Resources

• Learning For Justice: Article, Teaching the Past to Improve the Future
• Learning For Justice: Lesson, The True History of Voting Rights (grades 6-8, 9-12)
• Learning for Justice: Lesson, Why Local Elections Matter (grades 6-8, 9-12)
• Learning For Justice: Article, What Critical Race Theory Is and What it Means for Teachers

Transcript

Bethany Jay: The first Anti-Lynching legislation was passed by the US House of Representatives in 1918. But the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill was thwarted by a filibuster in the Senate. And during the next hundred years, over 200 subsequent legislative efforts failed. But on March 29, 2022, President Biden finally signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Just in time.

Bethany Jay: Right?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I mean, it only took 100 years to see this largely symbolic legislative victory. I’m glad a measure finally passed. But it would’ve been even better to see the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act become law.

Bethany Jay: Yes! It’s such a frustrating reminder of how many of the issues that we’ve been talking about from the Jim Crow era are still facing us today in one form or another. We see challenges to voter access, equitable representation, prison and policing reform, accurate historical education across the country. Wouldn’t it be great if we could learn more about how Congress is trying to address these lingering issues today?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I like the way you think. Let’s do it.

I’m Hasan Kwame Jeffries.

Bethany Jay: I’m Bethany Jay, and this is Teaching Hard History. We’re a production of Learning for Justice—the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This season, we’re offering a detailed look at how to teach the history of Jim Crow, starting with Reconstruction.

Bethany Jay: In each episode we explore a different topic—walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material and offering practical classroom exercises.

As we bring our fourth season to a close, we thought it would be a good time to look at how we are dealing with the legacies of the Jim Crow era today. And we’re going to do that through the lens of public policy.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I recently traveled to Washington, DC, to interview Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, representative of the eighth congressional district of New York (shout out to Brooklyn and Queens). He is the fifth highest-ranking Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives, the former whip of the Congressional Black Caucus and, I’m proud to say, my brother.

Bethany Jay: You know, we began this season talking about Reconstruction, when we saw African Americans elected to federal, state and local government, before the backlash against that profound move towards equity and equality. So it feels appropriate to bring things full circle by talking with Congressman Jeffries to get his perspective on the topics we’ve been exploring, like voting rights, criminal justice reform, education and more. I can’t wait to share this with our listeners. Should we get right into it?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Absolutely. Let’s get started.

It was really cool to be able to sit down and talk about the past and the present with my brother, the congressman from New York. But it's really, really cool to be able to sit down now with my co-host Bethany Jay and talk about the past, and the present and the interview. Bethany, what's up? What's going on?

Bethany Jay: It was much more cool to be at the Capitol talking with your brother. You don't need to pretend. I know.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Nothing beats hanging out with you. So, this is great. It's great to be back.

Bethany Jay: Yes. It's nice to be in the same, you know, space. And I'll have to say, I'm going to assign this particular podcast to my students because they are always so impressed that I know you, Hasan. They're very starstruck whenever they come to that realization. So…

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Well, I need to share that with my daughters, who are not impressed with me at all, one bit.

Bethany Jay: They never are. Yeah.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Never are. Well, look, we have some clips. We have this interview we want to listen to. So how about we just dive right in? I had a great time talking to my brother, and I learned a lot. And I want to share it with our podcast listeners. And I want to share it with you. Let's listen. And let's talk about it.

Bethany Jay: Sounds great.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It is my distinct honor and pleasure to welcome to the podcast the congressman from the eighth congressional district in Brooklyn, New York, Hakeem Jeffries. Welcome to the podcast, man.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: Good to be here.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Look, one of the questions that I get a lot is how did I wind up in the place that I am professionally. So, let me ask you, how did you choose this profession? Or did this profession choose you?

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: Well, I think that all of us are a combination of the experiences that we've had, you know, growing up that helped to shape you. And for me—growing up in Brooklyn, coming of age, seventies, eighties into the nineties, tough times, 2000 plus, homicides, crack cocaine epidemic, but a very vibrant community, golden age of hip hop, growing up in the Black Church—all of these are important influences on my journey and the advocacy that I try to bring to bear. And going into the law, which helped to shape my thinking, my approach and the way I frame arguments and ideas.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You stayed in New York. I left to go to Atlanta to go to school. You stayed, wound up going to law school in New York. How much of the…

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: I stayed in the frying pan.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Lord have mercy. How much? Just answer the questions. Focus, brother.

How much of looking at politics in the eighties and nineties—I mean, you're going from Ed Koch, mayor of New York; Dinkins, first Black mayor—how much of that shaped your approach to politics today?

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: Well, kind of remember Ed Koch. Far more cognizant of Mayor Dinkins. And in fact, that's the first time I voted, at least that I can recall that I voted. I remember being on campus at Binghamton and Dad sending me an absentee ballot saying, make sure you cast this vote in this election. Marlin Jeffries, being on top of it, saying, 'I gotta make sure my son votes in this election where David Dinkins has the opportunity to become the first Black mayor.’ So that's probably where I was first focused on what the municipal landscape was. But you may remember when Jesse Jackson ran in '84.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: '84 and '88.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: I was probably 14 at the time. You were 11 and 12. I remember Grandma Lee giving us Action Jackson t-shirts. Now I'm not sure if we knew he was a presidential candidate, or a superhero or what was going on. But I remember some Action Jackson, tight t-shirts in 1984.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, Bethany, I remember those T-shirts, and they were 1980 snug. They were snug. They were real tight. Too skinny to be wearing them.

Bethany Jay: With the shorts with a stripe up the side, I'm assuming. Right?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Oh, Lord have mercy, man. It was terrible. It was terrible. But it reflected not just what we knew about politics. My brother's right. I'm not sure whether we knew he was running for president or was a superhero or action figure. But my grandmother knew the significance of Jesse Jackson running. And my father knew the significance of my brother casting his first vote in that municipal election for the first Black mayor of New York City.

And it speaks to one of the things that we heard repeatedly throughout this season. This intergenerational understanding of what politics means and the importance of politics in general, but of being able to cast a ballot, being able to participate in the political process. And we talked about disenfranchisement throughout the season. But the flip side of that is African Americans determined to cast a ballot in the political process.

Bethany Jay: I think you're so right. And the fact that activism, it never stops. Right? It's happening throughout this entire period. Whether we're paying attention to it on a national scale or not, it's happening. And what I love about this interview—and I'm so glad that we're ending this season with this interview—is because at the core of it, despite all of the challenges that exist, the way the congressman frames everything at the core of it is hope.

Bethany Jay: He expresses so much hope throughout this interview, and I think you see that even in this reflection on your childhoods—of thinking about Mayor Dinkins, and thinking about Jesse Jackson and the hope that those figures embodied.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And that that "activism" doesn't show up—and I put that "activism" in quotes because it needs to be broadly defined—of a grandparent getting their children involved by giving them T-shirts and a father sending a note to the son in college, 'Make sure you vote.' That doesn't really register often when we think about, sort of, political activism.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, it doesn't hit the radar. It doesn't wind up in a documentary film. But that's how it happens on the ground, right?

Bethany Jay: Yeah.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: A parent and a grandparent say, 'Hey, you got to be involved. I need you to be aware of this.' And we see that from the post-emancipation period, through the civil rights era into the present.

Bethany Jay: You're so right. It's not just Jesse Jackson. It's also Grandma Lee.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It sure was Grandmama. She made a mean sweet potato pie, too. Hakeem continues. So let's dive back into the interview.

Bethany Jay: Sounds good.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This whole season we've been talking about African American political participation, particularly around the vote, right. 15th Amendment extends the right to vote to African Americans, men. But we go through this whole era of disenfranchisement around turn of the century.

Then we get the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Many people think, 'Hey, what else do you negroes need?’ Right? ‘You got this thing down.' But there has always been a push to make it more difficult for African Americans to vote, certainly over the last 50 years. You see it in the Reagan Justice Department, under the current Supreme Court with Shelby v. Holder, the Roberts Court. They've been making it easier for voter suppression laws and mechanisms to pass. And then, of course, with the new wave of voter suppression measures that have been passed, Georgia leading the way at the beginning of last year.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: Well, the right to vote has been, as you've outlined, under assault with increasing intensity over the last several years. And really that period of voter suppression that we're dealing with now was first ushered in with the Supreme Court decision in 2013—Shelby County v. Holder—which decimated key parts of the Voting Rights Act, section 4.

Now, the interesting thing about the Voting Rights Act is that when it was initially passed in 1965, great leadership from Dr. King, John Lewis, our civil rights heroes, foot soldiers, and of course on the Hill, President Johnson, democrats partnering with some moderate Republicans in the House and also in the Senate, where they broke the filibuster and were able to get it done.

Since that moment, voting rights for decades had largely been a settled question in the United States of America. Some embraced it enthusiastically, some reluctantly. But it was a settled question. And in fact, many of us often point out the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized into law four different times since its initial passage in 1965. And every single time it was reauthorized into law, it was signed by a Republican president—1970, Richard Nixon; 1975, Gerald Ford; 1982, Ronald Reagan, perhaps reluctantly, but he did it; in 2006, George W. Bush.

So the question then becomes, if multiple Republican presidents reauthorized the Voting Rights Act and when it passed in 2006, overwhelming vote in the House—I believe in the Senate it was 93 to 0, but 10 Republicans who are currently here serving in the Senate voting for it, if my recollection is correct—then what happened? Why, all of a sudden, has it become a controversial thing to make sure that everyone can vote?

Some may posit that the 2008 election—remind me who may have won that election?—the 2008 election shook some people up, changed some perspectives on voting rights being a settled question. Because after that, all of a sudden—first with the Tea Party revolution, and then the Supreme Court decision and ultimately the election of the 45th president of the United States of America—people had a different perspective on voting. And a lot of it can be traced, I think, perhaps to what happened in America in 2008.

Bethany Jay: The congressman reminds us that voting rights have been considered, sort of, settled law for quite a while and have just now become more controversial. And he notes that we can probably guess the reasons why that's the case. But during our season, we were talking about voting rights in the Jim Crow era, which certainly was not a settled issue at all, and the disenfranchisement of the Black population during Reconstruction and the continued disenfranchisement of the Black population until you get to that Voting Rights Act in many parts of the country.

And one of the really interesting conversations that we had this season about voting rights, I thought, was with Karen Cox, who spoke about the Confederate monuments. And I thought the way that she brought together those two issues, both of which are historic and contemporary, was really important. She had us thinking about the fact that Confederate monuments were often placed on the ground of courthouses as a signal that this is a government for and by white men and that that government was there to preserve white supremacy throughout the entire Jim Crow era.

And then the vast majority of those monuments are placed there after African Americans have already been disenfranchised across the South. And then you add to that fact that many lynchings take place on courthouse grounds. And Dr. Cox said, "You couldn't be more clear about white supremacy in your community than to put a lynched body on the monument itself."

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Mmm. Mmm.

Bethany Jay: And then again, she reminds us of the importance of the Voting Rights Act for this particular issue, even. Because once Black Southerners are able to register to vote, because the Voting Rights Act has been passed, they resent having to go to a courthouse where there's a Confederate monument to do so. And so some of the first locally elected Black representatives, post-Reconstruction, start working to change local monument laws and make it possible to remove some of these monuments. So we see how the issue of Confederate monuments is really in so many ways intertwined with voting rights, for better and for worse.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And I think that history that you just laid out speaks to the fact that as much as we would like to think of the American political tradition around voting rights being rooted in expanding the franchise, the reality is that voting rights moment—just as we get with the 15th Amendment, and then we get 100 years of disenfranchisement, and then we get the Voting Rights Act and a sustained period of expansion—not without people fighting back. But then you get, as Hakeem points out, that 2008 election of Barack Obama and that fierce turning against the expansion and protecting of voting rights.

Bethany Jay: Mm hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Suddenly Republicans no longer want to reauthorize and the Supreme Court turning against it. That speaks to the fact that, you know, maybe the tradition is really a tradition of disenfranchisement, that the disruption isn’t what we're seeing today. What we're seeing today is actually—in the context of American history, and thinking about that Reconstruction-Jim Crow moment and even certainly before—the tradition is disenfranchisement. And what we're actually fighting against is a return to what was normal.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Or a return to the status quo, which has been limiting the franchise, not expanding it. And it requires then us to think about, 'Well, what does it take, not only to expand, but to maintain the expansion.’ Because it just, on its own, that expansion won't exist. That's the activism that we saw. You had to fight to get the right. You had to fight to keep the right. And I think we're in one of those moments right now.

Bethany Jay: Certainly. And we saw that after the Georgia Special Senate election. I mean, it was almost immediate that Warnock and Ossoff are elected. And, I mean, within days I feel like…

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Literally.

Bethany Jay: Right?

…there were all of these new proposals in the Georgia state legislature to remove different access to voting rights.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: When we think about voting rights in this particular moment, and we put it in the context of American history and certainly the African American experience, this is not history repeating itself. This literally is history just continuing on. And that's a sad reality, I think that we have to acknowledge and recognize.

Bethany Jay: Yeah. And it's one that I believe the congressman goes on to talk about how they're trying to address it on the federal level.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Yeah. Let's listen to what he has to say about that.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So as we look forward towards the fall, and congressional elections coming up and then in two more years another Presidential election, what can be done with regard to making the ballot and ballot access available to all people?

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: So we passed the John Robert Lewis Voting Rights Act. We passed the Freedom to Vote Act, both of which are critical, both of which every single Democratic Senator substantively supports, including the Senator from West Virginia and the Senator from Arizona.

The disagreement right now is on process. 48 Democrats believe that, at least as it relates to the right to vote, the filibuster should not be an obstacle. I agree. Because the filibuster is not in the Constitution. The word doesn't appear. It's a custom. And it's a custom that has historically been used in defense of slavery and in defense of Jim Crow. And so the question is, why are we holding onto it?

It cannot be that this is what the Framers intended, because the Framers were very clear on the difference between a majority and a super majority. And I believe in four different instances, they said, 'Here is where a super majority will be required': to ratify a treaty, super majority; override a president's veto, two-thirds, super majority; to amend the United States Constitution, two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate, 75% of the states, supermajorities. And of course, as the country saw, not once but twice, when there's an impeachment in the House to convict the president and ultimately remove him, two-thirds. Four times, they said super majorities are required. They didn't say it was required to pass legislation in any other area or when you are trying to strengthen the ability of the American people to choose their representatives.

And so for the life of me, a lot of us cannot figure out why we're holding on to this custom that is not even anchored in founding principles of the country or the Constitution. So I think we have to continue to press the case legislatively, because I think we have the higher ground on substance. Particularly when you consider even in the 21st century, there are exceptions to the filibuster that the Republicans, in my humble opinion, have used and abused. There is the budget exception to the filibuster, called reconciliation, which the Republicans used in 2017, where 83% of the benefits went to the wealthiest 1% in America. Mitch McConnell used the judiciary exception to the filibuster not once, but twice.

So, given the history, given the Constitution, given the Framers intent, given the modern-day application of two exceptions to the filibuster, I can't figure out why the Senate can't see its way through to moving the John Robert Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. So we can't give up that fight.

I had the honor to serve with John Lewis. Many of us in the current Congress did. He never gave up when he almost lost his life on the Edmund Pettus bridge, against all odds. And so now, when we're in a much stronger position to advance enlightened legislation because of the service and sacrifice of people like John Lewis, and Fannie Lou Hamer, and Rosa Parks, and Shirley Chisholm, and Adam Powell, of course, Dr. King, and Roy Wilkins, A. Phillip Randolph, go through the list, we can't give up either.

And John Lewis would say, “Never give up, never give in.” “Stand up, speak up, show up.” Continue to get into some “good trouble” until you make progress for our society. And so that's what we have to do legislatively. And then on the ground, we just have to make sure that we are encouraging and familiarizing people with the different state laws well in advance of them having to show up. And have lawyers and others present to make sure that not a single citizen has their right to vote infringed upon.

Bethany Jay: Mmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, Bethany, when he talks about the filibuster and the way it has been used and abused to suppress legislation in the Senate, you know, I can't help but think that it is people who won, intentionally, are using political mechanisms to stop legislation. We can think about certainly anti-lynching bills and how they have been stopped through the use of the filibuster. Civil rights bills, they have been used intentionally to stop, the use of the filibuster.

Bethany Jay: Mm hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: But for those more currently who say, 'No, no, no. This is tradition.' Right? 'This is the process.' What they are doing in the present certainly has echoes of the past. But even if they are well-intentioned, I think the history that he just lays out says that we should not put process over people. And that's in essence what we are doing now.

Bethany Jay: And it's very clear what is happening in the states. The John Lewis Voting Rights Act is in every way addressing real problems and doing nothing except protecting people's access to the ballot. What is the argument against passing that bill?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Mmm.

Bethany Jay: You can't make one. Right?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I mean there is none. I mean, it's a process one. I mean, you have those who oppose it. Right?

Bethany Jay: Right.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I mean, so right now, the way the Congress is set up in the Senate, politically, you have full Republican opposition to it. And so now we're just talking about a handful of Democratic senators in the opposition who was saying, 'No, this is about process, it's about tradition.' And then you say, 'No, it's not.' Right?

Bethany Jay: Right.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So then, you know, what are you really afraid of?

Bethany Jay: Exactly.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And what are you really doing? And that's a question I think that needs to be posed to them.

Bethany Jay: Yeah. And you don't want to make that argument to hide behind the filibuster, as it were.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Right. You’ll be hiding behind the process, because you don't want to deal with the principles about democracy. Right?

Bethany Jay: Right.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The principle about democratic engagement, about protecting voting rights and about expanding voting rights in a democracy. You want to make it possible for as many people to participate. And those who don't, you know, you have to question their commitment to democracy.

Bethany Jay: Well, and this also goes back to the first clip that we played about your childhood with your brother and the awareness of the importance of municipal elections, talking about New York City, but local politics as well being so important because that's where the state legislatures are elected that create districts. And we all know that those voting districts can be manipulated in multiple ways by those state legislatures to make it either harder or easier for people to vote or to split blocs of different voting populations up for the benefit of one party or another. So it also starts, again—as you were talking about—with that small-scale activism, on the ground, in paying attention to who's representing you in your state legislatures.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And it speaks to the need of the federal government to step in when states go awry. We see this certainly during the Jim Crow era. Right?

Bethany Jay: Mm hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I mean, these states are running amok. You talk about states rights, right. Their right to discriminate against people and make it harder for Black folk to participate in the political process then. And now, we have states not limited to the South. I mean, I'm here in Ohio. Ohio's doing the same thing. Indiana, these other northern states, midwestern states, western states are doing the same thing, making it harder for people to participate in the political process. So therefore, you need that federal intervention to level the playing field to make sure that safeguards are in place to protect the right to vote. And unfortunately, the Congress has been unable to pass that legislation.

Bethany Jay: I was just talking with my students yesterday about Reconstruction and the meaning of the 14th and 15th Amendments and saying, 'Look, this makes the federal government the protector of your individual rights.'

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Mmm.

Bethany Jay: And that's what needs to happen in this case. And it has happened before, but…

This is Teaching Hard History, and I'm Bethany Jay. We prepare detailed show notes for each episode of this podcast, so that you can use what you learn here in the classroom. You'll find relevant resources,as well as a full transcript, complete with links to materials mentioned by our guests. You can find them at LearningForJustice.org/podcasts. Let’s return now to Hasan’s conversation with Congressman Hakeem Jeffries.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: There are other areas in which some federal intervention could be used when we think and reflect upon the Jim Crow era and also the present. And policing is one of those areas. The congressman had a few things to say about that.

One of the core characteristics of the Jim Crow era is the color line, forced segregation. One of the entities that maintains the color line during the Jim Crow era is the police. There is still a police problem, or at least a policing problem, in America today. Could you outline what you see today as some of the primary issues around policing and policing Black communities? And what do you think we can do about it?

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: I think we recognize that the overwhelming majority of police officers, certainly the ones that I interact with back at home in New York City, hardworking individuals who are in the community to protect and serve. And increasingly in places like New York City, the police look like the community. A majority of the New York city police department right now are Black, Latino, Asian or South Asian. But it cannot be denied that there are police officers who engage in police violence, police brutality, police use of excessive force. And far too often the community that disproportionately bears the burden of officers who cross the line are communities of color. And often African American young men.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You mentioned the mosaic that is the NYPD. And you're absolutely right. I mean, the numbers bear that out. It is probably the most racially and ethnically diverse police force. But go back to the video of Eric Garner, that mosaic is right there. Right? There's just not white officers. And so it seems to me that this is a policing problem. I mean, it's a culture of policing.

When we look back, I don't know if there's ever been a time where American police have viewed communities of color as worthy of protection, and not from an adversarial position and standpoint. You know, you can have that beautiful mosaic. And if you send different folk out, but to do the same thing, you're going to wind up with the same result.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: Well, I think the militarization of the police has been noted as problematic, and we saw it in Ferguson. And that, kind of, represents a siege mentality that I think is not helpful for the police-community interaction. That's a warrior mentality. That's not a guardian mentality. And I think part of the reform efforts involve de-militarization.

There's no reason to have Humvees and, you know, mounted automatic weapons and things of that nature when you're dealing with American citizens in American communities. Of course, to protect us from the threats of domestic terrorism, certainly international terrorism, is certain techniques and approaches that will be necessary in the extreme. That's part of the reform effort. How do you strike that right balance?

Bethany Jay: Mmm. I was thinking about your point that law enforcement has never really viewed communities of color as worthy of protection. And I'm reminded of Kidada Williams's episode on lynching and that great conversation that you had with her. She talks about a Charles White woodcut. And she describes the woodcut, it's from 1945, saying, "[It's] a mother holding a son, an infant baby boy, and outside the window is a tree in the distance with a small noose hanging from it. And so she has brought a child into the world, [and] she has hope for the future, but she also knows about the outside world and what fate could befall her son." And it came to mind because it was so familiar to so much of what we see Black parents write and say about raising Black boys, in particular, today—the desire to protect and dream for your child, even as you have to raise them to be aware of the fact that they could be viewed as threats by many people, including law enforcement, and that puts them in danger.

And Tamir Rice is the name that immediately comes to mind here—a 12-year-old little boy, seen as a threat and shot by law enforcement for playing with a toy gun in a park. And I know that Kidada Williams was talking about the extralegal violence of lynching. But I think the point about having to raise your children—both as children but also having to raise them to be aware of how others may view them—is there in both of those examples.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, I asked my brother what did he think should be done and could be done to address those very issues that you just beautifully laid out. This is what he had to say.

Bethany Jay: Mm hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Could you say a little bit more about like some of the, the mechanisms that can and should be used to hold police accountable to hopefully shift the thinking, the way policing occurs. ‘Cause, you know, there's some other legislation, George Floyd Policing Act, that is languishing across the street as well.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: Yeah, we advanced the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, not once but twice, out of the House of Representatives. And it's designed to make sure that the principles of liberty and justice for all, equal protection under the law, apply equally, including in the context of interactions between the police and the community.

Making sure that you hold police officers who cross the line accountable is incredibly important. Part of how we've endeavored to try to address it is to look at the choke hold example, which resulted in the death of Eric Garner, and strangulation tactics that resulted in the death of George Floyd. And our legislation would criminalize that because it's unconscionable, unacceptable, unnecessary, unjust and un-American. And we think it has to be made unlawful.

And once you make an unlawful. Then you can hold people accountable for it to a greater degree. And it sends the signal that there's certain techniques that in 21st-century America are just not acceptable, as I think people of all races in the aftermath of both Garner and, to a greater extent, George Floyd's death came to that conclusion.

Even though many police departments—including the New York City's police department, I believe Chicago Police Department, certainly the LA Police Department—as a matter of policy, outlaw the choke hold, why do we still see it being used? Because it's not been prohibited as a matter of law at the federal level, though New York City and New York state did change the statutes to prohibit it or strictly limit its use.

So some progress has been made in the aftermath of some of these tragic events, but hasn't necessarily been comprehensive. And the legislation that we advanced out of the House was in part designed to say, 'We want to strengthen the relationship between the police and the community.' A strengthened relationship between the police and the community is good for public safety. It increases cooperation. And ultimately when you increase cooperation, you will drive down criminal activity and make communities for everyone safer.

So we want to change the mindset of policing from a warrior mentality to a guardian mentality. Because too many officers—not every officer, maybe not even the majority of officers but too many officers—may have a warrior mentality. And if you have that, you might view some elements of the community as enemy combatants, things go wrong. But if you have a guardian mentality, then you view the community as a partner. And it's a relationship to be cherished, to be guarded, to be nourished. And that in part was what the George Floyd Justice in Policing legislation was all about. Shift the mindset of the interaction and the nature of policing, so that it brings law enforcement and the community closer. And I'm still hopeful that that is an objective that we can accomplish.

In the aftermath of the George Floyd incident, one of the things that provided some hope and encouragement is that, you know, you did see at least a temporary coming together of elements within law enforcement and elements within the community to have a dialogue about 'How do we strengthen this relationship?' Because both are worthy of being supported. We have to support our communities, and we have to support those who are protecting and serving.

Bethany Jay: Kelley Carter Jackson's interview this season was one of my favorites. And as I was going back through the season, I was thinking about her discussion of abolition—and this relates to what the congressman was saying—but her point that abolition was not really accomplished by moral suasion. It was accomplished by activism that was sometimes violent. And she points out that the 19th century is really violent in general. But she makes the point, and this is a quote, "I think [that] part of the problem in America is that we don't know how to deal with Black protest, whether it's violent or nonviolent. We don't know how to reconcile it because we're unwilling to do the work of relinquishing the power that suppresses Black people."

And so two things come to mind for me here that relate to what the congressman was saying, that the hysteria about the protests that emerged in the wake of the George Floyd killing and how they were framed by large swaths of the media but also how the police and even military response to them was more immediate and forceful than the response to the January 6 insurrection.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Mmm. Mm hmm.

Bethany Jay: But just as Carter talks about in the 19th century, those protests and their upheaval were essential in forcing the hand of the federal government to do something. And of course, it hasn't made its way through the Senate as well. But to have to address this problem and the fact that we have representatives of color in the federal government, something that wasn't possible in the Antebellum era, you know, is also what's making that possible, with people like your brother at the forefront in the push for that legislation.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I think Dr. Carter's interview was really exceptional because what she points out or makes clear is that as African Americans were struggling for not only access to the ballot, not only to participate in the political process but also for personal safety against the state and against racial terrorists, that all options were on the table.

Bethany Jay: Mm hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Too often, when we think back to the African American freedom struggle, where we're talking about the civil rights movement or earlier periods, we frame it solely as, sort of, one approach. It's nonviolence in the beginning. It's nonviolence in the end. And we don't see that as a part of a spectrum.

One of the great advantages of studying the Jim Crow era is that you see clearly the full spectrum, the full array of options, both in terms of strategies and tactics, that African Americans are going to deploy in their effort to secure those basic civil rights and human rights goals. And we see that really playing out over time, when you zero in on that question of personal safety, that question of dealing with police, whether they are rural sheriffs in the Deep South or they are modern militarized police forces in the urban north.

Bethany Jay: It's so true. And we only acknowledge, and you've made this point in the civil rights season as well, we really only acknowledge half of that story. We really only like to talk about the nonviolent moral suasion piece and leave out the protection at all costs piece and the fighting back piece. And we need to include both of those narratives.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Yeah. No, that's essential. That's essential. You know, Bethany, one of the things I asked my brother about, of course, was this question of policing. And obviously it's an issue—was an issue in the past, is an issue in the present. A contemporary issue that we're dealing with as a society is mass incarceration.

Bethany Jay: Mm hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Mass incarceration begins with mass arrests. The two are absolutely connected. Why do you have so many people in jail? Because you're arresting so many people. So, you know, I asked him about mass incarceration following our conversation about policing. And here's what he had to say.

The militarization of the police has been going on for a century. And there’s examples after World War One, after World War Two, certainly after Vietnam. But in 1980s, we see it really ramping up connected with the war on drugs, which then leads to a surge in the prison population or what we commonly refer to as mass incarceration.

So there's real harm that is continuing to be done to populations because of this surge in incarceration, from a-couple-hundred-thousand people in 1970s to over two-million people now. You were one of the sponsors of the FIRST STEP Act. And so you've been thinking about this and legislating about what can be done. Could you first share a little bit about what the FIRST STEP Act was? And then could you share, what is the second step? And what should that be?

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: Well, this has been a bright spot in terms of the effort to reform our criminal justice system, in that, this effort of trying to deal with mass incarceration and the over-criminalization of the American people has become bi-partisan in nature. And in many cases overwhelmingly so. When I was in the state legislature, that wasn't necessarily the case. I get to Congress, and I was asked by one of then-lead Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, Bobby Scott, who was the ranking member on the Crime Subcommittee, to serve on this Task Force on Overcriminalization. Five Democrats, five Republicans.

I go to my first hearing or two. And Brian Stevenson talks, and he was a law professor of mine. It was great to see him, hear from him. But then someone from the Heritage Foundation testifies as well. And I found myself agreeing with every single thing that he was saying about the consequences of overcriminalization, and the impact on liberty and the damage that's done to communities throughout America, including disproportionately communities of color.

And I'm trying to figure out, 'Am I being hustled right now? What is happening?' And this resulted in the FIRST STEP Act, which was led on the Republican side by Doug Collins, a conservative Republican from rural Georgia. I had the honor of being the lead Democrat, progressive, from the People's Republic of Brooklyn, working together and ultimately being able to pull together a coalition of the left, the right, progressives and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, the NAACP and the Koch brothers, the ACLU and the Heritage Foundation, Al Sharpton, Grover Norquist, all points in between. Ultimately, with Jared Kushner taking the lead out of the administration and a bill being signed into law by president Trump that was focused on two things: front-end reform and back-end reform. Front-end reform, meaning changing the overly harsh and unjust sentencing laws that were put into place during the so-called war on drugs.

And so we lowered the mandatory minimum thresholds across the board. And we made the 18-to-1 crack cocaine-powder cocaine disparity retroactive, which in 2010—under leadership from Barack Obama and the Fair Sentencing Act—had been reduced from 100-to-1 to 18-to-1. But it wasn't made retroactive because Jeff Sessions, who was in the Senate at the time, blocked it from being retroactive.

When we went from 100-to-1 to 18-to-1, the Congress of the United States acknowledged, as a matter of public policy, that law was unjust. But because you didn't make it retroactive, you still had thousands of people incarcerated under what Congress had then said is an unjust law. FIRST STEP Act took that 18-to-1 and made it retroactive. Jeff Sessions, then the attorney general, fought us on it. But we were able to overcome that opposition. And more than 9,000 people were released, 90% of them Black men, which also tells you about the disproportionate impacts that the war on drugs had on certain communities.

We also invested in prison reform, which is making sure that we put into place programs and activities that allow currently incarcerated individuals to become productive citizens as they transition from incarceration back into society, in order to dramatically reduce recidivism. It helps their individual lives. It helps families. It helps communities. And it also saves taxpayer dollars when you bring down the rate of recidivism by investing in people becoming productive citizens.

Those are some of the highlights of the FIRST STEP Act. But it was very comprehensive in nature and has made a big difference, the most significant piece of criminal justice reform legislation to be passed by Congress in over 25 years. And it's a foundation to be able to do more.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Bethany, I'd love to get your thoughts on what the congressman had to say.

Bethany Jay: Well, the parallels between Congressman Jeffries' discussion of mandatory-minimums and the crack-to-cocaine, 100-to-1 and 18-to-1, disparity just reminded me of your conversation with Robert Chase about the criminalization of Blackness in post-emancipation era. It's just striking the similarities. And some of those laws that Robert Chase talked about, the Reconstruction era Black Codes are written with racial language into the law, but many were colorblind in the way that the, sort of, war on drug language is seemingly colorblind, but not colorblind at all in the way that they're enforced. And again, that makes me think of the war on drugs. It makes me think of 'stop and frisk.' It makes me think of 'broken windows' policing. Right? All of these different policies that, as you say, lead to a lot of arrests, which are then going to lead to a lot of prisoners.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And it speaks to. I mean, I'm so glad you brought that interview that we did with Dr. Chase, because that moment is so critical. That moment in the 1890, turn of the century, 1910s, 19 teens, when the criminalization of Blackness becomes embedded in the white American psyche. And it becomes a part of the way policing proceeds. It becomes a part of the functioning of the criminal justice system. And so we wonder sometimes why police react to African Americans who aren't doing anything, but assuming that they are a potential threat and are a danger. Why Black communities are so overly policed. Why those percentages, in terms of arrests, the weight of that falls so heavily on the shoulders of African Americans. It has everything to do with that moment during the Jim Crow era when race gets criminalized. And that has that long-lasting—we're talking over a century now—impact on the way African Americans are treated not only by police but by the criminal justice system.

Bethany Jay: And Brandon Jett talks in his piece about the, sort of, shift from extralegal violence, in the form of lynching, being the way in which to force control over Black people, without slavery. And the shift from that to more seemingly respectable legal processes that are used to effectively do the same thing.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And I think it's important to point out that the purpose of the criminalization, as you point out, serve different roles. Right?

Bethany Jay: Mm hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So, you know, turn of the 20th century, the purpose of the criminalization is really about labor control. Right?

Bethany Jay: Right.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It's about controlling Black labor. But by the time we get to the contemporary moment—certainly in 1980s, 1990s, early 2000—it's less about controlling Black labor—I mean, that was a Jim Crow era thing—and more about how do you profit off of Black bodies through warehousing them. Right? I mean, that's. The mass incarceration is like, 'What do you do with this surplus labor? And how do you capitalize on it?' Right? 'How do you turn Black into green?' And then that begins to feed itself. And then we move from, you know, 350,000 people who are incarcerated to two-and-a-half million between the 1970s and today.

Learning for Justice has a special opportunity, just for educators. After listening to this episode, You can earn a certificate for one hour of professional development. All you have to do is go to learning for LearningForJustice.org/PodcastPD, PD for professional development. That’s podcastPD, all one word. Then enter the unique code word for this episode, all lowercase. You’ll also find a link in the show notes. It’s a great way to get even more out of Teaching Hard History.

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Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Hakeem had a little bit more to say on mass incarceration. Let's play that.

Bethany Jay: Sounds good.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: One of the bills that I'm currently working on, which has passed the House of Representatives and is over on the other side of the Capitol, as are so many pieces of legislation, is the Equal Act. And what the Equal Act will do is take that 18-to-1 sentencing disparity and drop it to 1-to-1, because there was never any logical reason to treat crack cocaine drug offenses differently than powder cocaine drug offenses.

There is no pharmacological difference between crack cocaine and powder cocaine. I've always wanted to use that word pharmacologic. I can't spell it. I'm not a professor like you. But I know what it means. There is no physical, chemical difference in how the body reacts to crack cocaine and powder cocaine. Even though that was part of the argument, that crack is more addictive, to justify a 100-to-1 disparity. The Equal Act will make it 1-to-1, and apply it retroactively and perhaps strike a final blow to the most significant relic of the war on drugs.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You mentioned that there may not have been a logical reason for the disparities in sentencing, based upon crack cocaine or powder cocaine. But it clearly was a racist reason, when we look at media portrayals of what crack was doing, and where it was coming from and who was doing it.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: You know, crack cocaine was viewed as the drug of choice for low-income Americans and, certainly in the inner city, communities of color. Powder cocaine used by more affluent Americans in suburban communities, largely white. And that's why when we made the 18-to-1 change retroactive, as well as some changes to compassionate release and good time credit, but the overwhelming majority of people incarcerated and therefore released were Black men.

When the war on drugs was initially launched in 1971, there were less than 300,000 people incarcerated in America. Today 2.3 million, disproportionately Black and Latino, incarcerate more people in America per capita than any other country in the world, including China and Russia combined. That's a stain on our society. And we've got to work to work it out, and we are doing so. And I think that's meaningful progress for the scales of justice in this country.

We passed the Equal Act in this Congress. Post insurrection, America divided, criminal justice reform is still bi-partisan. I believe the final vote in the House was 361 to 65. 70% of Republicans voted for it, including Matt Gaetz, and Jim Jordan, and Louie Gohmert and people who are part of the Freedom Caucus, the far right portion of the House Republican Conference.

I mentioned to you initially, I was like, 'Am I being hustled? What is wrong here?' Because when we were fighting to get rid of the Rockefeller drug laws in New York state, it was the Republicans who were fighting us. But over time, certainly after the great recession, I think three things happened. Fiscal conservatives said, 'Spending $80 billion plus on mass incarceration, which doesn't yield any reciprocal public safety benefits commensurate to the cost of the taxpayer, is a failed government program. It's fiscally irresponsible.'

So fiscal conservatives, people like Grover Norquist, started to come on board. Christian conservatives, who theologically believe in the power of redemption and the notion that everyone should have a second chance at life because everyone makes mistakes, started leaning in to re-entry, and prison reform and successfully transitioning individuals who may have made a mistake—making sure that they pay their debt to society, but it should be a just debt not a scarlet letter that stains them for the rest of their lives. Christian conservatives on board. And then libertarians, who believe that if you can take away someone's liberty that's perhaps the worst form of government overreach. And so libertarians like Rand Paul strongly behind criminal justice reform, Mike Lee and others. And so it's an authentic coalition.

I may arrive at the notion of criminal justice reform through a progressive lens of racial, social and economic justice. Republicans may arrive at it through a lens of fiscal conservatism, Christian conservatism or libertarianism. But we arrive at the same place. And that's why I'm confident that we can continue to do great work in this space.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: He is confident, Bethany. Are you equally confident?

Bethany Jay: Well, I would like to have his confidence, I guess. You know, the thing that does seem hopeful in this moment, in the way that the congressman described it, is the fact that multiple constituencies of lawmakers are coming to this and interest groups are coming to this from different places but arriving at the same end game. And again, it makes me think of Robert Chase's discussion of convict leasing and how convict leasing not comes to an end, but experiences a significant decline when it becomes less profitable. You know, as the infrastructure of the South has been rebuilt with convict labor, once that's done and that labor is less profitable for those prisons, that we start to see less prisoners there. And that's combined with some moral movements against the act. And so maybe that's what we're seeing here, this coming together of different interests that may all serve a good purpose.

Bethany Jay: But maybe I'm too optimistic.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I don't think you're too optimistic. You know, hope is necessary. Right? Hope leads to change. Hope is eternal. We've got to hang on to hope. But I hope the coalition that he was talking about holds. Because I'm not seeing it hold in the moment.

Bethany Jay: Mm hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm seeing it fracture. I'm seeing those political conservatives falling prey to party politics. Where now, even if you for fiscally conservative reasons—I don't care how you get there as long as you get there—but if it's fiscal conservatism that leads you to support the necessary reforms to policing and incarceration, then so be it. But now we're beginning to see and certainly we've seen this over the last couple of years, that that's not even enough, that you have to hold tight to a strict party line.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And that means you oppose anything and everything that is supported by those on the other side of the aisle.

Bethany Jay: You know, what you're saying sort of makes me think of Willie Horton. That was the Dukakis-Bush election. It only takes one example to rally a base, you know what I mean, against something that they would be inclined not to support anyway. And so really thinking it only takes one-or-two examples that can be blown out of proportion to get a whole community against prison reform.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Ah, that's true. That's true. So speaking about political parties, you know, I asked Hakim about the historical relationship between African Americans and the Democratic Party. Of course, you will remember Bethany, you did that wonderful interview, in which you trace that important shift that occurs during the New Deal era.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So this is what he had to say.

Bethany Jay: Great.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: There was a time in which African Americans were part of the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln. Then the depression hits. The president at the time, Hoover does a terrible job with this sort of laissez faire approach to solving the issues of the Depression. And then Roosevelt comes, takes a much stronger view, not completely without flaws.

But we see this transition away from the Republican Party into the Democratic Party for African Americans. And they've remained solidly within the camp of the Democratic Party for nearly a century now. You have a front row seat to seeing what's going on within the Republican Party. Why aren't there more African Americans, in this moment, in the Republican Party or supportive of the Republican Party?

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: Well, as my Republican colleagues sometimes point out, it was the Democratic Party that was the party of the Confederacy, the party of slavery and, in many ways, the party that fought to preserve Jim Crow. I think from a historic perspective, from a political party perspective, there aren't clean hands on either side.

Now the modern-day Republican Party is no longer the party of Lincoln, and it's not even a party of Ronald Reagan. It's the party of Donald Trump. And it's been overrun by people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, Lauren Bobert, Madison Cawthorn. So many people have been radicalized by the presence of the former president in our public space during the time that he was in office. It's the party of people who are on the fringes of the far right. It's not even clear that they believe in democracy. They don't believe in truth. So, this is not the party of John McCain. It's not the party of Bob Dole. It's not the party of Mitt Romney. And it’s certainly not the party of Jackie Robinson.

We grew up in the Cornerstone Baptist Church, dedicated to God by Dr. Sandy Ray, who was a Republican legislator in Ohio; and a prominent Baptist preacher, one of the greatest of all time; and a champion for civil rights. In the Republican Party of Sandy Ray, there was room for someone who cared about civil rights, and equality, and liberty and justice for all. In the modern-day Republican Party, I'm not clear that there's a lot of space for the type of diversity that certainly existed decades ago. But there's a history there that hopefully may serve to one day cause a revival for a more inclusive Republican Party.

That's why it's not clear to me why some people want to run away from history, when there's history there that allows for a wide variety of narratives to be told about where we've been as Americans and where we can ultimately wind up.

Bethany Jay: There's a lot there.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: There is a lot there. And there's a lot of history there that too often doesn't get told and explained. And when it does get told, it's reframed in sort of a ridiculous way.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It's like, 'Hey. Martin Luther King's father was a Republican. And you should be, too!' Without, you know. As an appeal to African Americans without any context for why he was or what that Republican Party looked like, the heirs of the Republican of Lincoln and what kind of Republicans they were embracing—the Rockefeller Republican in that particular moment in time.

Bethany Jay: I've never lost Facebook friends quicker than when I've pointed out that the Republican Party is not the party of Lincoln.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Mmm. Mm hmm.

Bethany Jay: That's a quick unfriend by the recipient. But, you know, one of the other things I was thinking about is, there's also this perennial question of, 'Is the Democratic Party taking Black voters for granted?' That they are always going to be Democratic voters, no matter how the party is working or not for them.

And that makes me think of that Great Depression episode that you started off this segment with. And you know, Jill Watts really talked about the Black Cabinet—that is influencing Eleanor Roosevelt really and working on some of the lower levels of administration of New Deal policies— that they're really pushing constantly for a more permanent and more sustained focus on the most vulnerable people, really making sure that government and of course, this is in the context of the Depression, but making sure that government continues to work for all Americans, no matter what your economic status is. And that's really Mary McLeod Bethune, who is really sort of active in making sure that those policies are pushed. And ultimately she's unsuccessful. A lot of those New Deal policies are not permanent. But it makes me think of conversations that we're having today, too, about how do we make this country work for everybody, no matter what your sort of economic status is? And those reforms seem to be the ones that aren't going through.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And that question of 'How do we make it work?' There is a role for elected officials in that. And they're not the only ones.

Bethany Jay: No.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: But there is certainly a role for elected officials in making this country work. The congressman had a few thoughts on that role, and why it may not be working as well as it both could and should.

Bethany Jay: Perfect.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: We're in the midst of a backlash. And whenever there's progress in America there's always been backlash. And there was progress with Emancipation and the Reconstruction Amendments—13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments—and we see a big backlash take place. The rise of Jim Crow, rise of the KKK, lynching epidemics, Black Codes, things of this nature.

And it takes another a hundred years to arrive at another moment of progress, when Dr. King, and Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, others stood up. And then people of every race, of goodwill, came together to make more progress. Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Fair Housing Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Great Society. Tremendous progress, but then that was also immediately followed by backlash. The rise of Richard Nixon, anti-government, anti-affirmative action, mass incarceration put into place in Nixon's first term in 1971. And that ushered in the caricaturing of inner-city communities, communities of color, designed to roll back the social safety net that had been put into place in a stronger way during the civil rights era, as part of the Great Society legislative initiatives.

And then a new hope arises with the election of Barack Obama. And we were told perhaps that we were entering into a post-racial era. But Tea Party, 'We want our country back.' Who took it away? Wait, the election of Barack Obama took your country away? And then the Supreme Court makes the decision in Shelby County v. Holder. They want to decimate the bipartisan 1965 Voting Rights Act, ushering in a new era of voter suppression. And of course, ultimately the election of Donald Trump, who for five years perpetrated the racist lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States of America, as part of an effort to de-legitimize America's first Black president and rode that lie into the White House.

It was a backlash that he intentionally capitalized on as part of his electoral coalition. Not the entirety of it. There were other people who were concerned about change. They wanted to blow the whole thing up in Washington, DC. 'It's not working for us. Let's see what this guy can do.' You know, other folks working through issues of economic anxiety, because of changes like globalization, and poorly negotiated trade deals, the outsourcing of good paying American jobs, decline of unionization, rise of automation. These have jammed working class communities of every race.

And Donald Trump manipulated that anxiety. But part of his electoral coalition clearly included people affiliated with neo-Nazis, the Proud Boys and others who have become increasingly vocal. All of that to say, anyone who has studied the trajectory of history knows that whenever there's been progress made in this great country, it's usually followed by a backlash.

Bethany Jay: Mmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The struggle to create change is never unidirectional. In other words, the progress isn't perpetual. There is always—sometimes framed, as my brother did here as—a backlash. But I think when we look at, Bethany, American history and specifically this post-emancipation, post-Reconstruction Jim Crow era, and we put that in the broader context of the nation as a whole, then the backlash looks more like a course correction than it does sort of an aberration to or an attempt to move America away from its core traditions. It seems like an effort by some to move America back to what it's been as opposed to what it could be.

Bethany Jay: So the question is, does the arc of history actually bend towards justice or not? And that probably depends on who is able to claim power and a voice. Does that make sense?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It does.

Bethany Jay: That if the same people are in power, then that arc of justice is going to stay like you're saying. It's going to course correct back. And I think that's why going back to where we started our conversation with voting rights with people like your brother who are in Congress, with HBCU's that continue to produce outstanding thinkers who become leaders in all different levels of our society, all of those Black institutions—which has been another thread of our conversation this season—the importance of them on every level, I think, becomes important in making sure that arc of history bends the right way.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And those institutions reflect the efforts of African Americans to exert the force necessary to bend the arc towards justice. Because without that force, without that effort, without that energy, without the institution building, without the sacrifice that we saw and as illustrated throughout the Jim Crow era, then that course correction, that status quo remains. Which also, Bethany, speaks to the current moment in which we are living and teaching as educators.

Bethany Jay: Yep.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And the response to talking about this difficult history, to talking about hard history. I asked Hakim about that.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: Representative Barbara Lee has an important bill that she has been advancing, which is in part based on the South Africa model of truth and reconciliation. And I support that legislation. And the idea is that in order for us to arrive at a place where we can reach meaningful reconciliation, we have to have an understanding of the truth of our collective journey as Americans. And that of course includes African American history, which is American history.

And hopefully, this next generation of Americans, the ones being educated right now, can help us bring America closer to that true reconciliation. I believe that Gen Z will do that—the most diverse generation in American history. But to arrive at reconciliation, there has to be truth.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What role do you see reparations, broadly defined perhaps as investment in community, playing in that reconciliation?

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: Given our imperfections that are obvious throughout our history, the least that we should do is determine how we can repair and heal America, which includes the wounds that have been inflicted on the Black community and the legacy of it.

HR 40 is the legislative vehicle that would just establish a commission to study the issue. And everyone would have an opportunity to participate. The four legislative leaders—Democrats and Republicans alike, House and Senate—can make appointments. HR 40—named after the fact that African Americans were initially promised but never given 40 acres and a mule, the means of production connected to the economy at the time in order to become economically independent; that's why HR 40 is named HR 40—was initially championed by John Conyers. I supported it when he championed it. And it’s now being championed by Sheila Jackson Lee.

We did vote it out of the Judiciary Committee, which is the furthest that it has advanced. It had never previously received, I believe, either a hearing or certainly a markup in committee. And every single Democrat supported HR 40. And I still hope that it gets a fair hearing in the United States House of Representatives.

Bethany Jay: The fact that a piece of legislation that would establish a commission to then study an issue hasn't been able to get out of committee, I think, tells us a lot about the reluctance to actually face this history on any level. And we're seeing that that has been the case on the federal level. And we're seeing that now in your town, elementary school, K-12 district, as well.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Yeah. It's unfortunate because a lot of the energy, most of the energy in fact, that has been connected to dealing with the hard issues of the past, dealing with hard history and even conversations about reparations, whatever that may take, has generally been better at the local level. And it hasn't been really something that has been taken up at the federal level.

And what's so unfortunate about the moment in which we are living is that, you know, education, of course, is controlled locally. And that energy that has existed in small places in the past really has some truth and reconciliation. That is now being challenged in the classroom, in that, 'No, we're not going to have any reconciliation. We're not even going to have any truth.'

Bethany Jay: Mm hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And that's unfortunate because that's where we are as educators. And you, and I and everyone who has appeared on this podcast, we're all just simply trying to tell some truth so that we can bend that arc, do our part to help bend that arc towards justice.

Bethany Jay: And I will say, the response I get from my students when they're hearing these things for the first time, as 19, 20, 21-year-olds in college, is real frustration that they hadn't heard it before. They're not frustrated with me for telling them something that's hard. They're frustrated that they didn't know it before.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Yeah.

Bethany Jay: They hadn't heard it before. A majority of my students are not African American students. And so I recognize that they wouldn't have confronted these issues, that if I taught Black students that they would be more knowledgeable, at least about what it is to live with racism in this country.

But kids are ready to hear this. They want to know. You know, Steven Oliver back in the first season told us, ‘Look, our students aren't coming to us as blank slates. They're living in this world. Whether they are Black or white, they have knowledge that racism exists. What they don't have is any way to understand its context and to know where it comes from. That's what we have to give them in our classrooms.’

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, one of the things that too many of our students aren't given, too many of our students don't know, is the tradition of Black congressional representation coming out of that Reconstruction era. So this is one of the hallmarks of the Jim Crow era, the beginning of it. One of the legacies being that lack of Black representation coming out of Reconstruction.

Bethany Jay: Mm hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And so I asked my brother, as a sitting U.S. congressman, to reflect on that.

One of the most historic things about the Reconstruction era, in addition to the passage of the Reconstruction Acts and then Amendments, was the election of African Americans, African American men specifically at the time, to the halls of power. And there is that Reconstruction moment where you have Black elected officials, or surge in Black elected officials. And then they are systematically removed from office, as we move into the 1870s and 1880s. And then you get the disenfranchisement constitutions, and it's impossible for Black folk to vote. Black folk can't vote, they can't elect African Americans to public office.

Then we see the Voting Rights Act, the groundswell of organizing to put the ballot back in Black hands. And we have the Black power movement, which is very much focused on electing African Americans to public office. And so, 50 years later, here you are sitting in Congress. How do you see your role as a African American who is a Congressman? Because we don't play the colorblind stuff, right? Come on, man. We weren't raised like that. So, how does that impact how you walk through the world? But then also, how you legislate in this world?

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: First of all, you never thought that hip hop would take it this far.

It's an honor to have the opportunity to serve in the United States Congress. To be elected as chair of the House Democratic Caucus. Represent the people of the eighth congressional district, majority-minority district, very diverse. I have the privilege of representing more Russian-speaking, Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union than any other member of Congress in the country. I mean, Hakeem Jeffries. Who knew? Only in America.

It's wonderful to have this opportunity and to be part of the Congressional Black Caucus. That's a meeting that I never miss. And it's every Wednesday. It's at 12 o'clock. And we get together as CBC folks to talk about justice, and strengthening our community and strengthening America. You know, being a part of the Congressional Black Caucus was awe inspiring when I arrived. To come to Congress and see Maxine Waters, and Barbara Lee, and Charlie Rangle, and John Conyers, the great John Lewis—living legends who had done so much to advance the cause of racial, social and economic justice in the CBC. Jim Cliburn and so many others, Emanuel Cleaver. I mean, you can go through the list, Eddie Bernice Johnson.

And to be able to serve with these giants within the Congressional Black Caucus, some of whom were founders, and to also represent a district that was once represented when we were growing up in Brooklyn by Shirley Chisolm, is a legacy that I'm proud to be part of. Standing on the shoulders of giants, like Shirley Chisholm. Understanding that the Baton has been passed to the current members of the Congressional Black Caucus to continue to make sure that this concept of equal protection under the law applies to every community, including the Black community. That liberty and justice for all applies to every community, including the Black community, and brown communities and immigrant communities.

That's the promise of America. And we have to continue to work to make sure that America keeps that promise, builds upon the legacy of people like John Lewis and others who believe that continuing change is possible. Dr. King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” And I always reflect upon that. And I think about what Dr. King meant is that in this world there are good folks and there are rough folks. But what we need for justice to prevail, to perfect our society, to make sure that we truly can arrive at colorblind society, is that good folks need to continue to be in the arena.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Well, I look forward to continuing to watch you, as you do the work that you were sent here to do. And certainly that our parents, and our grandparents, and our uncles and our aunts, wanted us to do as well.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: And let me just shout out Asha, Aliana and Alayla. My three, beautiful, intelligent nieces.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Well they'll be happy for that. And I'm sure they'll text you their thanks, sir.

Congressman Hakeem Jefferies, thank you very much for making the time to join us on the podcast. If you didn't, I was going to tell Mom. So I'm glad I didn't have to go nuclear to get you on. Thanks a lot.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: Great to be here.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Love you, man.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: Love you, Bro.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Appreciate it.

Bethany Jay. I love you, too, Bethany Jay.

Bethany Jay: I love you, Hassan.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This was an amazing season. We covered so much, such important history. And I enjoyed the interviews that I was able to conduct. And I really enjoyed sitting back and listening to you do the interviews that you did.

Bethany Jay: Likewise.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This is great. That's it for us this year.

Bethany Jay: It is.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Another season in the books, Jim Crow. I certainly want to thank, on behalf of my co-host, I think it's safe to say, to thank all of the guests who appear,

Bethany Jay: Oh, my goodness.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: To thank everyone behind the scenes, whose voices you never hear— Shea and Miranda and so many others—for making this happen.

Bethany Jay: Yes. I began this season being terrified of what it was going to be, and I ended up having just an absolute great time and learning so much too. So I was really, really excited to be part of it. Thanks so much.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Absolutely. And to everyone who listens, be sure to share it with your friends and colleagues. And stay in touch. You can find us out there.

Bethany Jay: Yes.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And we look forward to hearing from you. Take care of everybody.

Bethany Jay: Bye bye.

Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Learning for Justice—the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center—helping teachers and schools prepare students to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Learning for Justice provides free teaching materials about slavery, Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and more. You can find award-winning films and classroom-ready texts at LearningForJustice.org.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Most students leave high school without an understanding of the Jim Crow Era and its continuing relevance. This podcast is part of an effort to change that. In our fourth season, we put Jim Crow under the spotlight, examining its history and lasting impact.

Bethany Jay: Thanks to Congressman Hakeem Jeffries for sharing his insights with us. This podcast was produced by Mary Quintas and senior producer Shea Shackelford. Russell Gragg is our associate producer. “Music Reconstructed” is produced by Barrett Golding. And Cory Collins provides content guidance. Amelia Gragg is our intern. Kate Shuster is the series creator. And our managing producer is Miranda LaFond.

Bethany Jay: I’m Dr. Bethany Jay, Professor of History at Salem State University.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries : I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries and Bethany Jay:  And we’re your hosts for Teaching Hard History.

References

• NAACP, Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill
• Congress.gov, H.R.55 - 117th Congress (2021-2022): Emmett Till Antilynching Act
• Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, Proudly Representing the 8th District of New York
• The New York Times, David N. Dinkins, New York’s First Black Mayor, Dies at 93
• Warner Bros., Action Jackson (film trailer)
• The National Constitution Center, 15th Amendment - Right to Vote Not Denied by Race
• The Atlantic, How Shelby County v. Holder Broke America
• Vox, Why is Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act such a big part of the fight over voting rights?
• University of Michigan: Institute for Social Research, The 2008 Election
• Teaching Hard History podcast, Correcting History: Confederate Monuments, Rituals and the Lost Cause
• Congress.gov, H.R.4 - 117th Congress (2021-2022): John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2021 
• Congress.gov, S.2747 - 117th Congress (2021-2022): Freedom to Vote Act
• Brennan Center for Justice, The Filibuster, Explained
• Ballotpedia, Supermajority
• The New York Times, John Lewis, Towering Figure of Civil Rights Era, Dies at 80
• Magnolia Pictures, John Lewis: Good Trouble (film)
• American Civil Liberties Union, Police Excessive Force
• The New York Times, Beyond the Chokehold: The Path to Eric Garner’s Death
• Teaching Hard History podcast, Lynching: White Supremacy, Terrorism and Black Resilience 
• MoMA, Charles White. Hope for the Future. 1945
• Congress.gov, H.R.1280 - 117th Congress (2021-2022): George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021
• Congress.gov, H.R.5682 - 115th Congress (2017-2018): FIRST STEP Act
• U.S. House, Judiciary Committee
• Equal Justice Initiative, Bryan Stevenson
• The Heritage Foundation, About Heritage
• Congress.gov, S.1789 - 111th Congress (2009-2010): Fair Sentencing Act of 2010
• Teaching Hard History podcast, Season 3: The Civil Rights Movement
• Teaching Hard History podcast, Criminalizing Blackness: Prisons, Police and Jim Crow
• Congress.gov, H.R.5 - 117th Congress (2021-2022): Equality Act
• Teaching Hard History podcast, The New Deal, Jim Crow and the Black Cabinet
• BlackPast, Black and Tan Republicans
• National Constitution Center, The Reconstruction Amendments
• Teaching Hard History podcast, Building Black Institutions: Autonomy, Labor and HBCUs
• Congress.gov, H.R.40 - 116th Congress (2019-2020): Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act
• Teaching Hard History podcast, Dealing With Things As They Are: Creating a Classroom Environment
• U.S. House, Congressional Black Caucus
• National Women's History Museum, Shirley Chisholm

 

Return to Episode Listing

Resources

• Learning For Justice: Student Text, The Negro's Place in World Reorganization (grades 9-12)
• Learning For Justice: Lesson, Before Rosa Parks: Ida B. Wells (grades 6-8, 9-12)
• Learning For Justice: Article, I Didn't Know There Were Cities in Africa: Challenging Children's-and Adult's-Misperceptions about the African Continent
• Learning For Justice: Article, Teaching About King’s Radical Approach to Social Justice

Transcript

Bethany Jay: As teachers, we divide the narrative of history into discrete topics: a unit plan on the Revolutionary War, another on the Progressive Movement, another on the Depression. This strategy reflects the curriculum standards that we are asked to work with, and our need to craft a narrative that's coherent for our students. But it also puts historical events into different silos, very separate from one another. Then, every so often, a resource comes around that explodes those silos and challenges us to rethink that neat sequence of unit plans.

Bethany Jay: For me, that resource was Mary Dudziak's Cold War Civil Rights. I realize that I'm dating myself here—Dudziak's book is now over 20 years old, but it is still relevant. In Cold War Civil Rights, Dudziak explores the history of the Civil Rights Movement within the international context of the Cold War. She argues that the limits of American democracy at home, with regard to what was commonly known at the time as "The Negro Problem" (but which we know as the violence and structural racism of Jim Crow), constituted an international public relations crisis. A crisis that Cold War adversaries like the Soviet Union seized at every opportunity. Even during World War II, writer Pearl S. Buck noted that America's racial problems were fodder for enemy propaganda. Buck wrote:

Every lynching, every race riot gives joy to Japan. The discriminations of the American army and navy and the air forces against colored soldiers and sailors, the exclusion of colored labor in our defense industries and trade unions, all our social discriminations are of the greatest aid today to our enemy in Asia, Japan. "Look at America," Japan is saying to millions of listening ears. "Will white Americans give you equality?"

Bethany Jay: The discrimination, segregation and violence directed at Black Americans that Buck identified as an ideological problem during World War II only became further amplified by a Cold War context. To respond to international criticisms of the United States—or perhaps to drown them out—various entities in the US government organized counter-narratives. One of the most prominent of these was a State Department publication that emerged in the early 1950s called The Negro in American Life.

Bethany Jay: It may be surprising to those of us living through today's controversies surrounding teaching slavery to learn that this 1950's publication went to great lengths explaining that slavery was the "cardinal cause" of American racism. But as Dudziak points out, their focus on slavery served as a useful origin story. She says, "The reader was asked not to view American race relations in isolation. Rather,"—and here she's quoting the State Department—"'it is against this background that the progress which the Negro has made—and the steps still needed for the full solution of his problems—must be measured.'" In other words, by beginning with the sin of slavery, The Negro in American Life argued that America under Jim Crow represented real racial progress. To accompany narratives like The Negro in American Life, the State Department also recruited prominent Black Americans like Louis Armstrong to serve as cherry-picked examples of Black achievement, as evidence of the nation's great strides towards racial equality.

Bethany Jay: Of course, to maintain this celebratory and progressive narrative of American race relations, the United States government needed to carefully control which messages were available overseas. And so the State Department and FBI became very concerned with the actions of African Americans abroad. In the 1950s, everyone from Josephine Baker to Paul Robeson to W.E.B. Du Bois found themselves the targets of some combination of government surveillance, travel restrictions, blacklisting and smear campaigns. Why? Well, labor and civil rights activist William Patterson ran afoul of the State Department when he placed the plight of African Americans in the context of international anti-colonization movements. In doing so, he had complicated the nation's campaign to sell racial progress as a hallmark of the possibilities of American democracy. And the State Department's justification for revoking Paul Robeson's passport may say it all: Robeson's "Frequent criticism of the treatment of Blacks in the United States should not be aired in foreign countries. It was a family affair."

Bethany Jay: Like Robeson and Patterson, those who found themselves the targets of government surveillance, restrictions and persecution during the Cold War were parts of movements that sought the liberation of Black people no matter where they resided—movements that began well before the Cold War. In the earliest decades of the 20th century, African-American leaders responded both to colonization abroad and the violence and segregation at home by uniting under groups like Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association, the NAACP or myriad other organizations to effect change. Despite its importance, this history of Black political thought rarely gets much mention in the history curriculum. And when it does, it is often as a sidebar to seemingly more pressing 20th century issues. When, in fact, their work had an impact on much of our modern history, on many of those silos that often define our classrooms: from the interwar years, to World War II, decolonization, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and today.

Bethany Jay: I'm Bethany Jay, and this is Teaching Hard History. We're a production of Learning for Justice—the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This season, we're offering a detailed look at how to teach the history of Jim Crow, starting with Reconstruction. In each episode, we explore a different topic, walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material and offering practical classroom exercises.

Bethany Jay: Black political ideologies evolved against a backdrop of derogatory stereotypes and racial terrorism. In this episode, my co-host Hasan Kwame Jeffries spoke with historian Minkah Makalani about Black political thought during Jim Crow. They will help us to tell the complex and compelling history of this era in our classrooms by exploring how Black political leaders in the era of Jim Crow understood America's racial problems within an international context. Their work and their ideas influenced much of the 20th century as they actively worked to effect change both at home and abroad.

Bethany Jay: I'm so glad you can join us. Let's get started.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I have been looking forward to this episode and this conversation with this person since before the season began. I want to welcome to the podcast, Dr. Minkah Makalani. Minkah, what's up, brother?

Minkah Makalani: Man, it's all good. Thank you, Hasan, for having me on. Good to talk to you again.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Absolutely. Look, the reason why I've been looking forward to this episode, and to this topic, and to you specifically sharing some knowledge and insights with us is because too often when we look at the Jim Crow era, we don't look at the intellectual side.

Minkah Makalani: Right.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: We don't look at the side of Black folk thinking and acting on these thoughts and making sense of the circumstances that they find themselves in. And I can think of no better person to help us make sense of the political thinking of African Americans during this era than you.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, one of the things, Minkah, that I love to introduce my students to as just sort of a springboard into this topic is the UNIA—Universal Negro Improvement Association—which was Marcus Garvey's organization. Could you just share with us sort of a rough outline of who Garvey was, and what the UNIA was?

Minkah Makalani: Right, so Garvey is a really intriguing character. Very charismatic, dynamic and a complex thinker. So he's born in Jamaica, and his father is a printer. And so he is introduced very early on to the word and to publishing as a central political activity. He's also learning from his father stories about Jamaica's radical history: the uprisings that occurred both among the enslaved, as well as those efforts to redress oppression after the period of enslavement ends.

Minkah Makalani: And early in his life, he decided to begin traveling. And one of the places that he goes is to the Panama Canal Zone. This had been a project to construct the Panama Canal, and it brought a number of Black Caribbeans to the canal zone. One of the things that he noticed there was that you had this differential pay system—what was known as Panama Silver. And this was a differential pay that was given to Black Caribbean migrant workers that was distinct from the pay that was going to white workers from the US.

Minkah Makalani: He goes to London. He works for Dusé Mohamed Ali and his international African Times and Orient Review. And he's being exposed to Pan-Africanist thought for the first time in a sustained way. He's also hearing stories coming from around the African world that are being published in the African Times and Orient Review.

Minkah Makalani: And then he returns to Jamaica, and he establishes in 1914 the Universal Negro Improvement Association. And the UNIA doesn't get much traction early on when he's in Jamaica. And in about 1916, he decides to embark on a tour, initially to visit Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute with the hopes of establishing a Tuskegee in Jamaica. He has the unfortunate timing of arriving in the United States after Washington had died. So he decides to have a tour anyway, a speaking tour, to try and raise money for the UNIA that he would return to and continue to build in Jamaica.

Minkah Makalani: And during his time in the US, he witnesses reports and accounts of the 1917 East St. Louis race riot. And this is one of the more brutal race riots that precedes the Red Summer of 1919. And with everything he has seen and heard about in Jamaica, in the Panama Canal Zone, the stories that he had read about and the conversations he had had in London, his anger and frustration kind of came to a head, and he decides to establish the UNIA in New York and work in the US.

Minkah Makalani: He frames a lot of the issues in these global terms, and connects what's going on in the US to everything that's going on around the world. He's insisting on the ability of Black people around the world to live freely without the yoke of white supremacy bearing down on them. And he's insisting on Africa for the Africans. And this means the ability of Africans on the African continent to direct their own lives, to direct their own societies, to be free of European domination.

Minkah Makalani: The other thing that he does is as a dark-skinned, Black Jamaican, he is critical of a Black elite, particularly in the US North, that is fair in complexion and that maintains a certain social distance from working class and poor Black folks. You know, they're being shunned, they're being talked about disparagingly. You had preachers on Sunday who would give a sermon chastising people for dressing a certain way, or for eating certain foods, and being loud in public—things that are "bringing the race down." And so Garvey actually is also tapping into a sense of racial pride that doesn't privilege those who are fair skinned, those who are richer.

Minkah Makalani: And so it taps into a whole range of things for a lot of people. And it really is inspiring to think about how it must have been in the context of being a generation removed from enslavement—the 19-teens, 1920s. This is the first full generation where people are largely born outside of the context of enslavement, right? And the kind of psychic trauma that that brings on, the constant barragement of racial stereotypes, demeaning depictions of Black people, demeaning discourses about Black people being lazy, being a danger, et cetera, to have someone in that context talk about Black pride, and talk about the African continent as a place of pride and a place that Black people should revere and focus on and try and liberate as they liberate themselves, ended up appealing to such a wide range of people that the UNIA remains the single largest organization ever in the Black world. I think the records indicate that it had upwards of 1.5 million members, people who were paying dues, who were consistently a part of chapters across the US, in the Caribbean, as well as on the African continent. But in terms of support, people who purchased and read its newspaper, The Negro World, people who sent money in to the UNIA, people who purchased shares in the Black Star Line, this was the UNAI's attempt to establish an international shipping line that would serve the interests of Black people around the world, that number rises to about eight million people. It's hard to overstate how important and profoundly influential the UNIA was to Black life around the world.

Minkah Makalani: And two examples I'll give in terms of the African continent, Jomo Kenyatta recounts how in his village in Kenya when he was young, The Negro World would arrive, and it would be read over and over and over. And young people would then go to different parts of town and relay the stories that were in The Negro World. And the other person that gives a similar account of how influential Garveyism was is Kwame Nkrumah, who was so influenced by Garvey and the UNIA that when he leads the Gold Coast to independence in 1957 and establishes the nation of Ghana, he takes the Black Star Line as inspiration. And so the Ghana national team is called the Black Stars after the Universal Negro Improvement Association's Black Star Line. So you get a sense of how important that is as a movement to so many people.

Minkah Makalani: A lot of people in the 20th century can trace their early intellectual beginnings to Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. I like to tell my students about Audley Moore, or Queen Mother Moore, who is receiving considerable attention as of late with the resurgence of the push for reparations. A former colleague Ashley Farmer is writing a biography of Audley Moore and her work for reparations. But if you don't mind, I just want to read this interview that Mark Naison, a historian, did with her about her first encounter with Marcus Garvey in New Iberia, Louisiana, at a Longshoremen's Union.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Absolutely.

Minkah Makalani: So this is about 1920, 1921. Garvey was coming to give a talk at a Longshoremen's Hall, and the police wouldn't let him give his speech. And so she's explaining this. Quote, "Well, Garvey himself came, but the police wouldn't allow him to speak to us. And everybody vowed to go back the next night with the guarantee that we were going to hear Garvey. So we went. All of us went well-armed. Everybody had guns and big bags of ammunition. The police filed into the hall and stood up along the sides of the benches, man-to-man, on both sides of the aisle. So when Garvey came in, everybody stood up and applauded, and Garvey said, 'My friends, I wish to apologize to you for not speaking to you last night. But the mayor of New Orleans permitted himself to be used by the police, the chief, to prevent my speaking to you.' When he said that, the police chief jumped up on the platform and said, 'I'll run you in!' And when he did that, all of us stood on the benches, and everybody's guns came out. And with hand in the air, guns pointed, blue steel, Smith & Wessons, .44s, .38s, all kinds of guns, we said, 'Speak, Garvey. Speak!' And Garvey said, 'And as I was saying …' Garvey went on and repeated himself, and so the police filed out of the Longshoremen's Hall in New Orleans."

Minkah Makalani: I like to give that because it does a number of things. One, it does away with this myth that Black people in the South kind of just took oppression and were pushed around and bullied and never fought back. This is a clear indication that people were willing to bear arms if need be. But the other thing about this is that this is really her political awakening. She talks about beginning to read the newspaper, The Negro World and other newspapers after that, and then being compelled to move to New York in 1922 to really become involved in the UNIA. And then after its decline, moving into other political arenas. And this is where I think Garvey is really good also as a window onto a range of other organizations and political formations.

Minkah Makalani: Audley Moore is someone—or Queen Mother Moore, excuse me—is someone whose political career, intellectual activity extended over the course of the 20th century. She had the ear of Malcolm X. She informed a number of political movements throughout the 20th century, but her intellectual odyssey begins hearing about Marcus Garvey.

Minkah Makalani: And so I think, depending on how you want to approach Garvey, it can open up, and you can drill down into something very specific in the early 1920s, or you can expand it around the world, or you can expand it across the 20th century. But definitely you see those resonances throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and feeding on into those people who become very important figures in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What are some of the source materials that you use in the classroom to teach and talk about Garvey and the UNIA that you think might be useful to teachers K-12?

Minkah Makalani: The one document that I always use when teaching about the UNIA and Garvey is its "Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World." And this is a document drafted in 1920. And it kind of sets out some of the political concerns that the UNIA has. When you just look at the breadth of it, its preamble lodges 12 complaints, and then it goes on to make 54 demands. And this is a document that is so grand in scope that it goes from calling for Africa for the Africans to demanding the free and unfettered commercial intercourse with all the Negro people of the world, to something like, "We proclaim the 31st day of August of each year to be an international holiday to observed by all Negroes."

Minkah Makalani: So the document is long, and it can take a lot to kind of get into and walk students through, particularly in a K-12 context. But what it does, I think, which is so good, and it works equally as well in a university classroom, is it requires you to give the students some context. You have to explain a whole range of things that are going on in the world. You've had the Great War or World War I that has ended. You've had this concern about what to do with these African territories that were previously held by Germany. And pan-African congresses are seeking to make a claim at the founding of the League of Nations for the independence of Africa and the African colonies.

Minkah Makalani: President Woodrow Wilson has called for self-determination for European nations, but definitely does not consider that as an option for Africa. It's a very racialized notion of self-determination that he's articulating. And Garvey is saying, "Number 13: We believe in the freedom of Africa for the Negro people of the world. And by the principle of Europe for the Europeans and Asians for the Asiatics, we also demand Africa for the Africans at home and abroad."

Minkah Makalani: You see there that he's talking about Africa for the Africans in the context of Europe and these movements in Asia to assert independence and sovereignty. And so making those same kinds of claims for Black people. So you get students to think about what are the complaints and what are the demands that they are making, and why are they calling for this in this way?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You mentioned The Negro World and Marcus Garvey as its publisher. Would you recommend using The Negro World in the classroom?

Minkah Makalani: Mm-hmm. Definitely. There are a range of things you can do with looking at The Negro World to get students to see what are some of the topics that were covered. How did it mix a news story with an editorial that seeks to politically educate its readership, that seeks to situate a lynching or the Red Summer of 1919? Or an international congress—the Pan-African Congress or the UNIA's international congresses? How does it talk about them? It gets students to thinking about how everyday people are reading this newspaper, who are, say, going to a barbershop or maybe to a salon. People are talking about it in church groups, in their clubs. It shows the kinds of ideas they are debating, both with leaders but also amongst themselves. And then also what does it mean that so many people are reading this around the globe, and that in some instances it's outlawed?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: One of the great ironies that I find in Garvey and his understanding of Africa is that, to a certain extent, it draws upon some of the prevailing stereotypes of what the continent was.

Minkah Makalani: Mm-hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Is that a fair thing to say?

Minkah Makalani: I think it is fair to say that a lot of the views that Garvey expressed about Africans track with dominant, racist views about Africa and Africans. At the same time that Garvey is saying we need to look at Africa as our home, he would say that people need to be civilized, they need to be Christianized, and we need to redeem Africa. It is in many ways deplorable, but it's not uncommon for its period. Actually, Audley Moore recounts how her and her husband, after Garvey comes to Louisiana, they decide they're going to go to Africa. And an aunt tells her, "No, no, no, you can't go to Africa. If you go there, they're gonna eat you. They eat people there."

Minkah Makalani: Garvey sees himself as a very modern Black person, right? He's well-educated, he's well-traveled. Now it's the same thing that undergirds the thinking of Black leaders in the NAACP, the Urban League, and how they thought about their role to educate working-class Black people, and that is this idea of racial uplift. That those who are the most educated, who are the most culturally advanced, that it's their responsibility to uplift those Black people in the US who are poor, who are uneducated, and tell them what they need to improve themselves, but also to go back to Africa and civilize the continent.

Minkah Makalani: To talk about this history, to talk about this aspect of Garvey and this aspect Black thought at this time, is not to diminish it or bring it down, but to make it human. So Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, a whole host of characters, they end up not being heroes, but being amazing human beings who had flaws.

Bethany Jay: This is Teaching Hard History, and I'm Bethany Jay. We prepare detailed show notes for each episode of this podcast so that you can use what you learn here in the classroom. You'll find relevant resources as well as a full transcript, complete with links to materials mentioned by our guests. You can find them at LearningForJustice.org/podcasts. Let's return now to Hasan's conversation with Minkah Makalani.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Who were some of Garvey's contemporaries that we should know about, and would be helpful for students to be introduced to, to make sense of the thinking circulating at this time?

Minkah Makalani: So the figures abound in terms of his contemporaries. And some people who he was really close to, like the poet Claude McKay—also from Jamaica. He saw great value in some of his work, and then he denigrated other of his work. Langston Hughes, someone again who he saw great value in, but he denigrated his work. And Garvey was also critical of Paul Robeson, in particular his film Sanders of the River.

Minkah Makalani: You know, the most well-known contemporary of Garvey is W.E.B. Du Bois. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, excels in school; attends Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee; gets accepted to Harvard, but is forced to repeat a couple years of undergraduate work because it's deemed that Fisk isn't up to the standard for a Harvard education. And so he ends up studying economics and sociology in Germany, and ultimately ends up writing some of the works that become foundational to the field of sociology. And comes back to complete his PhD in history at Harvard on the suppression of the African slave trade. This becomes one of the most important early histories of the subject. It becomes the first in a series of books from Harvard University that issue from the dissertations that their students produce.

Minkah Makalani: After Du Bois writes his dissertation and graduates from Harvard, he immediately becomes involved in a number of political and intellectual formations in the late 19th century and early 20th century. And then in 1903, he publishes his first major work, which is The Souls of Black Folk, and it really does establish him as a major intellectual figure in the United States and around the world. He then goes on to help establish the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, as well as become the founder and editor of its magazine The Crisis. And Du Bois is a contemporary and an adversary of Booker T. Washington, and Washington's focus on industrial education, and Du Bois's emphasis on kind of a liberal arts education. Then he becomes an adversary of Marcus Garvey.

Minkah Makalani: One of the resources that I tend to turn to with my students is a book that was edited by Henry Louis Gates and Jennifer Burton called Call and Response: Key Debates in African-American Studies. It covers key debates around a range of topics that begin during the period of enslavement on up to the present era. And it has such topics as the politics of art, government, civic rights and civic duties, nature, culture and slavery, separatism versus integration. So it covers a range of topics that are useful because it's giving documents where the people from these periods are speaking themselves, both lay figures, as well as intellectuals and names you would recognize.

Minkah Makalani: And just to give you a sense of how good this material is and how useful it can be, in about 1920, 1921, you have Du Bois speaking explicitly about Garvey, as well as Garvey speaking explicitly about Du Bois. And so in one instance in Du Bois's Crisis magazine in January of 1921, he's writing about Marcus Garvey's economic program and his design for an international shipping line, the Black Star Line. And he's really critical of it. He sums up by giving his characterization of Garvey that I'll just read for you. "To sum up, Garvey is a sincere, hardworking idealist. He is also a stubborn, domineering leader of the mass. He has worthy industrial and commercial schemes, but he is an inexperienced businessman. His dreams of Negro industry, commerce and the ultimate freedom of Africa are feasible, but his methods are bombastic, wasteful, illogical and ineffective and almost illegal. If he learns by experience, attracts strong and capable friends and helpers instead of making needless enemies, if he gives up secrecy and suspicion, and substitutes open and frank reports as to his income and expenses, and above all, if he is willing to be a coworker and not a czar, he may yet succeed in his schemes toward accomplishment. But unless he does these things and does them quickly, he cannot escape failure."

Minkah Makalani: And so in that, you get this critique of Marcus Garvey that also gives you a sense of who Du Bois is. This is someone who's committed to the development of a leadership class of highly-educated, primarily Black men, although he does allow for Black women to be in that leadership class as well, but primarily Black men who will lead the fate of the race. And so he's kind of marking out Garvey's failures in a number of ways along those lines.

Minkah Makalani: Now writing almost in response to W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey offers his assessment of Du Bois and the NAACP. I'll just read this paragraph, and you can get a flavor for what Garvey is saying. "Du Bois appeals to the talented tenth while Garvey appeals to the hoi polloi. The NAACP appeals to the Beau Brummell, Lord Chesterfield, kid gloved, silk stockinged, creased trousers, patent leather shoe, Bird of Paradise hat and Hudson Steel coat with beaver or skunk collar element. While the UNIA appeals to the sober, sane, serious, earnest, hardworking man who earns his living by the sweat of his brow. The NAACP appeals to the cavalier element in the Negro race, while the UNIA appeals to the self-reliant yeomanry. Hence, in no sense are Du Bois and Mr. James Weldon Johnson rivals of Marcus Garvey. Du Bois and Johnson as writers and speakers, and Garvey as prophet, propagandist and organizer and inspirer of the masses are doing good work and all should be free and unimpeded in perfecting their plans."

Minkah Makalani: And so Marcus Garvey offers his assessment of what he sees as a Black elite leadership that doesn't reflect the interests of Black people on a much larger scale. Du Bois is nonetheless like Garvey: pushing for a pan-African or a global approach to solving the issues of racial oppression and colonialism around the world. So he not only participates in the 1900 Pan-African Conference, where he delivers the famous line, "The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line. And the color line belts the world." He leads the 1919 Pan-African Congress that's held in France, and then a number of subsequent Pan-African Congresses.

Minkah Makalani: W.E.B. Du Bois's Crisis magazine was widely influential. This is one of those periodicals that people would wait for in the mail, and they would read the stories, read his editorials. And it really helped shape how people thought about political struggles in the United States in this global context. And that helps shape a liberal to radical political orientation in the 19-teens and 1920s. In distinction from the NAACP, which is a very top-down organization—everything had to be controlled by the national headquarters—the Garvey movement and the UNIA was very decentralized in some ways. And so people who were in the UNIA chapters around the world and around the country had much greater latitude to organize and do a whole range of things that, by the time Garvey is arrested, he has no interest in them doing.

Minkah Makalani: And so in one case in particular, in Milwaukee, the leadership and most of the membership of the UNIA is composed of socialists and labor organizers who reject some of Garvey's business proposals in lieu of advocating for a Black working class struggle. Ultimately, Du Bois ends up falling out of favor by the 1940s with the NAACP as he becomes increasingly radical. And then you have a whole range of other people who are contemporaries of Garvey like Ida B. Wells, who did a great deal of work around anti-lynching, investigating lynchings. And this is beginning both in Memphis, Tennessee, when she exposed a lynching of three Black men, and was essentially ran out of Memphis, her printing press destroyed, but becomes a real important figure in terms of one of the earliest Black women intellectuals. Or people like Grace Campbell, who was a parole officer, a social worker but also a socialist and a communist. And you have her, along with a woman named Elizabeth Hendrickson, who helped establish the Harlem Tenants League, which organizes Harlem tenants around sanitary living conditions, affordable rents, really addressing the needs of Black people as they live in a day-to-day basis in their community, along with organizing people as workers in a radical movement.

Minkah Makalani: She's from St. Croix, Virgin Islands, and immigrated to New York at the turn of the century. Now she co-founds two organizations. One is the Virgin Islands Protective League. The other is the American West Indian Ladies Aid Society. Now these are mutual aid societies, but they took very radical political positions on a whole range of things. You know, they also live within probably five square blocks of one another in Harlem, and you can actually see how close their headquarters are. And so these are people who are interacting with each other and seeing one another on a daily basis. And then this kind of spills out into a whole range of organizing activities throughout the United States.

Minkah Makalani: You have organizations like the National Association of Colored Women. Or you have the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. And you have a whole range of Black women's clubs that take on a whole host of initiatives and projects. And some of those are concerned with improving the conditions that Black women and Black families are in, kind of social service oriented. Alongside that, you had organizations like the Ladies Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. And the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was a labor organization, and they had a ladies auxiliary. You also had a number of organizations like the African Brotherhood or the UNIA, where Black women played very important roles.

Minkah Makalani: These spaces that Black women are developing allowed them to engage in the intellectual activity of thinking and talking about and making sense of the world that they exist in, but not to see it simply as how race impacts Black people as if it's just one group. They're actually talking about how these issues that affect the race impact them specifically as Black women. You get this concern with what is known now as "intersectionality." And this is, I think, something that comes out of both formal political spaces like the National Association of Colored Women, and Black clubs, the labor organizations that people were a part of, but also beauty salons and social settings where they are talking to each other about problems with an employer. In some instances, they have to go out and work as domestics in the homes of white people, and they have to confront the range of issues that are presented there: low pay, sexual violence. Then they come home and they are confronting some of the same kinds of problems. And I think it's that constellation of spaces that allow for Black women to raise these questions and debate them.

Minkah Makalani: We have a lot of work that looks at the social world of Black men, but I think increasingly we have work that looks at the social world of Black women during the 1920s and '30s, and how those institutions and those social frameworks provide a much different picture of what Black politics looks like, and what the United States looks like, and what are some of these pressing issues. You could look at the work of, say, Brittney Cooper. You could look at Davarian Baldwin. You could look at LaShawn Harris. I try and draw on their work in my teaching.

Minkah Makalani: Other contemporaries of Garvey are the Negro Historical Association that is based in Harlem. It has members like Arturo Schomburg, George Wells Parker, John Bruce, Cyril Briggs from the African Brotherhood and others. And they are concerned with a range of things. So Arturo Schomburg, he's a bibliophile, and he's collecting works that get into the history of Black people around the world, which becomes the basis for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and History in Harlem today. George Wells Parker is articulating an early Egyptology. His pamphlet is called "Children of the Sun." And he's trying to look at and rehabilitate an image of Africa that looks to Egypt and some of Africa's more dynamic, well-known histories and civilizations that are seen as non-Black, that are seen as actually white or Middle Eastern, and arguing that these are African civilizations, and that this is a testament to the greatness of Black people. And so these are things that you see informing a range of political formations throughout the 1960s and '70s, but also intellectual approaches. So if you're thinking about Afro-centrism today, that is a kind of articulation of those early concerns with Egypt and ancient African civilizations that you have in the 1920s.

Minkah Makalani: Other contemporaries of Garvey are the African Blood Brotherhood, which is a radical organization that had ties to the Garvey movement, but ended up becoming some of the first Black members of the Communist Party. Cyril Valentine Briggs, Richard Moore, who had the Frederick Douglass Bookstore in Harlem for a good number of years, and one of the earliest to advocate for doing away with the use of the word "Negro" to describe Black people. Wilfred Adolphus Domingo, who actually had been in some of the same political formations with Marcus Garvey in their native Jamaica, some of their ideas end up really shaping what the Communist Party in the United States does. And some of their members, and some of those early Black people who come into the Communist Party through the United States, end up having this profound impact on what communism looks like internationally, and how it grapples with questions of racial oppression, national oppression and colonialism.

Minkah Makalani: One of the things I think is important to remember about the early 20th century, particularly the '20s and '30s, is that when you are talking about socialism or when you're talking about communism, it hasn't become this bogeyman that it is by the 1960s and '70s that can undermine someone's credibility or undermine a political movement. With the Depression, people are confronting the real drastic economic impact that capitalism is having in their lives. You're talking about people who are thankful to have oatmeal for a week, or to get bread. They're living in shantytowns, essentially. And you can find photographs of what were known as Hoovervilles, where people were constructing makeshift homes and towns really in the St. Louis area, on the banks of the Mississippi.

Minkah Makalani: So when people encountered the Communist Party or the Socialist Party, they were encountering a viable political party that spoke very specifically to their circumstances, to their economic life, to their social conditions. And at the time when people are being evicted from their homes, it provided them not only an organization that they could turn to if they are evicted who would come and confront the police or confront sheriffs, and then in many instances move families back into apartments or houses that they had been evicted from. And in terms of the Communist Party, in the '20s and '30s, you're talking about the only major political party that is explicitly articulating an anti-racist platform. You know, in all these parties: the Communist Party, Socialist Party, Democratic and Republican Parties, you had Black members encountering white racism, the racism of its members being dismissed, being ignored, being treated poorly, talked to poorly, even violence against its members, right?

Minkah Makalani: The Communist Party held trials where its members were tried for racism and expelled for racism. If someone called you a racial slur or if they hit you, or if they violated you or your person or your family in some kind of way, you could actually have that person tried and expelled. And that was profound. Audley Moore ultimately joins the Communist Party because of all the political parties that were around at that time, major political parties, she said that was the one that was actually dealing with Black people's needs at that point in time. The event that compels her is that the Communist Party takes up the case of the Scottsboro Boys. And these were nine boys who were arrested while hoboing on a train that stopped in Scottsboro, Alabama; were accused by two white women on the train of raping them; and were tried, convicted and sentenced to death in a matter of days, really. And the Communist Party took up that campaign, made it an international campaign.

Minkah Makalani: And the Communist Party is explicitly talking about the nature of colonialism in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean. And this is not to say that everything the Communist Party said about race, everything that it said about imperialism or colonialism was accurate or was the epitome of how one should think about these things, but these were issues that Black people held as central and essential to look at. And none of the other major parties were offering them any kind of language, any kind of political framework to either think about it, and then more importantly, I would say, none of these other parties offered Black people vehicles in which they could take their own ideas about racial oppression, about colonialism and bring it onto the political stage. And the Communist Party did that.

Minkah Makalani: So those are the kinds of things I think are important to really keep in mind to help explain to students who are encountering these terms in 2022 what the landscape was in that period. People who were trying to identify ways to transform their lives, and to address their most immediate needs, as well as speak to these larger global patterns.

Bethany Jay: Learning for Justice has a special opportunity just for educators. After listening to this episode, you can earn a certificate for one hour of professional development. All you have to do is go to LearningForJustice.org/PodcastPD—PD for "Professional Development." That's PodcastPD, all one word. Then enter the unique code word for this episode: liberation—all lowercase. You'll also find a link in the show notes. It's a great way to get even more out of Teaching Hard History.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: How did white authorities respond to the kind of organizing that was occurring through organizations like the UNIA, but especially the kind of public thinking that Black intellectuals and organizations were doing at the time?

Minkah Makalani: This is one of the more interesting things to talk about with students: the development and refining of state surveillance of Black intellectuals and Black political figures that begins in the 19-teens and the 1920s, that becomes a template for much of the FBI's activities in terms of domestic surveillance, and ultimately the COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program.

Minkah Makalani: So essentially, they begin to recruit people to infiltrate organizations and provide reports about the activities of organizations, or provide detailed reports about individual figures. And so you have reams and reams of federal surveillance reports on Marcus Garvey's activities; on the activities of Du Bois; A. Philip Randolph and The Messenger, his Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—a labor organization that organizes Black men who worked as porters on the trains; surveilling and monitoring labor organizations; Black women's clubs; a whole range of organizations. If they were concerned with and addressing political questions, they would put them under surveillance.

Minkah Makalani: And additionally, you had a cataloging and surveilling and monitoring of what went into their publications. So this occurs in the US. It doesn't necessarily disrupt the circulation of these publications, but they are also exchanging information with England, with France. And those authorities are barring the circulation of these periodicals in their colonies. And so it's really the work of maritime workers in some cases—Black maritime workers—to smuggle these publications into different places, once they get outlawed or barred or are taken possession of in the ports. So you have the whole range of these kinds of surveillance activities, and you can actually go through these reports and you can really construct, like, the day-to-day activities of some of these organizations.

Minkah Makalani: What this all leads up to though, are extreme levels of repression. So Du Bois is under constant surveillance. And people like he and Paul Robeson, they have their passports revoked, and they're unable to travel internationally. And this really limits their ability to make a living, as well as engage in the kind of robust political activity that they had before. You have the same thing happening with a number of individuals. In early 1921, Garvey goes on a trip to the Caribbean and to Central America, but ultimately the trip is extended for about five or six months, because the federal government is barring his re-entry into the United States. And he's ultimately forced to kind of tone down his more radical elements and begin to argue against radical political programs when he returns. And this doesn't stop him from being arrested, convicted and ultimately deported from the United States.

Minkah Makalani: So ultimately, Garvey is indicted on selling shares for his Black Star Line. And some of the boats that he's selling shares on, he doesn't actually own. You also have efforts that essentially destabilize some organizations, that create misinformation about different figures. And so what you have occurring in the 1920s and '30s is really leading up to that surveillance that happens of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement that we probably know a whole lot more about of Black radicals and Black intellectuals in the '50s and '60s.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I mean, literally, J. Edgar Hoover gets his start investigating the UNIA and bringing on Agent "800." Literally.

Minkah Makalani: Right, right. And you see him asking for more resources to expand his surveillance and get more agents under his guidance in these reports. And so you can go to the library. There's a person named Theodore Kornweibel, who compiled 25 microfilm reels worth of federal surveillance between 1917 and 1925 of Black political organizations. And in that, you see Agent "800," you see a whole range of people. You can see in those documents the thinking of someone like Hoover, and the language that he begins to develop, that 'We need to contain these threats. We need to surveil them. We need to make sure that we know all of their moves.' And you see to what extent those in power went to maintain power, and when they are forced to make concessions and to allow greater freedoms, to peel back some of the structures of racial oppression, they find new creative ways to maintain that control and domination.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: When we think about some of the ideologies that are circulating at this time among these various organizations and thinkers—you've talked about Pan-Africanism, for example, being one of them—is there a way to think about this era as a Black nationalist era, that that is really serving as sort of a unifying ideology across many of these organizations?

Minkah Makalani: Yes, I think definitely. You know, it might not be what one might detail as a typology of what Black nationalism is, but in terms of a sense of a need for racial unity to grapple with racial oppression and to move towards liberation, I think that informs a great deal of what's going on in this period. I think that everyone, for the most part, they are concerned with what political program can we pursue, and what strategies can we deploy that's going to liberate everyone, that's going to give us all equal rights? And then how that will reverberate outside of the United States, and will inform the fate of the colonized African countries, the Caribbean, Black folks in South America. Marcus Garvey, the African Blood Brotherhood, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Black Club Women, they're all concerned about liberating Black people across the board.

Minkah Makalani: Now the interesting thing too about this period is that you do have the explicit formation of nationalist political ideologies and political groups. So one of the organizations that come out of this period is the Nation of Islam, which is established by W. D. Fard Muhammad in Detroit in 1930, but then after his disappearance is taken over by Elijah Poole, who becomes Elijah Muhammad. He was a member of the UNIA, and one of the earliest members of Fard Muhammad's Nation of Islam. And then goes on to build it into what it has become and what we know it as today.

Minkah Makalani: And there are influences from the Moor Science Temple, from Noble Drew Ali, from a number of figures who are engaged in millenarian movements in the teens, '20s, that become the basis for the Nation of Islam and its unique or idiosyncratic eschatologies or ideas about a white race that's genetically coded to attack and kill and oppress Black people. As problematic as all of that might be, it is speaking to some real experiences that people are having, in terms of what they are encountering, and what their lives have been, and how they've been impacted negatively by white people.

Minkah Makalani: And, you know, one thing I would say just as kind of a caveat in talking about Black nationalism is you want to be careful to not overly romanticize Black nationalism, but you also want to be careful not to vilify it or just dismiss it as a Black version of white nationalism. When we talk about white nationalism, we're talking about these movements that are designed to reinstitute explicitly racist regimes because it sees the granting of rights, access, greater movement, economic advancement, Black people and Asians and Latinx folks as threatening white people. And that's not what Black nationalism is in and of itself. You do have extreme strains of that, but that's not anywhere near a central current within Black nationalism, and particularly not in the '20s and '30s.

Minkah Makalani: You know, just to backtrack a little bit. You think about Woodrow Wilson with World War I, and calling for the right of self-determination for oppressed nations. The argument for Black nationalism is really Black people seeing themselves as an oppressed nation within a nation. We want to have the same kind of independence to determine our life and to determine the direction of our nation. So it is in that context that I think we have to think about Black nationalism.

Minkah Makalani: There are a number of reasons why teachers should include this material in their course plans, but I want to just give somewhat of a personal account. All the way through elementary and high school, I had never heard of Du Bois, Garvey, Booker T. Washington. I never heard of the New Negro Movement: Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Audley Moore, any of these figures that we talk about in African-American history in the early 20th century. You know, we got Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, but not a real true portrait of what they were about.

Minkah Makalani: But when I got to college, and I had that first class that talked about and showed photos of Black people lining the streets of Harlem, all up and down Lenox Avenue, and you can see there are tens of thousands of people out on the street, and they're all there to get a glimpse of Marcus Garvey as he's driving in his motorcade parade at a UNIA convention. And they are hanging out of windows to see him. And then the professor is talking about the program of the UNIA—why it was so transformative and inspiring, as well as the problems of it. That lecture as a freshman at a small Black college really did transform how I thought about myself and how I thought about the world that I'd come into. And I began to try and hunt down material and read articles, try and find Marcus Garvey's speeches. And then that led me into trying to find the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, this person who was critical of Marcus Garvey.

Minkah Makalani: Learning about your past can really energize you to want to learn more about that period. And I don't think this is something that solely inspires Black children, but I think that is in and of itself a justification for doing this kind of work in the K-12 educational system. But I think it also, in terms of those who are encountering it for the first time, it gives them a much better sense of the world that they inherit. So if you're a white kid, if you are Latinx or you're Asian American, you're learning a complex and compelling history about the world that you live in and why the United States looks the way it does. Why the questions that are being raised in public political discourse, why the questions that are animating political movements like Black Lives Matter, and why the response to that in the form of seeking to ban Critical Race Theory, you begin to get a much better sense of why you are in the world you're in, and I think that helps you navigate it so much easier than going about your life blind until the point when you get to a college classroom and you're introduced to this material for the first time.

Minkah Makalani: I think you get this stuff to kids, and you give them a context and you give them a way to think about it and help them understand some of the debates, some of the circumstances and some of the things that were at stake. They can begin to formulate their own ideas. And it isn't indoctrination, it is giving students the tools and the resources to think about the world around them and how to make sense of that world themselves.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Minkah Makalani, thanks so much for joining us and for shining a light on the thinking of this era. Thanks a lot, brother.

Minkah Makalani: Brother, thank you as well, Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, for the work you do with this podcast. It is definitely something that I draw on when I'm preparing lectures. And I know it's influencing a whole range of people around the world. So thank you as well for the work you're doing.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Thanks, man.

Minkah Makalani: And for having me on.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: For sure.

Bethany Jay: Minkah Makalani is an associate professor of history and the director of the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939, and the co-editor of Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem.

Bethany Jay: Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Learning for Justice—the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center—helping teachers and schools prepare students to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Learning for Justice provides free teaching materials about slavery, Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and more. You can find award-winning films and classroom-ready texts at LearningForJustice.org.

Bethany Jay: Most students leave high school without an understanding of the Jim Crow era and its continuing relevance. This podcast is part of an effort to change that. In our fourth season, we put Jim Crow under the spotlight, examining its history and lasting impact.

Bethany Jay: Thanks to Dr. Makalani for sharing his insights with us. This podcast was produced by Mary Quintas and senior producer Shea Shackelford. Russell Gragg is our associate producer. "Music Reconstructed" is produced by Barrett Golding. And Cory Collins provides content guidance. Amelia Gragg is our intern. Kate Shuster is the series creator. And our managing producer is Miranda LaFond.

Bethany Jay: If you like what you've heard, please share it with your friends and colleagues. And let us know what you think. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We always appreciate your feedback.

Bethany Jay: I'm Dr. Bethany Jay, professor of history at Salem State University, and your host for Teaching Hard History.

References

• Minkah Makalani, History, Johns Hopkins University
• Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights
• U.S. State Department, The Negro in American Life
• BlackPast, William L. Patterson (1891-1980)
• Universal Negro Improvement Association, About Us
• PBS American Experience, Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind (film)
• Library of Congress, The African times and Orient review : a monthly journal devoted to the interests of the coloured races of the world 
• BlackPast, The Pan-African Congresses, 1900-1945
• Minnesota Historical Society, The Negro World
• Google Arts & Culture, Jomo Kenyatta: Light of Kenya
• BlackPast, Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972)
• Mariners' Museum, Marcus Garvey's Black Star Line
• AAIHS Black Perspectives, Audley Moore, Black Women's Activism, and Nationalist Politics
• Mark Naison, Audley (Queen Mother) Moore (audio interview)
• BlackPast, (1920) Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World
• NBC News, Racial violence and a pandemic: How the Red Summer of 1919 relates to 2020
• Poetry Foundation, Claude McKay
• Sanders Of The River (film starring Jomo Kenyatta)
• NAACP, W.E.B. Du Bois
• W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
• NAACP, Our History
• NAACP, History of The Crisis
• Henry Louis Gates and Jennifer Burton (editors), Call and Response: Key Debates in African-American Studies
• The Crisis, 1921: Vol 21 No. 3
• The Guardian, Ida B Wells: the unsung heroine of the civil rights movement
• New York Amsterdam News, Grace P. Campbell, a political activist in the shadows
• Harlem World Magazine, Harlem Civil Rights Leader And Political Activist Elizabeth Anna Hendrickson, 1884–1946
• National Museum of African American History and Culture, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg
• North Omaha History, The Life of George Wells Parker
• BlackPast, African Blood Brotherhood (1919-1924)
• Rare Historical Photos, Inside the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression, 1931-1940 
• PBS American Experience, Who Were the Scottsboro Boys?
• Zinn Education Project, March 8, 1971: FBI's COINTELPRO Exposed
• BlackPast, Messenger (1917-1928)
• BlackPast, James Wormley Jones (1884-1958)
• Southern Poverty Law Center, Nation of Islam
• Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939
• Minkah Makalani (co-editor), Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem

 

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