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Hello, and thanks for joining us for sustaining us here on KLCS PBS.

I'm David Nazar.

We're going to be talking about a subject matter that's all over the news these days, all over social media, just about everywhere, although with a different narrative, depending upon who you listen to, who you talk to, what you read.

The term racism is being used so often in the media or with certain politicians, and many argue this is fueling division in our country and are now questioning the use of this word.

So how do we talk about this emotional and highly charged topic that can mean so many different things to so many different people?

Well, how about beginning a conversation with no partizan divide or agenda?

Just simply candor, honesty, speaking from the heart.

And joining me now to discuss all of this and there is no one better to talk this through is my great friend and colleague here at PBS, Dr. Angela Williamson.

Dr. Angela is a Ph.D. and a faculty fellow of Fielding Graduate University.

Angela is a producer, the director of the writer of the Emmy nominated documentary My Life for Rosie.

And in conjunction with the documentary, Angela wrote a children's book about my life with Rosie.

We're talking about Rosa Parks.

She's also the author of the book Women Who Illuminate.

And Angela has a great program here on PBS where she hosts Everybody with Angela Williams And Dr. Angela, thank you so much for being here.

Is such a pleasure to be here with you to talk about this very important topic.

Thank you.

First question, tell me your connection for viewers who don't know, to Rosa Parks, the relation and, of course, give us an overview of the documentary, My Life of Rosa.

Oh, well, we're going back a few years for that.

I met Rosa Parks in the spring of 1998, and people are probably wondering, well, then how is she related?

Well, I married her first cousin, I think they said third time removed, but that was the first time I met Rosa Parks and I knew that she was part of the family.

They always said she would come to family events, but I never had that experience until she walked into my bridal shower for the first time.

And I was Rosa Parks is at my bridal shower.

And so that's what really would start a long road of me understanding what the history books said about Rosa Parks.

And then what I learned about Rosa Parks being part of the Williamson family.

And if we had to take that journey from 1998 and 2015, that was a pivotal year for the Williamson family because we lost our patriarch of the family, which was my father in law, and in losing him, things started to come to my attention and at that point I had already finished my doctoral program.

And so I'm still in research mode, and I start to listen to both of the aunts come and stay with us, and I start to listen to these stories.

And Carolyn, who was Cousin Rosie's personal attendant and who keeps her legacy alive in Detroit today, she started telling me a lot of these stories.

And at that point, because we had lost such an important person in our life, I figured as not only as a scholar, but as a mother, because this is actually the blood that runs through my son's veins.

It's probably time to start to get some oral history about the Williamson relationship with Rosa Parks, and that would start the journey that would lead me on this show with you right now.

So talking about the history, talking about that journey, I'm curious what motivated you, Angela, to even begin the documentary?

Of course, we're going to take a look at a couple of clips from the documentary later in the broadcast.

But what were you hoping to accomplish?

What are you trying to accomplish now?

So in 2015, I was asked to actually put together the memorial service for my father in law.

And as a video producer, I decided to put together a video.

I had to do research on him.

And I realized even though we had spent holidays together at the same dinner table, that I did not really know my father in law.

And one of the things I learned was that he was important in the 1970s jazz movement in Los Angeles.

I did not know that.

Luckily, he was part of an oral history project that saved that information.

I was able to glean from that, so I realized as a mother and as a scholar that I felt a calling to dig a little deeper into these stories.

I was hearing about Cousin Rosie through Aunt Carolyn and through on Alice.

And in doing that, I would come across this book, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.

And when I started reading this book by Dr. Jean Theoharis, she not only opened my eyes, but she supported all of the stories I heard about Rosa Parks and realize that, you know what?

This is probably a good research project.

I know video.

I should just go down that way.

Do what I love, do what I do, what I know, and then we get the documentary.

You know a lot.

You're a mom, you're an educator, you're a writer, you're the host of this show.

One of the reasons I'm talking to you about all this, I reviewed the documentary, obviously.

Could Rosa Parks, could the great Dr. Martin Luther King have had possibly a different, let's say, definition of, quote unquote, racism back then over a half a century ago, as they possibly do today?

I mean, have things advanced?

It seems they have.

They have, But I'm not going to say that we still do not have racism today.

I mean, we know that we've worked in this industry long enough that we understand that.

But there have been advancements because of Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, that we as a nation can look at race differently.

And sometimes we don't see that other side of what they were fighting for.

And that's what I wanted to do in the documentary, because what I realized was that Carolyn learned from Cousin Rosie that human rights is what's important.

And so if we examine human rights, then we have to talk differently about how we see race today.

Speaking of race today, there is no one who's going to argue or no one who is sane and sees our society that there is not racism, that we have a lot more work to do.

Yeah, with that said, and I also said our audience, obviously, as you all know, the issue of racism is so polarized in America, many argue this term racism is Angela We're using its use far too often.

There are many folks in the country who are angry with, let's say, conservatives and conservative media and conservative talk radio.

They say that these conservative hosts, well, they minimize they diminish racism and what's going on.

Our society.

Yet there are just as many, if not more, Americans who are basically saying, listen, we're angry with the far left.

We're angry with the with a faction of the liberal progressive media who sort of have invented a narrative where almost everything is based upon racism.

Yes.

As I said earlier, we have work to do.

Yet after reviewing your documentary, it occurs to me we are a great nation.

We are a nation of inclusion, a nation of this amazing African-American story.

Angela, where there is inclusion, there is achievement, there is success, there is accomplishment.

I'm wondering if we should focus more on that these days, not negating the fact that we obviously have work to do.

And, you know, there is if we had to do a case study and I may just do that, if we had to do a case study today, I would say, let's look at what the people of Utah and the Utah Ethnic Studies Coalition did.

I mean, they actually came together two years ago in June because that's the first time I was connected with them.

They came together.

There were people there that were conservative.

There are people that are liberal, there are people there, people of color, women, all age groups.

They came together because they realize that in order for our children to move forward in a society where we do not have racism or that we don't even talk about it anymore, is that they knew they had to come together and celebrate these accomplishments, is what you said.

And in two years, this group, through working together and although they all had different opinions but they listened to each other and they had these authentic conversations about racism, but also talked about the achievements and the importance of the next generation to understand those achievements so that they can look at racism differently.

Well, after two years of work, the governor in the state of Utah signed that ethnic studies bill this year.

And so can it be done?

I firmly believe it can.

But we need to get the stories out there like the Utah Ethnic Studies Coalition.

We need to get that out there more so people can see we can work together because we know it was done during the civil rights movement.

We've talked about that several times.

I wish we had more of these stories.

It seems that in this country today, just to further our discussion here, everything is sort of defined through this prism of racism, you know, on the news.

I mean, I've got all the news programs on all day because obviously have to monitor the news for our program.

And I'm not sure what the origin of this was.

Angela, It's a bit scary when people in the far left media or some liberals seemingly always say, well, you are racist if they disagree with you or they disagree with your ideology, or let's say someone says, well, you know, Trump had some good policy, you are racist, or if you questioned certain things or if you question protests after the horrific George Floyd killing from the Minneapolis police and you say, well, potentially they were some rioters, they're you're a racist, where did this narrative develop?

Because if you're labeling everyone a racist and when there really are acts of racism, how do we then take it seriously?

How do we fight back?

How do we defend against racism?

Dr. Angela.

At some point we stop listening to each other, and when we stop listening to each other, then we don't hear what the other person has to say.

So going back to your question, how can we stop this?

We need to take a step back and learn to listen to each other.

And I think what we're doing, because we are media professionals, but we take it to heart.

I think more of us need to come together and tell those narratives, because if our entire country, if they don't know those narratives, they are going to act the way that they're seeing other people act on TV or listen what they hear on the radio when they're listening to podcasts, when they are on social media.

So there I think now more than ever, as media professionals, we have the duty to the people that we serve to give them the entire story so we can start listening to each other again.

I hear you.

I appreciate that.

Now we're going to step away for a moment and review a clip from Angela Williamson's award winning documentary, My Life With Rosie so we can further our discussion.

Angela was kind enough to allow me to select the two clips from her documentary for you.

So this is a clip I've dubbed the Quilt.

One of my favorite stories about Rosa Parks was how she would go to these very kind of iconic black power things.

And she would sit and she would do some sort of sewing, some sort of handwork or crocheting.

Well, the project that I guess we're most proud of is the one that the quilt that we made that is shown behind Maya Angelou when she was speaking at the musical.

That is the quilt that our group made.

There's a kind of philosophy of quilting, right?

Quilting is is, is, is collective.

Much of quilting is collective.

Each year when we have our quilting show, we hang this quilt and it's pointing to the North Star and Maya Angelou asked to have that when she came to the orchestra hall in Detroit to do her concert.

So I use it in the book to talk as a metaphor for Black Power, because I saw it as an interesting way to think about how you add a new patch to an existing sort of quilt of protest and to sort of think about somebody like Rosa Parks, who'd been active for decades at this point and who who didn't sort of see Black Power as being so very different from other things, because so many of the strands of Black Power were strands that were already in the quilt of black protest before self defense, independent black political power, economic justice, criminal justice, right.

All of these things that sometimes we associate with black power, are there things that Rosa Parks had worked on for years?

This is one of the things we try to keep alive is the history of quilting.

To let you know it's a special art that everybody was given a gift and this is what we want to bring out the best in them.

But also how you come and you help other people.

So you you come and you if somebody is working on a quilt, then you so their quilt and that philosophy.

Right.

And so that image of sort of her listening to Stokely Carmichael or who her at the Gary Convention or the Black Power convention in Philly, but she's sitting there so she's herself right that she and that complicated self.

Right.

So she is still, you know, she wants to be busy.

She wants to have her hands busy, right, in a kind of you know, But she's also there with the, you know, kind of this country's kind of most fearless radicals.

Right.

And so there's something very interesting about that.

And I think it's sort of, I think help people this kind of imagine her in those moments.

So whenever we go and put on a performance or an activity, we always take that quilt pointing to the North Star to let people know.

And we also take other a couple other quilts, a quilt that we made, and we let all the children sign a piece of cloth.

They put their names on there and we made this quote for the Head Start program, and it's a queen size quilt and everybody's name in the year is on there.

And those are the two quilts that we show because we want to do our community involvement.

And we're back with Dr. Angela Williams.

So, you know, I appreciate the quilting theme and I hope that's where we can take this conversation.

My take away from that is how we just build on the quilt.

How do we quilt together, you know, so to speak.

Me We about inclusion, talk about that.

Well, I think it was really interesting how Dr. Theoharis says that everyone comes to the table and you bring your own piece of cloth.

And if we wanted to look at this from where we want to talk about it in a rhetorical sense, well, our own piece of cloth could be what our background is, but also to coming in with an open mind to that next piece.

And what does that piece have to do to help form the pieces together?

And so I love that quilt, not only because it talks about the history of quilting and it really shows how it is part of the African-American culture.

And think about that.

That quilting started during the days of slavery.

But look at today.

It doesn't matter what your skin color is, it doesn't matter what your age is.

You can be male or female.

You can still learn to quilt.

And the quilting industry is probably, don't quote me, $1,000,000,000 industry right now.

So look at how something that was just used because the slaves had to pull the scraps together to keep themselves warm at night.

But look at how that transcends over generations to we don't even think about it now.

You want to take up quilting.

Great.

You go into a quilt shop, you tell them, I want to learn quilting.

Everyone comes in, talks to you even if they've never met you before.

You have something you share together every once you go into the quilting world and look at that because no one looks at your skin color, they don't ask, Do you like rock and roll or do you like the blues?

They don't ask you, Are you liberal or are you conservative?

What they ask you is, do you want to come in and help me learn to quilt and everyone works together?

What a great way to show how America can move forward and has moved forward from something that started during our darkest days.

Complicated question.

I'm going to obviously oversimplify this critical race theory.

CRT, It's very controversial throughout the United States.

Some select school districts, some young children, they're being taught CRT.

Dr. Angela is a good is about as a somewhere in the middle.

I don't know.

I don't know either, David.

But look at how critical race theory started.

It started during the civil rights movement, started looking at systems, looking at the criminal system, also looking at the labor system.

And then last but not least, looking at the education system.

Well, we know that we still have work to do, but there have been advancements there.

So to teach critical race theory like we are still back in the sixties and seventies, I'm I'm thinking on a personal level, but also to as a scholar, I don't want to discount what Martin Luther King gave his life for and what Rosa Parks gave her entire life up for to march for civil rights.

We need to be able to find a middle ground to teach this so that we can all talk about inequality together.

Because inequality, yes, there is skin color, but there's other things, too, depending on where you're at on the social economic level, too.

We need to talk about that as well, too, because there are so many people in our country right now that are suffering not because of the color of their skin, but because they're in poverty.

Well, that leads me to the next question, socioeconomic.

Let me explain for the audience about that, because we talk about this on the program here in sustaining us, there's a term often use environmental racism is sort of born out of a climate science environment.

Environmentalists are activists.

They talk about people of color who live in disadvantaged communities, who are victims of things like extreme heat.

We've talked about them on this program, urban heat, islands living in communities, not much greenspace, not much parks, space, fewer trees, less shade, no biking and hiking trails.

Angela, can an argument be made that it's not necessarily the color of one's skin?

As you said it, the color is green, it's money.

If you don't have money in this country, you're in trouble.

You know, we've talked about this before.

I've worked in places like Arizona, Idaho, Texas, rural America, middle America, as a young reporter to too long ago to want to remember.

And the only parks they had there were trailer parks.

I'm not trying to be funny.

This is the truth.

Poor white neighborhoods have this same dynamic that places of color do.

And I'm wondering sometimes, is it a poverty issue and not necessarily a racism issue?

I think poverty is something that we need to talk more as media professionals.

And just like you, I mean, I didn't start out and those were all areas, but I am so happy to say that these rural areas have opened the doors for my life with Rosi, the documentary and the children's book.

And so I've been to these areas and I've been to Iowa, where it's a farming community where right now they're suffering financially because they cannot plant and because it's all seasonal.

And so you have those poor areas and in those poor areas you're seeing all types of people together, not just one race in this area that it impacts.

I mean, in Georgia, I mean, there are certain parts of Georgia that we went to that we pretty much saw the difference between the poverty line and people who weren't in poverty.

And what you saw was you saw all types of people there.

And so I think it's a deeper issue.

I think it's a poverty issue.

And I also see that something as media professionals that we can work on to bring that to the attention to the masses, to show that if we attack the poverty issue together, then the last thing we're going to do is have a racial divide.

And Angela, we're going to check out another clip from your documentary, My Life with Rosie.

This one I've dubbed On the Bus.

Well, when I first saw the bus at Henry Ford, it was just awesome to see.

The original bus that Rosa Parks was arrested in, sat in an Alabama field for.

30 years to restore.

The bus to its original condition.

The Henry Ford Museum.

Received $205,000.

In funding through the Save.

America's Treasures Program.

The bus is permanently on.

Exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum.

Well, because we know it hasn't died, it lives on.

And then everyone will learn the truth of what hi really existed and how everything happened, because it's right here for them to see is the education that helps everyone to realize what really happens.

If they ask me what to add to this exhibit, it would be a statue of Rosa Parks, and I think that would finish the exhibit.

And this is the actual seat Rosa Parks sit in.

The one you said.

Yeah, because remember the guy next to her, he got up and left because he was scared.

Yeah, he was scared.

You see a lot of history right here.

A lot of history here.

Because I remember I was little was on the bus with her myself down in Montgomery, and that was no good for me.

The legacy lives because I know that Rosa Parks is an activist, but I also look at her as an educator.

I think she educated an entire generation of people to stand up for themselves and to advocate for themselves and for me as an educator.

That's what I tell my students to do.

I make sure that they look at education as something that's valuable because they decide that is valuable and not because I want them to.

And I think that that is the way I'm in it.

That's her legacy.

And it's amazing.

The collective gathering of everyone in the city.

They wrote the bus came together to stay, made the decision, stay off the bus, and after a year later on, a year later, the bus was out of business.

They started begging the people, Please come back and run back.

And the bus, this bus eventually went out of business, the whole bus system.

And I wish they spirit of support manifest in our communities now.

And I was in support of one another in that way.

And and during that time, children played a big part in that because the fliers would never get out if the children hadn't took them.

But today was a part of the civil rights movement to takes everybody.

I mean, you fight for the human race.

It's not just for a black race, white race, it's the human race.

Rules and no children saw such.

She loved kids.

Yes, she loved this.

She loved her family.

She never had kids, but she loved family.

She adored her family.

And she wanted to make sure you knew about your history.

Oh, yeah.

And we say, Rosa or Aunt Rosa, because that's what we was taught, because we couldn't say Rosa, just plain Rosa.

So you had to put a tail on this.

Those it was a sha la Rosa yet Rosa or either anti Rosa.

And we're back with Dr. Angela Williams.

And Angela, a final question.

You and I have talked about this so often.

Our friendship actually began in a very uncensored way.

We were two curious people.

We read a lot.

We wanted to find out about each other.

And, you know, we're just having these open and honest offline discussions about race, race in the race in America.

And my question is this.

But the billion dollar question, can we get past this, quote unquote, racial divide that the media wants to present to us?

I firmly believe that we can, and we do that just like Rosa Parks did.

It.

She firmly believe that her all of her hope was in that next generation.

And if we can continue the same path that Rosa Parks started back before her historic bus stand on December 1st, 1955, she was working with young people and getting them to stand up for human rights so we can continue that with our next generation.

Then I believe this will be something that we don't talk about anymore and we work on other bigger issues, like we talked then on this program about poverty.

We can take care of those issues, too.

Everyone looks at the state of Utah as all white must everyone there is conservative people.

Look at that.

I did.

I was shocked when this person reached out to me and asked and told me what they wanted to do.

It's like, okay, is this spam?

But they did it.

So if a state like Utah can bring conservatives or liberals together, people of color, men, women, does it matter what your sexual orientation is?

Does it matter what your religion is?

They can come together and get an ethnic studies bill that celebrates everything that we have all brought to America.

How can we can't do that ourselves.

We can do that.

I know we.

Can.

And I, I go back to and this is really used talked about simple, but this is really simple.

It's based on the philosophy of Rosa Parks.

And I believe we can do this in three ways that this book teaches young people.

It's it asks everyone, how can you protect human rights?

Well, first of all, the first question is how can you honor differences in others today?

We honor differences.

I'm willing to listen to you, even if I may not have the same opinion as you, but because I honor you, I'm going to listen to what you have to say.

How can you make a new friend who is different from you today?

I mean, you talked about how we made friends.

I mean, we can still do that.

It's so simple.

We did that when we started out in the sandbox.

We didn't care what Charlie was or what Sue was.

Did they want to play with me?

And they became friends for life.

And then last but not least, how can you stand up for a person in need today if we just stand up for people that are in need today and there's so many people in our country right now that are in need, how could we not bond?

And we have the perfect example from your one of your favorite clips.

You showed the quilt.

Yeah, we know it started in the darkest days of America, but now it doesn't matter.

If you want to learn how to quilt, you go to that quilt store, they will welcome you.

They don't care who you are.

Look at the lessons that the quilt has taught us.

Why can't we continue that and pay it forward?

Dr. Andrew Williamson, thank you for our bond.

Thank you for your continued friendship and thank you for this great interview.

You know how much I appreciate it.

I appreciate you and thank you for having me on your show.

Yes.

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I'll be sure to get back with you and be sure to catch our program here on PBS or catch us on the PBS app for All Things Sustainable.

Thank you so much for joining us for this edition of Sustaining US Here on KLCS PBS.

I'm David Nazar.