00:04:10.700So I think the moment we're in is a moment
00:04:12.500where you see the politics of fear and anger prevailing.
00:04:16.620And there are people in this country who want to govern
00:04:18.920by making a lot of people afraid or a lot of people angry.
00:04:25.200And they know it's a very effective formula.
00:04:27.560The problem is, is that when you look at human history,
00:04:30.380the times when leaders have used fear and anger to get power,
00:04:34.600some of the worst moments in human history,0.61
00:04:36.300That's what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. You had a whole population being encouraged to hate another group of people and to fear another group of people.
00:04:45.680In Rwanda in the early 1990s, neighbors started slaughtering neighbors because on the radio, narratives of fear and anger spread all across that country.
00:04:54.820And the periods of American history that I worry the most about are when you've had voices who are saying these hateful things where they're saying children are super predators.
00:05:04.240So let's lock them all up. Everybody is a threat. So let's let's execute lynchings, all of that.
00:05:10.540And so I think we're in a moment where there has to be a counter narrative to the politics of fear and anger.
00:05:18.380We have to start talking about what we believe and what we hope for and what we want to see.
00:05:24.880And certainly with regard to the legacy of race, there's a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done.
00:05:31.020And I've long believed that the history of racial injustice in this country has created these toxins in the air.
00:05:37.060It's like pollution. We all breathe it in and we inherited it.
00:05:41.220And the tendency has been to be silent about it.
00:05:44.900And I think that silence has made us vulnerable to a lot of bad policies, a lot of bad actions.
00:05:50.820You know, we were silent after creating the Constitution in the 18th century that talked about equality, liberty and justice as we applied those concepts to indigenous people.
00:06:01.020peoples and we displaced millions of Native people and created a narrative of racial difference to
00:06:06.700justify that displacement. We said, oh no, those Native people, they're savages. And too many people1.00
00:06:11.260were silent and accepted that narrative. And I think it's that same narrative that then gave
00:06:16.520rise to 246 years of slavery. And when I give public talks, I really emphasize the fact that
00:06:22.960I believe the great evil of slavery in America wasn't the forced labor, wasn't the bondage,
00:06:28.080wasn't the degradation and humiliation. I think the great evil, the enduring evil, was the narrative
00:06:33.460that was created to justify enslavement. Because people who enslaved other people didn't want to
00:06:38.600feel immoral or indecent, didn't think of themselves as immoral and indecent. So how do you feel moral
00:06:43.220and decent when you're pulling away a screaming mother from her children, knowing that mother
00:06:47.960will never see those children again because you're treating her as property? Well, you need a
00:06:50.880narrative. And we created a false narrative where we said that black people are not as good as white0.98
00:06:55.560people, that black people are less human, less evolved, less capable. And that narrative was so0.99
00:07:00.340powerful that it survived the Civil War. I often argue that the North won the Civil War, but the
00:07:05.980South won the narrative war because those ideas of racial hierarchy prevailed. And then the court
00:07:11.660sided with that narrative at the end of Reconstruction and prioritized states' rights
00:07:17.780over constitutional rights. And throughout the 20th century, we're in that struggle.
00:07:21.840And a lot of people thought when we got into the 21st century that we had gotten past that. But now we're seeing just a new manifestation of these counter narratives that look at race and identity and othering as a mechanism for creating political power for those who feel like they will benefit by dehumanizing, diminishing, deporting people who are other.
00:07:47.000And it is the struggle of America. It is the challenge of our country. But our ability to meet this challenge, I think it's got to be our commitment to learning more, to preparing ourselves to be more effective at narrative struggle, narrative warfare, narrative politics, and to articulate something that is transcended, that pulls us out of this loop that we've been in for so long.
00:08:11.480When you, it's so interesting, so much of your work, you talk in that frame of narrative and sort of owning that narrative or the narrative owning us in that context. How do you begin to sort of culturally shift that narrative? You referenced in passing that we haven't been truly taught the real story, but how does that narrative begin to ship, shape, shift?
00:08:33.060Yeah, I think it begins with knowledge. And people say, what can I do? And I say, learning is an action item. When you learn the history, you're prepared to say things and to do things. I look at what we've done in this country in the middle of the 20th century. Everybody was smoking because we didn't know or we didn't acknowledge the harms of smoking.
00:08:53.460But when we learn the harms, we began to see people see that as something that you shouldn't do.
00:08:59.500And narrative work begins with knowledge.
00:09:02.900It begins with sharing and understanding.
00:09:04.720Mothers Against Drunk Driving in the 1980s, you know, you go back to you go back 40 years and the laws against driving while intoxicated were very minimal.
00:09:14.600We didn't even make people stop driving when they got stopped and they were tested and they were intoxicated.
00:09:21.480And then these mothers started documenting and dramatizing the loss, the consequences of drunk driving by profiling their children who had been killed.
00:09:31.200And all of a sudden, we began to have a different relationship to tolerating that phenomena.
00:09:35.840And very quickly, the laws in this country shifted.
00:09:39.020And it meant that even if you were prominent and had status, a sports star, a politician, you were going to be confronting something challenging if you drove while intoxicated.
00:09:50.040That's narrative work. And so I think we have to do the same thing when it comes to
00:09:54.360the history of America. And for me, that just means talking more honestly about who we are.
00:10:02.520And I've been recently, because it's the 250th anniversary, I've been recently struggling to
00:10:08.160kind of just be honest about my American identity. And to be perfectly honest, I've struggled with
00:10:15.800my American identity at times. Because unlike most Americans, I am not the child of immigrants.
00:10:22.200My foreparents did not come to this country looking for greater opportunities or seeking
00:10:27.660shelter for some distant threat. They came in chains. They were abducted and kidnapped and
00:10:33.220trafficked across an ocean where millions died. When they got here, they weren't allowed to pursue
00:10:39.160a great American dream. They were enslaved for 246 years. After emancipation, they were promised
00:10:46.860equal protection and the right to vote, and then they were betrayed. That promise was never enforced.
00:10:52.940And then there was subjected to codified racial hierarchy. I was born at a time when I couldn't
00:10:58.600go to the public schools in my county. I started my education in a colored school,
00:11:02.640and it took lawyers to force them to open up the schools. I graduated from high school. I graduated0.67
00:11:08.020it from college. I went to Harvard Law School. I left Harvard Law School to go help people. And
00:11:12.620with my Harvard Law degree, one night I was pulled out of my car by police officers who suspected me
00:11:18.800just because I was sitting in front of my apartment. And they pulled guns and threatened to blow my
00:11:23.620brains out. And I had to navigate that. And for the last 40 years, I've stood next to people in
00:11:28.040our criminal legal system where my clients should be presumed innocent, but most of them, because
00:11:34.520of their race or their poverty have been presumed dangerous and guilty. And so what am I supposed
00:11:40.020to think about when I think about my American identity? And the powerful thing for me is doing
00:11:47.340this work has actually caused me to shift. Because what I realized is that those 4 million Black
00:11:53.480people who were emancipated after the Civil War could have said, we want revenge and retribution0.57
00:11:58.560against the people who enslaved us, who stole our children, who sold our siblings. But instead,
00:12:03.080Instead, they did something great. They said, we're going to build a better America. I think they became great Americans. They started building schools like historically black colleges and universities. They built churches. They built families. They invested in this country that had enslaved them. And they did it with this passion and commitment. They were great Americans, which allowed me to start thinking differently about who I am.
00:12:29.760I am not the child of immigrants, but I am the descendant of great Americans who contributed to this country, even when they had no rational reason to believe that the country was going to contribute back to them.
00:12:40.220And despite the violence of lynching. And, you know, recently I've been thinking about that. We're here in Montgomery, Alabama. This is a city with rigid racial segregation. And then black women, primarily in the 1940s, stopped cooperating with segregation on buses.
00:12:57.880um viola white uh was told to give up her seat to a white person she said no she was arrested
00:13:05.140she was beaten but when she said no she was saying i'm going to push this country to do something
00:13:11.700better i'm going to seek a more perfect unit i want to see a greater better america and i think
00:13:17.680she was a great american because she said no and then in the 1950s a black veteran hilliard brooks
00:13:25.0601950 got on a bus here he paid his dime the bus driver said oh the bus is full you can't ride he
00:13:31.920said well give me my dime back and the driver said no and he started arguing and hillier brooks
00:13:37.200says i'm not leaving until i get my dime back they called the police police came and shot and killed
00:13:42.780that world war ii veteran who was unarmed and i actually think he didn't do anything wrong by
00:13:49.000insisting on an America. And then, of course, in 1955, those black women, Claudette Colvin and
00:13:55.160Susie MacDonald and Aurelia Browder and Mary Louise Smith and ultimately Rosa Parks, they said
00:14:01.020no. But what they really were saying is, I'm going to push this country to be greater. And I think
00:14:06.780they were great Americans. And they gave birth to a civil rights movement that was sustained by
00:14:13.160great Americans, black and white, young and old, who pushed this country to do something better,
00:14:18.860stronger. And we became a more robust, healthy democracy in 1965 after the Voting Rights Act
00:14:23.720has passed. And with that knowledge in my head, it's shifted my American identity,
00:14:29.820because now I want to be a great American too. Now I want to contribute to an environment
00:14:35.580where equality and justice prevails, where we don't give in to fear and anger. And I think
00:14:41.820that's the moment, that's the opportunity we have in this moment of conflict and controversy
00:14:48.000And I'm prepared to assert that I want to be a great American, not in terms of wealth or power or status, but in terms of what I can do, what I can say, what I can contribute to create an environment that really meets the expectations, the aspirations that we talk so much about.
00:15:05.800your um your work around building that counter narrative or at least developing a different
00:15:12.900narrative um a more enlightened illuminated narrative began here what in 2018 yes with the
00:15:20.740sites and i've been here since 1989 doing legal work but yeah but we opened the sites uh the first
00:15:26.560the national memorial and the legacy museum we opened in uh april of 2018 and the purpose was
00:15:32.400to do what? What were you inviting? Yeah. I mean, the truth is, is that when I was a little boy,
00:15:40.000the county that I grew up in was 80% white, 20% black. If you had a vote in our county on whether
00:15:46.020to let black kids attend the schools, we would have lost the vote. You know, democracy in that0.98
00:15:50.640sense, majoritarian democracy, wasn't going to work for a disfavored minority. But lawyers were
00:15:57.060able to enforce the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown versus Board of Education. And because those
00:16:01.940lawyers could bring the rule of law to that county, I had an opportunity to do things I
00:16:07.220wouldn't have had otherwise. And so when I got older, that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to
00:16:12.720be a lawyer that could use the rule of law to help the vulnerable and the marginalized and
00:16:16.980the unprotected. And for most of my career, that's what I've tried to do. That's how we've helped
00:16:21.760get people who are wrongly convicted off of death row. It's how we've helped protect children from
00:16:26.600excessive and cruel punishment. It's how we've helped to shield people from unjust sentences
00:16:31.180and things like that. But probably about 15 years ago, I began to worry because it seemed like the
00:16:37.780courts were retreating from the commitment to the rule of law that I had lived under most of my life.
00:16:44.580And probably 15 years ago, I began to worry that we were moving into an era where we couldn't win
00:16:49.640Brown versus Board of Education. And today, I'm very doubtful that we could win a case like Brown
00:16:55.660versus Board of Education. I don't think our court today would do something that disruptive
00:17:00.000on behalf of disfavored people. And I think that awareness just made me appreciate that we were
00:17:08.240going to have to get outside the courts and begin engaging in narrative work to create the kind of
00:17:13.700balance you have to have for the rule of law to prevail. If the fear quotient is really high,
00:17:18.960then the rule of law suffers. That's what happened in 1945 when the Supreme Court was asked in
00:17:25.540Korematsu to strike down putting Japanese Americans in concentration camps. I think they had an
00:17:31.000intuitive understanding that that can't be squared with our constitution, but the fear
00:17:34.560was so high in the 40s, early 40s, that they said, no, you can do that. And without a narrative that
00:17:41.280says, no, we're risking more than our security by giving into that kind of thinking, we allow
00:17:49.980something horrific to happen. And so I started to believe and continue to believe that we have
00:17:55.640to engage in this narrative work, create a cultural landscape, a narrative landscape that
00:18:00.660makes it unacceptable for us to demonize people because of their race. It should be unacceptable
00:18:06.720to say that Somalis are a garbage race, to say that Haitians eat. It should be unacceptable to1.00
00:18:12.760everybody, regardless of their political perspective, because that is the kind of
00:18:17.460bigotry that can have no place in a healthy democracy. And you start with Haitians, and then
00:18:23.440you move to Somalis, and then you move to other Africans. Before you know it, you start moving and0.97
00:18:27.200moving and moving, and only certain kinds of people are allowed to be here. And I don't think
00:18:32.460it's an exaggeration. It's what history has taught us. And so the narrative work has to be done to
00:18:38.420create an environment where we say, oh, sorry, no, that's too much. When white men march onto a campus
00:18:45.040like the University of Virginia and start chanting anti-Semitic and racist things,
00:18:49.800we have to say, no, no, no, no, no. There's no space for that in this democracy. And when we
00:18:54.660fail to do that, I think we create an environment that becomes even more imperiled. So yeah,
00:19:01.020I see this narrative work as essential now, as key to preparing us for this next chapter
00:19:08.240of the American story. 15 years ago, what was taking shape? Was there a moment? Were there
00:19:14.420moments. What was the trend line then that you started to reveal a different sort of unraveling
00:19:20.640of sorts? Yeah, I think it really began with the Supreme Court's decision in Shelby County
00:19:25.860in 2013, where the court seemed to be minimizing the history of racially biased voter disenfranchised.
00:19:35.140That's the central story of this country in the 20th century is the way we tolerated
00:19:39.180disenfranchisement of a whole sector of the population just because of their color.
00:19:44.420And one of the great stories of the century was the effort to challenge that and to overcome that.
00:19:52.200And the Supreme Court in 2013 didn't seem to appreciate the harm of disenfranchisement, didn't appreciate the struggle, didn't appreciate the resistance.
00:20:01.380And it became clear to me they just didn't know.
00:20:06.480And it's not impossible or hard to understand.
00:20:09.480And they should have. But it was clear to me that we were going to have to do some things to kind of make it less possible for someone to have that point of view.
00:20:17.760And then I saw it in my individual cases. We were representing people who were tried by all white juries and majority black counties.0.58
00:20:25.000And it was clear that the prosecutors were excluding people on the basis of race.
00:20:29.380And because we had won so many cases based on that claim before, the courts were getting tired.
00:20:33.960They're like, oh, my God, we're going to be reversing cases forever and we don't want to keep reversing cases.
00:20:37.380So we'll just say that wasn't, that was error, but it wasn't, it was harmless error. We're going to tolerate that kind of bigotry. Cases where prosecutors were referring to black defendants with the N-word on the record, when jurors were using the N-word to describe, and the courts were saying, yeah, not reversible. That's okay. It's a problem, but it's not the big.
00:20:58.120And that's what I was seeing that made me realize that we were underestimating the harm of this history. And part of what I wish I could do, I joke with Fred Gray, the amazing civil rights attorney who's still alive, he's 96, who represented Rosa Parks and represented Dr. King.
00:21:19.660I joke with him. I say, oh, Mr. Gray, we need to find the time machine so we can go back to 1965.
00:21:25.040And he's always so game. He said, well, what are we going to do if we get back to 1965?
00:21:29.080I said, I think we assume that if we had a Voting Rights Act, people would cooperate, that people wouldn't have to be held accountable for a century of disenfranchised.
00:21:55.360Every black, every congressperson from the American South voted against the Voting Rights Act.
00:21:59.440They didn't commit to ending disenfranchisement.
00:22:02.500And I just wish we could get back because what we should have done is basically held people accountable for a century of disenfranchisement.
00:22:10.420In corporate business, you can't steal someone's copyright and then just say, I'm sorry, you're going to have to pay damages.
00:22:16.520You're going to have to do something to repair that harm.
00:22:21.340We have concepts in the law like punitive damages and actual damages.
00:22:25.920There's even something called treble damages where you pay three times as much.
00:22:29.740And I really think we should have said, oh, no, these states that disenfranchise black people need to automatically register black people when they turn 18 as a remedy for a century of disenfranchisement.0.59
00:22:40.420I don't think it would have been wrong to say, you know, states like Mississippi, you need to go into the black community and get their votes on Election Day because you've made going to the polling places so threatening and intimidating and menacing.0.50
00:22:51.420People may still not come. So you're going to have the burden of getting their votes.1.00
00:22:56.160And I think about where we would be today had we done that.
00:23:00.320We could be having a conversation. Well, maybe we don't need to automatically register people anymore because we've had 60 years of repair of that.
00:23:06.800We don't need to go into the community. But we did the opposite. We allowed people to think of
00:23:11.120new ways to disenfranchise. And we've tolerated that. And instead of seeing that in 2013,
00:23:17.280the Supreme Court bought this fiction, well, that everything's different now. Everything's
00:23:22.120changed now. And then we see the case that came out earlier this year, where the court guts the
00:23:27.900Voting Rights Act. And what happens is immediately these legislatures try to diminish and to minimize
00:23:34.280of black political participation in exactly the way a generation ago people did that. And so
00:23:39.920I think for me, it was a set of decisions that I saw coming. It was the way people were talking.
00:23:48.320You know, Barack Obama got elected in 2008 and everybody was quick to say, oh, we're post-racial
00:23:52.080now. And it never seemed that way to me. But I saw it up close and personal in the cases I was
00:23:59.260working on, but I also saw it at the national level with just the way courts were retreating
00:24:03.900from this full commitment to the rule of law.
00:24:06.140So the inspiration to design a museum, a memorial, lynching museum, that offered what
00:24:25.540Name one black person was lynched during the era. They can't answer that. You know, the law of slavery, the transatlantic trade. You know, when you go into our museum, we have exhibits about slavery in New York City, slavery in Boston.
00:24:40.780The Boston Harbor, which is identified because of the Boston Tea Party, was also a harbor where thousands of enslaved black people were trafficked.
00:24:49.580The coast of New England and its shipbuilding was built on the economics of trafficking enslaved people from Africa to the Americas.
00:24:59.560Wall Street built by enslaved people, Broadway.0.60
00:25:01.720And if you don't know that, you will think, well, slavery, that's a southern thing.
00:25:07.000And so for me, it was about creating a new relationship to the harms of this history, to create a new relationship, because that narrative, you know, it continues.
00:25:20.040You know, the presumption of dangerousness and guilt that was used to justify lynching, even when lynching violence became less pervasive, it was still there.
00:25:30.840After the civil rights movement, there was still a presumption of dangerousness and guilt that black and brown people had to navigate.
00:25:36.700And five years ago, when people were out on the streets, they were reacting to a manifestation of that presumption of dangerousness and guilt as a result of these high profile police killings.
00:25:48.500But we haven't done much to help people understand the nature of that.
00:25:52.540And so, yeah, that was the motivation for me is just truth telling.0.51
00:31:34.120and it still took a couple of decades before there was reckoning, and you'll always see the deniers
00:31:38.500and that movement to go back to the other direction. But in the United States, we never
00:31:43.900shifted power. The people who fought against this country during the Civil War, the Confederates and
00:31:49.300the insurgents, the enslavers, quickly were restored to power. They could have been
00:31:56.580subjected to harsh punishments for treason and all of those things, but we withdrew the federal
00:32:03.940troops within 12 years after the Civil War. And the Supreme Court, made up of Southerners,
00:32:10.340sided with these former Confederates in terms of striking down all the civil rights laws that
00:32:16.740were passed in the 1870s. The same laws we were passing in the 1960s, we passed in the 1870s and
00:32:22.16080s. There was a Civil Rights Act in the 1870s to kind of ensure that Black people would be
00:32:27.700treated fairly. But the court struck these things down. The Ku Klux Klan Act, which could have
00:32:32.100protected people from the lynchings that we document, struck down by the court. And
00:32:37.060the court had the power to undermine the kind of transformation that we should have seen,
00:32:45.940even the civil rights era. It was a broad coalition, but there was no change in power.
00:32:52.560We saw political diversity, which was really useful, but we didn't see a transfer of power.
00:32:57.740The people who benefited from those decades of disenfranchising Black people, who benefited from sharecropping and tenant farming, from exploitation of Black labor and poor white labor, the people who benefited from exploiting lands and things like that, never had to forfeit any of that.0.87
00:33:17.660And you can see a landscape today that is very much connected to that.
00:33:20.480So I think the power dynamic in this country has made it harder for us, which is why the civil rights movement for me is still so influential, because, you know, the thousands of people in Montgomery who stayed off the buses for 382 days, they didn't have money.
00:33:37.740They didn't have big organizational support.
00:33:40.480They didn't have foreign governments helping them.
00:33:43.100They just had their will, their courage, their bodies.
00:33:47.760what they did have was a powerful moral narrative that segregation is wrong, that racism is wrong,
00:33:54.620that bigotry is wrong. And they just made more people see it. And I think that moral
00:34:01.180narrative, that moral position is going to be necessary. You know, I can't make people in this
00:34:10.360country who can shield themselves from the problems of bigotry and exploitation and of hunger and of
00:34:16.920food insecurity and health, you can't force them to do something. But if they can see the harms of
00:34:25.260that, if they can feel some connection to what it means to live in a place where we tolerate
00:34:31.660food insecurity, the United States, the richest country with all of these people in America that
00:34:37.340are struggling with hunger, all these people struggling with health care, if we can create
00:34:42.100a consciousness that says, you know, the health and well-being of my family, of my community
00:34:47.780really does depend on making sure people aren't starving to death, people aren't dying from
00:34:54.100treatable illnesses and disease just because they don't have money, that people aren't
00:34:58.340being excluded unfairly from opportunities because of their color or their gender or
00:35:02.720their ethnicity, that we're not just abusing people because they're undocumented.
00:35:08.240That consciousness has to be part of what I think we do moving forward, because the power, as we've seen, is not rooted in, that's my great disappointment. You know, you had all these people in the tech sector and other sectors that were, you know, were posturing so much five years ago.
00:35:26.920And when power said, no, we want you over here, not over there, so many of them just ran. And that's why I think it has to be rooted in something that's less transactional than do I make more money this way or that way.
00:35:43.500Was that the flaw five years ago, that it didn't have deep roots, that it was situational?
00:35:50.160I think it was. I think that is the flaw. I mean, particularly, I look at the corporate sector in particular. Many of them say, oh, we're going to have DEI now. We're going to create this role and we're going to do this. They were very public about it. They were very loud about it. And I kept saying, yeah, you're articulating a remedy without defining the problem. And that's going to cause resentment. I wanted those corporations.
00:36:15.220You were literally off. You believe that at the time?
00:36:19.360That's the core of what we're trying to do here. I said, look, put out a report that documents over the last 30 years, all the women who were denied promotions because of their gender, all of the people of color who were more qualified, who were denied promotions because of their race, because you didn't feel comfortable having women and people of color in leadership positions.
00:36:39.680It's not a radical conclusion. Everybody was doing it. But just talk about it, detail it, document it. If you can, name the names of all the women who should have been promoted and who were more qualified. And you put out the problem report. You report on the problem. And then you say, and we're not going to do that anymore. We're now going to have a remedy for that problem. We're going to commit to diversity.0.52
00:37:03.140we're never going to deny a more qualified woman or more qualified person of color leadership roles
00:37:08.520because of their gender or race. That is the commitment we are making. But instead, they
00:37:13.100wanted the optics of DEI without owning up to their own institutional failures. I wanted journalism
00:37:21.300and media to do this. There are media companies all over this country. So look at your record
00:37:26.080over the last 80 years, how you covered the civil rights movement, how you covered lynchings, how
00:37:29.920you covered, the ways in which you contributed to legitimating this racial bias. Just look at it.
00:37:35.540It's right there. Tuscaloosa News in 1941 had a headline, this newspaper believes in white0.99
00:37:43.720supremacy. 1941. Wow. So I said to the editors, when did you renounce it? When did you say you
00:37:50.320no longer believe in white supremacy? And he was like, well, nobody thinks we believe in white
00:37:55.820i said why why do you say that you've never you said we believe in it but you haven't said
00:38:00.120i said just acknowledge it and so we put their newspaper in our museum i said no people are
00:38:05.540going to ask you and for me it's a process that's why we talk about needing an era of truth
00:38:11.460and justice truth and reconciliation truth and restoration truth and repair but for me those
00:38:17.640things are sequential you've got to commit to truth telling before you get to the beautiful
00:38:21.680hard work. You can't just skip to reconciliation or restoration or redemption. You got to have
00:38:26.520the truth part. And I think too few institutions did that. Academic universities should have said,
00:38:33.100yeah, we didn't admit black students at our college until 19-whatever. We didn't have any
00:38:37.560black faculty, not because there weren't talented faculty out there. We just didn't feel comfortable0.90
00:38:41.420having black faculty. We didn't feel comfortable with women as heads of department until 1980-something1.00
00:38:48.100Just put it out there and then acknowledge that there were very skilled people who could have done it.
00:38:53.040But now we're not going to do that anymore, because by not doing the truth telling, we made it too easy for people to say, oh, they're giving things to women and people of color that they don't deserve, which has then fueled this counter narrative when, in fact, it's the opposite.
00:39:08.020You know, I talk about this. I fly a lot. And I was getting on a plane. I was upgraded to first class. And this guy sitting next to me was quiet. And then the pilots came on. They'd come in late. And it was a black pilot and a woman co-pilot. And the guy literally grabbed my arm and turned to me and said, oh, my God, did you see who's flying this plane?
00:39:32.100And I said, yeah, he said, we're in trouble.
00:39:37.640I said, for that black man and that white woman to be a pilot and co-pilot for this commercial airline, they had to be more skilled than a lot of their white male colleagues.
00:39:49.000They had to do better to get this opportunity.
00:39:51.780So not only are we not in trouble, we're probably in the best hands we could possibly be in.
00:39:57.380And then when we landed, I started praying.
00:39:59.040I said, oh, Lord, please don't let them mess up this landing.
00:40:01.180And the landing was flawless. And I looked at the guy and I said, see, he didn't have anything to say.
00:40:08.720But that's the mindset that has been cultivated because we've been unwilling to acknowledge.
00:40:16.620And I want the airlines to talk about the ways in which they didn't embrace women and people of color and leadership.
00:40:23.040But that's true for every institution. And I just think it, you know, climate change, tobacco, all of these things that have shifted, they're rooted in truth telling.
00:40:33.560Once you understand the harms of tobacco, once you understand the harms of fossil fuels or the harms of certain kinds of toxins in the environment, the environmental movement is rooted in knowledge about what's a threat.
00:40:44.800then you are motivated to do things that you wouldn't otherwise do. I think in the health
00:40:50.320care context, you know, I hear a lot of what's happening today. And it's to me like telling
00:40:55.400doctors, you're not allowed to tell patients that they have diabetes or high blood pressure
00:40:59.820because that's a bummer. Nobody likes to hear that. And, you know, people could say, oh, I would
00:41:05.800love to ban high blood pressure and diabetes. But the reality is that the disease is still going to
00:41:12.160be there. And if you don't tell the truth and let somebody know, oh no, your blood pressure is too
00:41:17.900high or your sugar levels are too high, then you can't get to treatment. Then you can't get to
00:41:22.580care. We can treat these problems, but it begins with an honest, accurate diagnosis. And we have
00:41:29.380not accurately or honestly diagnosed the challenges, the injuries, the harms, the wounds, the illnesses
00:41:36.520that have been created by our tolerance of bigotry, inequality over decades.
00:43:46.240And so my dad couldn't get a mortgage loan or the kind of assistance that his white colleagues could, which meant that he had to get exorbitant race to build his house.0.67
00:43:55.400And when he died in 2017, he didn't own the house that he had lived in and he didn't leave us wealth.0.67
00:44:02.660He left us debt. And there are hundreds of thousands of black families who are the who are the descendants of veterans who were denied.
00:44:10.840Now, I think we can, first of all, acknowledge that, talk about that.
00:44:14.000And then we could think about, well, what should we do about that?
00:44:48.080And instead, what we have is a defense department that is renaming military bases after the architects of white supremacists, those who defended enslavement.
00:45:01.220And so I think it wouldn't be possible to do that if we had created a more honest understanding.
00:45:08.100And veterans would be saying, no, that's just not possible. The military would be saying, that's just not possible. We have almost a majority minority army and we're still doing these things. So I think it has to be sector by sector. I think, you know, in sports leagues, you know, I talked to the NBA five years ago. I was like, you know, you guys can be honest about your history, too.
00:45:26.640You know, there were a lot of talented athletes that couldn't play because of your fear. Journalism, politics, all of that. I think it has to be done in that way. Corporations, academic institutions, such hostility right now in a lot of academic spaces to creating room for people of color, for people who are different, for women.
00:45:52.860Because, again, I don't think we've been honest about that history of exclusion.
00:46:18.640And many of them would still have it if the Supreme Court hadn't ruled in Loving versus Virginia. So when you don't have a court that's willing to do that, where are we, right? And so I think that kind of process has to be the way we move forward.
00:46:34.640I think we can bring people along on a lot of really important, healthy, restorative community building.
00:46:43.440When we do our community remembrance work, we create these small community groups, black and white, young and old.
00:46:49.280And we say, look, this horrible lynching happened in your community.
00:47:53.620Who doesn't want to live in that world?
00:47:55.320I want to live in a world where no one is going to be disadvantaged because of their color or because of their ethnicity or because of their gender.
00:48:04.240I just think that's a healthier, better world.
00:48:07.060It's a world with more innovation, more art, more beauty, more all kinds of great things.
00:48:15.240But we can't get there if we don't hold, if we're unwilling to make that commitment.
00:48:18.300The reparations movement, what does it represent to you in this context more specifically?
00:48:25.000I think it represents an awareness that you can't just move on from harms and injuries.
00:48:35.380I mean, I acknowledge as a criminal defense attorney, if I go to court with my client who's been convicted or arrested or charged with burglary,
00:48:44.020I can't say, oh, your honor, I talked to my client. He said he's never going to burglarize another home. So we're going to just go now. They won't let me do that. They will say, oh, no, he has to pay for that. He has to be held accountable. We're happy to hear that. And maybe that'll influence the way we hold him accountable. But there can't, there has to be accountability.
00:49:04.760And I just think we believe in repair. We believe in reparations, like I said, in the business context. If you don't honor a contract and you cost somebody hundreds of thousands of dollars, you're going to have to pay that money. You can't just say sorry. And we believe in that. In the corporate sector, in the private sector, if you violate another company's interest, if you undermine their economic interest, you have to pay those damages. It's not radical.
00:49:32.860but somehow in the civil rights context, in the human rights context, we believe you can have
00:49:39.480demonstrable violations of rights. You can do great harm and then not have to pay, not have to
00:49:46.100say anything. So those Japanese Americans who lost their lands and were rounded up, we don't owe you
00:49:51.720anything. No, that's not acceptable. And it's more complicated the longer we wait, which is why I0.99
00:49:59.780I think it's urgent. I think it's something we should be dealing with now. But again, for me, begins with the truth telling. I think it begins with understanding sector by sector. If those corporations had issued those reports talking honestly about their history, we would just be in a different place now.
00:50:18.780First of all, they wouldn't have retreated from it just because somebody said, we don't like that.
00:50:22.200They could point to the problem, say, you may be willing to tolerate this problem, but we're not.
00:50:27.400And I think that people would support that.
00:50:30.260But because they didn't do that, we're in this kind of loop.
00:50:33.700And that's the way I think the process of repair, the process of remedy, the process of reparations, all of that has to be rooted in that same thinking.
00:50:42.400But I think it's important to connect it with the way we think about harm in virtually every other context.
00:51:05.860It's just what happens when there's a violation of the law or a violation of rights.
00:51:10.840We just haven't extended that when it comes to human rights and civil rights.
00:51:13.820And when you hear people in the reparations side, particularly as we've battled the reparations question, and there's been a dozen variants of reparations, it's not just cash contributions.
00:51:29.080I mean, that was sort of the headlines was just we're writing checks.
00:51:33.240And then it's starting to check off other ways we can be repairers of the breach.
00:52:19.080I just think it's we don't disconnect from our history.
00:52:24.020The soldiers who battled and prevailed in World War Two won our freedom.
00:52:31.640Had they not won, we'd be living a very different life. And we owe them something because they fought that battle for us. And just like we can't disconnect from what they achieve for us and say, well, I don't owe them anything because I wasn't here then. I wasn't live then.
00:52:48.260it's just dishonest. Of course you are benefiting from that. And I, you know, I just think it's not
00:52:55.360that complicated when you actually get into it. I look at the landscape of this state, Alabama.
00:53:02.900You know, we've got all of these counties that are black belt counties. They have many of the
00:53:06.680majority black populations. They're some of the poorest counties in America. And if you dig deep1.00
00:53:12.680into the question why, they also had the largest populations of enslaved people. In the 19th
00:53:18.160century, hundreds of thousands of people were trafficked to this state. They were forced to
00:53:24.220labor. They created great wealth for the landowners, many of whom still own the land.
00:53:30.900And that allowed their children to get education, to have opportunities. It's very hard to disconnect
00:53:37.140from that. Whereas these enslaved people were then denied any opportunities. They were forced
00:53:42.500into sharecropping and tenant farming. And throughout the 20th century, those white landowners0.93
00:53:47.280kept manufacturing out of the South because they didn't want competition for cheap labor.
00:53:52.800And so we said no to manufacturing in Alabama, in many parts of the state.
00:53:56.900And manufacturing went to the Midwest. And so here we are now in the 21st century,
00:54:02.64050 years behind the rest of the country when it comes to creating manufacturing jobs for poor
00:54:07.940white people and poor black people for middle income white. And that's because of the decision0.72
00:54:12.360making of those landowners two generations ago who were trying to exploit low-skilled
01:07:16.360Yeah, well, we have to be very sober about the threat that we are facing. I mean, this is the
01:07:19.620first time in my life when I am I don't see that institution as a place that will protect the
01:07:27.200rights of the vulnerable against the powerful in your life in my life until very recently because
01:07:32.520I was born in the 50s after Brown and even though it was never easy you know and I've been going
01:07:39.820into court protecting children who were sentenced to life without parole and the court has been an
01:07:44.300ally and recognizing the cruelty of that these death penalty cases that I've argued you know0.80
01:07:48.380we couldn't have gotten the majority of people to say don't execute the intellectually disabled or
01:07:52.100children. But that court was committed to enforcing the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel
01:07:57.440and unusual punishment. And they became an institutional player committed to the Constitution
01:08:05.320even when it's unpopular. None of those civil rights rulings were popular. Loving versus
01:08:10.560Virginia that banned interracial, bans on interracial. It wasn't popular. I've got the
01:08:14.540polling that bears that up. Unbelievable. I believe it. And so you have to have an institution
01:08:20.540that is prepared to stand against an angry majority that wants this thing because it
01:08:27.020satiates their bigotry. And I think we've had a process that has become much more ideological.
01:08:36.620cool. And you see it playing out over the last decade. I think in the 1990s, the Senate would
01:08:45.620have never refused to give process to a Supreme Court nominee because they didn't like the party
01:08:53.160in power. That's something we did during the Obama years, and it set a terrible precedent.
01:08:59.580And now we're just in this game playing. And the consequence of that is that I do worry about
01:09:04.340that court. I think it can be restored. I think it can be redeemed. But we can't be naive about
01:09:12.660what we're seeing. And I think that the most recent rulings, particularly in the voting
01:09:17.420rights, that plays that out, bears that out. I mean, nothing is more fundamental to the story
01:09:22.540of America than how we overcame this historic opposition to full political participation
01:09:29.300for African-Americans. And we've only had it for a short period of time. And now the court has
01:09:35.680gutted it as if somehow that history doesn't exist, that doesn't apply anymore. And I just
01:09:41.680think it would be naive to imagine that they wouldn't do the same thing in virtually every
01:09:45.660other context. And in fact, you have people who've been appointed to the bench at the lower federal
01:09:51.200courts who are asked, do you support Brown versus the Board of Education? And they won't say yes.
01:09:56.600Yes, they won't answer. And so I think that, you know, there is a real threat to all of that progress when people have created these new narratives.
01:10:09.700Again, you have elected officials say, oh, no, the people who the civil rights movement was bad because it would victimize white men and all this kind of narrative stuff.0.50
01:10:19.160And people will embrace these things. You're seeing this rise of just wildly racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric.
01:10:26.600that no longer is disqualifying. That's not disqualifying. And so, yeah, I think it would
01:10:32.140be naive. And so I don't think we can just say, oh, the court wouldn't do the right thing on that
01:10:38.400and just go away. We have to see that as a challenge that has to be met. And it took a
01:10:45.460long time to get the U.S. Supreme Court to the point where they would rule favorably in Brown
01:10:49.620versus Board of Education. The court of the 20s, the court of the 30s, the court of the 40s would
01:10:53.840not have made that ruling either. And it took a lot to get the court where it finally made that
01:10:59.540right decision. And it will take something to get the court back to that place. But I think that's
01:11:05.240where we need our court. We need a branch of power in this country that will resist and stand against
01:11:12.100the ebbs and flows of any political movement that is fueled by fear and anger and it wants a certain
01:11:19.380thing at the expense of another group. I think that's essential in a democracy. And it's not
01:11:24.240just in America. It's global. You see this all over the world, and there are countries all over
01:11:28.380the world where judicial branches are being undermined by these political currents. But
01:11:33.640once you lose that autonomous, independent commitment to the rule of law, it becomes
01:11:40.760very easy for things to go very bad very quickly. I was in a meeting I'll never forget, though,
01:11:48.140i i i never i wish i recorded with revan lawson in the peak in southern california
01:11:56.440um all the activity out on the streets yeah uh with the leaders of the blm movement and it was
01:12:05.580a small community meeting with the governor and the mayor uh and everybody goes around the room
01:12:12.940And then Larson starts to lay into everybody.
01:13:19.100And Reverend Lawson said, I understand.
01:13:21.440But that just means you're not ready for this part of the movement.
01:13:25.020And I think the same is going to be necessary.
01:13:27.300I, you know, there's no, I say we need an era of truth and justice,
01:13:33.800truth and restoration, truth and reconciliation, truth and repair,
01:13:37.380because we can't correct, we can't undo 400 years of harm in a year or in two years or three years
01:13:44.940in a single march or in a single moment. It begins something, but we have to prepare ourselves. This
01:13:50.340is a marathon. It is not a sprint. And that just means you have to be prepared to do something
01:13:55.040really hard. And, you know, it's an ongoing process. I tell people all the time, you know,
01:14:02.760even as I'm getting older, I'm realizing I have to do things I didn't think I would ever have to do.
01:14:08.800And I really do. I've started saying these things I never imagined I'd hear myself say. But
01:14:13.420here recently I've been saying, you know, I'm prepared to represent the 10 million Black people
01:14:19.360who were enslaved in America. When people start trying to erase their story, erase their history,
01:14:24.400minimize their struggle, those people will suffer immense trauma and abuse and constant sorrow.
01:14:31.980And we cannot let that be erased. And so I'm going to advocate for them. I'm prepared to advocate for the millions of black people who were terrorized by our tolerance of lynching. I want to do more to represent everybody in this country who had to deal with the humiliation of segregation and Jim Crow, because if we don't articulate the harm for them, we can't get justice for their children.
01:14:52.280And it sounds like a little bit out there, but I really feel it. I really believe it. And it's a whole new challenge to say we're going to take that on. But it's the one I think that, you know, I and others have to take on.
01:15:06.880And I think that's what Reverend Lawson would affirm. And that's what I want to say to everybody. It's like, you've got to commit now. You've got to be willing to do things. You know, I talked to some people and they're like, well, I don't like that person because they said this and they did this and I don't like that.
01:15:24.120you know, I grew up in a generation of formerly disenfranchised people who said sometimes we're
01:15:30.900never going to get perfect candidates to vote for. And they, I was taught some, you know,
01:15:36.520you have to make a choice between bad and worse sometimes, but you absolutely vote for bad because
01:15:41.380that is better than worse. It is the strategy for progress. And because of that, we can make
01:15:46.600bad better and then we can make better good. And then we can get from good to, that's a process,
01:15:51.100but we don't insist on, that's an elite, that's a privileged perspective. The only people who can
01:15:55.780really do that are people who aren't impacted by these political shifts. And there are a lot of
01:16:00.700people who aren't impacted by these things that are saying a lot of things that I just think are
01:16:06.160unhealthy for how we move forward. And so what I'd be saying is that we've got to commit to doing
01:16:11.980hard things. What's the thing that's uncomfortable that you're doing? What's the hard thing that
01:16:16.760you're doing? What's the challenging thing? When somebody is saying something that sounds really
01:16:20.380great and you want to infer, but you know it's not smart. How are you dealing with that? And
01:16:25.100that's what I feel the need to say over and over again. And I'm here in Montgomery, Alabama. This
01:16:33.620is a political environment that is very challenging, but this is where I believe I'm
01:16:41.880supposed to be. And we are trying to make Montgomery, Alabama the most important place
01:16:47.400in America to come if you really want to engage with this history of harm. And what inspires me
01:16:53.120is that if we can create the landscape that we've created here, if we can create the footprint that
01:16:58.140we've created here that deals honestly with slavery and lynching and segregation, there's
01:17:01.500not another place in America that can say, oh, well, they did that in Montgomery, Alabama,
01:17:04.900but we can't possibly do that here. And that's the power of facing the hard things and just
01:17:13.500pushing through it. And that's what the civil rights movement was all about. When people
01:17:18.240gathered on the Emmett Pettis Bridge in March of 1965, they weren't under an illusion that nothing
01:17:24.220bad could happen. They didn't think, oh, we'll be fine. Nobody's going to get violent. They knew
01:17:28.780there was a real risk of that. And if they didn't know at the first march, they certainly knew
01:17:33.020at the second march. And yet they went. And I think it's going to take that kind of commitment.
01:17:39.160And it's just, I say to people all the time, you've got to be willing to do uncomfortable and inconvenient things to create the kind of change that we desperately needed.
01:17:48.820And it's sometimes frustrating and disappointing to be strategic, to be tactical.
01:17:56.880But I just, as somebody who's been in courtrooms in very difficult places for a very long time, in front of institutions that were very resistant, I'm persuaded that that's the way we make progress.
01:19:34.940I think it's really a replication of counter-narrative work that we've seen throughout history. Whenever a movement emerges that advances the concerns of the workers or people who have been historically excluded or disfavored, there has to be a counter-narrative that makes it seem like it's dangerous, like that's not healthy.
01:19:58.000and censorship and silencing has been a historic trend. So when abolitionists were making progress
01:20:08.080and ending slavery by talking about the immorality of it, they got enslaved people
01:20:13.500to write their narratives. Narratives, 12 Years a Slave is a film version of an actual narrative
01:20:20.540written by Solomon Northrup, who details his experience. What Southern states did was make it
01:20:29.460illegal for anyone to be in possession of abolitionist literature. White people could0.80
01:20:35.640go to jail or prison. Black people, enslaved people would be killed, would be executed for1.00
01:20:40.440just having. So the way they were going to deal with that threat is to eliminate the power of1.00
01:20:46.240the narrative through censorship, through threat and violence. And the same thing happened after
01:20:51.780the federal troops left. They didn't want people talking about multiracial coalition,
01:21:00.120multiracial democracy, and they used violence and threat to eliminate that. The massacre of
01:21:05.200Wilmington, the coup that displaced a multiracial government. And that was true throughout the1.00
01:21:11.70020th century, which is why they bombed Ida B. Wells' office in Memphis. It's why she had to
01:21:19.840flee to Chicago. It's why the newspapers here were so hostile to civil rights activists and0.99
01:21:25.880all of that. So it's the same strategy. They think that people have been ignorant for so long and
01:21:34.200been comfortable with this ignorance, they just have to get back to that point of ignorance.
01:21:37.680And what they realize is that, oh, wait, when you start talking honestly about all the horrible things that happened with slavery, people start to feel like, oh, my God, we should make a commitment to never do that again.
01:21:48.780When you document in detail all of the horrors of mob violence, mobs going to jails, pulling black people out and torturing them on the courthouse lawn, in front of their children, they brought their children to witness this.
01:22:01.420When you start detailing that, people say, oh, wait a minute, that seems really wrong.
01:22:06.860when you give them the statutes of segregation, when you let them see, oh, no, it's against the
01:22:13.180law for a black and white person to play chess or checkers together. It's hard for people to
01:22:19.980defend it. And so the strategy is, let's just keep them from knowing any of that. It's the
01:22:26.000tobacco industry strategy. Let's just hide all the evidence of how tobacco contributes to smoke,
01:22:31.660to lung disease and cancer. Let's hide the evidence of what fossil fuels do. It's the same
01:22:37.920idea, but you can only do it when you have the power to implement that strategy. And that's
01:22:44.860the dynamic that we're in right now. And, you know, the same is true for progressive voices
01:22:53.300as well. We also have to be thoughtful about what we are offering people, because in some ways,
01:22:59.780You can create a narrative that is off of what I believe is the narrative that's at the heart of the struggle. And so, you know, I think because you have the power to ban books you just don't like, you can also get into trouble by using censorship as a way of kind of controlling a certain kind of environment.
01:23:25.980And I don't think that's healthy. I don't, you know, I don't think anybody should ban Harper Lee to Kill a Mockingbird because you don't like it because of the way it characterized.
01:23:36.820You know, I've criticized that book for a very long time, but I don't want it banned.
01:23:41.040Right. And certainly they've got people on the right who say, oh, no, I want to ban the book because it makes it seem like crusading against racial discrimination is a noble thing.
01:23:49.440And so I feel like that has to be part of what we identify and recognize. But yeah, I think it's a very common historical trend practice. That's what the Nazis did. It's what a lot of governments are doing in many parts of the world. They don't want you to.
01:24:08.500I mean, you look at banning people's access to the Internet, banning access to certain kinds of information.
01:24:14.460It's a way of maintaining a certain kind of control.
01:24:18.220I think it should be rejected in a democracy that is healthy.
01:24:22.120And that's why it's so objectionable when you see it playing out in some of these states.
01:26:26.580I'm Lacey Mosley, author, actor, stand up comedian, creator and host of Scam Goddess podcast, the true crime comedy podcast all about robbery, fraud and those who practice it.
01:26:37.060Each week I bring on incredible guests like Conan O'Brien, Iowa Debrey, Lamorne Morris and Nicole Byer.
01:26:43.380Oh, I scammed them. What? I could talk to you for an hour.
01:26:46.560You're a generational yapper like me. That's why I had to make yapping a job.
01:27:27.500One of the things we're tolerating is, and you referenced,
01:27:30.980300,000 to now two-plus million folks,
01:27:35.020largest system of its type anywhere in the world.
01:27:38.300Obviously, so much of your work is defined in that space.
01:27:40.980You referenced in passing, but it's important to sort of revisit it,
01:27:45.340life without the possibility of all for a 13-year-old.
01:27:48.720And the injustices of people with severe mental illness or dementia being condemned to death.
01:27:55.620The death penalty itself, the death penalty, specifically a vestige of a narrative that we haven't fully advanced, convict leasing, benching, obvious death penalty, mass incarceration.
01:35:13.960And the beautiful thing is it's liberating, you know, Justice O'Connor would go around and say, well, I'm in your state.
01:35:20.060You don't have the death penance. You should feel so lucky because it's just a burden.
01:35:23.900And she was up close to it. And she wasn't a big, you know, progressive liberal.
01:35:27.880She just saw it up close. And and I do think that's where states have a critical role to play because that criminal justice policy is largely a state policy.
01:35:37.860Yeah. I'm I'm actually really pleased that the Biden administration commuted most of the death sentences before he left office, because I think it would be horrific now to be witnessing these spectacle executions, which is what we'd be seeing.
01:35:55.600But for that. And it's the reason why.
01:35:57.960You reminded me, forgive me, I forgot. I mean, with all the noise at the end of that administration, I forgot that's exactly what he did.
01:36:05.660Yeah. I mean, you know, and it was. And what we would be experiencing. That's right. And it wasn't an uncomplicated thing to achieve that. Yeah. But I think not only did it help the health of our federal criminal justice system, it wasn't a disaster. It was actually something that people were willing to see as appropriate, given where we are in this country.
01:36:30.54020, 25, highest number of deaths, executions, that is, in decades. But interestingly,
01:36:38.720among the lowest number of people sentenced to death.