 Welcome! My name is Sandy Bermanzan. Thank you all for coming. It's so great to see so many of you here. I just want to give a big thank you for the enormous outpouring of support from all the areas in the university and in the community. It has been a truly humbling experience. I also want to give a shout out to our sponsors who made this all possible. I'm going to list them. There's 27, which is amazing, and it's also going to take me a minute to go through all of them. But that's how this event was able to happen. The Mosaic Center for Students of Color. Alianza Latinx. The Center for Health and Well-Being. The Women of Color Coalition. The Peace and Justice Center. The Departments and Programs of Asian Languages and Literature. Anthropology. Classics. Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. Economics. Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies. Geography. Geology. German and Russian. Global and Regional Studies. History. The Miller Distinguished Professorship for Holocaust Studies. The Humanities Center. Political Science. Psychological Science. Religion and Theater. The College of Arts and Sciences Dean's Office. The College of Nursing and Health Sciences Dean's Office. United Academics Executive Council. The Center for Cultural Pluralism. And the Women's Center. So let's just give all those people. Thank you. And there are so many individuals who came through for this and went above and beyond to help out and to promote this event. There are too many to name, but thank you all so, so much. I want to thank the Davis Center staff for helping me pull this off. And for Channel 17 back there. For taping. You are all appreciated. And just an aside, those friends or family who couldn't make it, this is going to be taped and you'll be able to stream it on somewhere. I don't know where yet, but Channel 17's website. I don't know what that is, but Google it. And I want to let you guys know that the funds for the Honorarium for the speakers are going to be donated to two amazing organizations. The Beloved Community Center. Frankie. And the African Roots Library. So the Beloved Community Center is in Greensboro, North Carolina, run by two survivors of the Greensboro Massacre, Nelson and Joyce Johnson. And it's dedicated to organizing for justice, equality, dignity, worth, and the enormous potential for all people. The African Roots Library is in Kingston, New York. It's a newly established independent community library that promotes literacy through learning and teaching about the African Roots experience, including history and culture through a dynamic exchange of information, ideas, and creativity. Without further ado, I'd like to give a little introduction of my parents, my heroes. Paul Bermondzane was born to two Jewish survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. Paul grew up in the Bronx. Nobody... That made me. Bronx, okay. He went to City College of New York, where he became involved in the movement to end the war in Vietnam. He went to Duke Medical School in North Carolina, where he became a revolutionary. He studied pulmonary disorders and psychiatry, graduating with a citation in community medicine. He organized to oppose Brown Long, a disease of textile workers. In 1979, he was an organizer of a demonstration against the KKK, which was attacked by the KKK and Nazis. Five people were killed, and Paul was shot in the head, which you can see pictured right there. He remains partially paralyzed from the assault. He is now retired from the practice of psychiatry after almost 40 years. During his career, he conducted extensive research into the diagnosis and treatment of schizophrenia, publishing numerous articles and a book on his work. He now lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife, Sally Bermondzane. Sally grew up in New York in the 1960s. Oh, sorry. And in the 1960s, she went south for college, so she grew up before the 1960s, is what I'm trying to say. And in the 1960s, she went south for college at Duke University. She joined the civil rights movement, and in 1979 witnessed the Ku Klux Klan kill five people and critically wound her husband. She wrote through survivor's eyes from the 60s to the Greensboro massacre. Sally earned a PhD in political science at the City University of New York, and for two decades taught at Brooklyn College, CUNY. There, she chaired the political science department for eight years. Now, Professor Emerita and her grandmother, she resides in the Hudson Valley with her husband, cats, and chickens. She writes historical fiction, and this year, she published The Story. I thank you for coming. We're going to start with a videotape that's about 10 minutes long, and I just wanted to say a couple of words about the videotape because it gives a bit of the story. It's a remarkable thing to condense as much information as the video does into just 10 minutes. The guy who did the video, Jim Waters, was a cameraman for Channel 12 News in Greensboro. And much of the videotape is what he got. And he was also a hero in this story because after the murders took place, there was succession of trials. The local authorities made it their business to be sure that they had a strict line that everyone was supposed to follow. That line was that this was a shootout, that there were two sides arrayed against one another, and that the communists and the Klan were just shooting out, you know, it's like the matter and anti-matter, going against one another. Jim Waters, during the trial, was one of the few of the reporters who refused to go along with that. He said, no, this was an attack. This was an assault. And he was... he lost his job. He was bitterly attacked over many years. And many years later, in 1999 at the 20th anniversary commemoration of the massacre, Jim presented us with this video, which he had made. He's an Emmy Award-winning videographer. And I'm still quite astonished at the condensed nature of the thing. And I also want to mention that after you've seen the movie, you might want to buy the book. Sally's book, Through Survivor's Eyes, it's the best movement book I know. So I'll leave it at that. I will just start the video. My name is Sally Blum, and I'm really happy to be here today and have such a wonderful audience to listen to our story. We were young and angry. We had been activists in the civil right. We were young and angry. We had been civil rights activists in the civil rights movement from the 1960s through the 1970s. When the movement died down in the mid-70s, we found Marxism and Communism. To us, it meant equality of all races, black, white, brown, everybody, equality of men and women, and a method to end capitalist exploitation. I'm not a communist anymore, but I still believe in equality and I still believe in ending exploitation. In the 1970s, we were brash and loud and full of rhetoric. We organized against police brutality in poor neighborhoods for good schools and decent health care. We got jobs and textile mills and hospitals and organized unions in a very anti-union state of North Carolina. In 1978, there was a strike wave across North Carolina from the dock workers on the coast all the way up to the sanitation workers in the mountains of Asheville. We did strike support. One of our members, Jim Waller, led a textile strike in Hall River, North Carolina. In the middle of all this union activity, the Klan re-emerged. They had disappeared during the Civil Rights Movement, but they came back in the late 1970s, especially when there was a union drive going on. And their aim, what their focus was, was to split workers, black and white and brown, from each other so that you couldn't get workers to together unionize. We developed an anti-Klan campaign in response to the resurgence of the Klan's men, burning crosses like you could see in the video, having meetings like that, burning crosses, planning crosses on people's lawns who were blacks moving into a white area. And we focused on exposing the supporters, the secret supporters of the Ku Klux Klan. People like, frankly, today, Donald Trump, you know, who secretly, and he actually very openly, supports the far right, and we thought it was very important for people to understand, it isn't just the Klan's men, it's the people behind them who are getting them to do their dirty work to divide people. So in 1979, we as a Klan re-emerged, we protested the Klan in the China Grove, North Carolina, and in the Cater, Alabama. And in Greensboro, we planned, which is where we were, most of us lived, we planned a march and a conference to educate people about the secret supporters and the history of the Klan. And this conference in March was to be held on November 3rd, 1979. Unknown to us, the Greensboro police got their agent in the Klan, paid agent in the Klan, named Eddie Dawson to organize Klan's men to attack our demonstration. I mean, the Klan's men probably wouldn't have even known that we were doing a march and a conference without Eddie Dawson going around to them and trying to get them to attack us. Unknown to us, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms sent their agent, Bernard Buckowitz, to join the North Carolina Nazis and to urge these Nazis to join with the Klan to attack our demonstration. And the Klan and the Nazis had not been working together. This was the first action that they did together was to attack us that day. And then since that time, they developed closer and closer relationship. So you saw what happened in the video today, just now. And there were no police. The police, we had a parade permit where the police said that they would protect us. But they didn't. They weren't there. They had been sent to lunch by the police brass, right as the police brass knew and had been following Klan and Nazi getting together in the edge of town and the caravan of Klan and Nazis with a police car, the last car in the caravan, coming towards our demonstration. And as they approached our demonstration, the police officers who were supposed to protect us were sent to lunch. So it was a setup. The Klan and Nazis opened fire on us, knowing that there were no police around to stop them. They murdered five of us, wounded another 10 in full daylight and in front of four TV cameras. And that's why that video was able to, you know, that's the footage from those four TV cameras. The police blamed us for our own murders. And the media went along with them. They went along with the police in spite of their own TV footage. To them we were communists. The epitome of evil, kind of like Muslims today or so-called illegal aliens. The impact of this attack crushed the union movement in North Carolina. Union activists got fired from mills, activists all over and all kinds of issues were harassed. The whole region was affected because people were afraid, understandably. The Klan and Nazis, meanwhile, grew not just in North Carolina, but nationwide. One of the men who was part of that caravan was named Frazier Glenn Miller. And he, so he's part of that caravan, he became a leader in the militia movement of the 1980s that all over the country. And that militia movement led to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1994 that killed 168 people. And this is the same Klan and Nazis, the same type of mentality and some of the same people that marched through Charlottesville with those tortures chanting Nazi slogans like blood and soil and where one of their people drove a car into the anti-Klan protesters killing Heather Hayer. But this year, the public reacted on a massive scale against not only the Klan and the Nazis but also their secret, their not-so-secret supporters in the high places, particularly Donald Trump. The massive protests in Boston and Tennessee and other places led to the Klan and Nazis cancelling a whole bunch of their demonstrations, and that is a true, very important victory. So there's much more to be discussed about fighting and resisting white supremacy that we'll get into this evening, and Paul will be talking about some of that. But what I wanted to talk about is how do you recover from this? How do you get your life back together? How do you get beyond the fear? And so I want to just tell my story about that process. First of all, we mourned the dead. The five people who were killed, I just want to tell you a little bit about them. They were very close friends of ours. They were all activists. They were all involved in union drives as well as other community issues. This is a picture of Sandy Smith, who was the chairperson of the Textile Union Organizing Committee in Greensboro, North Carolina. She was a dynamite organizer. This is Jim Waller, who I mentioned led a textile walkout and strike in Hall River, North Carolina. He was the president of the Textile Workers Union there. This is Bill Sampson, who was a shop steward and who was actually running for president of his local when he was killed in a local in Greensboro, North Carolina. Cesar Kousey, who was a co-worker of mine because I worked at Duke Hospital in the dietary... Anyway, I was a low-paid worker there. Cesar, I'm forgetting the name of the type of job I had back then, but anyway. Cesar was... he was one of the leaders of a union drive at Duke Hospital. So he was also extremely involved. And then finally, Mike Nathan was a doctor. He was supportive of the union drive. He was very good at getting people to sign union cards. He was really wonderful that way. But his job was as a doctor, as a pediatrician in a poor black community in Durham, North Carolina. So these were who were killed. They were wonderful, vibrant, talented, wonderful people. And so here are more casual pictures of him, of them. And I really especially wanted... my favorite picture is this is Sandy Smith. And so she was not just a tough union organizer. She was also a wonderful, warm person. And she lived with Nelson and Joyce Johnson and was like a big sister to their daughters. And here she's holding a baby. Now it's not her baby, but we all love... we were all part of each other's lives and we all love to hold each other's babies. This baby is Mike Nathan's baby. And this baby, he was... this baby was six months old when he was killed. So she, her name was Leah. And Leah Nathan, she never got to know her father. She was six months old. But I wanted to tell you that Leah Nathan has been part of our lives ever since then. We went to her... Paul and I went to her wedding. And just this summer we went and visited her and her husband and she has two little kids now. And so we're still very, very connected. So, for me, well, the 1980s were really, really rough time. I was basically depressed for at least a decade after this happened. I had two little children. But I was the lucky one because my husband, Paul, had survived. Whereas there were widows that had lost their husbands. And so I was lucky. But I had my hands full. I was pregnant at that time with a certain young lady who did a great job organizing this event. I was... I wasn't even three months pregnant. So when this happened I was... I kind of assumed that I would miscarry. I just... I couldn't focus. I had been so focused on being pregnant. And then suddenly I forgot that I was pregnant. You know, because it was so much happening. But she's a tough one. So here she is. So... But meanwhile, my husband, who had been shot in the head and the arm and was on the critical list, he went through five hours of brain surgery that day into that night. And then he was on the critical list for several weeks. And so he had to relearn how to walk. He was in the hospital and rehab center for like months. And we... And he obviously couldn't work. I had a two-year-old as well and was pregnant. And so I had to take care of him. So we had no money coming in. We were like... Anyway, we were like people today. We were just working, you know, paycheck to paycheck. And so I got on welfare back in the day when there was aid to families with dependent children, you know, way back then. Also, we got on food stamps. We got on WIC program. The things that were available and they really helped us eat. So that was really important. But most important to us in our survival as a family, kind of psychologically and socially as well as physically, was that we had this circle of survivors, the people who survived these attacks. And we shared everything. We shared our houses. We shared our cars. We shared taking care of the kids. Paul and I moved into a friend's house because I couldn't live alone with all that. We moved into the basement of our friend's house. I gave away Paul's car to another friend. We shared taking care of our kids. We had potlucks. We shared our food. And so six months after the murders, I gave birth to Sandy and we were still hanging in there. And she was a joy to us ever since then. So, and by this time, Paul was out of rehab and he was very slowly, painfully learning how to walk. Meanwhile, the Klan-Nazi trial, the first trial, was going on and our pictures were in the newspaper every day. And we felt extremely vulnerable. You know, wouldn't have taken anybody, you know, somebody who wanted to hurt us could have very easily hurt us. And so we decided to move back to New York where both of us had grown up. We thought it would be a better place to rebuild our lives from scratch. And so 10 months after the murders, we moved to Brooklyn where we lived for 30 years. But our circle of survivors continued to be our closest friends. Most of them still living in North Carolina. And we would visit them at least once a year and often more than that. Our kids became very close to our survivor, you know, the circle of all of our children that we had became close to each other. They could talk, they could share stuff with each other that they could with nobody else. They called themselves the second generation. So they had their own activities and their own discussions if we don't even know what they were talking about. So, but for me, even though we lived in New York, my heart was still in North Carolina. Over the trials that went on over five years, there was basically no justice. And we continued to be dehumanized in the press. And I wanted to tell our story of us as human beings and people who wanted a better world. So over the decades, several decades, I kept on going back to North Carolina and I talked to every single person I could find who had come to that demonstration planning to protest the Klan. And I taped 53 different people in interviews asking them how they, you know, how they grew up, how they became interested in being activists and how the murders, the massacre had affected their lives and what they thought about, what they felt politically in their involvement. And so this meant that I relived the massacre over and over and over again. And that was hard, but it was also healing to go through and it connected me even more strongly to all these different individuals. And I learned a lot of people from many walks of life, especially what it was like to grow up poor and black in North Carolina. And the other thing that it really taught me is the importance of storytelling, how important it is to hear as well as to tell your own story. I think that's a really important way to get to know people and to have a bond develop between people. So anyway, I wrote this book and there just happened to be more than a couple of copies over there, so feel free to purchase one. But anyway, what I want to say is the way I did it, because I had interviewed 53 people, but you can't write a coherent story with 53 characters. So I chose six people just trying to get a sense where you could go into depth. One of them is Nelson Johnson, who Sandy mentioned, heads the Beloved Community Center now with his wife Joyce. And he had been there. He's basically been the leader in Greensboro, North Carolina since the 1960s, and powerful man who eventually became a minister. And so he was one of the people. Wellena Cannon is another person who grew up in South Carolina, the daughter of sharecroppers. And so she had a powerful story, really understanding of what it was like to be poor and victimized by terror, even as a child. Her son, Kwame, was also at the massacre as a 10-year-old. And he, as a teenager, was just really infuriated by these trials that kept on letting these murderers get off scot-free. And so he got into robbing people. Not a good idea. But anyway, so he got caught, and he got sentenced to two life sentences. Basically, they were trying to punish his mother and the rest of us for, you know, he was carrying a hot, had a heavier sentence than anybody ever had in North Carolina for robbery. And Wellena, his mom, really organized a campaign to free him. And he was still in there for 13 years, but he did get, you know, come out and he still now is a really good guy. So his story is also in here. Plus, Marty Nathan, who had been married to Mike Nathan, and she became a very strong vocal leader in the fight back, you know, that we went through. And then Paul and I are the fifth and sixth person. So that gives you a sense. The book tells everybody's story through their own eyes. It's their words that I just put into a story. So the main point I want, the reason I wanted to say all that is that it was very healing process. It really was to get it, you know, kind of pull things together and relive that pain but also come out through it. So that was really important. So then the other thing that was very, very healing was there was a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Greensboro, North Carolina that published this report. And it's the first Truth Commission that held hearings and, you know, like based on the South African Truth Commission, it's the first one to operate in United States, in fact in North America. And it was a very powerful thing. It was largely, it was the person who did the most to get it to happen was Nelson Johnson. He's a real hero throughout this whole thing. And so this is what the report of that one day, you know, but it really goes into what the police role was, the role of the courts, all this. And it also, and it criticizes, you know, it really like lays the blame and stuff. It also, you know, in terms of the police and the higher ups and the courts and stuff and the media, but it also criticized us for our language and our harshness and stuff. And, you know, I agree with it. It's really, what? Oh, okay, thank you. See, I tell you, she's on the ball. Okay, so anyway, I want to just end by saying that there's still a struggle going on. There is a struggle against white supremacy. There's a struggle against exploitation of demeaning people, oppressing people. And the violent racists are still out there. They disappear when people stand up like in Charlottesville and also during the Civil Rights Movement when it got powerful. But under Trump, repression is still really heavy. And the arrested demonstrators face heavy charges and that we need to support them. But there are many other ways as well to fight white supremacy. Demonstrating is only one. And many are fearful of it with good reason. And so I just wanted to say that I think a very important way to fight white supremacy is through community building. And in a lot of ways, that's very important, whether you're demonstrating or not, no matter what you're doing, to build communities across racial, class, ethnic, religious boundaries. It's a very important thing to do so that people can talk to each other, hear each other's story, tell each other their story, get to know each other. So I just want to, you know, one of the things that we do, because that's what we are involved in where Paul and I live, and hold potlucks because when you have a potluck, everybody shares and it's a basis for getting to know and to talk to each other and work on projects, issues, even if you disagree with each other or have different religious views, you know, work together on something that you can agree in. So this is what we call building circles of trust. And I think that is a very important way to fight white supremacy of building understanding, communicating based on understanding and differences and then being able to reach out ever broader into more people. So that's my, thank you. In the larger scheme of things, the Greensboro massacre was a small thing. Only five people were killed. And we've had what, Las Vegas was 56, killed, 500, something wounded. And they say that's the largest mass killing in American history, which of course is complete nonsense, because that totally leaves out all the people that were killed in Oklahoma City, for example, 164 people were killed and the many Indian massacres that took place in the development of U.S. history and how many people died in the middle of passage. So one of the things about the media, and I'm very glad people are here, because one of the things about the media is there is no history. History does not exist. It's not even worth talking about. God forbid you should think about it. You might get upset. Don't get upset. I'm going to talk about two things, and I may get a little upset, so forgive me. I'm still a little upset, I am. I want to talk about two things. I want to talk about the event itself, my experience of the event itself. Everybody wants to know what's it like to get shot in the head, that kind of thing. So I'll tell you a few things about that, maybe more than you want to know. And I also want to give some reflections on what happened and what it all means and how I see things today, 38 years and what is it, six days later. We just had the 38th anniversary on November 3rd. I'm going to have reflections without a lot of big answers, but hopefully it can stimulate discussion, and hopefully I won't talk too long to prevent discussion. Now I want to give you a bit of background on the day. Sally did some. We were doing a lot of union work, and we were doing all of our union work as wide open communists. It was really quite striking. People knew where we stood, in spite of the opprobrium that's heaped on this label, we were very clear that we believed that we needed to have a socialist revolution, destroy capitalism, replace it, the dictatorship of the proletariat, you know the whole drill. We were out there with that, and in spite of that, we had lots of success. Sally was mentioning there was at least six union locals in the textile mills that were about to elect members of the CWP as presidents of their locals. Think about that a minute. North Carolina, an anti-union open shop state. Now you also, I see a few gray hairs in the audience, so people may remember that there used to be a textile industry in the United States. That really sounds like ancient history, I'm sure to many of you, but there was probably at least a half a million textile workers in North Carolina. The strike that Jim Waller led was the first wildcat strike in the textile industry since 1934 in Gastonia. It was quite a remarkable event by itself. In any case, we had a lot of work that was going on, and the media of course continually tried to slander us in the local press. The problem was that the more they slandered us, the more they discredited themselves because the quality of people, the quality of the work that they were doing. So on a certain level, you have to feel some sympathy for the local bourgeoisie. They had no choice in how to deal with us. So they chose the preferred solution that they use all over the world when there's revolutionaries conducting successful work. The run up to the day, we applied for a permit. We were very scrupulous about applying for a parade permit which would entitle us to protection by the police. Don't count a lot of protection from the police, as it turns out. We were disarmed, which was a great variance from the usual North Carolina law, which holds that you can carry weapons openly. I think that's still the law in North Carolina. But a provision, a stipulation of the parade permit was we were not to carry any arms. A number of people had the presence of mind to violate that, and several people did fire back. But there was, you know, one guy had a two-shot derringer that jammed. Dori, who you saw in the video talking about we fired back, she got off three or four shots, maybe five, I'm not sure. But against the semi-automatic weapons that we were facing, it was a small response, all things considered. The other thing was that our parade permit, which is usually a pro-forma issue of just, you know, fill out the form, they give you a parade permit and you're on, was delayed continually up until two days before the scheduled march. So we had a press conference on the steps of the police station demanding our parade permit because it was being delayed unnecessarily and it was disrupting the activity that we were trying to organize, not to mention the fact the police were tearing down our posters the whole time. Now one of the things that happened at this, Sally gave you a bit of the story already. There was a guy who was mingling around during this press conference and, you know, the people that were there who came over and talked to me. He was a white fella, a little taller than me, talked with a southern accent, a northern accent, very strikingly, northern accent and a little bit of a lisp, seemed like a quiet, gentle fella. He said he was a businessman, he did painting and stuff in the area and he was shocked that there was such a thing as a clan in Greensboro in this day and age. And I thought, this is a pretty weird guy because the clan had been getting built up in the press locally for several months, several years by that time in their comeback after their period of underground existence following the civil rights movement that forced them underground. This guy's name was Eddie Dawson. And Dawson, I'll tell you more about Dawson in a little bit, keep the suspense going. One of the things that happened also on the run up to the demonstration was that we had a demonstration against the clan and the Nazis at a little town called China Grove, a very forceful confrontation and the clan and the Nazis formed a coalition after the China Grove demonstration. They formed a group very seriously, very similarly named to the group that was operating in Charlottesville. The name that they organized under in North Carolina, they were in Lewisburg, October 23rd, 1979, just two weeks before the Greensboro Massacre. They organized a group called the United Racist Front. Something, I can't remember exactly the name, something like United Front was the name of the group in Charlottesville. The United Racist Front was the first time that the KKK would touch the Nazis after World War II. The KKK prides itself on being 100% American, right? And the Nazis, of course, were the enemy of the United States government in World War II, so the clans stayed away from them even though they agreed on most things that are important to them. So they organized this United Racist Front and they were very incensed by the fact that we had burned their Confederate flag in China Grove, so they vowed revenge. These were all things that were going on. Many of them escaped our notice during that day. The day itself remains in my mind a time of the most profound confusion. I mean, it was really quite something. We were gathering our people together as you saw, you know, getting our signs up and setting up the sound truck and so on. And I was standing there with a little bit. I had my little checklist, you know, clipboard and things were checking what we showed. This has done that stuff and so on. And standing on the curb, just looking around, a few feet from me about as far as her picture is now, Sandy Smith is standing there. She was a very wise woman, very alert and aware person. She says, it's weird. I said, what's weird? I don't know if she was talking to me. She said, what's weird? She said, no cops here. Hey, no cops here. And she was right. There were no police on the scene. And we were used to having demonstrations. We'd had hundreds by this time and the police would harass us in every possible way as long as they possibly could. But there were no police there. And I didn't have much time to think about it or reply because then a group of cars just drove in very slowly, very slowly. And in the second or third car, this guy is leaning out the window yelling at me. It's Eddie Dawson. Right? You asked for a clan, you got it. Little did I know Dawson was a paid police informant for many years inside the KKK. And he had been actively going around North Carolina organizing and recruiting. And that day he was in charge of leading the caravan to the site where the murders took place. On the day that we had our demonstration to get the parade permit, which we did get, it turns out that Dawson was there because he got the parade permit, our parade permit before we did. And the morning of November 3rd, he and several other fine characters in the KKK drove the route of our planned march, presumably to ascertain what was the best place for our encounter to take place. Eddie Dawson. His testimony made it quite clear that he, through him, the top officials in the Greensboro Police Department were intimately involved in the planning and the execution of the murders on November 3rd. Now, I didn't know any of this at the time, of course. I mean, retrospect makes things a lot easier to put together. But these were things that were going on behind the scenes. And the only thing I saw was Dawson in the car. It was very strange. And very shortly after that, a few feet down the street, the lead car in the caravan, that pickup truck, this young guy leans out of the pickup truck with a long-barreled pistol. He waves it around a few times and fires a single shot into the air. And there were several things very weird about that. Pistols make a noise when they're fired, make a noise very similar to rifles. It's a crack. It's kind of a crackle noise. But this gun that went off made a noise much closer to that of a shotgun, sort of a thud, boom, like that. And there was a black plume of smoke that hung in the air there for a little while. Now, as you can imagine, we have a crowd that's assembling. There were probably 75, maybe 100 people there by that time. It was about a half an hour before we had to begin. And as soon as people heard the gunshot, they split. People started running, trying to take cover, trying to find some place to seek safety. I was among them. You hear a gunshot, you want to get out of there. So we ran back. It was in a housing project, a black project called Morningside Homes, which has since been demolished. It's Greensboro's guilty conscience. They had like a line of houses. It was a car that was fairly wide, but it was a fairly contained space. Ran back into that, and I was carrying one of these signs on a picket stick. So I ran back. I had found a place, and I looked behind me, and what I saw was Caesar Kousey standing with a stick. And he was surrounded by a bunch of guys with sticks who were hitting him, and he's hitting back. So there's like a stick fight going on. I didn't know what was happening, but I saw Caesar was there with a stick. I had a stick, so I did the whole baseball bat thing a few times. And I ran back to help Caesar. What do I know? And I took three or four steps, and then zip, zip. I was hit in the head and in the arm. I had no idea what happened. All I knew I was down. And I must have been in and out of consciousness, a little factoid for those of you interested in such things, psychologically, 40% of all open head injuries retain consciousness. I learned something from medical school. You see that? So when we, well, I'm on the ground, and I'm just lying there. I'm quite confused. I don't know what had happened to me. I looked up. I saw a Dory firing back. I thought that was the best thing I had seen. I heard gunshots. I didn't know what exactly was happening. I didn't know who was firing and what was happening. But Dory looked like she was doing something good. I looked at the grass, and there was blood on the grass, and I thought it must have been mine. I didn't know what it was. I don't know what. I thought maybe it hit by a stick. All I'd seen at this point was that one pistol in the front and stick fights and stuff going on. And I'm on the ground. There's all this noise. I mean, there's people yelling. There's people screaming. There's gunshots. There's sticks cracking. Couldn't make any sense out of it. How much more confused I was because my head was mixed up from the injury. I have no way of knowing. But Sally came and she calmed me down. And then right around when she came, it suddenly got quiet. It was very quiet. It's the strangest thing. You know, putting it back together, looking at the videotape, obviously these guys took off at a certain point. Gunfire stopped. It got very quiet. There was just a few isolated voices yelling different things. And I heard Sandy's dead. Jim's dead. You know, I was one of several doctors on the scene and I thought, well, I need to go take a look at these people because you don't want to have somebody who's considered dead by somebody who doesn't know, and they're not going to receive the kind of attention that they could be kept alive with. So I'm trying to get up. Sally's trying to calm me down. And it was a very strange experience because I couldn't get up. And the most compelling image I have in my own mind of what had happened to me that still stuck with me was that somehow I had been turned into a 100-year-old man. I couldn't get up. This was years before my generation, you know, the 60s generation, the boomers, people say that we're the generation that can still get down, but now we have trouble getting up. Well, this was before we had the trouble getting up, so it was kind of an unusual experience at the time. Now, I was very confused. It was extremely, extremely disorienting, all of it. And what happened from all of this confusion, I have to tell you the confusion I had that day as I came back to myself over time, it's an assumption I'm making that I'm back to myself or something like that, that I realized that my political confusion was at least as great as the confusion about events that I was experiencing that day. An enormous amount of political confusion. I've had a great deal of time to reflect on what's happened and what it all means and what we were trying to do and what we should be trying to do and how to proceed. Now, in the course of the last 38 plus years, I made an interesting discovery that has helped me to orient myself a little better. I realized that I was actually a historian trapped in the body of a psychiatrist. That was an important discovery for me because it's a different kind of a perspective. Psychiatry plays an extremely bad role in a lot of these discussions that we can and should be having that we're not having because psychiatry says, well, he's just a crazy guy, you don't have to worry about that. Don't talk about what's happening in the society. The conversation about all these mass killings that are going on now is completely circumscribed. All you can talk about is gun control. The only reason this happens is because there's crazy individuals, right? And we know from the DSM-5, which is what we're up to now, that insanity is a product of an individual brain problem and that that's just the luck of the draw. But in addition, the DSM-4, 3 and 2, which is what I worked with before I retired, they said, you can't diagnose a large group as being crazy. Even the whole country has gone insane. You can't say that, not officially, right? So these are some of the things that enter into my thinking about this. I was a communist at the time. I'm no longer a communist for a lot of reasons. One is I don't think it's really radical enough. It's just change at the top. And, you know, the wealth is redistributed, but it's redistributed wealth that's made by workers who are still exploited. And the other thing is communism really failed in Russia and China. I think it's been a very distressing failure, but a failure nevertheless. But capitalism still needs to end. It's an evil and destructive system, and we're experiencing some of the most pernicious effects of that today. I want to say a few words about that. I want to also give what I call my portable definition of capitalism. A lot of people can't talk about capitalism without referring to Marx's four-volume work capital. Now, if you need to refer to four volumes in order to have a conversation, that's not portable. That makes it very difficult to have a serious conversation. I think we need to have a precise and clear definition of what we're talking about. I think it's a fairly simple thing. Capitalism is a relationship between owners and workers. It's a relationship characterized by the fact that the workers make things, the owners take what they make and sell it on the open market as commodities for as much as they can get away with, while paying the workers as little as they can pay those workers in order to keep the arrangement going. The two main considerations they have, of course, are that workers shouldn't starve, although they violated that many times over history, and second that there should be no rebellion. Those are the real considerations in setting a wage. So that, to me, is capitalism. The racism by keeping people divided is central. It's a pillar of the capitalist system. It's an essential pillar, if that's not too redundant. Racism grew out of slavery. You can't change capitalism without defeating racism, and you can't defeat racism without transforming capitalism. And for people who are involved in the struggle against white supremacy, white people, the key is not to just become guilty and guilt-ridden. The key is to take up the issues of black people as your own, because no one group alone can do what's necessary to transform the capitalist system as it needs to be transformed. And another observation on the problem of racism, a lot of people, I would even venture to say most people, consider racism to be an individual, sort of, in the heart. It's an individual prejudice. It's what's in your heart. But it's really much more than that. It's a much bigger thing, much more insidious, much more widespread, and in some ways more vulnerable. I've been reading recently some of the Afro-centric historians, people like Sheikh Antadiop, fascinating stuff. And the fact is that much of history, perhaps most of history as it's written in the West, African people are not a part of human history. That's racism. That's an integral part of racism. So the struggle against racism is not just in the streets and demonstrating. The struggle against racism is a very important part of that struggle, is a struggle, an intellectual struggle, an academic struggle, a struggle to honestly look at the reality of people. I mean, black people are dealt out of history, even though black people built this country and built so much else of the West. But that's the way the thing is set up because of intellectual, your point of expression, intellectual academic racism, which is rampant. And today, we see the effects on the U.S. population of this kind of racist culture that pervades the society. Young black kids are killed in the street, videotaped, and people don't see their crime was committed. I've been meeting for a few months with Trump supporters. I've been blown away. It's like some of them who are a little less racist, you can push them a little bit to say, yeah, well, it was really wrong that they choked Errol Garner in the street in Staten Island. A blatant out front murder committed on the screen right there. And she had to be pushed. She's one of the better ones that I've been talking to. You know what I'm saying? But it's like there's not a crime because the human connection has been severed. I think that's a key thing that's happened as a result of American capitalism. Human connections have been cut. And I think that white supremacy is the legacy of dehumanization in the United States. And that dehumanization has gone through several successive phases that have resulted in the remarkably dehumanized condition in which we all find ourselves today. You know, first was the extermination and expropriation of the Indians and the enslavement, I should add. There's a very large Indian slavery that went on prior to the kidnapping and enslavement of black Africans, which is the thing that we're most familiar with perhaps, but the extent, the scope, the depravity of that continues to shock me as I read more history. And finally the importation, not finally, I shouldn't say finally, the importation and repression of generations of European immigrant workers is another form that dehumanization has taken place in the United States. And today we're still undergoing the commodification of everything. Everything is for sale, including everybody. Everybody has their price. Anybody ever hear that expression? Everybody has their price. That's all that there is, is money. It's a totally modified culture. And the human connections have been severed to the point that it's everywhere. I mean, I've been astonished at these killings that are taking place repeatedly. I mean, the police killings of unarmed black youth have been remarkable and I've been even more stunned by the extent to which scores of people are killed by these shooters. And what really amazes me is the media. You can only talk about gun control and you can't talk about... The one question that's important to me, I mean maybe somebody else has a better question, it's always possible, is not what did he do that morning? Did he have an argument with his mother-in-law? How many bullets did he have in the clip? They get lost in these extraneous and totally ridiculous details. The only question that seems to make any difference to me is why does this keep happening? And my best understanding at this point, and again I'm sure that I can be corrected, but my best understanding at this point is that we have become a dehumanized society as a result of the fact that all of us have been reduced to the level of commodities by capitalism. And it's my view that we need a new kind of revolutionary movement to address this. The old revolutionary movement has failed, at least as miserably as socialism failed in the Soviet Union in China. We need a whole new rethink of all this stuff. That's my take on this thing. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you for coming. I want to have discussion. So that means questions, but not just questions. People have comments. If you're making denunciations, keep them at least a little short. Hi. My question is what your view is on progress because to me it seems that the more I learn about history, the more depressingly cyclical it seems. And along those lines, if you wanted to start a new movement, to me it seems that every movement we try to make is flawed because humans are flawed and how can we make a movement that's kind of, has that ever happened and can it ever happen? Heavy question. A very good one. I think there has been progress and there's sort of starts and stops and stuff like that. There's been some progress. There's certainly been progress in terms of recognizing gay and lesbian and transgendered people as human beings. That's something that has been moving forward although also accompanied by violence that a lot of people of color have experienced transgendered women in particular. So I think that there is, I also think that there's progress in terms of, I mean as a person who studied history in the academy, unlike Paul, who is a recent convertee to studying history. So I think there has been a lot of progress in terms of more and more serious scholarship on African history, African American history and culture, Native American history and all those interrelationships. So that I see also as progress. But as far as, but you can't say, well everything's getting better because it's not. I mean, environmental issues are getting worse. The violence is getting worse. The economy is getting worse. More and more people have a heart. I mean, the generation of young people have a hard, much harder time. Even when we were in college getting a job, I mean I had a lot of low paying jobs, but I never had a hard time getting a job. Whereas there's a lot of difficulty just getting a regular old job these days, much more than before. So I think there are a lot of serious problems that are going on. And I just want to say two more things because I think that question we could go on all night just on that one question. But I just want to say that I think that nonviolent demonstrations and, you know, political movements that are especially demonstrating that that needs to be nonviolent. We need to have the police do their job protecting demonstrations and speech. And we really have to, because I know that there are some people who are very angry and think that, and even we did back in the day, you know, of like, well, we're going to carry arms and that'll protect us. Obviously it didn't for us. And I think that if that whole idea of carrying arms and stuff, what it does is it narrows the people who will demonstrate together that the broader, these broad base demonstrations that are, which Martin Luther King, he began that movement, you know, very important to build on that. And so I think in us trying to right wrongs in terms of demonstrations that nonviolent protest is really important. I also think that as far as like sharing and community building, which I mentioned before, that's really important because we can't just have the academy and a couple of good professors here, there and every place share their wisdom. I mean, I was a professor, so, you know, it's really great to teach, but it's got to be much broader than just the classrooms. And so that's why I think if people, if all of everybody here just gets out and has this conception of community building and crossing barriers and reaching out and asking people, not just telling people what they should do and how they should act, asking them their story, you know, and tell them your story and just sort of connecting on that human relationship. And that's how we're going to be able to move forward and help each other. And, you know, things will get tough, you know, and there will be hard times, but that's how we can get through it. And so that's just some partial response to your question. Hello. Thank you for coming. So I have a couple questions. So Sally, first, I have a question for you about something you had mentioned. So the Truth Commission report that you had mentioned, you mentioned that there was criticisms of your language in it that you at this point in time agree with, and I'm wondering if you could go into what those criticisms are, so that's why you agree with them now. My second question, Paul, if you'd like to answer this, is around based on your experiences with Eddie Dawson and this revealing of the involvement of and I guess organizing of the police with KKK members. I wonder what your take on what the future of the policing system looks like in an anti-capitalist, I guess, revolution and based on the roots of policing within the slave patrol and slavery and racism, would advocate for abolition of the prison industrial complex and the policing system as we know it. I know that's not a small question, but I just figured I'd propose it. I'm just going to give a one sentence response to the question to me and then let Paul tackle that big one. Well, we had the demonstration that we organized was titled, Death to the Clan. And so we didn't mean that as we want to go out and kill clansmen. That was not at all what we meant, what we meant. I mean, you know, there's like in demonstrations there, I have seen things that have say, you know, death to taxes or death to this or that, you know, it means I'm against that. But clearly that was a not a very good slogan to organize a demonstration around and we paid for it dearly because the public, you know, didn't see our intention. They just said, oh, death to, you know, that's bad. And so that was the kind of rhetoric that they criticized. There's so much in what you ask because how do people regulate themselves is really what the whole story needs to be about. And right now the United States is going through one of the worst repressions that any society has ever gone through. I mean, several people are nodding, yes. I'm talking about the mass incarceration of people of color. This is unprecedented. The numbers of people that are in jail for basically nothing is astonishing. The whole genesis of the mass incarceration of people of color was Nixon's attempt to crush the black movement of the 60s in 1968. He made it very clear that in his words, the problem is black people. What we need to do is figure out how to do that, how to deal with that without looking like that's what we're doing. That's a direct quote from Richard Nixon in Haldeman's Diaries, page 57. Check it out. Very interesting. The scope of this repression, from my reading of history, I can think of no place where any society has tried anything similar on this scale. Even as a percentage of smaller population, the only thing I know that matches it is the repression under Stalin's Gulag where the percentages and the actual raw numbers are actually fairly similar. Also very important, the Gulag repression was conducted for the same reason as the repression of African people in this country. That was to prevent an alternative, a political alternative from forming. That was what they were concerned about in the repressive Soviet Union and that's what they're doing here. The movement in the 60s was incredibly powerful and dynamic. Whole sections of the army went into Detroit, Newark, Harlem during these uprisings and it was tit for tat for days and weeks in some cases. We're talking about a very powerful movement that has been crushed and now people are going to prison because their grandparents dare to stand up like that and it's ongoing. Frankly, I don't see how they're going to deal with it. I think this is an integral part of the whole question of how do you deal with the police system, the policing system. I think it's a very large question. I think we need to find ways of managing ourselves and building a society where people actually have the power. My problem with communism is that it's just another centralized state with people more committed to redistribution at the top. I don't see it as a really fundamental difference where everything in society is managed by people who have real power over the welfare, the wealth and the doings of society more generally. But it's a very good question. I am not a big believer that, what do you call it, those body cameras or sensitivity groups for the cops is going to make a huge difference in my view. I differ with Sally. I don't think the police's job is to look after our demonstrations. I think the main job is to make sure that a political alternative does not gain power or even gain momentum. I think when I look around the world and see all these police dressed in the same black, intimidating uniforms, it tells me this is a global system and these guys are out to keep us where they want us. The workers and consumers, and that's it. It's not a satisfactory answer, but I don't think there is one. Please. Yes. You really just took the words out of my mouth that I was going to speak up about. I recall seeing some footage on Khrushchev. I guess that was what decade. I don't know. I think it was the 60s and he was standing up on a podium. He'd come to visit. It was a big breakthrough through the Iron Curtain. He was here, I guess, and he picked up his shoe and banged it on the podium. Pardon? Okay. He said that America was essentially so stupid that we were like an apple tree with the apples on the tree that were rotting and were going to fall off into the hands of the communists. You could sit there and say, well, how bizarre and cruel and stupid a thing that is to say, but actually I think it's what we're doing. Whether it's into the communists or whatever, I feel that our penal system, our prison system is the worst one in the world. It reminds me of in the Garden of the Beast in the book where Germany had no idea what was rising upon them. And we have no idea. We have little idea except for people coming and doing this kind of thing. We don't know and we don't want to know how terrible this situation is and I think that our prison system is, we're shooting ourselves in the foot. We're rotting it from the inside out. We're taking the most vital parts of our people and our heritage and incarcerating whatever truth is slain in the streets. It's just classic and we're just sitting here having afternoon tea. I can't believe it. It's just so bizarre. And I'm so glad you're here. I just feel that we're in very grave danger. We're just sitting here watching this nation destroy itself while we comment on it in the news media. I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do, but I feel that somehow to attack this in the lowest place is to attack it in the prison system. But am I going to go get myself killed with that help? If it will, I'll do it. I really, I don't know what to do. We are a nation of sadists. We are a nation of ignorant, murderous, terrified. It's just, and I just have to talk. I don't care if I'm making sense. I'm just more than upset and I'm so glad that you... Thank you. I don't think I need to make many comments. Don't get yourself killed. That won't do much. It sounds very noble, but it limits your effectiveness. But I do think that people need to find a way to connect to this thing and talk and find better ways and better ways as you continue to talk and explore. I mean, my favorite image is the three blind guys and the elephant. We're all one of those blind guys trying to figure out what this thing is. And we're all working on that. And the more we work together, we can figure it out even better. That's my take on it, so thank you. And I think the desire to do something is a very precious thing. And I'm sure you'll find something very positive to do. You're not going to solve the whole problem yourself, but at least you have a chance of making a contribution in the right direction. The revolutionary movement is like a rainstorm and we're all individual drops. One drop is of no significance, but taken together, it can erode mountains. So please, more. Right over here. Hi, it's so nice to finally see you guys speak. So my question for you guys is that often times in academic spaces like this, I feel as if the conversation becomes about systemic change. And everyone in this room, we all come to these things and we like to feel as if when we leave and walk through the door that we're doing things, but the reality is in our daily lives, resistance looks much different. And I think that's the beauty of your story, is that it's kind of shedding light on how we can resist in our daily lives. So my question is what tools to resistance do you guys find the most successful in terms of interpersonal connections and relationships? A very lovely question. That's very good. For myself personally, I want to talk about one thing that the generous support that the sponsors have given us. We're going to donate it to a community library in Kingston, New York, near where we live that is an African Roots library. And the thing that's wonderful about this library, it's not part of the public library system, it's totally independent. And it's in a historically black community that's now quite a diverse community. And we open our doors to, we want to, and it's the director of it is a man who spent over a decade in prison for non-violent drug sales. I mean, he was a pusher. But he never, he didn't use violence and he paid for it. He was part of this Rockefeller drug laws in New York City, in New York State. And so the people who are involved, the adults who are involved in it include formerly incarcerated people who are really trying to share lessons who don't want to see these poor kids in that neighborhood go through that same experience. They want the kids to have something positive to aspire to. And so this is something that's been a wonderful project that we've been involved in. And, you know, it's just, we're trying. And so, and then another project we're involved in, which is, I know there are things like this around here in Burlington in Vermont, is a farm that's, that this is a socially oriented farm that tries to bring community there. It has a big CSA, has lots of projects, has a very Native American aspect of teaching Native American culture. So we've been involved in both of these and kind of brought things together so that we've, well, the most best example is we just had a Halloween festival that was organized by a young man that has gotten involved with both the farm and the African Roots Library. And he's a dynamite organizer. And he basically brought, there were a thousand people who came to this Halloween festival on this farm. That would look like Kingston. And Kingston is a very diverse community of a large African American population, a large Latino population. And everybody came to this festival. It was free. It was, he raised a lot of money, you know, he raised money from businesses and it was like, and I was part of a Native American cultural part of that. And anyway, it was just great. And it was like, so that's an example of community building that has been very exciting to me because there are now people in, that people are starting to cross those barriers to talk to each other and to do things together. And so that's just one example. So I would say I'm probably a contemporary of yours. I call it being on the last quarter. And looking at the olds, that's going to be left for my grandchildren. There are three. Two of them live in Canada at this point and are having a very broad experience of life. And one of them lives down the driveway in my son's house on a piece of property nearby. And he is like any 12-year-old had about three or four years of playing the video games, a lot of it with tanks, you know, these sort of dehumanized games, even though there's a real bottom line about being good to your fellow to be inclusive and all of those things. It's still how he amuses himself. And we might ask ourselves, who funds these games that the Xbox people put out? How addicted are you to those things? What does that mean to you when you can kill so quickly in an electronic scenario? How is it for you when you live in a pretty diverse community that's pretty liberal, such as Burlington, you may not even be here for college, this town really works, that's my observation. But we have an avowed Nazi here, a young man who made it into the press for his beliefs. How would we change or invite him into the diversity that we enjoy that we believe in? And what is it about us, white Northern Europeans, that can't recognize where we came from? The documented fact that we all come out of that will do by plane in Africa, essentially, and emigrated through the world. So who are we being to each other? How do we include each other? How do we take the most perceived heinous person that we see out operating in the community and get them involved and open a dialogue with them? So that's just an observation. If you think he's the most heinous person in the world, it's not going to go well for starters. But I do think that talking to people with whom you disagree is very important. I mentioned that I met with, for a while, I've had several meetings with these Trump supporters. And the thing was going pretty well. One guy who was quite racist, much more than I expected, made the statement that black people should be glad they were brought here in slavery because it did so much to improve their prospects for doing stuff and they escaped African slavery and so on. It was a combination of ignorance and malice. I was frankly kind of, oh, okay, thank you. And, you know, the next meeting I wanted to talk to him about that. And he, all he wanted to talk about was race. Some of the other people they wanted to talk about class-type issues. And he changed this whole story. He said, I didn't say that. That was something I read in the newspaper in Boston. I would never say something like that, he said. So I figured there is no point talking to this guy because he's dishonest. So, you know, the one thing I've learned, and this is a crash course in psychiatry, the one thing I learned from 40 years in psychiatry, it's actually been more than 40 years, Sandy, underplayed it, is that, is a nine-year-old boy riddle about how many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? Anybody? Yeah. Thank you, thank you, thank you. There you go. That says it all, right? Oh, is that right? So, she comes by it honestly, very good. Anyway, so I think, you know, dialogue is always good, and you do the best that you can, but you also have to make decisions about how to prioritize your time. And this guy, I'm not meeting with him anymore. What he showed me was he's dishonest. So there's no point in having a discussion. It's not going to go anywhere. That's all I can say on that. I'm just a visitor to this campus for a few days from the United Kingdom. So I ask this with the greatest of humility and with genuine interest. And I absolutely take, and I'm inspired by Sally's call to community building and rallying. And some people will have the temperament for that. Other people may not. And not everybody has to do everything. But I'm just thinking two days ago hearing about the signs of mobilization of groups that aren't normally represented in legislature or in state houses and so on, the success of women, women of color. I think there's a Sikh mayor. I mean, there seems to have been a mobilization into legislative positions. I mean, Paul, with your quite, I think, sobering and, you know, vision of how difficult the task is to transform a politics, a polity. There are people in this room who might be considering just going into politics. And that's not quite the community building. It's a slightly different type of task. So I'm just wondering what your view is. Is that a waste of time? Is it deluding ourselves that people can do any good because the system is so stacked through the finance of political parties and this sort of thing? Or, well, I'd like your opinion on that in any case. I just, before you answer the question, I just want to let everyone know we have about a little less than 10 minutes left and then we're going to have a reception in the Livik Fireplace Lounge so we can continue out there when we're done in here. Yeah, I think it all depends. I mean, I think that some people will be wasting their time doing that. I think some people can make a very positive contribution using what they call the bully pulpit and using the political platform to let people know what's really going on. I think the most radical thing anybody can do is talk about what's actually happening because you're not going to get it from the media. So there's no one answer to that. I think some people, if they're just going into office and then when they get into office they're very happy to be there and that's it. That's a waste of time. I wouldn't support that. You can't tell in advance, of course, but I think anything people do in the direction of awakening folks to what's really going on is a good thing. That's my view of that. I agree with what Paul said. I know, I was assuming we would disagree on that but I also wanted to speak to the question of trying to transform somebody who's Nazi wing or misogynist or something like that. It is true if a person wants to change then you can have a dialogue. There have been some interesting work by people who themselves have been in far right groups and who are reaching out now to try to talk to other people like themselves. One of the things is a lot of times people who are brutal, whether it's against, no matter who it's against, have themselves experienced violence and so that if there's some way you can hook into having a discussion and it's sort of the storytelling thing. There are people who have really painful stories and if there's some way of hearing that story of enabling some... Not everybody can bring out a... You have to have a trusting relationship before you're willing. I went for ten years of being depressed and I went back to school and I got a whole master's degree without talking to anybody, not one person, not a professor, not another student about the Greensboro Massacre. I couldn't talk about it and so it's a hard thing but then eventually I was able to start to talk to people about it and then I ended up writing a book about it and writing a dissertation on it and it was kind of like... I'm being denounced too, of course, but anyway, one professor who disagreed with me and many things told me that I had a worm's eye view of the world, which I thought was really interesting. But anyway, the point is that it takes different... I mean, some of us have skills to be able to reach out to people. Some of us who have experiences being in prison or having family members who are in prison can draw out those painful experiences from people who are in prison or coming out of prison. And so I think there's so much to do and community building in this kind of relationship building is so vast. I mean, all of us can benefit from it and all of us can find our niche in it. I mean, we have a friend who is a great cook and that's her thing. She feeds people. People bring her food and she creates these delicious meals out of it. That's her thing, you know? I mean, so everybody... There are all these different things that people can do and sort of trying to figure that out, I think, is a challenge for each of us. But I'm just saying that it's been very rewarding to do. We have a... Hi. Thank you so much, both of you, for being here. And Sandy is really one of my favorite people. We had grad school together. We took classes. What an honor and thank you for your perspective. So I want to... This might not be a favorable topic, but here in Vermont, you know, this concept of the white supremacist or the Nazi, right? But what I experience as a woman of color is so many well-intended white people not doing anything. Things happen all the time and many times, as many times as I was going to, rallies after our black community members in the United States murdered, brutally murdered, for nothing, absolutely nothing, and hardly anybody showed up until Trump was elected. And it made me feel like people... And there was police brutality. It was police brutality here in Winooski, where a person was killed, but he was a white man and nobody showed up, or very few people showed up. And it makes me think, if y'all aren't going to show up for your own people, how are you going to show up for anybody else in Vermont? How are you really showing up for people of color? So how do we talk to the individuals who are not the supremacists, right? The well-intended white people who are booing individuals on the Patrick Gymnasium floor for not standing up, right? But who's having those conversations with those folks? And I think that is what I have the hardest time with here in this area. So I hear you. And one of the things that I think is really important is when somebody has a family member who gets hurt or killed, that even if you can't go to a demonstration about... And I think it's really important to realize that there are a lot of people who really can't... They can't do that. They can't demonstrate. It's just too scary for whatever reason. So I think it's a matter of broadening. And also it's all of us pushing ourselves to do things. But even if you can't go to a demonstration like that, take food to the family. Reach out to the family. Reach out to them. Talk to them, okay? And then also if you have, like, say a group of people that have a potluck. I mean, potlucks are great. I love them. They are. They really are. And then maybe the people in the potluck could say, you know, well, I'm thinking about going to demonstrate against that person who was hurt or killed. I'd like to go out and support that, but I don't want to go by myself. And maybe five or six people could go. So I would just try to find creative ways of, you know, but when people are hurting, that's a very important time to reach out to them. And even if it's not a demonstration, but just to connect with them and hear, talk to them. We end exactly on time. This is an extraordinary convergence of... Thank you very much.