz musicians. He's a major and explainer of free jazz to other audiences. Would you like to talk a little bit about Baraka's kind of performative or dramatic nature, even as a poet? I mean, I saw him. He was a teacher when I was in college. At that point, he was a kind of button down Marxist. This is the early 1980s. He wore a dry suit and a red, black and green tie, but led us through pretty rigorous exercises. But the one thing that was unusual in that class is how often we read dramatically. And he was. And you said he taught this class? You took a class that I took at Columbia University. He was there for a while. Okay, right, right, right. No, I'm interested in that because so many people have taken that class. Yeah, no, I mean, he's a major teacher of lots of people, particularly in the New York area. He also taught at other... Also in DC and yeah. Yeah. But can you talk a little bit about him as a kind of theatrical exponent or presenter of poetry? Yeah, I wouldn't call it theatrical, even not meaning it's incredibly involved. And Alden Nielsen has a book coming out on this about jazz reading, Baraka reading with jazz. And something that, you know, one of the points of the book is Baraka really always wanted to be a musician. Right. You know, in this sort of free jazz environment. And by performing as he does, you know, when he starts, he'll, I don't want to do this because I'll knock off the butt. You know, when he starts to read a poem, he goes, you know, he creates a rhythm. And, you know, he even sings at some point. And sometimes it's quite wonderful. But I think, you know, he is thinking of poetry as performance. And when I interviewed him once, you know, I said, you know, what form do you want your poem to be in? And one thing he said, you know, he didn't care if the written page disappeared, which I don't think is true. But, you know, he wanted that sound. That's what, you know, and one of his famous essays is called How You Sound. Right. And he's terrific at, you know, ringing, creating that sound. And a sound that this, you know, this all goes back to the blues. And if, you know, if you do that sort of tradition, he comes out, it's free jazz, but it's free jazz associated with blues. If you go with that tradition, you know, it's a singing tradition. It's tradition, it goes back to, you know, it's an oral tradition. I mean, it goes back to, it goes back, back, not after, but early African American experience. And when I came to New York, and was on a live on a subway with a lot of black kids, I realized, gee, that sounds like Baraka. I mean, it's the same sort of voice. But so there's this trying to, you know, capture that sound and the sounds of the music. And it is quite extraordinary. And people are taken by it over and over. His poems are full of attempts to register pure sound, right? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, all the scat and that all the making up of making up sounds. Yeah. Okay. One of the, someone on chat in the audience mentioned that Baraka had taught at Stony Brook. I believe he had an appointment there for a long time. Yeah, I taught with him at Stony Brook. Really? Okay. That makes a lot of sense. All right. But Mary Helen, I think that you have a more sort of visual presentation that you may want to give us as part of this introductory. Yeah, I do want to look at this here. Yeah, please. Okay. I do want to look at some of these visuals because, you know, children, because she's, the work that I'm talking about is in the 1950s and 1940s, well, mainly the 1950s. Let me see if I can get this to come up. Doesn't seem to want to play. We can see your first slide, I think. I know, but I want to go to the other slide. Well, then you've, you've exceeded my grasp already because Okay, here we go. Okay. I found the arrow. Okay. Well, there she is. I'll show some of these visuals because again, you try to get back to children who is, you know, 10 years, really before Baraka. And back into this moment of the Cold War that I think is very hard for people to understand who are, you know, past, you know, are younger than a certain age, you know, certainly younger than me. It's harder to understand what kinds of barriers we're facing black artists. And I'm thinking now black playwrights in this early period when there was so much resistance to any kind of black struggle and militancy. So I'm just going to show you some visuals just to introduce you to children's and to how radical she was for the 1940s and 50s. She was associated with every left-wing organization, including the Communist Party. I don't know whether she was a communist or not, but she certainly was a part of the most radical left groups. So here you have her in this picture. This is a picture with Herbert Aptecker and Eur Gournier. People may know Gournier from his daughter, Lottie Gournier, but Gournier was a trade union activist and communist. And Herbert Aptecker was one of the major communists in the United States Communist Party. And so, you know, there's there in the picture. I also wanted to look at a few of the slides from her FBI file because she earned her left-wing reputation. She earned it. So, you know, every page has a list of all the organizations that she was involved in. I just have to look at some of these from the Civil Rights Congress to the Freedom, the Frederick Douglass School, Masses and Mainstream, the Jefferson School of Social Science, where they taught Marxist philosophy and Marxist history. All of these eventually are going to be on the Attorney General's subversive list. And children seems to have been, I'm sure she wasn't unmindful of her FBI file, but she seems to be absolutely, you know, intrepid, just, you know, being in office. She walks in the May Day Parade. She works with the things that we wouldn't even think of as radical. The teachers union, she tried to get black. She was always trying to get black actors in the unions where whites were segregating themselves. She's a member of the National Council of the Arts and Sciences and Professions. And again, to our 21st century eyes, that just looks like a little organization. It was on the Attorney General's subversive list, right? And then there's the Committee for the Negro and the Arts. I think that was one of the major organizations that she was involved in. And it's interesting in one of the good things about the FBI file is it gives you so much biographical information. It tells you where they were, who they were with, so that they're fantastic biographical materials. And always, it's the confidential informant of known reliability who tells you something. Here she is in Negro History Week, and she was in that every year. One of the things that she did, though, as a dramatist is that she worked with the Civil Rights Congress to put on a play at the Club Baron. And then it was reviewed in Paul Robeson's Freedom magazine, and sometimes by people like Lorraine Hansberry. So she created this network of left-wing artistic resistance. And you have to think of her as very much a part of this kind of coterie of leftists. Always being, you know, her comments, always many comments about her being in the the daily worker. She also was working with left-wing whites in, for example, the Czechoslovak workers' home, and sometimes Jewish workers. I mean, you know, she covered the gamut. So this is, you know, Masses and Mainstream, which publishes her first play, Florence. And let me just make a comment about how radical Florence is, although not to, you know, 2020 audiences. So one of the things about the Cold War is that it tried to suppress dissent. This is one of the hallmarks of the Cold War. Bill, you can chime in here at any point, because you know all of this. All right, so what kinds of dissent is the State Department and the government trying to control and suppress? It certainly is black dissent. Okay, so here, and I'm just going to look at this play and look at some of the lines in the play, because she stages Florence in a way so that the actors come in through double doors and when they reach the stage, the stage is divided into colored and white. Okay, this is 1949. This means she is staging segregation so that it's represented visually. The white characters come in and they have to turn and walk to the white side. The black characters come in and they have to turn and walk to the black side. And then what happens? The characters have an interaction. So there's three characters in this play. One is Mama, or Mrs. Whitney, and the other is a white woman, an upper class white woman, Mrs. Carter. They begin to talk to each other, friendly at first, of course. And then little by little, Mrs. Carter begins to say the kinds of things that a liberal white person would say, thinking that she was being, you know, kind to Negroes. And Mama, who is on her way to New York to convince her daughter, Florence, to come back home, because Florence has gotten ideas that, quote, a Negro woman shouldn't have. She wants to be an actress in New York. And so Mama has been sent because Florence is now out of money. Mama's being sent to New York to bring her home. At the end of this conversation, she interacts with Mrs. Carter. She begins to get angrier and angrier. And at the end of the play, she decides to send the money to Florence. And with a note that says, you can be anything you want to be. And so she's, again, look at how she's staging this whole resistance to segregation. And that resistance was, let me give you an example of how race was working in 1949. What could you not say? I mean, you couldn't say the word white supremacy. The only people who were saying the word white supremacy were who, Bill? Communist. Only the communists. They were the only ones, they started saying that. Mary Helen, did I get that right? Okay, good. Yes. So, you know, even the terms that you were not allowed to say, you were allowed to say racial prejudice, that was it. The concept of structural racism, that came right out of the Communist Party and the people on the left. And so this play, in a sense, is staging that kind of look at the way structural racism works, but also look at the way an ordinary working class woman like mama is resisting that. So it's a very powerful little one act play. So I'll stop there. I'll pick up with the other plays as we go along. Okay. Just one thing we can notice right away from, you know, first of all, thank you for the images. They're wonderful. Really helped to tell the story. This magazine Masses in Mainstream, that looks like the Scottsboro Boys. No, this is the Martinsville Seven. Ah, okay. Okay. And so, you know, that's about them. I was going to say something about Masses in Mainstream. Just publishing in that magazine would have led the FBI directly to your home because it was the literary magazine of the American Communist Party. That's 1950. It's the height, right? A first wave post World War II anti-communism in the United States. So just allowing her play to be published there was courting a certain level of danger. As she said, she's quite intrepid. Sorry about the arrow with this photograph. Maybe you can tell us a little bit more about the Martinsville Seven. Okay. But it's parallel to the Scottsboro case because it's another case that Communists were involved in. I think the NAACP was actually involved in it too. But again, this is part of the second act of her play Goal Through the Trees. So Goal Through the Trees is published or produced in 1951. You couldn't get any deeper into the Cold War than 1951. Is that right, Bill? I mean, I would say that that was a nadir, a low point. I mean, it comes in a low point. It's a low point. But a high point of the Cold War. So Goal Through the Trees has four acts in it. And it's a dramatic musical and civil rights play, I guess you would call it. But part two is called Martinsville. And she simply has the mother of one of these men. Okay. So these men were arrested in 49 in January of 1949 for raping a white woman in Martinsville, Virginia. Martinsville, Virginia was considered a kind of more liberal place, which of course in 1951 could have meant downright racist. Is it near Atlanta or? I don't know where. It's in Virginia. It's in the southern part of Virginia. Okay. So they're arrested, seven of them, a couple of them were too young to be tried. I think they were like 12. They arrested, tried for the rape of this white woman. Apparently, some of them were involved in the sexual assault, not all seven of them. In one year, by January of 1950, well, two years in 51, they were all executed. They were executed, all seven of them in two days. I think it was February 2nd and February 5th, and all executed. So it was, it was a real travesty. But who wrote about it? Who had the nerve to write about something like the Martinsville Seven? Well, in the second act of the play, she has the mother of one of these boys talk about what these children were like growing up. And then dramatically at the end of the, of this section, she has a character come in and call out their names. And as they call out their names, a bell peels for each one of the seven. You know, she's taking on racial stories that, you know, playwrights did not deal with. And she's taking them on in a way that, that, that critiques and condemns the treatment of blacks in the United States. In fact, when I went through this play, I was thinking of how much everything that Childress did has a real bearing on what's happening now. She called out every one of these stories of an unarmed man being killed by the police. She wove them into her play. So this was one, you know, that tried to keep alive the idea of the, of what happened to these young men. Right. It sounds in part that one of the things that she's doing is kind of building on extending, giving new life to 30 social realist traditions, which were obviously produced in a different moment before the classic of American anti-communist, I mean, Blackston Hughes writes a famous play about the Scottsboro boys. Yeah. Don't you want to be free? Yeah, exactly. It seems like she's sort of keeping that tradition alive, extending and changing it. But so can you see this, can you see this copy of the page in freedom? Yeah. Okay, so this page in freedom was, you know, core, it was like corresponding to what she was doing in the play. So, you know, Childress is working on freedom, another publication that's going to be banned by the Attorney General. And here's the video. Put out freedom. Who, who is responsible for freedom that me? Well, mainly, you know, I mean, it was Paul Robeson's idea. Lorraine Hansberry worked on it, Lloyd Brown worked on it, and Alice Childress, Bula Richardson, you know, so many people on the left worked on it. Right. But again, look at what you see in 1951. If I had seen something like this when I was in elementary school and knew that there were people out there who were fighting for black freedom in 1951 in this kind of resistant, you know, powerful way, you know, showing the Martinsville 7 being hung by, hanged by the Statue of Liberty. You know, that's the kind of thing that that leftist did visually and the children's did in her plays. And it's interesting that the word at the bottom of this, the critique is, this is an example of white supremacy. 1951. That's amazing and prescient in all sorts of ways. It's also interesting too, since we're talking to dramatists, that these circles of resistance seem to be constructed, at least in part, with dramatists at their center, right? I mean, you have Paul Rubson, right, who obviously does a lot of different things in his life. He's a major political figure, but you know, an actor, right, and writer of plays as much as anything. So, so I have a like, a fancier question, but there's a, there's one real practical question up that I think a lot of people are probably thinking through right now as you give this presentation about Childress and Barack. So Mary Helen, what would be the best place to look, practical place to look to get a collection of Alice Childress's plays? And I'm going to ask the same question to Billy. If you were going to buy a single volume or a couple in order to just confront this work, where would you start? You know, Kathy Perkins put out a book on Childress. I think this might be the only, I think this might be the only book that I've seen that has a collection of her plays. And she doesn't have all of them, but she's got all of her 1950s plays here. And, you know, as you know, I was surprised when I got this book that there is no real scholarly collection of Childress's plays. I mean, one that would introduce them and put them in their historical context in their, you know, scholarly academic context. There's just, there's nothing like that. There's been, you know, relatively little attention paid to Childress. I just found a clip of Childress reading at a play reading. She's reading along with trying to think of Max Roach is what Abby Lincoln is reading the part of Julia in Wedding Band. And there's a little clip of them on YouTube. And it's the first time I've ever seen Childress, you know, live. And certainly the first time I've ever seen her actually read her plays and she's a fabulous actor. Yes. Yeah. She's an award-winning actress early in her career. Absolutely. Yeah. She, you know, she actually, now she, all the things that I've read say that she won an obi in 1955 for Trouble in Mind. But Perkins says that she was not able to find any real documentation of that. But I do think that that is true. Yeah. She was very well known in off-Broadway circles too. So Billy Joe, what would you suggest to folks trying to find their way into Baraka's work? Yeah. Well, one thing, okay, two things. And this isn't self-advertising. The first thing is my collection. He's bragging. This is the standard collection. Okay. And the reason, I mean, so this, I don't know what it's about, 81 something. No, that's can't be. It doesn't matter. It's been out for about 20 years now. But when I did it, and so what it is, it's, it's, it's so it's called The Learay Jones and Mary Baraka Reader edited by William J. Harris. And who published the Billy Joe? Well, it's, as which one, here's the funny thing. It switched publishers. And I just pulled a copy from the, it originally is published by Thundersmouth Press, but it isn't anymore. It's published by another press. Okay. And I'd have to go upstairs and pull another copy to see what the other press is. But this really deals with his entire career. And it is, it is a good place. It is a good place to start. So, you know, talking about somebody who's, you know, doing lots of different things. So it has things from his poetry. It has from his music, criticism, blues people, it has all it's arranged in each of his styles, meaning like from being a beatnik, being, being, being a black nationalist, being, being a communist, it's all here. So this is a good place, a good place to start. Now, an interesting thing about, thing about this book, when I was teaching at Stony Brook and I was teaching Baraka, there wasn't a book. I mean, what I would do, everything, not everything, but most things were out of print. I don't think blues people's ever got out of print. But so, you know, I was using Xeroxes and, you know, and, you know, and breaking copyright law. And so I called a Mary and I said, I want to do a reader and I got him. He's not a very easy person. He was 10 o'clock at night and I got him. And he said, yeah, you can do it. And Thunderville Press is interested in it. And that's where that book came from. And it is, it is a good introduction to his work and even has Baraka's criticisms of it in his, in his short introduction. This book is called SOS. And this is his poems. And it's, you know, it's relatively cheap. Cheap is published. It's published by a major publisher, Grove Press. And this covers his entire career. And this is the best book. So you get the career was published, you know, just like a year before, before he died. It has some extraordinary new poems, some beautiful lyric poems, and it covers the career. And the paperback edition has oral poems of Baraka's. So it has that sort of, you know, that tradition also. So it's, you know, the published poems and then poems, which are representative, representative oral poems. So those two collections. Thank you. Some very helpful folks in the audience are placing up in the chat function if you want to check it out. More detailed publication information. So thank you for that. So I have a question about maybe putting these figures together a little bit, at least potentially in Baraka's sort of famous mid sixties moment, when he becomes probably the most famous and influential black writer in the world, right, around the time of the Black Prophet's repertory school, so on. He also is very putting it there and not, okay. Yeah, no, I'm just thinking in that moment, you know, it seems he thinks that he's the lodestar of black art as he moves to Harlem after the assassination of Malcolm X. Right. Yeah. And there's good arguments that he is in certain ways, though he's forming this theatrical collective in Harlem in a brownstone that they were, you know, that they renovate themselves. But what I was going to ask is this, in that moment, his attitude towards prior generations, black American artists, playwrights, writers, is I think it's safe to say dismissive. Well, like if you look at essays in home. Yeah, he dismissed Black Lit, it's interesting, and he dismissed both Baldwin and Langston Hughes. Right. And he reverses himself as he learns, you know, as he learns the tradition. I think he spoke at Baldwin's funeral, yes. He did. He did. Go to talk is in my book. Yeah, is it? Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, it's beautiful. It's quite beautiful. When it comes to his reclamation of Langston Hughes, there's amazing pictures of him at the Schoenberg Library. Oh, dancing. Dancing with Maya Angelou. Yeah. Langston Hughes' ashes have been very marble for to sort of make that burial an active and productive one. But the question I was going to ask is this. Oh, sorry, I'm winding up. No, no, I was happy. Good. Yeah. Do we know about the relationship to the extent that there is one between Baraka and Childress or maybe Baraka and the generation of the Cold War that Mary Helen has written about so well? Can we think about that? I mean, how did these two and maybe the forces they're associated with exchange ideas? I don't know. And I do not really know her work, but what I was doing was, you know, so I know something, you know, reading around and what Mary Helen was saying earlier. And they're so similar. And they both are, let's say, maybe my mother's term pigheaded or strong-minded, you know, both involved with both involved with with left politics. But I don't think, I don't, I don't think there's any, you know, connection. And I don't remember him ever talking about her. And he does come from a very different moment. I mean, there's that fifties. It's that we'll call it beat. It's much more complicated. You call it avant-garde moment. And then there's that cultural nationalist moment. And then there is the commune moment. And he called himself a communist, not a Marxist. And that starts with 1970, 1974. So I see parallels, you know, and before that, we're talking about magazines. I don't mention freedom boys. That's later. What are the Marxist magazines? We talked about before. Masses, the new masses. The masses, the masses and so on. Yeah. Baraka was, Baraka was publishing in all the magazines of that, of his particular moment. And Negro Digest, which is extraordinary, becomes Black World. It's an extraordinary magazine. Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting that their lives were so parallel, working, you know, in the 1950s and 1960s. So I'm thinking of Wedding Band, which is first produced in 66, and then its biggest production is in 72. And, you know, when I look at that, I think about the way in which children just represented a form of dissent and racial resistance. It's never as overtly available as Baraka's kind of resistance. I mean, he's, I like, I love the way you described it out there, readily available, outrageous, readily available. You can't, you can't miss it. Okay. So I want to think about Wedding Band and the kind of racial resistance and racial power that's in this play about a Black woman who is in a relationship with a white man. Now, the first thing that happens, of course, is that people like John Killen say, oh my God, you've betrayed the race. You know, this is the worst thing that you could possibly do in the 1960s when all this militancy is going on. But look at the way she stages this place so that it's actually about this Black woman moving into a Black community of other women as she tries to work out this relationship with this man. Right. Children's never let you forget that these two people do love each other. But what she does is she puts them on an equal footing. He's a baker, a working class white man, she's a seamstress, a working class Black woman. They do love each other, but Childress's play dramatizes the structural racism in their situation so that they can't get out of it, even as much as they might love each other, they can't break out of this structure. She also has the Black woman in this play say the most powerful things about slavery, about segregation, you know, about white liberalism. All of that is voiced in this play at the same time that Childress holds on to this personal relationship as something that also has value. That's a kind of nuanced story that in the 1960s it didn't have the relevance as something like Dutchman, you know, where he gets on the train and says things like, you know, to the white woman like, you know, Betsy Smith hates you, you can't claim it. All of the things that he does in that play, like I say, immediately strike you with their militants and anger. Childress weaves that anger right in here, but she never leaves it there. She makes you go deeper. That's really interesting. Yeah, it is. I was going to say, Mary, do you have other reflections on Childress's encounter, you know, in the 60s with Black arts ideas? Does it affect her career, even if she's not in direct, you know, contact with Baraka, or maybe that's just not important to her? Like you're saying, she's, you know, she's working in a parallel related, but maybe separate tradition. I don't have any specific thing that she said about the Black arts movement. And I suspect that Childress would have been somewhat suspicious of Black nationalism because she always worked in not just interracial circles, but always in leftist circles. And so I think she wasn't drawn to nationalism. In fact, there was also, that I say in my book is that these other people from the 1960s like Asi Davis and Julian Mayfield, they all have this moment in which they leave the left and they, you know, say, you know, I've got, I've got to get closer to this kind of Black nationalism. And Childress never has a moment like that. So, you know, it strikes me that, you know, it wasn't something that she was drawn to. Okay. Billy Joe sounded like you wanted to say something there. Oh, I just want to say something like there is also both with the beats and with the Black nationalist, you know, there's this strong sexism. So that is something that she would not find, find attractive. Yes. Yeah, particularly in early Baraka. So, so it is now 3 p.m. my time in St. Louis, 4 p.m. in Eastern time. Right. The tyranny of the time zone, you know, some of us are in from California, I noticed, and other times, but maybe it's time now to turn to some audience questions. Does that make sense? Oh, that's fine. That would be a good thing. So there's, we're going to go to the Q&A function. Folks in the audience want to leave a question. Maybe we could go there. I can also go back and forth between that and the chat, and I will start with the question from chat. I'm not sure if we can answer it, but the question about, can we talk about how you see Adrian Kennedy fitting in with Alice Childress and Amiri Baraka? So reflections on any connection. I can't. I can't either. Neither can I, sadly. So we have failed the first question. But we would like to make it up to you in some subsequent questions. So shall we move over to the Q&A? Or you can, we can go and chat too. I can see both. I see five questions in the Q&A. All right. Well, let's go to the Q&A. The first question I see from Dominic Taylor who asks, can you speak about how Blackness is performed in Childress's Trouble in Mind? Here I mean the play within the play Chaos in Belleville. That sounds like a question for you, Mary Helen. Well, yeah, I could say that the, so Trouble in Mind is her 1955 play. The one she won the OB for. Okay. The play within the play is called Chaos in Belleville. And that is the play that's being, that's written by the director of White Man, whose name is Manners. And it's a play that requires the Black people to do certain kind of stereotypical things. So the major Black woman in the play is the mother of a son. And at some point she is supposed to turn her son over to the authorities with the expectation that they will be fair. Now this is the white guy's idea of Southern justice. The mother, the play, the woman actor goes along with it as long as she can. And then, you know, she really can't stand it anymore. And she said, I can't find the, yes I can. I think I have, nope, I don't have it right here. But she says, why would I, why would his mother send him out to, you know, to these authorities knowing that she can't trust them? And, you know, Manners says, well, you know, this is, this is the play. This is how I wrote it. And she said, you know, that's the problem. She says, you know, you wrote it that way. Let me see if I can find it actually in here where she says, okay, so this is the mother saying, tell me why this boy's people turned against him. Why are we sending him out into the teeth of a lynch mob? I'm his mother, and I'm sending him to his death. That's a lie. Okay, then John, but his mother doesn't understand. Then we'll let it. Everything people do is kind of their mother. And then there have been cases of men dragged from their homes. In other words, there have been cases like this. And then the black woman says, but they was dragged. You know, they weren't sent to be killed by their mama. So she's staging this resistance to the white man's idea of black life in chaos in Belleville. And again, it's another way to me in which children's is also staging a kind of Cold War dialogue. This is the kind of soft liberal position that the white audience could stand. And at some point, Manners says that he says, this is as much as a white audience can take. And so then you realize, you know, from, you know, that the other play is reacting to you're actually creating a play that is soft enough for this audience. Okay, thank you. And now we have a question about two plays of Barakas that I believe were published together, The Toilet and Baptism, probably his best known plays after Dutchman. Billy Joe, do you have some reflections on those and how they might fit into some of the issues we've been talking through? The Toilet and what's the other? The Toilet and Baptism? Yeah. A little on The Toilet, Nothing on Baptism. I think it's an interesting play in a lot of ways. One, I mean, something, a scene comes up in it. Well, it's about, it's about kids. Yeah. And there is a white kid. And, and, and they're black kids, and the white kid is, you know, like they're, they're friends, but his friends don't like that to be. And finally ends up with a, with a fight. And, and the white boy he's beaten up. I can't remember by him or somebody else. I want to show this picture. Oh, cool. Can you, can you see this? Higher, higher. Yeah. Okay. This is a staging of The Toilet in Detroit, Michigan, back in the 60s. And I think it was staged by Woody King, who works in New York now. Yeah. Woody King does a lot of Barakas. Okay. But the story is, you know, that these people are all, you know, they're, they're arguing, the young men are arguing, and they're bullying the white kid. And it turns out that one of them, I think it's a black guy, is gay. And he's the one that goes back into comfort, the white guy. Yeah, what happens? Yeah, that happens. I mean, the character, it's a main character. And I don't know if he's gay or not, but he comes after this macho thing and beating up the guy, he comes back. He comes right. Yeah. And he comes back to exactly to comfort the guy. Now Baraka talks about that ending and said he was kind of forced to put it on. And I don't know if that's meaning like that. He was forced to put on what? The ending where he comes back and comforts the guy. Yeah, I don't. Right, right. That's great. I just like your sound. No, he didn't want to admit that he had that gay ending. Yeah. Yeah. So I see Robert Crossley has this. But before that, the set for the toilet is designed by Larry Rivers. And it's a lovely set and it's in some museum somewhere. Yeah, it's a it's a fabulous play. Well, Mary Ellen, it's not like you want to address Robert. Yeah, go ahead. We'll come back to the questions above it. But there is a question from Robert Crossley. Is that the one? I can't see the question. Oh, okay. Well, I mean, Robert Crossley's question is this. And we will come back to the questions above it. Many men and women who acted in the ANT, the American Negro Theater are familiar names in American theater history, because they moved on to Broadway or Hollywood, right? Asa Davis, and so on. But are there names that should be known among black women and men who were directors in the 50s and 60s? Well, directors. Yeah, or maybe just figures out of that world, right? A black theater in the 1950s. I mean, maybe B Richardson. Um, she's one, she was a really fine actor. We see her again in she plays with Cindy Poitier in the movie in the heat of the night. Oh, that's time I saw her. I think she plays a kind of conjure woman there. Because it was also in the ANT. Yes. Harry Bellafonte, the rain, Hansberry, all of them were in ANT. Ruby Dee, Asa Davis. Right. Speaking of Lorraine Hansberry, there's another question about Lorraine Hansberry, who's, you know, certainly her profile has been much revived in recent years. There's some recent biographical work. So yeah, it's interesting that they are it's they're more sympathetic to her being leftist now than they were before. So that's just kind of a meaningfully queer playwright. Yeah, right. So important in the history of sort of queer representation. It also seems to me that she's been revived in kind of tight parallel with with the Baldwin revival, right? They're often seen as comrades and friends and Baldwin and she both went to the famous meeting with, you know, Bobby Kennedy that resulted in a blow up of one form of the civil rights movement. But so any reflections on the relationship between both of our figures today and Lorraine Hansberry and the extraordinary revival of her work right now? You know, there's a strange relationship between children and Hansberry in that they never talk about each other. At least publicly they I can't find any statements about them. And yet they were, you know, working in New York in some of the same venues. They certainly knew each other. They were both on the left. But I think that there was some kind of, I don't know whether it was competitiveness or animosity between them. So I don't know. And then, you know, Hansberry's play comes out in 59 and it's it just kind of takes over the whole, you know, black media scene. And everything else gets wiped out. You know, we see very few revivals of children's play raising in the sun is always being revived, although wedding band, it was just produced a few years ago. So it comes back. And then, you know, Hansberry also dies in what 64. He dies really young of cancer. Yeah. And children's is, you know, dies in 1994. So there's, you know, there's a long period of time in which Hansberry is absent. But I think it's very strange that children's doesn't talk more about Hansberry. And it could be also that Hansberry kind of drifted away from the left. You know, she stopped identifying herself as someone on the left. That's interesting. I'm going to advertise my own work now briefly, very briefly, but I was going to try to bring it up. Oh, yeah. No, I swear to God, there's a germane point here. Okay. By the way, this gift goes great with a turnover in regimes next month, but anyway. And we are going to have one. Well, we are, I guarantee it. Can I tell everyone just so they know that your book, FBI's EYES is for everyone at home, everyone watching this. It was the cornerstone of this entire event. Amy Von Masek and I came across it and we were looking at how black writers were censored, censored, how they were limited, how they were silenced. And it's only fair to say that's why we're here today because we came across Bill's book, FBI's EYES. That's right. Well, thank you very much. And what I was going to say, actually, I was promised I was going to try to make a point with this. One thing that Childress and Hansberry have in common is that they were both targeted by the FBI in ways that seemed very intense and very early. Lorraine Hansberry has one of the longest FBI files of any black writer of the 20th century. They were fascinated and worried about Raisin in the Sun, the FBI was, and they sent agents out to review the play before it made it to Broadway. When it was on its trial runs in New Haven and Philadelphia, there were actually FBI agents sent out. And in her FBI file, there are pretty elaborate reviews of the play that show, you know, both, let's just say, heavy political interests, but also a certain amount of insight into aspects of its politics around the question of Africa that critics and other readers haven't emphasized till recent years. So it's pretty fascinating that way. But anyway, let's get back to these questions. Oh, you didn't know what we've mentioned. Baraka is also mentioned in the portrayed in the book. And it's quite fascinating because I didn't really know this material before. But it's fascinating the the agents are so taken by him. Yeah, you know, they're sort of seduced that it's not that they don't find him evil and bad, but they find him also attractive. Yeah. So it's quite incredible. And something that Mary Helen said earlier, and I felt bad about it when I when I when what's my mind when I was reading the material for literary agent for literary critic, these FBI files are great to say, I was thinking I said to my wife, I said, gee, if the FBI, you know, snooped on everyone with fabulous material material. One of the reasons this book exists is because Mary Helen kindly gave me a copy of Alice Childress's FBI file a long time ago now. So she was willing to share her research, let's put it that way. So people should buy the book. Oh, absolutely. Yes, I mean, it is really, it is really an exciting and interesting book. I think people should buy several copies at one time, of course. Well, I don't think one should be greedy. Let's go back to the questions. So we have a question to say, you know, with the revival of Trouble in Mind, do at the roundabout theater next year? This is a good question for both of you. What other Baraka or Childress works? Would you like to see mounted on contemporary stages? Right? If we're going to pick two or three that, you know, could be redone, and you think would have a particular form of express in the present, what would you like to see revived? I would like to see her 1951 play go through the trees revived in a modern kind of representation. So here's a play that begins in Africa, and there's an African woman reciting a poem about the Middle Passage. And then it moves to part two, which is about Harriet Tubman. That's not about Harriet Tubman rescuing anybody. It's about Harriet Tubman working in New Jersey to earn enough money for her trips back south, with two other women. And the two other women are fearful of being arrested because they know that Tubman has a price on her head. It sounds like an analogy with the Cold War, Mary Helen. Yes, exactly. That's why I think it should be staged as a kind of Cold War play, because all of these different sections of the play are all underground scenes. So here's Tubman in the underground trying to convince these other two women to keep working, even though it's politically dangerous. And then the third part is the Martinsville seven part. And the fourth part is set in South Africa with two freedom fighters who are fighting against apartheid. So I would love to see because, you know, she children's wrote the music for it. She wrote the dance sequence sequences. And, you know, so much of it could be visual. So the Martinsville seven section could be done with all kinds of video and and different kinds of, you know, screen images of the history of that. So that's I would love to see revised. Okay, how long is it? Oh, it's probably if you did it on stage, you'll probably take two hours. Okay. It sounds like a diaspora and an avant-garde play and emphasis. And that's the way it would have to be done and kind of avant-garde style. And I think it could be. Yeah, sounds exciting. Even if they changed the Martinsville seven to, you know, the Central Park five. Right. Yeah. Or somehow wove that into to that section. So, yeah. Billy Joe, correspondingly, what would you like to see revised? I would like, I would like two plays. One play, which is published with Dutchman, which is called The Slave. Oh, yeah. And it is, takes place during the 1960s. A black revolutionary comes to his, to the house he used to live in. He wants to take his daughters away. And his wife is now married to a white, some type of, let's go, some sort of white guy, white intellectual. And the plays are really interesting. You know, there's a racial war going on. A line which went through my mind this morning, because I was talking to somebody else about somebody, something else. And so the hero of the play is going, you know, who wants to bring about the revolution. And he talks to the guy, the white guy. And he says, you know, I'd rather talk to you and my illiterate troops. And so this whole thing, there's something lost, a world that he, that's been lost for him. So that play, I think it'd be interesting and relevant to the moment. The other play is called The Most Dangerous Man in America. 19, 2019, 2015. It's about W. E. B. Du Bois. It was staged in New York. Woody King, pardon me. Very late play, it sounds like. Yeah, right, right. Woody King, you know, produced it, directed it. It is not about Du Bois as a civil rights leader. It's about Du Bois as a communist. It's not Du Bois about integration. It's Du Bois about seeking some sort of black liberation, human rights, black human rights. There are a couple reasons. When it was, you know, we're talking about censorship. One thing about this play, so here it's Baraka's 2015. He has not, it's, you know, here's his famous playwright. It's staged in a little theater. It is, you know, where his stuff is ending up. And let's say it's staged in a little theater. I just drifted. Sorry. This is a way that censorship works because he's not in these big places. It's a little off, off Broadway, off Broadway theater. The review of it in the New York Times, and you can just say this is, you know, personal, calls it basically inert and not very, and not very, not very good play. I and the audience found it a very exciting play. But, but I think the times it's looking for a different sort of, different sort of person. So, and it's a play that, it's a play that it's hard to get. So I think it'd be terrific to, to, to re-stage it. Give it a second time. There's a couple of comments on the chat. Go ahead Mary Helen. Sorry. Yes. A couple of comments on the chat that we should look at because they say there's a film version of the toilet on YouTube. But then Lanisha reminds us that in the toilet, those two, the white guy and the black guy that goes back at the end were lovers. That was the hidden text of, of the toilet. Thank you, Lanisha Gonzalez. Okay. I want to also say I saw the slave staged in Detroit. Yeah, because you know, Baraka and Woody King and David Rambo were friends. And he did, he did several of, they did several of Baraka's plays in Detroit when Woody King was still in Detroit. And he, he staged it in a, a school, in a school auditorium so that all the audience were, this is, no, this wasn't the slave, this was called slave ship. Oh, and the audience had to be part of the audience, had to be part of the people on the slave ship. It was very, very dramatic. Yeah. People talk about, I've read it and been totally unimpressed. Yeah, you have people have seen it. No, I think it's magnificent. Well, it was, it was, it was powerful. Yeah. Powerful. That's good. I think both the children's and Baraka were really born dramatists. They, they instinctively understood what was dramatic in the retelling of these stories and stage them very well. It's hard to talk about them without actually having, you know, the performance. Right. Yeah. Same thing with Baraka's poetry, right? Yeah, I was saying the poetry, the reading, right, lives in the moment of reading. So I just want to, I want to throw it over to Amy from the dramatist group because I believe she wants to make a, something like a final statement. Oh good. I want to hear it. Oh, well, that's so, that's so much pressure. No, I just really wanted to, I wanted to thank just sort of closing remarks to thank all of our panelists today and especially to thank my co-producer, director of community engagement, Jenna Crisponte. I know that we weren't able to get to everybody's question and I'm so sorry, but we are recording this. It will be available again on our website and on the DLDF website. This production of Band Together was co-sponsored by the Dramatist Guild Political Engagement Committee and the Dramatist Legal Defense Fund. Special thanks to the board of the DLDF and President John Weidman and to Nicole Salter and Gwydian Sulavan, chairs of the Political Engagement Committee. I just want to thank you all. If there's any, if there's like one more question or one more thought about Baraka and Childress that either of you would like to give, we'd love to hear it and then I think we'll wrap it up for today. Well, there's a good question on here. I appreciate the discussion. Just wondered what panelists think about whether overt confrontational angry work is effective to encourage social change. That is an excellent last question. Is reflective, subtler work effective to encourage social change? Does art affect change? It sounds like it has a slat question. No, I don't think so. The person is saying does art affect change? No, the person is saying certain styles of art, which ones affect change? And does this sort of confrontational one? Well, you got the confrontational person, so you start. What? I got the... Oh, I got the confrontational person. Yeah. I think what Mary Helen is saying is you're on, Bill and Joe. Yeah, no, I just doubt. I just thought I did not. I thought first she said I was the confrontational person. I'm not. Obviously, I'm like Joe Biden. I'm a nice guy. But I think it's sort of fascinating over time, watching people respond to Baraka, and they respond. They do respond to the confrontational work. That's all. And I don't know. And sometimes the subtler work, I'm not sure it's subtler. It's just sometimes it's not revolutionary. Well, let me go back to answer this question to Bill's work on J. Edgar Hoover. So here's something that Hoover said in the 1950s. He said, the Reds have done a vast amount of evil damage by carrying doctrines of racial revolt and communism to the Negroes. And I'm thinking, you know, J. Edgar Hoover's version of reality did not stand. What's what's stand are the people who actually took up racial resistance and racial revolt. That's what's come down to us. So yes, I think all of this are both Baraka's and children's. They both affected change because we now look at Hoover's words. And, you know, that's those are not the words that we feel moved and changed by. So thank you, Bill. I think that's a great ending. Giving us an early Christmas gift. Thank you. All the gifts we can get right now. Well, this whole panel is a gift. Yes. Yeah. Wonderful talking to you. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, I don't want to talk for my fellow pals, but I guess I will immediately, which is, you know, we are, we have email addresses, you know, we're supposedly teachers. So if people have particular questions, particularly right, Billy Joe and Mary Helen, I think. Anything. No, you can ask us. I'm sure we'd be happy to correspond to the extent that we can. So thank you all for coming. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, everybody. Yeah. Thanks, everybody. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. It's good to see you guys. We'll talk to you. Yeah. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Jenna.