(no audio) (no audio) (no audio) - To some, the Civil Rights era seems like ancient history, but to others it's within living memory.

Today's guest helps put the history of that era into a broader context about who we are as a people and what it means to be an American.

She's Dr. Francoise Hamlin this week on Story of the Public Square.

(bright inspiring music) (bright inspiring music continues) Hello and welcome to Story in the Public Square, where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is a scholar and author, Dr. Francoise N. Hamlin is the Royce Family Associate Professor in history and Africana studies at Brown University.

She joins us today from Providence.

Francoise, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you for having me.

- You know, impressed by your scholarship, we're gonna talk about that a little bit today, but I was recently having a conversation with a colleague about the contributions of the African American community to the history of the United States and the reminders of the greatest ideals that sort of made the United States a nation.

Whether we're talking about Frederick Douglass in the 19th century, Martin Luther King Jr. in the last century.

When we think about the grand scope of American history, what are those contributions like from Black Americans?

- I mean, you've said it, right?

The contributions are very great, and they go beyond sort of the figurehead leaders that you have mentioned.

There are hundreds of thousands of people just in every community and in every society that has contributed.

You know, arguably African Americans are central to the actual construction of this country, literally.

And so that is one of the reasons why this history is so important.

When I teach Black history is American history, American history is Black history, African American history.

So I don't really separate the two in a way that I think is often separated too often.

- Well, in your scholarship in particular, you've also brought Black women into that history.

And could you tell us a little bit about that?

- I think, the question is Black women or women have always been in history, right?

I mean, they've always been, they're actually the majority of the population, right?

They're the backbone of societies.

They're the backbone of communities and households.

So the fact is, so why have they been excluded?

It's because they've been excluded from the institutions that have given, and the people who are in these institutions, who are giving themselves the authority to write history.

And so they exclude everyone else from that history.

And then what you see is as women have gained access into these institutions, say the academy, and let's face it, a lot of it is because of the Civil rights movement, right?

Sort of the Black Freedom Movement, and those laws that were created as a result of activism, that these women had opportunities to change the narratives once they got into these institutions.

Which is again, is another question and a reason why we need to keep these institutions representative of society, to make sure that everyone's stories are out and none are sort of raised up higher than anyone else is.

- So, your book "Crossroads at Clarksdale" looks at the struggle for freedom in the Mississippi Delta after the Second World War, and Black troops had fought in World War I, a war to make the world safe for democracy, only to return home, to this country, to Jim Crow.

What did civil rights gain or why did civil rights gain more traction after the Second World War than the First?

What changed?

- I like to call it the perfect storm after World War II, that wasn't sort of in place during World War I.

You have a greater number of African American soldiers out in combat in World War II, in part because of a lot of agitation and activism that had happened in the interwar years to include more folks in the military, right?

Starting with a Philip Randolph, well, not starting, but culminating in a Philip Randolph in 1941, kind of pushing FDR to start opening up the army and the armed forces in ways that hadn't been done before.

And the perfect storm also comes in with the GI bill after the war, more people coming back, able to take a little bit of advantage, particularly educational advantage, and go to college and universities, come out with some skills beyond manual laboring, so that they could become more financially independent from the plantation system or whatever manufacturing system that had held them in sort of financial bondage for all of these years.

And we're also dealing with, at the end of the Second World War, an increase in travel, an increase in knowledge, an increase in how information is received, which is different.

I mean, we're talking about a 50-year, almost 50-year period, 40-year period, and technology has improved a lot.

So the circulation of information and what have you is very important in movement making.

- So let's look at education today.

There are some who will argue that American history is too divisive, that our children are too young to know what Ruby Bridges endured herself as a child, and also Emmett Till.

What do you say to voices that are making that argument?

- May I be blunt?

I call them hypocrites.

I think these are the people who are making those suggestions are the people who are in line with those who cause the trauma to these children in the first place, and yet they want to protect their own children from those crimes.

So my question has always been, what was the protection for those children who were terrorized?

And whose innocence are we valuing when we make these arguments?

What narrative do these folks want their children to know and to inherit and to perpetuate, right?

Because this is really about control of knowledge.

It's not about, I don't think it's about protecting their children.

I think it's more about making sure their own version of histories don't include them as the perpetrators, you know?

And so what I find sort of important to add when I say this is that knowledge, you know, no learning about the past isn't about assigning guilt.

It's about acknowledging the past, understanding it, and making decisions moving forward not to repeat it.

So when you take away that ability to do that, then we are repeating the same crimes and the same sort of bad histories and using children as a sort of, the innocence of certain children as a ploy to pull at heartstrings, which, but really... And ultimately we are not educating our children to be citizens of the world.

- Is that a uniquely American phenomena?

That's not an east Providence accent, right?

In your own experience in the UK, are there elements of that history that are as contentious as the history of race relations in the United States?

- Yes, there are.

And I'll say our education systems are very different.

But I would like to think that our...

I mean, again, I've left the UK 24 years ago, I think the society is moving a little closer to where America is now than it was when I was growing up.

And I think the history there was a lot more cohesive, a lot more inclusive.

The media was a lot, you know, the BBC prides itself on actually doing what we, you know, we actually had world history in classes, and it didn't center Great Britain in the same way as I think American history, even teaching world history.

My son's doing it now.

It still centers America as the center of the world.

And coming from a country that existed a long time before, there are homes that people live in that are older than this nation itself.

I see sort of the disconnect there with learning the history.

And then, it became really clear to me, I was an exchange student in Mississippi in the '90s coming from England where I finished high school, and I knew more American history than the people I was in class with who are Americans.

And that was really telling to me.

It's like, shouldn't it be the other way around?

(Jim laughing) - So Francoise, in recent years, there has been a sort of moral panic in some places and with some people about critical race theory.

Can you break that down for us?

What is the objection?

Why would people care or object, not care, why would they object?

- It's the same arguments clutching at straws that sort of creates the question before.

Like, "we shouldn't teach this history because of our children."

Critical race theory isn't taught in schools.

It's not even taught in most universities.

It's a lawyery term created by lawyers.

So it's taught in sort of professional schools and it's really sort of thinking about including, it's using different tools and a different epistemology to understand the society around us.

And again, this sort of fear-mongering to say that this is harmful is to purposefully keep the population undereducated, right?

So using smoke and mirrors to convince people that they're not the ones responsible for whatever lack they perceive themselves as having, and that blaming other people for taking things away, right?

So, again, it's this blaming game, smoke and mirrors, but, as we would say in England, a storm in a teacup, kind of playing this zero sum game in politics to try and convince people that "you don't have, because of these people are taking it away from you," not "you don't have it because we are taking it away from you from the top down," which encourages people to vote against their own interest.

And we see this all the way since enslavement, right?

The moment of enslavement.

If you think about slavery, what happened?

It took so many jobs out of the wage earning workforce.

So that's why you have a very, very impoverished white population who are literally on sort of living in the same dire poverty as, or some of the enslaved were probably living a little better than some, depending on where they were.

Yet because of the system of racism and white supremacy and kind of feeding into and sort of teaching these folks that "doesn't matter where you are, you're still better than them," even though really, they're living in the same dire squalor as folks who are enslaved.

How do you maintain that system?

Because you're talking about a tiny number of people who are owning slaves, right?

Able to maintain this institution through smoke and mirrors and this kind of system of white supremacy that's kind of baked into this society.

- You know, I want come back to your high school exchange student experience.

One of the things that I think that you're right, so much of high history education in the United States is focused on the US experience, and the US is that sort of indispensable nation and the glorification in a lot of cases of American history.

But if you really look at American history, we had 250 years of chattel slavery, 15 years or so of reconstruction, and then, what, another 70 years of Jim Crow.

And America, the United States does not become a liberal democracy until 1964.

That's in the lifetime of a lot of people watching and listening to the show.

The fact that we don't know that history well enough, what's the societal cost?

What does that do to us as a nation?

- It keeps us underinformed for sure, and it continues, it perpetuates the myth that America is number one and that it should be the moral leader of the world, when really, I would say, that liberal democracy itself is a myth and that we're still not there.

I think it's a goal.

It's always a goal, but not one that he country has actually achieved.

1964, the date you cite is the Civil Rights Act and then the Voting Rights Act happens in 1965.

Immediately, those pieces of legislation were undermined.

And now we can say that probably both of them hardly exist anymore.

So for me, it's always questions about progress and how are we defining success and progress, when we keep on asking this, you know, returning back to the same questions and the same scenarios.

And again, purposeful undereducation ensures that we don't move forward, because we're always circling back to the same arguments, definitely different circumstances in enslavement, but Jim Crow was maybe a touch above that.

And sort of where are we now?

As an outsider, there are so many things about the US that don't live up to its own rhetoric.

And I saw that in Mississippi.

It was one of the reasons why I decided to become an American historian, because I needed to understand why was what I thought I understood about America, built on what they were telling the world completely different from what I was experiencing and what I saw.

And that for me has become something that I've continued to work on and try to understand.

- [Jim] That's fascinating.

- So here we are, 60 years after 1964, how would you assess the state of the Union in 2024 in terms of race, and more, if you want to go even deeper.

- That's a huge question.

I think it's really important, you know, we've just had Martin Luther King Day and we are thinking about Black history month.

I think it's important to recognize that King was disliked by the majority of Americans at the time of his death.

He was considered a race monger.

He was reconsidered a rebel, right?

All of these things that we now, it's very interesting how now this myth of King, his is now this kind of, and I have deep, deep respect for Martin Luther King and the work that he did, understanding the role that he played, understanding that he would die, right?

I mean, I think all of this is very, very true.

But in the same vein, I think sort of this idea of elevating this myth of him as this one person standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and really only memorializing half of the speech and not the entire, "I Have a Dream" speech, right?

Which is actually a lot more radical than folks might want to admit, that that itself is a sort of a miseducation for folks.

Because again, I think I've gone off on a little bit of a tangent, but I think it speaks to how we, even if we do teach history of Black people, it's of one person and it's a distorted history, right?

And that is problematic.

And it also kind of excludes any possibility that movement making can happen again, because we don't have another King, right?

But in reality, this is the sort of the research I do, like movements happen.

It's not the civil rights movement, it's a massive movements that are happening in the individual spaces and people are doing the work on the ground.

King understood that, which is why he traveled everywhere, because he knew the cameras were following him.

So he understood his role as the figurehead.

He understood it, he embraced it, but he also understood where the work was happening as well.

I've gone real, well, off the subject you might- - No, it's a point well taken.

The United States now is a nation of, what, I think 320 million people.

You know, it's dangerous to speak in broad generalities.

But if we look at America in 1963 versus America in 2024, has there been progress made?

Are we better now than we were before The Civil Rights Act, for example?

- Again, I would say, you know, what are the markers of success and progress?

Have things improved?

Of course.

People like me are in higher education institutions and teaching this history that this was not taught earlier.

Universities themselves have transformed to include women, people of color, different classes, right?

All of that has blossomed since the '60s.

So that's of course is improvement.

But what are we seeing now?

The attack on higher education.

Why?

Because, you know, those things can't exist.

Those things can't prevail because it might actually change the status quo.

It might actually break down systemic racism.

And that can't happen, right?

So what do we go back to?

They fall back on under-education from childhood and trying to perpetuate these myths and fearmongering to create the scenario where folks will once again vote against their own interests because of lack of education or undereducation, 'cause they are getting educated, but just not necessarily in critical thinking and what have you.

So that's what I see.

So again, with the ideas of success and progress, it's like two steps forward, one step back, and some might say three steps back, because 50 years later we should be far ahead, because technologically in so many other ways, we are, as a race, as a human race, but this country sort of in terms of culture and society and morality, I don't think they have sort of the edge that they think they have.

The kind I say they, like, I'm not here and I'm not part of it.

And I think that's very worrying, and that should be something that folks should be concerned about, because we are living in a very global world, a global society where the attitudes and the opinions of the world actually do make a difference.

- So something else that is really worrisome are some of the disparities between Black people and white people.

And those include health outcomes, education levels, family wealth, incarceration.

The list is long, and we could do an entire show, three shows on that list.

But in general, what do you make of that?

Why and what might the solutions be?

You're a historian, but I'm sure you have thoughts on where we as a nation might go.

- You know, again, it goes back to, you've listed all of these things after asking me how far have we come, right?

So it's that double-edged sword, right?

So the same issues that we find were an issue 50 years ago, 60 years ago, 100 years ago, are still the same.

So I think that systemic racism hasn't gone away.

It's reinforcing itself.

And until that is dismantled, things won't change fundamentally.

The system will always try and correct itself and sustain itself.

And so education, how can we, you know, we have to fight this fight to under educate our children.

We have to fight for all history to be taught and to be taught sensitively and to be taught correctly.

We have to then teach and reinforce, have civic lessons about the importance of voting.

We do have to think about this idea of the electoral college, because that is purely undemocratic, right from the inception of the nation.

And so that foundationally, this country was built on undemocratic systems and racism, right?

And so understanding that and accepting that is the way forward to kind of thinking about solutions that might undermine and disrupt white supremacy.

But that's a huge task.

But I do think that's why education is always in the bullseye, because it starts there, it started there with Brown v. Board of Education, right?

This whole idea of keeping the races apart means that you can fearmonger and you can teach a certain rhetoric because you're keeping people separate.

And so their experiences match or, you know, they will never have other kinds of experiences.

So the idea of children being together, children are innocent, they do play together, they do all of these things.

You can't have that because then it's starts being disrupted from a very, very young age.

So that's why I believe most of the battlegrounds early on in the mass civil rights movement was around education.

And before the war, it was with higher education, trying to desegregate law school, you know, things that had lower stakes in terms of numbers of people and adults.

But then, it sort of happened with Brown V Board, and sort of years of precedence in the Supreme Court.

So understanding, again, the role of the Supreme Courts and being on top of who's in the Supreme Court, right?

And that all of these things do matter if not for you, but for future generations.

So, am I a little bit pessimistic?

A little bit, because I do see this as systemic and I don't see the system...

I see that in the Civil Rights movement, and definitely Black Lives Matter now, the fact that we have another movement on the Black freedom struggle means that we didn't solve many of the problems that existed.

In fact, we've circled back to them.

But the goals of those, and sort of thinking about sort of understanding systemic racism and understanding where power lies and how citizens can play a role with education and voting, again, is being undermined now blatantly.

- Francoise, we've got literally 12 and a half seconds, but I saw that you have spoken about Black History Month overseas in American embassies.

What's it like speaking to international audiences about these issues?

Literally 15 seconds.

- And it is really interesting now, because I'm a Brit teaching American history, so I get a lot of, "Is it really that bad there?"

You know, it's quite terrifying.

And I think, again, undereducation, Americans don't travel very much outside of their own bubble of their own nation.

And of course, it's a huge nation and many Americans don't even travel their nation.

So I always push my students to travel.

But basically, I think, again, the America's myth of itself being this great thing that every other country aspires to is not true.

So other people are like, "What's it really like?"

Because it can't be this, you know?

And I think because of social media, they're beginning to see it in other ways, because the sort of the TV programming and what have you is now supplemented by TikTok and what people are seeing online.

- Francoise Hamlin, thank you so much for spending some time with us today.

That is all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about Story in the Public Square, you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

He's Wayne, I'm Jim, ask you to join us again next time for more Story in the Public Square.

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