 Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our annual Constitution Day event. My name's Keith Webster. I'm Dean of Libraries at Carnegie Mellon and it's my pleasure to welcome you to our annual lecture. We gather each year for Constitution Day because any college that receives federal funding is required to do programming to honor Constitution Day. And for the past 16 years, the University Libraries has partnered with the Division of Student Affairs to host an annual lecture. As we move into this evening's event, I'd like to recognize and acknowledge our greatly valued partnership with the Division of Student Affairs and with the University's Alumni Association. Their help really makes this event possible. I'm particularly grateful to my colleagues, Shannon Riff and Andy Presbilla, Joe Ramsey Miller in Student Affairs and Katie Morris and Ryan Frytag in Alumni Relations. This event is particularly important to us because we house in the Posner Center one of only four surviving copies of the first printing of the U.S. Bill of Rights and its ratifications. And you'll learn a little bit more about this in a few minutes' time in a brief video presentation. The running order this evening is that we will begin with a video presentation by our colleague, Sam Lemley, Curator of Special Collections at the University Libraries. Sam oversees many of our wonderful treasures in our collections, including the remarkable Posner Collection in which the Bill of Rights is housed. Sam will speak to you through a prerecorded video at the end of which he will introduce our keynote speaker this evening, Professor Joe Trotter, a wonderful colleague and someone with whom we have a tremendous partnership. Joe has chosen for his topic this year African-American workers and U.S. Constitution past and present. At the end of Dr. Trotter's lecture, we will be joined by Dr. Wanda Hedding-Grant and Gina Casolaino. Dr. Hedding-Grant joined the University earlier this year as our inaugural Vice Provost for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. She is also the University's Chief Diversity Officer. And she will be joined by Gina Casolaino, Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students at the University. And they will help us, or Wanda will moderate at Q&A with Joe and all of you in our audience. Gina will bring things to an end with some closing remarks. So you've heard enough from me. I hope that you have a pleasant evening that you enjoy Sam's video, that you enjoy Joe's lecture and that you participate actively in the Q&A session at the end. So with that, I am going to step aside and I hope that someone has a magic button which will allow you to hear from Dr. Sam Lemley. Thank you and good afternoon. Good evening, everyone. I'm Sam Lemley. I'm the Curator of Special Collections at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries. And tonight I'll be sharing something from the collection with you in introduction to tonight's event. This is, I think, one of the most remarkable things in Special Collections at CMU. It's a printed pamphlet. It's about 11 inches tall. And at some point in the past, it was actually removed from its original binding. You can see that there are some small fragments of that original binding spine on the pamphlet's left-hand edge. You can also see that there's a small stain in the upper right portion of the first page and the outer leaves, right? The first and last pages that kind of serve as the pamphlet's binding in the absence of the original binding are noticeably darker and kind of stained. And that suggests that it's actually been in this disbound condition for some time and was probably handled in this condition for the centuries that it was in circulation before coming to CMU. So on the first page of the document, about a third of the way down, is the article or the document's title. And that's articles in addition to an amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. Of course, this is a copy of the American Bill of Rights. It was printed in Philadelphia by Special Commission in January or February 1792. And this particular copy was purchased by Henry Posner Sr. in 1963 and was later deposited with the libraries along with the rest of the Posner Memorial Collection by Henry Posner's son and family. So given the appearance of this document, it usually surprises visitors to special collections to learn that this is one of the rarest documentary artifacts that we have. And in fact, it actually might be the rarest single item we hold, only five copies, including this one are known to survive. So that's a vanishingly small survival rate given the size of the original edition, which I'll get to in a minute. But apart from its rarity, what's fascinating about this document is that this printing of the Bill of Rights, it wasn't fully unprecedented. This was not the first time that the constitutional amendments that would become the Bill of Rights had been printed. In fact, they had been put into circulation fairly early, usually in the form of newspapers or broadsides as early as 1789, which was immediately after they were approved by Congress and sent to the States for debate for ratification. So what does make or did make this particular printing of the Bill of Rights important and groundbreaking then is the context of its printing. And remember that it was printed likely in January or February 1792. In other words, immediately after Virginia became the 11th and final state to ratify on December 15th, 1791. And it was Virginia's vote that met the requirement that three fourths of states ratify any proposed amendment to the Constitution. And remember too, at this point in American history, there were only 14 states and the Constitution itself was fewer than five years old. So this document that I'm holding, putting it differently is it's the first form of the Bill of Rights that could claim the force of law and the first time that it's 10 articles appeared in print as an integral part of the United States Constitution. And for this reason, constitutional scholars and scholars of American history refer to this document, this printing as the first official Bill of Rights. So instead of merely listing the ratified amendments though, it also records the kind of legal deliberation and legislative compromise that led to ratification. So in a sense embedded in this document is the story of the contentious origin of the American Bill of Rights. And I think the best and most basic evidence for this is the fact that it lists 12 amendments rather than the more familiar 10. What many don't know is that of the 12 amendments that were originally proposed in 1789, only amendments three through 12 were ratified to become part of the Constitution. So for example, our first amendment which protects the freedoms of speech, religion, assembly and the press was actually the third in the original form of those 12 articles. So besides that though, beneath the printed amendments beginning on page three appears a kind of roll call of states recording how each state voted on the question of ratification. And I find this fascinating because it turns out that the bulk of the Posner Bill of Rights actually isn't the Bill of Rights at all. The amendments take up only one leaf or two pages out of 12, but otherwise most of the document is given over to kind of an enumerative record of legislative bureaucracy. So I'm gonna show Pennsylvania's vote on screen here which appears on page nine. And Pennsylvania was one of the last states to submit its vote on ratification. And you can see that that vote is dated September 21st, 1791 or about three months before Virginia's deciding vote. So after Virginia's vote to ratify was submitted to the federal government, Thomas Jefferson who was then Secretary of State commissioned the printing of this edition and 135 copies were made and distributed to the 14 state legislatures to ensure that they had the sort of official and approved language of the amendments on file. So that's a very almost painfully brief documentary history of the Bill of Rights that only brings us to about 1792, 1793, but I wanna end with the observation or sort of by looking forward with the observation that this copy of the Bill of Rights offers a number of important lessons, most of which are still very much alive today. Famously Thomas Jefferson called the Constitution a good canvas in need of some retouching. And I think revisiting this document in 2021 reminds us that the American experiment is maybe always a good canvas in need of some retouching. And that's part of its power and part of its beauty. After all, this particular copy of the Posner or the Posner Bill of Rights lacks all the so-called reconstruction amendments including the 13th Amendment which effectively ended slavery in the United States and the 14th and 15th Amendments which respectively extended the rights of citizenship and the right to vote to recently emancipated enslaved people. So with that idea kind of offered in introduction I want to welcome and thank Professor Joe Trotter who will be giving the keynote lecture for this event. I very much look forward to hearing his thoughts and meanwhile I would invite all of you, anyone to reach out to me with questions about special collections or the Posner Bill of Rights. Thank you very much. I first of all want to thank a number of people for making this event possible. Keith Wester, Wanda, Jaina, Ryan, Katie, Andy, Shannon all of you, thanks very much for arranging for me to give this lecture on the African-American experience particularly workers and the US Constitution. As you can see from the screen I have entitled this talk, African-American Workers and the US Constitution. And if you saw the advertisement you will notice there was a little sub here to say it passed and present. And so if you would move to the next slide I want to share with people the overview of this particular talk. As you know, I am especially interested in talking about the role of African-American workers in this constitutional order. I think very often we privilege the doings of some of the most educated and articulate members and leaders of the community. Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King and many other luminaries have gotten substantial attention when we talk about how the Constitution relates to blacks and their struggle for freedom. But today I want to end this talk looking at this notion of interracial class relations and the Constitution. But those first three items will be an effort to situate this struggle over the Constitution more broadly in some of the debates that have been going on about blacks and the Constitution over several years. And especially the idea of whether we should regard the Constitution of a pro-slavery document or an anti-slavery document whether black people can see themselves inside that document in a viable way that reinforce their quest for citizenship. And so I want to just start by taking a look at this notion of a pro-slavery constitutionalism. So if you would move to the next slide, please. I want to talk a little bit about this. And for the audience sake, I'm going to move pretty quickly through the slides initially because they're a little bit longer than I want to burden you with trying to read. And so I'm going to move fast through the first few slides. This first one is simply situating that from the outset of the new constitution in 1787, African-Americans faced an uphill battle obtaining their rights under the new document. Would you fast forward please for me to slide five? Right here, this is good. Thank you. What I want to say here is this idea of the Constitution as a pro-slavery document, a document that denigrated black people and denied them access to citizenship. It's really based upon three major, you'll see in my, I passed that slide, but three major components of this pro-slavery argument about the Constitution reinforcing the interest of slave owners instead of the interest of the enslaved. And the first item is that it guaranteed the continuation of the international slave trade into this country for 20 years, which meant that the federal government took a hands-off policy toward the slave trade and guaranteed Southern slave holders in particular that they could continue to import African people enslaved human beings into the country for their profit and benefit. And this is considered to be a great failure in terms of the African-American quest for freedom and abolition because it really reinforced the institution of slavery and sort of gave Southerners the ideal that this was their nation and the way this nation would unfold would be on the basis of white supremacy and the enslavement of black people. So that's one pillar of this pro-slavery constitutionalism. Another part, which is equally and even more important over the long haul is that the future slave clause was entered into the federal constitution. And this clause allowed slave owners to enter any state in the union and reclaim people of African descent and as private property and re-enslave them. And because it didn't provide any opportunity for the accused to defend themselves, then it opened the door for free people of color to be ensnared in this process and to be re-enslaved illegally. And so this was a very, very disappointing dimension of the constitution for African-American. And just keep in mind, free people of color would start to increase quite substantially so that by the beginning of the civil war, there's a half million people who were defined as free people of color. And so this ideal of the future slave law giving such blanket power to slave holders really made this population very insecure and exposed them to a number of abuses in terms of being re-enslaved. The third item, and this one gets probably more attention than the other two, is this three-fifths clause, which is often taken as a symbol that slavery regarded black people as less than human beings. But I put in here adding insult to injury is that black people consider in the racist perspective as sub-human beings. But at the same time, these Southerners are arguing that they should be counted as people toward their representation in Congress and in other federal bodies. And so this particular provision enabled slave holders to really take control over the federal lawmaking bodies of the period. Four of the first five presidents of the United States were Virginia slave holders. And if we look at the first 12 US presidents, eight of them claimed ownership of enslaved people of African descent. And so this is a big issue for us thinking about the African-American experience with the American constitution, US constitution. To the next slide, please. But what I wanna call your attention to is this last bullet on this slide. Given what we've said about the international slave trade, about the idea of the future of slaves and about the three-fifth clause, should we therefore consider the constitution of 1787 as uniformly and consistently a pro-slavery and anti-black instrument of government? That is the big question. And it's one that I would like to take up here in this discussion. Now, my short answer to that question, should it be considered a pro-slavery document? It's almost like, yes. I mean, how else can you regard it given the evidence? And here's some additional evidence I wanna say that would lead people to say that this was primarily a pro-slavery document, is that until the onset of the civil war and the emancipation of some 4 million people of African descent, slave owners dominated US policies and practices on race and slavery. And these four items that I list here, fugitive slave law of 1793. These slave owners weren't content to allow the constitution to protect their right to go into any state and retrieve enslaved black people. They immediately got to work and had Congress pass this fugitive slave law of 1793 that spelled out in even more uncertain terms the vulnerability of these people who were fugitives and free people of color who had escaped to the North. This second item, Prig versus Pennsylvania is a US Supreme Court case. So these slave holders are not stopping at Congress. They're asking for the judiciary to stand solidly behind their ownership and enslaved people. And so this statute in 1826 for Pennsylvania sort of set up laws that made it illegal for people to just try to re-enslave a person. They had to take it before a judiciary body and get some kind of allowance and have some kind of testimony that would allow people to defend themselves. And then in some lower court cases that supported that statute, the slave owners simply didn't accept it. They said, we're taking this all the way to the Supreme Court. And so it was taken to the Supreme Court in Prig versus Pennsylvania. And in that case, the court said Pennsylvania's law cannot supersede federal law protecting the property of slave owners in the South. And so slave owners could continue to go into these Northern states, retrieve people and return them to slavery. And then the fugitive slave law simply reinforced the fugitive slave law of 1793. And then this Dred Scott decision simply went a step further and just obliterated the notion that black people could be citizens of the United States. And so just sort of define the United States as a all white republic and without the capacity of black people to become citizens. And so with all of these ideals and all of this evidence supporting slave holder perspective, you would think that no, there's no way black people going to manage to get very far under this constitution. But the truth is there were some areas in that constitution that opened the door. And so I want to go to the next slide and talk a little bit about this. And so I said a better answer would be yes and no, that there was an anti-slavery document as well as a pro-slavery document in some ways. And again, I want to identify three areas where people sympathetic to black people and African-Americans themselves turn to the constitution in three ways to buttress their case for liberty and for citizenship and for the abolition of slavery. Next slide, I want to go to the first item. Okay, this first item, item number one. People who were sympathetic to black people turned to this notion that the framers of the constitution refused to allow southerners to write slave and slavery into the document. And as James Madison put it, that would be wrong to explicitly write into the constitution the idea that property and men or human beings were legitimate rights, protected in perpetuity by the fundamental law of the land, that they would not accept that. And so that is one place where northern allies of black people didn't cave in to the southerners who wanted an explicit provision, acknowledging that slaves as property was legitimate and should be protected under the constitution. The next item that African-Americans took heart in is the way in which once that 20 years of approval for the international slave trade was up, the US Congress did move quickly to outlaw the international slave trade. So in 1808, Congress outlawed the international slave trade into the country and supporters of African-Americans and African people themselves believed that was a wedge for them to begin pushing this constitution more and more toward the anti-racist and anti-slavery perspective, okay? And then the third item, which is significant as well, although historians have been critical of this whole provision, the Northwest ordinance before the constitutional convention of 1787 took place, the Articles of Confederation government had outlawed slavery in the US territories north of the Ohio River. And the constitution that was written incorporated that provision in article four, section three and four. And so abolitionists and people who were involved in crafting an anti-slavery movement and crafting a movement to transform the constitution into an anti-slavery instrument, they pushed this idea that the constitution allows the federal government to limit and even eliminate slavery. So they were pushing hard on that. And so these three items, not mentioned in slavery by name, by outlawing the international slave trade and then looking at the territory and saying, no, we're not gonna permit slavery north of the Ohio River. That activists took hard in these items and they pushed very diligently to transform this constitution into an explicitly and much more explicitly anti-slavery charter. And in a fundamental way, they won the day. In the end, next slide please. I just wanna call attention to this very quickly. The civil war and the emancipation of some 4 million people of African descent resulted in the triumph of the US constitution as an anti-slavery and anti-racist document. Passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendment to the constitution between 1865 and 1870 defined black people as four citizens of the United States. In a series of civil rights act by Congress, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, 1875, outlawed racial discrimination in virtually every aspect of the nation's public life. All kinds of institutions were asked to desegregate and not discriminate on the basis of color. And so this was a great victory for the anti-slavery forces, for African people and their own struggle over years to emancipate themselves. And so the United States as some legal historians now say that this created a second constitutional order which could be called an anti-racist constitutional order compared to the other constitution that lasted in full force all the way down to the beginning of the civil war. The emergence of the post-bellum white supremacist system soon undermined the citizenship rights of black people despite the creation of an egalitarian document that brought black people into the body politic. The next slide please, I'm gonna move quickly. I just want to say this is a very, very troubling, disturbing and violent moment in the nation's history and for black people. In the late 19th and early 20th century, beginning actually with reconstruction, look at this, the Democratic Party from the beginning called itself the white man's party and it pledged to remove black people as a valuable force from the political economy of the nation. The party's program dovetail very well with the rise of white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Both the party and the Klan wage violent campaign against African-Americans across urban America and of course in rural areas as well. In New Orleans alone, race riots erupted in 1866, 68, 73, 74 and 1877. In 1866, the riot left over 50 black dead and another 150 people injured. The U.S. Army station in New Orleans and other federal authorities ignored pleas for help. And so that by the onset and by the way, in the 1890s and the late 1880s is the heyday of the lynchings of African people. And so it just inaugurates a period in which black people's citizenship is being stripped away. And so that by the beginning of World War I, the new Jim Crow order, the new white supremacy system, the new segregationist order is well in place. It defined people of African descent as second class rather than first class citizen. And it undermined the promise of the second anti-racist constitutional order. But black people didn't despair because they moved forward and struggled even within the context of the Jim Crow order. They struggled against that order and they consistently mobilized above ground and underground to really undercut white supremacy. The modern black freedom movement must be given credit for extending the unfinished, you know, in some way finishing the unfinished business of the second constitutional order. And what I mean by finishing, I mean it added another layer of legal protection for African American rights by delegitimating the Jim Crow order between 1954 and 1968, the US Supreme Court's Brown versus Board of Education decision and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, 65 and 68 established the foundation for the emergence of a new equal opportunity regime. It's not an entirely new constitutional order. It's a elaboration and development of what has started nearly a hundred years ago. And because I'm just gonna read this because I think it's important that the class dynamic that I wanna talk about, there's not enough time to do it justice, but the modern black freedom movement helped African American workers as well as educated and more professional people. Sociologist Bart Landry notes that the gains of the modern black freedom movement reach far down into the neighborhoods and homes of the black working class, as well as the middle class. And I know for a fact, and we may talk about this a little bit more, but coming from a coal mining family, there's no way I would be in a Carnegie Mellon University today without the unpack of the modern black freedom movement. So it may not have gone as far as it should have. And we're gonna talk about that too, but it was a tremendous breakthrough, tremendous moment in African American history. And it wasn't that moment just it wasn't automatic. It's like people sacrifice all of the struggles of the civil rights era, all of the violence and bloodshed, all of the death eventually produced something tangible that helped this next generation to get a footing of some sort in the American order. It's unfortunate that this sort of effort to finish the unfinished business of transform the constitution in reality to a document that ensures the full citizenship rights of black people, that some fundamental structural changes as well as the persistence of certain racist ideals and practices undercut that achievement. But the collapse of the nation's urban industry economy had a devastating impact on the movement toward this more just and equitable society. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, and I'm pushing ahead on a lot of different fronts, but the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement symbolizes a new moment in African American constitutional and legal history. And I'm going to suggest that we may be now in a moment of a kind of third constitutional order because it seems like that second constitutional order didn't pan out as well, even after the great breakthroughs of the civil rights movement. And so we'll have to talk about where do we go from here? In the wake of George Floyd's public execution in the hands of Minneapolis police, some activists have urged the movement to embrace the constitution in a more activist and militant way. Next slide. I'm quoting from this activist and writer, Brandon Simeon-Donkey. I don't know how many of you familiar with him, but I searched the web on this one to try to get some up-to-date information about how the Black Lives Matter was beginning to interface with the constitution as a way to empower that movement. And Donkey wrote this essay that says, why the Black Lives Matter movement should claim the 14th Amendment. He saw the Black Lives Matter as not really invoking the constitution in the way that it might as a potential weapon against what he called the racial caste system, that the 14th Amendment, and I'm quoting, converted the constitution into a potential weapon against the racial caste system. But more than 150 years of evidence demonstrates that the amendment and its judicial interpreters have abandoned Black folk. To reverse that damage, the people who endeavor to create an anti-racist world must snatch the constitution from the groups of the enemies of Black freedom and seize hold of it for the first time. Black Lives Matter, because our constitution, because the Equal Protection Clause demands it, end of quote. I thought that was pretty telling quote, trying to really connect contemporary today's movement with this constitution in a vibrant way. And so I wanted to bring that forward in this talk. Here is where I want you to bear with me. I'm going to read, I'm gonna conclude by reading this section of the talk. This is the heart of what I'm trying to get at. It's this ideal that at each moment of our constitutional struggle, there has been a dynamic interplay between the activism of poor and working class Blacks and their highly educated elite counterparts. And I mentioned earlier that very often we published the words and deeds of the most articulate, eloquent and educated leaders of the African-American community. But we need to give greater attention to the precise class dynamics of the African-American struggle for just constitutional order. These class dynamics are not only deeply rooted in the early 20th century beginning of the great migration of rural Southern Blacks into the major urban industrial centers of the nation. They are also present in varying degrees from the founding of the constitution to recent times. In closing, I wish to provide one prominent example from the mid 19th century before the Civil War. In 1851, following the enactment of the future of the slave law of 1850, an annual convention of Black people met in Cleveland, Ohio. At that meeting, a young 19-year-old barber named H. Ford Douglas, no relation to Frederick Douglas, moved that the convention approved a resolution that he wished to put forward. His resolution declared in no uncertain terms that the U.S. Constitution was, quote, a slave holder's document. It was designed, he said, to protect and perpetuate the institution of African slavery. In rising to speak, the young barber forcefully declared, I hold, sir, that the constitution of the United States is pro-slavery, considered so by those who framed it. The constitution, he continued, legalizes and protects, quote, one of the valid systems of wrong ever invented by the cupidity and avarice of man. Furthermore, he said that the racial provisions of the U.S. Constitution exceeded the tyranny of the worst days of Roman despotism. Finally, Douglas concluded, quote, no colored man can consistently vote under the United States Constitution, end of quote. According to one historian, the young Douglas was, quote, a formidable working class abolitionist opponent who was rapidly becoming one of the most forceful abolitionist orders in the state of Ohio. Only four years earlier, Douglas had escaped from slavery on a Virginia plantation. He was very close to the grassroots everyday lives of enslaved fugitives. Across the state, he took his message that the constitution protected slavery and was an optical to the liberation of black people. The Cleveland Convention, however, defeated the Ford Douglas Resolution by a large vote of 28 to two. So he had one friend on board, or at least one friend who was willing to speak up on his behalf. Now, at that same Cleveland Convention, too well educated, openly mobile, free men of color led the opposition to the Ford Douglas Resolution. One of these men was John Mercer Langston, the future attorney, founder of the law school at Howard University and later president of Howard University. The other man was William Howard Day, a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio and an accomplished newspaper editor. Both Day and Langston firmly embraced the constitution as a foundation for the African-American freedom movement. They believed that it would be a mistake to allow slaveholders and their pro-slavery judges and politician to define the US constitution and its role in the fight against slavery and second-class citizenship. As Day put it, and I'm quoting, I consider the constitution, the foundation of American liberties and wrapping myself in the flag of the nation. I would plant myself upon that constitution and using the weapon they have given me, I would appeal to the American people for the rights thus guaranteed." End of quote. Langston was even more specific. He invoked the constitution to challenge the future of the slave law, slavery and discrimination against free people of color on the ground in the 1850s. In his view, the constitution guaranteed, quote, trial by jury due process of law and habeas corpus, end of quote. Against this standard, he concluded that the future of the slave law was not only unjust but flagrantly unconstitutional, end of quote. Langston and Day left no doubt about their views on the legality of the future of the slave act of 1850. In their view, the future of the slave law possessed, quote, neither the form nor the essence of true law. It kills alike the spirit of the declaration of independence, the constitution and the palladium of our liberties. End of quote. In conclusion, I would like to return to my basic argument about the African American struggle for broader and more inclusive American constitutionalism. This struggle was not directed only from the top down. While Day and Langston won the vote at the 1851 Cleveland Convention, their embrace of constitutional principles cannot be understood outside the influence of poor and working class blacks like Ford Douglas. Their efforts included an ongoing and dynamic relationship between the struggles of poor and working class blacks and their more highly educated brothers and sisters. The African American constitutional struggle also entails significant support from a small core of white allies. But most of all, it included a long and protracted fight against white elite as well as grassroots white working class opposition. The struggle continues to this day with the emergence of the digital age and the Black Lives Matter movement. In many ways, African American activists believe that the US Constitutional Convention that met in Philadelphia in 1789 never adjourned. The struggle over the meaning of the constitution and access to rights has continued to this day in a variety of settings across the nation. Thank you. I think I'm asked to invite Dr. Wanda heading grant forward to moderate a conversation with the audience today. Thank you. Well, oh my God, Dr. Trotter. First of all, I'm so happy to be here with you and everyone else. And as you said, I am Wanda heading grant and I use she, her, hers pronouns. And my heart is beating so fast. And not only as a person who is so embedded in higher education, but very specifically as a woman and as a Black, African American woman, my heart is just pounding right now in terms of something going on up in here in terms of the information you're provided, what I'm thinking about in terms of the past, my present and in the future. So I just want you to know, first of all, thank you so much for what you shared. And I also want you to know that it's having a profound mind opening, eye opening, but also sort of an emotional kind of response on me. And so one way I think that to help me get a little bit like, ooh, calm down. I want to start with Jess, let's just take a quick moment here, besides saying thank you. I think it's important to say congratulations on the 25th anniversary for the Center for African American Urban Studies and the economy. Also now. Thank you. Thank you. So if you're all out there, please clap. I appreciate it. Yes. And so just would like if you could just take a brief moment to just share a little history about cause and its mission. And also, I think it would be great so people know what's also going on and maybe they might attend some of the events that are happening. Yeah. Well, Wanda, let me tell you, is deeply rooted in the notion of diversity, equity and inclusion. It's like almost, in 1985, I came here. That's over 30 years ago, I came here and I took a job in the history department at a time when the history department was a pioneer at Carnegie Mellon in this notion of history from below, history from the bottom up. I mean, it resonated with me and I found that it would be a great home for me intellectually and politically, all kind of ways to be here. But the reality is that Carnegie Mellon wasn't doing very good on recruiting or diverse student body, faculty, administrators across the board, a lot of deficits. And so cause grew out of this notion that I and my colleagues had and especially I felt that, man, if I'm going to survive and survive and thrive at Carnegie Mellon, there's got to be some way that what I do can be connected to what the community needs. And so we created cause as a way on two levels, as a way, and I'm doing history, right? And I'm not working directly in the policy realm, in public policy schools are really good at all of that. But I'm a historian, I'm trying to ground the history of the contemporary community in its past so they can understand better about how to move forward. And so cause were created to create connections between historians working on issues in the past with contemporary public policy and scholars, sociologists, political scientists and so on working on the present and trying to understand the impact of deindustrialization on black people in Pittsburgh and across the nation. And so that was where cause had its beginning to really, to demonstrate in some ways that history can play a role in people who are currently struggling trying to make sense of their world today. And so that was one part and the other part is that we wanted to open up our lectures and any programming that we had to the larger Pittsburgh community. And we didn't want to see these contributions that scholars from across the country were bringing to Pittsburgh and sharing with us. We didn't want to see those sort of just captured behind the walls of academia and people in the community have no inkling you know if what's going on. So there has been a great presence in our event of people in the neighborhoods and around the city. And so that's where we started that's where we wanted to go. And I'm just happy we've done it for 25 years and happy to celebrate it. Thank you, thank you so much for all of that. You know, you mentioned doing your talk you know coming from a coal mining family and I'm aware of that. Can you just share a little bit in terms of you were trained as a bricklayer early on in life and as well as that correct. You know, how do some of these firsthand experiences inform you around the studies and what you're looking at? How did it shape your perspective? Or did it? I like that question. I like to talk about it to tell the truth. My upbringing in West Virginia had a profound impact on me. I came from a family of 14 siblings 10 sisters and four brothers. And all of my sisters, well, you know, at least five of my sisters were older than I. So I had to really come to grips with living in a household with a lot of women. But they helped me tremendously. And then I have four brothers who were younger than me. And my mother became wood old when I was about 12 years old. And she taught me much about life because after our father passed away, she was in the sole direction of our family. And one of the things that she did that I appreciate to this day is that there were so many relatives who were coming to town, talking about which ones they would take. You know, they're gonna spread us up and spread us across the country, like refugees, you know? So my mother said, there is no way if we're going to suffer, we're gonna suffer together. And so she kept off, but by that time there were two sisters who had graduated but all 12 of us are together. And so we managed to stay together as a family. And it has been a blessing. But then to get back to the training part, I was a student in high school when the counselors, they forced us to make a decision. What kind of life are you gonna leave? What are you gonna do as an adult? And at that time, I wasn't doing so well in school that I could even pretend that I'm going to college. You know, I said, I can't do that. And they'll know I haven't taken all the courses. And so I said, I'll go to trade school. And our high school was equipped with a trade school where you could take auto repair, carpentry, electrician, all kinds of things. But I chose Brick Lane because I was informed by a young man who was in our neighborhood who was laying bricks. He was in trade school much earlier than I. And so I decided to take up Brick Lane. The problem is that before I could finish high school and get some kind of certificate that I could do this, my mother moved the family to Ohio and there was no Brick Lane trade school there. And I had to study, you know, in a different kind of way. And eventually I found my way to history courses in Ohio and started to say, oh man, I really, I enjoy this, you know? And so that's one way to shape, you know, my trajectory. And so in Ohio, I think my mother's instinct, we're right. It gave us greater access to education and an opportunity to really, you know, to do some good. Well, thank you. I'm glad you're doing what you're doing. And I'm gonna go now another layer down and we have a question here for you that gets a little closer to what you were speaking about. It reads, it's a very interesting idea that Black Lives Matter should embrace the Constitution in an activist way. Yeah. What would that look like? Say that again, Wanda. One of our participants, audience members has asked, it's a very interesting idea that Black Lives Matter should embrace the Constitution in an activist way. Oh yeah, what that looks like. Yeah, thank you. Yes, yes, and they're using a quote from, it's a quote from something you said. I'm still wondering what that's gonna look like too, you know, it's unfolding. But I do think that mass, you know, let's say grassroots social movements, I think they almost always ultimately have to come to grips with their impact on public policy and the instruments of government and the way in which part of what they wish to accomplish have to involve, you know, governmental structures. And so I think this is one way in which I think the infusion of new young people into these legal institutions. I think the fact that young people in the Black Lives Matter movement are no doubt in law school today and they're getting degrees and they are rethinking the whole constitutional order. I think it's going to evolve in terms of another generation of young people who actually are not shackled by the same paradigm, so to speak, as some of their elders. And so I think they can rethink and creatively craft a new kind of constitutionalism that will at least serve better their moment in history. But I'm convinced this thing is not over and it will never quite be over. And so, but just doing good for moments as you move through time and getting closer and closer to equity and inclusion and all of those other things, I think it's worth to fight, it's worth to fight. That's right. It reminded me when we were doing Juneteenth and when you were talking and part of what was bubbling up as I'm finally kind of settling down in my heart was this, we are some resilient people and so I remember thinking about that and really as folks who were enslaved and really wanting to put out there in the atmosphere in the space that we were very much a part of the ending of slavery. It wasn't just horses and people coming in soldiers and just sort of announcing it in Texas. And you know, there was so much work that was done by a set of people to get us to that place that slavery would go away. And so as you were talking, it reminded me of that in terms of the resiliency, the smartness, the adaptability and flexibility and the strength and courage and all those kinds of things that how the constitution was used in a different way to open things up. So then that leads me to, besides making that statement as part of things that were going on for me. What are your thoughts about, and ending with that the young people and the youth, what do you think about, you know, civic education and whether that's a loss that we certainly don't have it so much anymore in terms of, you know, people not understanding civics, understanding our history. And then I'm trying to connect that to where we're at in terms of the argument about critical race theory. And so all of that is to sort of get into in terms of why are there things missing from our educational system that the people as such as my age, the young, the old should be having. And what is the race theory fit in all of this for you in terms of folks understanding the world before, the world now and planning for the world in the future? Long question, but I wanted to give some background. Right, yeah. Yeah, I just think that, you know, this struggle has always been part of this struggle, you know, struggle over education, the struggle over learning and, you know, access to knowledge and much of what is, you know, considered critical race theory. You know, for years, African-Americans were not part of the academy, you know, at least the mainstream academy. And so a lot of these ideals have been around in what we could call the black history movement that was sort of underground until the civil rights era, you know, because African-American scholars had to work in isolation and alone and with a lot of disdain, you know, for their perspective on society, politics, culture and so on. So a lot of what people are reacting against and negatively is the awakening, you know, that this scholarship is forcing, you know, upon the country and young people, I think many of them are more receptive to some of these ideals than some of their elders may think. And that we have to keep, and we have to keep fighting this fight. We can't give up because people are contesting, you know, our perspectives and interpretation and so on. So we just have to keep struggling with that. And I definitely will say that we need to bring young people into higher education in as larger numbers as we can and as quickly as we can. It's very, very critical. Well, I have another question here. Yeah. You know, Dr. Trotter, what message would you send to social justice activists of today who are navigating labor movements today through an intergenerational lens? Yeah, well, I, you know, I'm just really appreciative of social justice activists who are working in the labor movement today. But I just think I would just suggest that the kind of history that we've done on the labor movement can be instructive to some of the struggles that are going on today. African-Americans have a very rich labor history. And it's not just a, it's a very diverse kind of history of strategizing and reactions to the predominantly white labor movement when they were excluded from unions and so on, strike breaking, for example. And I'm actually, we're working on a study of Pittsburgh right now. And I've been looking at a lot of examples of strike breaking in the early 20th century and the late 19th and early 20th century when African-Americans really, some of them embrace this ideal of breaking strikes as a way to address the color line and labor unions. You know, like labor unions were excluding blacks from jobs. And so blacks were saying, if the only way we're gonna get into, you know, the industrial sector is by breaking a strike, then we'll break a strike. And I'm saying it wasn't an easy choice for them. They didn't just automatically allow companies to import them into the city to break a strike. It was a thoughtful process and the dangers were great. They understood the dangers and they were not all of one mind. There were blacks who were cross a picket line. There were blacks who were not cross a picket line. So I just think that the complexity of the experiences of African-American in the earlier period, I would just encourage activists to also become, you know, labor history conscious, so to speak, you know, conscious of labor history. And also about the interracial dimensions of it, because throughout black labor history, there have been moments and opportunities where blacks and whites have made common cause and they have really come together to challenge some of the mistreatment they encountered in the workplace and from the employers. You know, one question I'm gonna ask you is related to, I saw it earlier, the question could talk a lot about resistance for people who refuse to come aboard or want to listen or participate. I'm curious your thoughts about what do you do when there's a resistance to moving forward, moving that needle around D, E, and I and J or Jedi justice, you know, equity, diversity and inclusion. What do you do? Any words out there for folks? You mean when there's resistance? When there's resistance to making the change around fairness and, you know, equity and diversity and inclusions or just fairness around justice. How do you deal with that? You're thinking of, I just wanna make sure I understand, are you thinking of resistance on the part of people empowered or resistance on the part of people who will stand to benefit? So that's definitely, let's go with empower right now. Well, my approach to this is that people who are disadvantaged and outside, you know, the orbit of influence and power, but they're never outside the orbit of influence and power, but they just simply have to come together and organize and to build communities of resistance, communities of struggle that allows them to support each other in these undertakings because it's always risky. Somebody has to pay prices. And so I think that when people are unified and they have a common, you know, set of issues that they are going to demand and work for, people in power have to in some way respond to those. However much they may wanna resist, there's a way in which there's a dependence on workers, you know, and people who are disadvantaged, they play a role, they contribute something, they are important. And so the more value they place on themselves and their struggles, the more value they'll force people in power to concede to those struggles. So I think they just have to stay the course and keep struggling and building unity. And also with eyes open, and you can't ignore the points of cleavage, even within your own range, there are divisions that you have to overcome. I'm not sure that's a great answer, but that's about the best I can do to take it. Well, this has been wonderful. We are coming to the end of our time and you know, there's always plenty of time to ask a lot more questions and so forth. As we're ending, I wanna say thank you for sharing so much. And it's been a pleasure speaking with you and asking you questions. I would really at this time like to invite my colleague, my friend, Gina Casalingo, to come and share some closing remarks. Thank you. Thank you so much, Wanda. And Joe, Dr. Trotter, Dr. Heading Grant, for bringing life. Dr. Trotter, your reflections, your research and your words today really brought to life meaningful ways that ordinary working people, both embraced and as you shared, deployed constitutional principles to advance a more egalitarian political landscape. You've given us so much to think about and as Dr. Heading Grant shared, to hear your personal narrative is quite meaningful to all of us who have watched your work and admired your work. So thank you for sharing so much with us. And Wanda, thank you so much for moderating a terrific Q&A session. As we close our program, I'd like to lift up the power and the resonance of having centers like our very own cause. You heard a little bit about it from Dr. Trotter, the Center for African-American Urban Studies and the Economy. The work that Dr. Trotter and colleagues do to call for more urgent action to understand and dismantle systemic racism is ever more critical today than even when the center was founded 25 years ago. I know that our event participants, we all join one another in gratitude for your lecture, Joe, this evening and for your passionate and tireless work as we celebrate the 25th anniversary. This Friday, I encourage you to take a look at our website, university website, where you'll learn more about day two of the celebration of the cause program on training the next generation, changing the academy and reaping the harvest at 4.30 PM this Friday, I hope you can join. And also looking to share with you opportunities to deepen our knowledge thanks to Dr. Trotter who has curated the Constitution Day 2021 reading list that I know I'm looking forward to exploring in the weeks ahead and one more shout out. The opportunity to highlight a book display on the intersection of STEM, perfect for Carnegie Mellon, identity and social justice curated by our very own Dr. Heading Grant and our DEI learning and development trainer, Mark D'Angelo who has joined Wanda's team. All of us are invited to participate in an upcoming book discussion event heading right to the point, discussing the immortal life of Henrietta Lacks through the lens of diversity, equity, inclusion and justice, which will be hosted by Dr. Heading Grant on October 14th and you can find out more about that on the library's event calendar. You know, on a personal note as I wrap up, it was interesting to hear you reflect on the founding of cause Joe because, you know I'll share that as a member of this community only for the last 19 years. So I came after cause was founded in recent, you know, months over the last year plus I have really especially seized the opportunity to reflect on my own work in the DEI space and the work of this institution that I love and call home. For my first days here at Carnegie Mellon in the early days of cause, in the days of Dr. Jerry Cohen's presidency it was evident to me that this community and this university's leadership cared deeply about diversity. But when I pause to think about what it means to be in an institution that is centered in diversity, equity and inclusion work I have honestly never felt more energized and more hopeful about the work that is being done collectively to advance our impact than I am today. We are so fortunate to have the expertise and the leadership of our vice provost for diversity, equity and inclusion, Dr. Wanda Heading Grant as she joins countless subject matter experts among our faculty like you, Dr. Trotter along with passionate advocates among our students, our faculty, our staff and our alumni and of course the leadership of this university today. Taking time to reflect on the founding document this evening of this nation provides an important opportunity to consider our present day and a brighter future. I love that you lifted up the past, present future, Wanda in your initial reaction to Joe's lecture. A brighter future where we aspire to create justice, equity and liberty that are indeed enjoyed by every person not only here at Carnegie Mellon but across this land and that here at Carnegie Mellon we're in the business of not only imagining a more perfect union but in creating it through our research, our scholarship, our service and our collective everyday actions. So with that I'll close tonight's session with thanks to all who joined us. Thank you all for being here and especially to the faculty and staff from university libraries, Student Affairs University Advancement and the events team and of course our featured speaker, Dr. Joe Trotter and Dr. Wanda Heading Grant for bringing us tonight's program. Thank you all so much and have a great evening.