Is the next big realignment in American democracy on the horizon? Alex Lovit joined the This Day podcast team on stage at the Howard Theatre in Washington, DC, to discuss what history can teach us about the historical moment we’re living through and the path forward. Featuring special guest Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II—bishop, author, founder of the Poor People's Campaign and the Moral Mondays movement, and Kettering Foundation senior fellow. This live recording was the culmination of our month-long America 250 series with This Day about the unexpected historical moments that shaped our democracy. If you missed the series, check it out in This Day’s feed or here: https://kettering.org/this-day-the-context/ Thanks to everyone who joined us in DC, and thanks to This Day for their partnership! Learn more about This Day here: https://www.radiotopia.fm/podcasts/thisday
Alex Lovit:
Hello, Context listeners. This is your host, Alex Lovit. Today, we're bringing you a special conversation. It's an episode of the history podcast This Day that was recorded live at the Howard Theatre in Washington, DC. We called the evening The Next Realignment, a history-informed look at this moment in American democracy, and more importantly, what might be next.
Realignment has a definition in political science, when voting blocks and electoral results shift in meaningful ways, and we may be on the cusp of that. But we also chose to consider the word more expansively, because if you look at US history, you'll notice that when one sphere shifts, others do too. So, what does it mean to think about a realignment beyond just politics? What would a moral realignment, an economic realignment, or a cultural realignment look like? Jody Avrigan, host of This Day, facilitated the conversation, which included myself and Jody's regular co-hosts, Nicole Hemmer and Kellie Carter Jackson.
And the special guest was Kettering Foundation Senior Fellow, Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II. Bishop Barber holds leadership roles with the Poor People's Campaign and the organization Repairers of the Breach. He's also the founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at the Yale Divinity School. He's one of the great moral, political, and intellectual leaders of our time, and it was an honor to have him with us.
This event was the culmination of the month-long America 250 series that we did with This Day, about how, throughout our history, American democracy has sometimes become more inclusive and sometimes less so. If you missed that series, you can find episodes in the podcast feeds of both The Context and This Day. So, here's the episode, live from the Howard Theater in Washington, DC, The Next Realignment.
Jody Avrigan:
Please welcome William J. Barber. And we also have with us my two co-hosts for this day, so please welcome from Wellesley College, Kellie Carter Jackson and Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt. Hello there, Nikki.
All right, let's talk realignment. Well, no, let's get one thing out of the way first. Kellie, should we just do this now so you don't have to awkwardly wedge it in later? Kellie went to Howard.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
What, what? HU? All right. That was the first thing I was going to ask, "Is HU in the house?" That's all I need to know. I'm good now. We can start.
Jody Avrigan:
But you went to the campus store and dropped some coin.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
I did. I did. I bought a sweatshirt, I bought a hat, I bought a crop top, like... Good times. I cannot leave DC without buying Howard Merch.
Jody Avrigan:
Yeah, as it should be. Reverend Dr. Barber, I want to start with you, and I want to ask... Well, I guess I want to ask if you buy the premise, do you think we are on the cusp of a major realignment?
William J. Barber II:
First of all, let me say a HBCU too, North Carolina Central University. I just need to get that out of the way.
I think we have been on one for some time. I think we are in a struggle for civilization itself. I really believe that when we look at... We're in many places at one time. One writer says what we're dealing with is the iconography of a too often repeated reality, where we step forward and then we have massive shifts backwards. But at the same time, I was writing something in the back, we're in the middle of extreme poverty. Poverty by America, not just poverty in America, but as Matthew Desmond said, poverty by America, where 800 people are dying a day from poverty, and we have 140 million poor and low-wage people in the wealthiest nation in the world. What is that?
And then we have this moment of moral deregulation. We have a cry for a moral vision at the very time that we have policies and politicians who are, at every day, trying to get us to deregulate our morality, deregulate our commitment to a more perfect union, get us to deregulate.
And then we have the battle for what I call "The Third Reconstruction." I think that America went through two. The second one was killed, murdered, destroyed, and maligned. And we're in a battle for a third reconstruction because right now, we are in the midst of those who want to retrogress, that is undo, what was won in the Second Reconstruction and block the possibilities of the third.
And so in some ways, we're dealing with systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation, denial of healthcare, the war economy, and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism have combined into a kind of interlocking injustices. Dr. King called the three [inaudible 00:05:19] evils, but we have more than three today. And what is being called for is a massive moral movement to push back against those things. And we're in that moment, the birth pains of a third reconstruction.
And then finally, I think we're in a place, if I might be a preacher for a moment-
Jody Avrigan:
Please.
William J. Barber II:
Where the Bible, where Psalms 1:18 says, "You can be in a time when the stones that the builders rejected become the only hope for civilization." The stones that the builders rejected have now become the chief cornerstone. 140 million poor, low-wage people, 87 million poor and low-wage voters. The number one reason they don't vote is nobody talks to them, but the place to most expand the electorate is among poor and low-wage people. And the place that could overturn every margin of victory, if just 10 to 12% of them were to vote, it would be poor and low-wage people.
So the question is, whoever captures the moral vision of poor and low-wage people is going to be at the center of whatever the realignment is and pushing the nation towards being a more perfect union.
Jody Avrigan:
Nikki and Kellie, Dr. Barber is tying together so many strands of our political and cultural and economic lives. The movements that you studied, the eras that you studied, were the conversations that led to actual change kind of swoop... We tend to think of movements as "the blank movement" or "the blank..." It's focused on a specific issue, but Kellie, where do you start with that?
Kellie Carter Jackson:
I mean, when I think about Reconstruction, I study the 19th century, and reconstruction is definitely a realignment. It is a revolutionary realignment in which you are going from slavery to freedom. And at that moment, you're getting all of these constitutional amendments. Slavery is abolished, Black people are becoming citizens, Black men are getting enfranchised with the vote.
And then in that moment of freedom, Black people did not waste any time. Immediately, they're starting public schools. You get your first universal public school systems. You get Black elected officials for the first time. You have people who went from being enslaved to now elected in the House of Representative. You get massive, warp-speed change. Black people were not sort of like, "All right, let's sort of ease into freedom." They were like, "Let's go." And they do that very, very quickly. And on multiple levels. You see how they are creating their own banks, creating their own HBCUs. Howard gets started right after the Civil War ends. You have all of these-
Jody Avrigan:
You're just going to mention it every time. Okay.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
I'm sorry. I'm going to be insufferable tonight. But you have all of these moments in which change is rapidly happening, and at that exact moment in which you get all of this progress, you get backlash. Almost immediately. The Ku Klux Klan is founded within six months of the ending of the Civil War. Civil War basically is over in April, the Ku Klux Klan has their first meeting and call to order in December. Christmas Eve, no less.
So this backlash that we see is a constant violent conversation with progress that's trying to take place. And I think it's a cautionary tale in how we think about how progress happens because we think that we're supposed to either do one thing at a time or we're supposed to wait, and it's like, "No, all hands on deck."
Jody Avrigan:
And moreover, progress for this group and then this group and this group, and I think one thing I've learned from you, doing this show, is that the fight for Black progress ended up leading to progress across the board.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
For everyone.
Jody Avrigan:
For everyone.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. For everyone.
Jody Avrigan:
These are fights for everyone.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Not just for ourselves, for everyone. Yeah.
Nicole Hemmer:
And in fact, it was a precondition of progress for everyone else that you had to have Black freedom before you could move forward on all these other fronts. And speaking of backlash, I mean, the Supreme Court in the 1870s and 1880s, they're writing these opinions where they're like, "I think we're far enough out from slavery that we can calm down on all of these laws to help Black people out." So that idea, which is reiterated again and again today to talk about arguing against reparations, arguing against affirmative action, that was being rehearsed in the 1870s and 1880s. So that backlash has been around for a while.
And I study, essentially, the backlash, although they wouldn't have seen them that way. But I will tell you, the American Right, as it is forming its organizations in the modern movement after World War II and laying its plans for how it will gain institutional and political and cultural power in the United States, one thing that they had was patience, that they were laying the groundwork for things that would not bear fruit for decades.
I mean, if you think about the assault on Roe v. Wade, now, it certainly wasn't Dobbs that was the first time that Roe v. Wade got rolled back, but the understanding is that we can win little victories on our path toward the big victory and we are willing to wait, that there were things that they wanted, that they wanted enough to work for, for decades and decades. While I wouldn't suggest emulating the goals, I would suggest that that kind of commitment to a set of values is pretty effective.
Jody Avrigan:
That's what [inaudible 00:10:58]
William J. Barber II:
Yeah. Well, you know Charles Hamilton Houston, who's right here at Howard, when he started going after Plessy versus Ferguson, recognized that they would win and lose and win and lose and win and lose, but it had to be a sustained battle. It took 50, what, 8 years after 1896. And I think that's part of what we have to do now, and we have to understand what have been some of the obstacles.
It's in 1935 that Langston Hughes writes a poem, "America has never been America to me, but I swear this oath, America will be." And he does not call for just Black people to be moving. He talks about Black people and workers and the Native Americans. In this great poem, this African American poet lawyer lays out a pathway forward for fusion politics because... And he lays out this notion of a dream that Dr. King later picks up, but he knew that even post-slavery, what did you have? The 13th Amendment first, to answer the question, "Is slavery even legal?" Then the 14th Amendment, equal protection under the law for all persons. Not all citizens, all persons. And then the 15th Amendment, about who is eligible to vote. Of course, it only meant for men and not just for women, but the point is that it said that no one could deny or abridge the right to vote.
But fusion politics was the key of the Reconstruction. It was Black and white in the South. By 1868, '69, '70, every state legislature in the South was controlled by a fusion coalition, Black and white fusionists, protected by the police and military protection, we have to remember that, who were voting, as you said, to have public education, were writing preambles to the constitution, like this one. In North Carolina, when fusionists, Black and white, came together, they rewrote the constitution, and this is what they said. Listen to this language: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all persons," this is 1868, "all persons are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the enjoyment of the fruit of their own labor and the pursuit of happiness." "The enjoyment of the fruit of their own labor." So they, even then, were laying the groundwork for labor unions.
And then finally, when you get to 1898, the only coup d'etat in this country... People say, "We haven't seen one before." Yes, we have. It was November 10th, 1898 in Wilmington, where they brought a Gatling gun to the city, killed more than 3% of the city. But here's the kicker: They ran Black and white politicians out of office, Black and white fusionists out of office, and said, "We will have no more of this kind of intersection and working together that is transforming the nation."
Jody Avrigan:
Alex, let's return a little bit to the idea of a realignment in the broadest sense, but also kind of trying to track other moments when our country has realigned. What does political science, what does history teach us about the signals for we might be living in one of those moments?
Alex Lovit:
Yeah. Well, so as Jody said, I could go on about the Sixth Party systems in American history, but I think the core idea is just a time when what the parties stand for shifts and who the people voting for those parties also shifts. So you can certainly see that in the 1960s and '70s, when the Democratic Party becomes the party of civil rights. I mean, the Republican Party was the party that abolished slavery. I mean, Black people abolished slavery by taking advantage of the war and running away and making it impossible for slavery to be reconstituted, but the Republican Party got credit for ending slavery. So it was a big deal, and it took a long time for Black folks to switch allegiance to the Democratic Party. So that's an example of realignment, when you get changes in who's voting for who. And we see a little bit of that right now.
William J. Barber II:
The Lincoln Republican Party.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yeah.
William J. Barber II:
I wasn't going to say that, but I had to say, because my granddaddy was a Republican, but he wasn't this kind of Republican. He wasn't an extreme... He was a Lincoln, coal-mining Republican who fought with white coal miners in the 1830s against the government and the coal bosses in the 1830s and '40s. And he was a Republican even after Roosevelt came into office, because he was holding on to the vision of Frederick Douglass and Lincoln.
Alex Lovit:
Well, I always think it's funny when people, every so often conservatives rediscover that the Democratic Party was the party of... And it's like, "Yeah, so?"
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yeah, I know. Yeah, yeah.
Alex Lovit:
It was a long time ago.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
They're like, "Frederick Douglass was Republican." We know.
Alex Lovit:
So, other things that might signal a realignment, so that's shifts in who's voting for who, shifts in what the parties stand for. And then another one that I think is interesting that we're kind of seeing now is when you start getting fractures within parties, where you don't just get to say, "I'm a Republican," now you have to say, "I am a Stalwart Republican." "I'm a Mugwump Republican."
Jody Avrigan:
What was that word?
Alex Lovit:
"Mugwump."
Jody Avrigan:
"Mugwump." Am I the only one on stage that doesn't know that one? Okay.
Alex Lovit:
This is like in the 1870s, 1880s. But so now, you have to say, "I'm a MAGA Republican," right?
Jody Avrigan:
Yeah.
Nicole Hemmer:
Yes, yes, yes.
Alex Lovit:
Once again, we have invented a new word to define a division within... Just the party name isn't enough anymore.
Jody Avrigan:
And what's that a sign of dissatisfaction with?
Alex Lovit:
Well, it's sign that the party isn't holding together quite the same way that it used to, that there's fractures within it.
Nicole Hemmer:
And just to emphasize, this process takes such a long time. You think about the Democratic Party becoming the party of civil rights. It's in 1948 when Hubert Humphrey is calling on the party to walk into the bright sunshine of human rights and to discard its support for segregation. It doesn't bear fruit, necessarily, until 1964 with the Civil Rights Act, and even then, it's an incomplete victory.
And so, you can see the signs of realignment, but it doesn't mean that things are going to change immediately, and the best activists are the ones who understand that, who call for immediate change, and yet know they will likely be in the trenches for decades. They're going to be in the trenches for their life, but they will continue to push for that change, even if it's slow in coming.
Jody Avrigan:
Can I put you back in preacher mode for a second?
William J. Barber II:
Yeah.
Jody Avrigan:
What Nikki just said, that... What does it take to be in the moment and fight for the change and maybe be convinced that it's about to happen, but also, at some level, also know that you may not be around to see it?
William J. Barber II:
Well, I like to say that you're either sowing the seeds for a movement, you are in the midst of the movement, or you're going to receive the fruits of the movement, but all three are possible, and you have to think about where you are. But part of what you have to do is look at what's attacked.
Now, if we are honest about history, there's not any major shifting in America where part of that was some serious moral movement, where people move beyond party, like Democrat and Republican, left versus right, and they were grabbed by something more principled. And you know that because, for instance, in the 1930s, there's a book out called One Nation Under God: The Purchasing of the American Pulpit, and the extremists who were part of the national manufacturers and the coal and oil groups, they were angry at Roosevelt, some of his plans. They were angry that a social gospeler was labor secretary, and she was pushing Roosevelt in some ways.
And they asked, "Who do we have to move in order to control the moral vision of the nation?" And It was decided after polling that it was religious bodies. And they said, "Then we've got to figure out a way to purchase them. We got to figure out a way to buy them." And they literally hired somebody and said, "What we want you to do is go in and steal the churches, steal the pulpits, change what they're talking about. We can't have these pulpits talking about love and justice and caring for all people." And the person that engaged in it, inside of a few years, claimed to own 19,000 pulpits around the country.
Dr. King said, at the end of the Selma to Montgomery March, and this is something we often miss, he says, he lifts up the First Reconstruction as a model, and then he says, "Every time there is the possibility for the masses of Negroes and the masses of poor whites to come together and form a voting block that can fundamentally shift the economic architecture of the nation, the greedy oligarchy sows division, funds division. What they called in the Southern strategy, 'positive polarization,' intentionally dividing the people that, if they stay together, can shift the nation." And they said this: "If we get caught, we'll lie about it. But if we do it-"
Alex Lovit:
They said that.
William J. Barber II:
They literally said that. "But if we do it, we can control the nation for the next 50 years."
Here is the fear, I think, in realignment. When President Obama ran and won, it wasn't President Obama, it was the electorate. What scared the bejesus out of extremists was the cracks of the Southern strategy open up. Obama wins in South Carolina, wins in Virginia, wins in North Carolina, loses on election day in North Carolina, but he wins through same-day registration, early vote that the movement had won a year before he ran for office.
And what they saw is this thing now. Two of them. One is that in a few years, this is going to be the first time in the Western Hemisphere, the minorities that were forced to raise the crops and had been slaves and had been [inaudible 00:21:38] people that worked on farm, will be in the majority. That's never happened before in the Western Hemisphere. Secondly, there's not a state... We're in a moment, round there, there's not a state where if 10 to 15% of poor and low-wage voters or 20% of Black voters that haven't voted come together, unite, that they can't overcome every margin of victory out there.
That is hope for us. It's work for us, but it's also the hope that is causing so much fear. As in South Africa, they used to say, "A dying mule kicks the hardest." "A dying mule kicks the hardest." And I think that's part of where we are right now.
Jody Avrigan:
But that reframing of the rise of Obama... Because we think of them, and I think when we look at US history, we tend to think of these singular figures and these singular politicians. It's one of the things that Alex and I talked about at the beginning. We fixate on the political actors and maybe don't see the movement behind them.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yeah, no, I think this is one thing that I have noticed, and maybe y'all can agree or not, that is shifting in terms of realignments and how we see power. I see a lot more movements being leaderless, particularly among younger demographics. I think we've become a little bit disillusioned with leaders. We've sort of gotten a little bit over celebrity culture. There's still that out there, but for the people who are doing the work...
And I use Minnesota as a perfect example of this, when they were facing all of these ICE sweeps, that movement to protect your neighbor was largely leaderless. No one was sort of at the helm, saying, "This is how we're going to do this or this." It was neighbor by neighbor, person by person, across all classes, across all cultures, across all demographics, saying, "This is how we are going to strategize and protect one another." And it's been one of the most effective strategies I've seen in trying to combat ICE and combat all of the violence that Minneapolis and St. Paul is facing.
And I want to see more of that, actually. I tell my students all the time, "When you get a lot of these leaders, we shouldn't be surprised when they get assassinated." You know what I mean? We've seen this happen with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and Fred Hampton, Medgar Evers. These targets, when you have specific leaders, make it very easy for the opposition to take someone like that down and then dismantle it from the top down. But I think if you have group-centered leadership, which is something that Ella Baker pushed a lot, it is much harder to dismantle the collective than it is the individual. And that is something that I think we're even seeing some of that on the Right a little bit. Like, what happens when Trump is gone? How does the Right move?
Jody Avrigan:
But also, it returns agency to everyone, right?
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Sure.
Jody Avrigan:
And you wrote a whole book about people who stand up and refuse.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
"And we refuse."
Jody Avrigan:
Kellie wrote a book called We Refuse, and it's really about this.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Not "I" refuse, but "we," the collective. Yes, yes.
Jody Avrigan:
Yeah. But individuals, collectively. Alex, and then...
Alex Lovit:
Yeah. So it's also a technological story. So the leaderless movements of today are in part enabled by technology, by social media, somewhat squashed by the current leadership of social media, but that's true in a way that it hasn't been in the past. And I think that's something we often leave out of our consideration of a movement.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yeah, that's a good point.
Nicole Hemmer:
And Reverend Barber's point about Obama is really important because we tend to have this flaw in our historical memory where we recall the big moment, right? We recall 2008 and Jesse Jackson sobbing in Millennial Park. So this morning, I was at Vanderbilt, and I was teaching about Brown v. Board. And Brown v. Board is something that all of my students know. They know 1954, the end of the segregated schools. But when I was teaching it to them, I started in 1910, with the founding of the NAACP, and then take them to Howard University and to Charles Hamilton Houston and to Thurgood Marshall and all of these movements that were working to change the law as part of a bigger project to bring equality to the United States.
And they succeed in 1954 when they go to the Supreme Court and they finally get that nine to zero vote on Brown v. Board. And even that doesn't end segregation. 10 years later, only 1% of Black students in the South are going to integrated schools, that it is a fight that continues past that moment. And so we remember that signal moment. We remember 2008, we remember 1954, but we don't always see clearly the decades of work that go into making this moment happen.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
And the coalitions that go into that too, because it's not just the NAACP-
Nicole Hemmer:
NAACP-
Kellie Carter Jackson:
... it's all these organs-
Nicole Hemmer:
... ACLU. Yeah.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yes, it's CORE, it's SNCC, it's the CLC. It's all of these labor unions that are doing all of this work too.
William J. Barber II:
Yeah, like labor unions that we don't think about in Birmingham, Alabama. We don't think about how Black and white labor unions were in New Orleans, and they were split over race because the union labor movement sometime didn't take seriously enough the issue of race and how race would always be used to split Black and white workers. But down in New Orleans and Birmingham. We don't think about the fact that SNCC's symbol was a Black and a white hand shaking, that NAACP was predominantly white. In it's beginning.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
With white leadership. Yeah.
William J. Barber II:
Yes. Yeah, white leadership. Because we get locked into this, "It's Black over here, it's white over here, it's brown over here," when actually what we need is moral fusion, a fusion that takes race and class seriously. Somebody asked me, "Is it race? Is it class?" I say, "It is. Why are you separating through..."
And then, if you look at it, the Koch brothers got in the room in the 80s and said they were going to steal the way of the movement, and they were going to build a movement. They said while Dems and others would be focused on a Messiah candidate, they were going to build a movement that could produce candidates and punish candidates.
And when we look at in North Carolina, as I said, we had fought for years to get Democrats to pass same-day registration early voting, it wasn't until we came together in the moral movement or what we call the HK on J Movement, four of the organizations joined together to push Democrats. And then they passed it in 207, and then it works in 208, and then they tried to destroy it in 2013. Then we form another coalition, Moral Monday, that went for two years. 2,000 people got arrested, but we also filed a civil rights lawsuit against the worst bill since Jim Crow. But the plaintiffs, excuse me, were white, Black, women, churches, synagogues, young people. And some of the lawyers said they had never filed a civil rights lawsuit like that. And we had to say to them, "But there's this realignment and a regaining of fusion that worked in the South. We're not talking about something that didn't work. Fusion worked, moral fusion and political fusion."
And finally, I want to say that what we... I don't know if I want to see leaderless movements or movements that understand that they don't start from the top, that you always got to have some leaders, even if you have a committee. But the issue is we need to nationalize state movement. If we will remember, every major shift, labor shift, civil rights shift, began from the bottom up, from Selma up, from Birmingham up, from Greensboro up, from Plymouth, North Carolina up, from South Carolina up. My wife and I talk about that all the time. It was state-based movements, from the bottom up. And that's one of the reasons why, earlier this year, made some people mad. I said, "We don't need a march on Washington right now. We need to march to the polls to change Washington." We didn't need a march on Washington.
Now, because when they marched on Washington in the past, they never marched on an election year. In election years, They always built from the bottom up. So rather than have a march on Washington, we led, she led, and others, a 51-mile march from Wilson to Raleigh, the first day of early voting, for three days. Ended up with thousands of people signing up to do canvassing, so forth and so on. And the voter turnout where we marched through went up 47%.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Wow.
William J. Barber II:
Now, what if we had had state marches in every state? What if civil rights groups and all had come together, and not focus on trying to reinvent 1963 but do what Dr. King said? He did tell us what to do: "Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back..." And the women knew what to do because they got mad because they weren't allowed on the program. So what did Diane Rush do? She went to Selma with her husband to start building out what would later become the Selma movement. State-based movements from the bottom up, nationalizing state movement, giving the power to so many people that you can't destroy it. I think that's part of the realignment.
And I wonder, not to be too long, if the Democrats are really serious, and what I mean by that is, we hear all of this conversation about affordability, affordability. That's the statement of a problem, not an answer or a solution. The question is, some Dems are still running on they're against Trump. I'm really kind of sick of hearing that. I want to know, not are you against Trump, but if you get the majority, what are you going to do?
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yeah. What's your solution?
William J. Barber II:
Are you going to pass living wages? Are you going to pass universal healthcare? What are you going to do to address affordability? Because critique is important, but if you're going to move people, you got to have a vision.
Jody Avrigan:
[inaudible 00:31:44]
William J. Barber II:
You got to have a vision.
Jody Avrigan:
Nikki, I know you've been thinking about this a lot.
Nicole Hemmer:
This is something that I think about a lot because one of the things that we know from studying history is that when a window opens for change, it opens very quickly and it closes very quickly. And it is the people who are prepared to take advantage of that moment, who have been thinking for years and decades about "How would you build institutions differently?" What different laws would you write? What different amendments to the constitution would you make? How would you think about society being ordered differently, and how are you going to achieve that? And then when the window opens, they're able to act and take advantage of that.
And so I know we've spent a lot of recent years in despair, but I think that if people are looking for something hopeful to hold onto, one of the things that you can start doing is start thinking about those questions. What do you want to see happen when that window of change opens, and how are you going to force that window open?
Jody Avrigan:
And you're talking very specifically.
Nicole Hemmer:
I'm talking very specifically. I'm saying, you want a third reconstruction? Start thinking about what the-
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yes, what it can look like now.
Nicole Hemmer:
... contents of that third reconstruction are. How will institutions look differently? What are you going to do about the Supreme Court? What are you going to do about the Senate? What are you going to do about the electoral college? What are you going to do about the city council in your hometown? What are you going to do about civic institutions? How would churches look different? How would libraries look different? How would universities look different?
And you can't necessarily tackle all of that at one time, but you can tackle the thing that matters most to you, so that when the window of change opens-
Kellie Carter Jackson:
You're ready.
Nicole Hemmer:
... you are ready to act in the places and with the people who you are already in community with.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yeah. I'd say it's-
Jody Avrigan:
Well, just as Dr. Barber pointed out, that's also what voters want to hear.
Nicole Hemmer:
Yes.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yes.
Nicole Hemmer:
Yes. They don't want to hear about Trump anymore.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
So true.
Nicole Hemmer:
They want to hear what the future is going to look like.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
It's so true. Yeah. I tell my students all the time, because this is a question I get every time I give a talk, it's like, "Well, what can I do? Well, what can I do?" And I tell people all the time, "Well, first, what are you passionate about? What do you really care about? Is it the environment? Is it poverty? Is it mass incarceration? Find what you are good at, where your skills and talents are, and then seek out the people that are doing this work. Because I guarantee you, you do not have to reinvent the wheel. There are people who are already doing this work, who are in need of laborers, who are in need of people that can help build coalitions with them."
And I think it's hard work trying to start something from the bottom up, but there are so many people who've already begun that work and just need people to partner with them. And that, to me, is something that I feel like is really feasible. It's not this pie-in-the-sky, idealistic idea of-
Jody Avrigan:
"I'm going to fix democracy all by myself."
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yeah, yeah. It's like, "No, no, no. Somebody is doing this work. Find out how you can get on board. Find out how you can carpool to your goal."
Jody Avrigan:
Alex?
Alex Lovit:
Well, yeah. And often these realignments, the political realignments start outside of politics. So politics is about "What should tariff rates be?" well, that's back now, and "Should we be building canals?" And meanwhile, there's a movement off to the side, saying, "Hey, we got to talk about this slavery thing." And eventually, that forces its way into politics. Enough people get upset about this problem that the political system has to adapt to it, has to create a political movement to enable the social movement that had already existed.
William J. Barber II:
'65 wasn't an election year, but the people elected to change the people who got elected, many, including Lyndon Baines Johnson, that didn't want to touch voting rights. But when the people got together, created crisis that was seen all over the world, it forced elected people in an election year to elect differently, to do differently, because they were upset.
And so, could it be, and I'll offer a couple of practical things, that if... This was written in 2012 by Joseph Stiglitz. "The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why, why, why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go to bed without the basic necessity and permit scores of citizens to live and die on the street?" So as we're here tonight, 800 people will die today from poverty, Black and white. 30-something per hour. Quarter million a year. Quarter million, every... Just die. Before Trump. Trump stuff has exacerbated, COVID exacerbated, and we've not addressed it.
We've not raised the living wage since 2009. And yet, work has gone up and wealthiest wages, money had gone up. We put together a Third Reconstruction Resolution. I want to ask you to Google it. It's out there now, 14 points of what it ought to look like. And we put it on the floor of Congress, got 40-some signatures. Some people said, "Well, we don't know if we're ready for that." But they're making the mistake that my sister just mentioned. You don't get ready when the time is right. You get ready before the time.
So we laid out a clear agenda on economics, on voting rights, on the environment, on the Supreme Court, on all of those things. It's called the Third Reconstruction Resolution. In fact, I'm getting ready to build a Third Reconstruction Moral of Southern Alliance around this. And the point being that all of us are right, that we have some very practical things to do. If we organize the pain, the number of people that are losing their healthcare outdistance the margin of victory of the last president by 20 times. 20 times. Because he won by what? 1.2 million votes or so. There'll be 20-some million people lose their healthcare, 20-some million people will lose their SNAP. People are dying. 800 a day.
All movements happen when folk get sick and tired of being sick and tired, when the pain is too great to continue the direction that we're in. And there are 87 million poor and low-wage voters, 30 million don't vote. Number one reason they don't vote, according to a study we did with Columbia University, is "No one talks to us." What if, in a very practical way, we place before the American people a third reconstruction agenda and then mobilize the pain?
Now here's the danger of it, though. If you mobilize... Can I say this? Okay, Lord. If you mobilize the pain and then don't do a damn thing, that's going to be more dangerous than leaving it alone. In other words, we're in a curious position right now because if folk win a majority this time and then say, "Well, the first thing we're going to do is go after all these people and prosecute..." So you mean you're going to win, and the first thing you're not going to do is pass living wages? The first thing you're not going to do is restore people's healthcare? Are you cuckoo? People want to know that their vote matters, and whoever gets the majority this time better show people in a real, tangible way. Like a combination bill, what we call "an omnibus bill." Maybe a third reconstruction bill. How about that? How about that? Led by somebody from Howard. No, I'm just saying. But what if?
Jody Avrigan:
That's-
William J. Barber II:
I'm serious.
Jody Avrigan:
... playing to the crowd.
William J. Barber II:
And put it on the table, make the president or whoever veto it, but show people that the realignment is here because we're not only going to wait for the door to open, we going to kick it open with policy. That's what we, I think, have to do in this moment.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
That's good. That's good.
Jody Avrigan:
I mean, time and time again, you talk about this, and we've talked about this, and you think about this a lot too. There's just that lack of follow through, even at the moments where people know the window is open. Why is that?
Nicole Hemmer:
They get distracted by other things. They don't think they have enough power. They didn't care about it that much to begin with. I mean, there's a lot of reasons why there's not that... And there are structural obstacles, right? It's hard to do, and when you do it, sometimes you're stopped by the Supreme Court or you're stopped by all of these other institutions. And so there's a lot that has to change all at once, in some ways.
And we've had moments, and this is why we keep talking about Reconstruction is because Reconstruction was one of those moments when the old world fell away and a new world was possible. And it doesn't necessarily take a war to do that, but it comes with a lot of bloodshed because power doesn't give up easily. I mean, that's why it's so hard. And sometimes, we elect the wrong people.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
That's real. That's real.
Jody Avrigan:
The ones who won't follow through.
Nicole Hemmer:
Who don't follow... I mean, have you...
Jody Avrigan:
I'm just here to ask questions.
Nicole Hemmer:
Imagine in your own mind a few different names of people who are willing to draft on the coattails of the energy of the majority, but never really saw themselves as part of a true coalition with the poor, the oppressed. They aren't those things, and they don't necessarily see themselves as part of that. They'll take the votes, but they don't see that as, not just the people they serve, but the political community that they are a part of.
Jody Avrigan:
We did an episode in our series, with our collaboration with Kettering, with Eric Ward who used the term, and he called, at the end of one of our episodes, for a new "popular front" in this country. I know that phrase has some connotations, especially in other countries, but his point was, to what you were saying, Dr. Barber, there's a need to find common cause across all the different groups. I love that idea of mobilizing the pain, but if everyone can commit to the big idea and the big fight and find their purchase in it, maybe that's what leads to lasting change.
Alex, you want to jump in on any of this?
Alex Lovit:
Well, so I was thinking about 1896, which is a moment of... So this is one of the realignments. It's one we often forget. And it was a push. I mean, it was both the end of a certain kind of fusion politics where there had been this populist movement that had been, at its birth, a cross-racial, working class movement, and then they... They got so big that the Democratic Party was like, "All right, we'll let you guys in. We'll fuse with you guys." And there was a moment there when it looked like there was going to be this kind of working class, cross-racial coalition that would change the economic structure of the country. And then it didn't work out.
So not all these stories end in success, and I think that means that lesson about patience we talked about before, but it also means it's always worth having the fight.
Jody Avrigan:
Kellie, go ahead.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Well, it shows me, I think we perpetually underestimate white supremacy and just how it works. I think [inaudible 00:43:07] like white supremacy is a hell of a drug, but the way that people draw their superiority, draw their identity, draw their significance, their value, their culture, their language from white supremacy, it is one of the most divisive systemic structural plots against humanity that I have ever seen.
It keeps women from getting realigned. You see it time and time again where white women will vote against their gender in favor for their whiteness. You see that happen again and again. You see how these labor coalitions split up, always along racial lines. I think, until we have a honest, come-to-Jesus moment about just the violence of white supremacy and the undoing that it does for all of us, I don't know that we're ever sort of going to get ahead of it. Because there will always be another opportunity where white supremacy pops up and people see the allure or the seduction in it and take that over solidarity, over collective action, because there's something that they want individually that whiteness gives them that these other things don't do for them. And we got to be honest about that, and that's what we really have to tackle.
William J. Barber II:
Yeah, I think my dear sister's exactly right, and we got to understand that racism is a form of heretical ontology, that God created this, that it's a divine thing. Racism is a religion, not just a sociological reality.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
It's a belief. Yeah.
William J. Barber II:
And it's a belief system. But it's rooted in the greatest hurt to humanity in all, and that's the love of money. How can you have a conversation of race without dealing with class? It doesn't require Blacks to go over here and whites to go over here. Where's the courageous moral fusion coalition come together, that has won? Take for instance, people say that down south, that poor whites are the cause, for instance, say, of Trump being in line because they voted against their own self-interest. Be careful saying people vote against their own self-interest, because it may be their interest and you don't realize where the interest is because nothing has changed it. But it's actually not true that the majority of poor and low-wage white... The actual truth is most poor and low-wage white... Poor people didn't vote, period.
So, not only must we not underestimate the power of white supremacy, we must not underestimate our power. We're talking about a reality right now where we're talking about 10%. If you get 10 to 15% of poor and low-wage people organized... In North Carolina, for instance, the president's election was 183,000 votes. 1.5 million poor and low-wage people didn't vote, 500,000 African Americans, but nobody talked to the poor directly on political candidate. They just didn't. Trump went where the poor were, but Dems didn't ever speak directly to them and say, "If we get elected, we're going to deal with this poverty, say, by a living wage."
So we have to have what I call "a moral analysis," moral articulation, moral agenda, and moral activism that changes even the language, like this Left, Right, puny language that doesn't do anything for anybody. We really got to talk about right versus wrong and speak to the heart and the core and be willing to go. I go to East Kentucky and bring folk from Louisville with me. You got to be able to go and find out.
For instance, we don't even know that the war on poverty started in Harlan County, Kentucky. The justice that stood against Plessy versus Ferguson was Justice Harlan from Harlan County, Kentucky. If we don't know this history, then we are not actually grabbing the power that is possible and we live in this kind of mythology that is not overcomeable. When in fact, last election, 21% of African men voted for Trump. Why? 40, 50% of Black folks stayed at home, even with an African American woman on the ticket. 90 million Americans stayed home. The current Congress that we have is there because of only 7,000 votes. 90 million people.
There's a deeper, deeper kind of analysis, and that's why I believe we have to have a moral fusion coalition, not just coalition. Because coalition, sometimes people join them, when they get what they want, they leave them. But moral fusion says, "We agree that systemic racism, systemic poverty, so forth and so on, are moral issues that, until all of them are addressed, we will not leave the fight." That's a different call to action than just, "Come in because of your issue." You see? No. "What are the issues that, if I don't stay together, we don't stay together, I actually undermine the reason for my own existence?" That's what a moral call is, that "I have to do this till I die, because the existence of those immoral things constitute a major contradiction and require an eternal dissatisfaction with them. And I need to find who else feels like that." That's the coalition.
And politicians aren't going to always be... I know when, quickly, after Biden and Harris won, some of us started marching in the city and getting arrested because we were calling for three things in that big bill: Voting rights, living wages and healthcare. And we were told by some civil rights group, Black and white, "Stop it. Leave them alone. Don't push too hard. Let them just do the COVID piece, and then we'll come back to the other stuff. Let them give Manchin what he wants, and then he'll vote right later." We knew that was a lie. And so what happened? We got a vote out of the House on living wages, went to the Senate, the Senate did a vote, but eight or nine Democrats joined Republicans and voted against living wages.
If we don't have the courage to address that, and like the Koch brothers said, punish some people politically when they do that, then we never can build a coalition. But if we do have the ability to do it, we can fundamentally shift. Think about 15 to 20% of people in the state, organized around this idea of a moral-fusion, third reconstruction coalition that won't take no for an answer.
Jody Avrigan:
This is a little bit of an aside, but I love your point about all the people who don't vote, and I've always thought that when they report vote totals, they should also just report alongside it the number of people who stayed home. That should just be one of the standard numbers that we hear when we get election results.
Alex Lovit:
Which is about a third of the country.
Jody Avrigan:
It's about a third. So the last election-
Alex Lovit:
It's about equal, Republican and Democrat.
Jody Avrigan:
... was a third, a third, a third. And I think if we just framed it that way, I don't know what it would mean for people. You want to jump in on that and maybe bring it to right now? I mean, do you see... You can put it in the frame of this upcoming election, or you can take a longer view about the next few years, but do you see this coalition emerging and do you see politicians feeling the heat in that way?
Nicole Hemmer:
I think so. I mean, I think that there is a coalition emerging. It's not always at the top of the Democratic Party, but I mean, even just think about the rise of the DSA in the Democratic Party. We're talking about MAGA Republicans, and the way that that party is struggling with its identity, the Democratic Party is also struggling with it. There's a fed-up coalition in the Democratic Party that is asking for bolder action and is asking for not waiting, because we waited during the Obama administration to get to the next thing, and we waited during the Biden administration to get to the next thing.
And there is some real value in people who are sick of waiting, and that itself is a coalition that you can mobilize and that is mobilized, and I think, that also understands that, absolutely, voting in November is vital. That is a vital election. And that is not the end of the work, and that's not even the most important part of the work. It's a stop along the way. And being in coalition with people who understand that it's a stop along the way, I think, is one of the more important things.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yeah. I mean, I'll just say very simply, when it comes to justice, patience is not a virtue. It is not a virtue. It is not. And I think it feels good, some position might say, to "Wait, don't go too fast. You'll ask, you'll rush, and you'll get it wrong," or "You'll scare other people away," and things of that nature, and "Caution, caution." I don't think that works at all. Matter of fact, I think that is a tool of the opposition is to get you to think that patience or politeness is something that is useful. When people are dying? When you word that, 800 people a day, there's no patience in that. There's no waiting in that. When people need to eat, they can't wait two to three years to eat. And so I think we have to have a sense of urgency, a real sense of urgency and momentum, and that's the only thing that's going to propel us to the next sort of moment or the next sort of big movement.
I mean, I think about a lot of candidates, people like we were just talking earlier about Angie Nixon, who's running for US Senate in Florida. Yeah, shout out to Angie Nixon. But what I love about hearing her speak is, one, she has a real urgency to her. And she has lived a life of poverty. She is in close proximity to what it means to be powerlessness. I feel like those who are closest to facing the oppression are those best suited to address it. And that's what we need to do. We need to be empowering people who are closest to the problems.
Jody Avrigan:
And again, that's what voters respond to, that urgency.
Nicole Hemmer:
And in-
Jody Avrigan:
Nikki real quick, and then Dr. Barber.
Nicole Hemmer:
I was just going to say that in that Hubert Humphrey speech from 1948, he's talking about this exact problem. He's like, "You have all of these people who are saying, 'You're moving too fast, you're moving too fast.'" And he's like, "I say to those people, we are 127 years too late."
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Snaps.
William J. Barber II:
Well, remember when Dr. King was in the jail and he said the greatest enemy of the civil rights movement were not the extremists or the Klan, but those who kept saying, "Wait"? And remember when Coretta Scott King didn't wait after he had been murdered? She still went to the Day of Solidarity and spoke. And somebody asked her, "Well, how are you out here and your husband was just violently murdered?" and she said, "But that's not the only form of violence." In at that speech, she said, "Violence is ghetto housing. Violence is denying living wages. Violence is denying healthcare. Violence is denying education." Then she says, "And an apathetic attitude that refuses to address these other forms is also violence." I think that part of what's got to happen, and politicians are going to be key to this but movement's key to this, I think it's going to require some massive civil disobedience.
Back when the big, deadly, ugly, destructive bill was going on, ministers went into the rotunda, and we were arrested for praying. But a lot of media wouldn't report it. And some politicians ran from us. Ran from us for praying. It's one thing the people that stood against us for... It's the ones that ran from and said, "We don't want to be too close to that, because they may not vote with us." They're not going to vote with you anyway. They're not voting with you.
So I think that there's going to have to be some massive moral... And we're going to have to change some of our language to talk about violence. Think about it. The most progressive politician you know, when's the last time you heard them say the word "poor" or "poverty"? Think about that now. With 800 dying a day. Pete Buttigieg came to the church I pastor at, and he said, "I probably will get torn down by this, by the party, but I'm going to tell someone." Because I asked him straight up, "Why won't y'all say the word 'poor'?"
Jody Avrigan:
But does talking about affordability not count for you?
William J. Barber II:
Heck no, that's just a statement. Or excuse me. Lord, help me. Lord, help me.
Jody Avrigan:
I knew the answer, folks. I'm just...
William J. Barber II:
Lord, help me, help me, help me. No, because I don't need a statement of the problem. And if you're going to state it, state it right. Affordability has been with us a long time. It's been us ever since the country began, because poor white men couldn't even vote. We've always had an affordability issue. But the question is, what are you going to do about it? And what's the level of affordability? Some people don't have an affordability problem, they have an existence problem. They are dying. And if we can't say that, if we can't have...
So, Pete Buttigieg said that he said, "I'm going to tell you something. We are consulted by our consultants, not to use the word."
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Wow.
William J. Barber II:
That the consultants at the highest level tell them, "Use words like 'those trying to make it into the middle class,' 'those trying to acquire...'" Why can't you say poor? And then they'll say, "Well, Reverend Bob, poor people don't want to be called poor." I said, "Well, then the poor people came, and that's who called... They named the movement." We didn't name it. They said, "We want people to understand that this is unnecessary, changeable, fixable poverty." Think about, we're talking about something that could be eradicated, for the most part, with about four pieces of legislation that makes sense for everybody. And so, when are we going to decide?
I preached a sermon at the National Cathedral, and this is the title of it. America Must Decide That Death is No Longer an Option. And I'm one who, my faith begins in the graveyard. That's where Christian faith begins, in the graveyard, on a cross, but it doesn't stay there. The prophets of the ancient Judah preached against death, what they call "the conspiracy of death." If we don't start talking about that and helping people understand how serious this is that every regressive piece of public policy has a death measurement. Voting right has a death measurement. Denying healthcare has a death measurement. Environmental injustice has a death measurement. A death measurement.
And we almost need political public health specialists who help us do the kind of analysis to say, "America, you are allowing people unnecessarily to die." We're going to need preachers, when people die in their congregation from poverty or healthcare or die, to ask the family, "Can we have a public viewing? Can we invite the media to come and say, 'This is what policy death looks like'?" God didn't call those people home. God will accept them home, but God didn't do this. God didn't do this. Unnecessary, changeable governmental policies. Being the only nation in the world of the 25, 21 richest nation that doesn't offer some form of universal healthcare did this. And if we can have a real serious confrontation and collision with the reality of the death measurement in policies, maybe the conscience of this nation will kick in one more time.
It was the death of those four girls in Birmingham, 15 days after I was born. My father and mother said they had to ask a question, "What have we done to have a child in the midst of a country that will blow them up in a church?" And my father said, "We got to give up our middle-class existence in Indiana and go south because if we don't challenge this death, then we are accessories."
Jody Avrigan:
Kellie, I wonder if you could talk to us a little bit about the First Reconstruction, and in the wake of all that pain and the kind of pain that Dr. Barber's describing, I get the sense that sometimes people tell the story of Reconstruction, rightfully so, as a failure, but there was a window-
William J. Barber II:
There's a window.
Jody Avrigan:
... of real achievement. And I wonder if you could just remind us of what that looked like.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
The story of Reconstruction is really a success. It is really a success story. The Lost Cause has shaped it as a failure because they wanted to show that Black people weren't ready for freedom, and they wanted to show Black elected officials as inept or corrupt. But my mind is blown when I think about what Black people were able to accomplish just months after slavery, within years of slavery, that you had people who were enslaved for 300 years and they're building schools, and they're building churches, and they're building banks. Freedom's Bank, right here in Washington, DC.
Black people had saved, collectively, like $10 million. We're talking from pennies, from pennies. People had established the first public health institutions. It is such major, rapid change. When I think about someone like Robert Smalls, who's enslaved in South Carolina and then becomes this elected official in the House of Representatives and what he's able to do for the state of South Carolina, instituting the first public health and public education systems, it is inspirational.
I feel like, if this is what people can do with no reparations... Keep in mind, nobody was getting paid to do this. No one was getting compensation for this. It is mind-boggling. And I think, if this is what Black people could create, if this is what they could push through through will, through force, in a short amount of time with nothing, how much more do we have an obligation to create change with what we have?
When I think about my grandmother, she was a domestic worker. She worked for 59 years, for three generations of one family. She worked until she was 75 because there was no pension for people who were domestic workers. She had an eighth grade education because there was no high school that would educate her in the state of Mississippi. And when I think about her life and then I think about mine, and I think about how I'm a professor, I'm at Wellesley, I'm going up for full professor this year. I'm writing my third book. I'm doing all these. I'm here, y'all. I'm here. She could not have dreamed. She could not have imagined that within two...
And I'm a second generation PhD. My mother has her PhD. My nephew has his PhD. He's a third-generation doctorate. We could not imagine. Change can happen so fast. It can happen so quickly. There's so much possibility there, if you can do the work to get it done and keep pushing no matter what.
Jody Avrigan:
Well, Nikki, you study the 20th century. I think this reminder that it can feel like we're really far away from the moments when this country really enacted real change, but a lot of us are walking around, really living in the wake of it.
Nicole Hemmer:
Very much so. And just to think about the long tail of Reconstruction, there are only a few short years where they're able to pass legislation to give real meaning to the 14th Amendment. And the Supreme Court then tries to take that away with a bunch of rulings in the 1870s and '80s and '90s. But when the NAACP goes to the Supreme Court in the '30s and the '40s and the '50s, the Supreme Court comes back to them and they're like, "Well, shouldn't you wait until Congress passes a law that outlaws or bans school segregation?" And the NAACP is like, "No, no, no, no. No, no. We already have the laws. Congress already did that work. They did that work in 1866, in 1870, and 1871. The laws are on the books."
And they looked at that, and the Supreme Court didn't always take them up on this argument, but the Supreme Court often did. They would be like, "Oh, yeah. Oh. Oh, okay. We actually already have a legacy that was given to us by the people in the aftermath of the Civil War that gave us the power to undo the wrongs, the discrimination, the oppression of the last 80 years." And so, there's a gift embedded there. And it's not just the gift of this legislation, but it is the gift of the vision of what America could be, that we still haven't fully enacted. But imagine if we took that vision of the United States that was crafted before the Civil War, but was enacted in the years after the Civil War. That's a beautiful legacy that we could begin to take as the founding of the country we want to build.
William J. Barber II:
Well, the 14th Amendment is the re-founding. The 14th Amendment, the middle of all of the amendments, is the re-birthing, the re-believing, the reconstituting of America. All persons. All persons. You think about applying that language. You understand why certain people hate it so, now, in the political structure. It doesn't say "all citizens." And I think, if we think about... I come from a free community that was free and yet was involved in the underground railroad in North Carolina, was Blacks, it was whites, it was Tuscaroran Indians. And that's why I do so much studying around how in each of the reconstructions, the First Reconstruction, the Second Reconstruction, there was this fusion. You don't get A&T, North Carolina Central, the banks, without this fusion of Black and whites, working together.
And the other side, we have to be honest, is you had to have troops in the South to protect... Because the violence was always there. The Second Reconstruction, if you look at how it began, we talk about Rosa Parks, but do we also talk about the two Jewish ladies that sent her to Highlander to get prepared for what was coming? And she learned the methodology of nonviolence. We have to, as it's kind of, say, telling of the whole story. I say all the time, when I look at my skin, I recognize the whole story. Some of my skin is the result of rape, but some of it is the result of righteous relationships that crossed all kind of boundaries to build out a better America. And I want to own that as well.
You got to talk about, in North Carolina, how a guy by the name of Galloway, who was a senator, a Republican senator from Wilmington, founded the Republican Party, but joined together with whites to pass legislation for public education and made public education a constitutional right in the first section of the Constitution. A constitutional right. Something we don't even have in the United States Constitution today.
So I love my sister calling us back to the remembrance of that history. And understand that that remembrance is not so that we just remember, it is to say, "If they could do so much with less, we must do more with more." We have so much more than they had. Let's stop being afraid, and realize that if the people in Reconstruction, with the very threat... You realize just a few years ago, maybe the seven... We couldn't be in a room like this anywhere down south without somebody coming and hurting us. We have this possibility of the power that exists if we fuse together and have a kind of courageous, conspicuous courage in this moment.
Jody Avrigan:
We have to start to wrap up, and there's a short question I want to ask of each of you. But I do think it's really important, I want to hear from Alex and Nikki on this, it's important to keep reminding ourselves of real-world examples of when we've made change and enacted reform. And I want the two of you to talk about something that's happened quite recently in the grand scheme of things, not at the level of the First Reconstruction or the Civil Rights Movement, but when we think in practical terms about the reforms that are going to be needed in this window that is potentially coming, in the wake of Watergate, there were some real reforms in this country.
Nicole Hemmer:
Absolutely. I mean, in the wake of Watergate and the Vietnam War and all of the turmoil of the 1960s and the early 1970s, you had a whole generation of democratic lawmakers who were swept into office, the Watergate babies, and they passed real reforms to put limits on what they saw as an imperial presidency. So they passed the War Powers Act, they passed FOIA, they passed all of this legislation to begin to ask for accountability from leaders. They understood that one component of democracy is accountability, that no person is above the law. And so when Richard Nixon says, "When the president does it, it's not illegal," they were like, "Incorrect. And we will pass laws that make it clear that that is wrong and that we do not subscribe to that view of the world."
And over the past 50 years, the Republicans have embraced a project that I'm writing about in my next book, to say, "Well, actually Richard Nixon was right and the president is above the law." And the Supreme Court right now seems super happy about that. But there was this moment when there felt like a combination of popular will and elected official will that allowed for a rewriting of the relationship between the president and Congress and the people. And that can happen. Should it have gone further? It absolutely should have gone further, but that's for us for next time. How are we going to do accountability in the aftermath of all of this?
Alex Lovit:
Yeah. And I think there were real reforms in the wake of Nixon, in the wake of Watergate, and they did hold for a while. There are other times in American history where there have been big scandals and real reforms, and it made a difference. So the Pendleton Civil Reform Act of whatever, I didn't look it up before.
Nicole Hemmer:
1881.
Jody Avrigan:
So disappointing.
Alex Lovit:
Thank you. History professor right there. Teapot Dome, giant scandal no one remembers anymore. So there have been these moments of overt corruption and obvious problems in the American system, and we do make reforms. And even if those reforms don't last forever, even if a century or two later we're still back fighting over those same things, those reforms still had an impact, and these are fixable problems.
Jody Avrigan:
Okay. We need to start to wrap up. I'm getting the "it's Monday night" feeling here. We're going to wrap this up. No, this has been incredible. And I want to end by asking each of you if you could very quickly recommend, say, either a book, or a speech, or an essay, or a documentary, or a clip on YouTube, or a song, or a poem, or something, one thing that people can maybe go home and check out that will help them get ready for this window of change that Nikki is talking about and that we think and hope might be coming. So why don't we go Nikki, Kellie, Alex, Dr. Barber.
Nicole Hemmer:
All right. So I want to recommend a piece that was written by Frederick Douglass in 1857. It's right after the Dred Scott decision is handed down, and Frederick Douglass responds to this, and he says, "Look, there's one way to look at the Dred Scott decision, which strips citizenship from Black people, which was an enormous win for enslavers in the United States." He's like, "And the Democrats are celebrating this. They're really happy today, but a dying mule kicks hardest." He's like, "They keep saying that this is a settled question, and they keep having to say it more and more and more and more because more and more people keep joining us in seeing the immorality of enslavement. And so, while everybody else is crying over the Dred Scott decision, I'm celebrating, because I know they wouldn't have come out and said this, the Supreme Court wouldn't have made this enormous move to strip Black people of citizenship if they didn't understand that we were going to win."
And so, when you're feeling a bit of despair, read Frederick Douglass, in this moment of real despair, saying, "We know we are going to win this, and a dying mule kicks hardest."
Jody Avrigan:
Frederick Douglass is off the board, Kellie. It's your choice.
Nicole Hemmer:
Uh-oh.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Okay. I was also going to say Frederick Douglass. And now, just in this spare moment, I have decided to switch it to Toni Morrison. I believe it is 1993, she is giving the commencement speech at Howard University.
Jody Avrigan:
[inaudible 01:12:48]
Kellie Carter Jackson:
And in that speech... It is a banger of a speech. I mean, you're like, "This is why she's a Nobel laureate." She talks about fascism and what it is, and she offers this 10-point plan of how fascism seeks to steal, kill, and destroy. And the formula is so brilliant and so all-encompassing and so current. It's though she could have given the speech last night. It is powerful, but she doesn't just leave us with this formula of "This is what it is." She offers up solutions for how to combat it and how to address it and how to really see it for what it is. Not a Left thing or a Right thing, or a blue thing or a red thing, but this sort of insidious, toxic system that causes division for everyone. It's brilliant, and Toni Morrison is GOAT.
Jody Avrigan:
All right. And I want to know who was in the audience for that speech, right? 1993, I mean... Yeah.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
You can see it on C-SPAN.
Jody Avrigan:
I'm sure there'd be vast notable folks. What's your rec?
Alex Lovit:
Well, y'all are giving some serious answers here, so this is kind of a silly one, but there's a picture of James Brown in the back of this theater. So I will pick James Brown's Funky President, which, James Brown was a problematic person and I think we're probably lucky he was never president, but he was funky. And I think that song, so this is in the early '70s, this is actually a moment of realignment, right? This is a time when American politics are really changing, and it kind of shows the limitations of affordability politics. It's complaining about inflation, it's complaining about affordability. And you can win an election or two that way. But then if inflation goes down, what'd you do? You didn't build a movement. But it's still a great song. Y'all should listen to it.
Jody Avrigan:
Do you know about Dizzy Gillespie's run for president?
Alex Lovit:
No.
Jody Avrigan:
It's a great one.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yes.
Jody Avrigan:
Yeah. They can form a little ticket.
William J. Barber II:
I was just thinking, "Everybody get on up, get involved." That was James Brown.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
"Get on your feet."
William J. Barber II:
And I want to give my final piece, but I just, sister, I just can't help it, it's just in the atmosphere.
"What the Taney Court has done is monstrous, but there are some things Taney cannot do. He cannot cause the sun to rise in the eastern horizon, neither can he put the stars to bed at night. So as monstrous as this decision is, I receive it with a joyful spirit because I know that every attempt to stop the abolition movement has only served to intensify and embolden our agitation."
I think when I hear Frederick Douglas say that in the spirit, it makes me think that there are a couple of things we have to do. From my faith perspective, we've got to have a season of repentance. Because what we see now started, if you will, in 2013, and we should, with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, Section Five, and that should have been all people's fight, not just Black people's. There should have been massive outcry in the streets. Every civil rights organization.
So there's a sense in which I want to be a part of repentance, metanoia, because sometimes when you're facing something as big as we're facing, you have to ask the question, "Who let them in?" That's the question of the movie, Sinners. "Who let them in?" Jesus raised that same question in Luke when he said, "Whenever the strong man takes over the house, somebody has to ask the question, 'Who didn't fill the house with the things there ought to be that allowed room for the strong man in the first place?'"
So having said all of those things, I would ask us to go visit a woman in East Kentucky, a coal miner's wife. The coal bosses and the sheriffs were after her husband because her husband had joined with Black and white people to stand against their atrocious attacks on the very lives of coal miners who worked hard in the dark depths of the coal mines, only to die before they could see their children live. They came in the house, looking for her husband. Her husband had escaped.
She told them, she asked the sheriff, "Why are you here? Why are you doing this?" When they left, she took a piece of a calendar down, and she penned words that have been used even by the Black Lives Matter movement and other movements that sometimes people don't know. It came from a white woman in Eastern Kentucky. Simply this, "Which side are you on, my brother? Which side are you on? Which side are you on, my sister? Which side are you on? I'm on the justice side."
This moment of realignment is really about "Which side are you on?" There's no middle ground. Either you're on the side of justice for all, or you're on the side of those that would make justice for a few. And when you make it for a few, you really make it for nobody. Go read that story of that song and then sing it. "Which side are you on, my brother? Which side are you on my sister? I'm on the justice side."
Jody Avrigan:
Dr. Barber, thank you so much for joining us this evening.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
So good.
Jody Avrigan:
And I want to thank the Howard Theatre, I want to thank Kettering, and of course, Alex, Nikki, Kellie. Thank you. And thanks to all of you for coming out on a Monday night. Take care, everyone.
Alex Lovit:
Thanks again to Jody, Nikki, and Kellie from This Day for their partnership.
The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Our producers are George Drake Jr. and Emily Vaughn. Melinda Gilmore is our director of communications. The rest of our team includes Jamal Bell, Theo Clyburn, Jasmine Olari, and Darla Minich.
We'll be back in two weeks with another conversation about democracy. In the meantime, visit our website, kettering.org, to learn more about the foundation or to sign up for our newsletter. If you have comments for the show, you can reach us at thecontext@kettering.org. If you like the show, leave us a rating or a review wherever you get your podcasts or just tell a friend about us.
I'm Alex Lovit. I'm a senior program officer and historian here at Kettering. Thanks for listening.
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests. They are not the views and opinions of the Kettering Foundation. The foundation's support of this podcast is not an endorsement of its content.
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