00:00 - Hello, everyone.

00:02 - Welcome to the Pennsylvania Historical Association's opening plenary.

00:06 - For 2025.

00:08 - My name is Adam Bentz, and I'm the director of library

00:11 - and archives at the York County History Center.

00:13 - We're happy to work with them.

00:14 - I'm also the vice president.

00:17 - So we're thrilled to be able to bring the to Europe.

00:21 - The last time the met in York, as some of you know,

00:24 - was 1956.

00:28 - The program chair

00:29 - in 1956 was Doctor Henry James Young.

00:32 - And he is one of my predecessors in the role that I have right now.

00:37 - In 1956, he was working at the State Archives.

00:41 - So it's kind of a tradition that isn't a tradition.

00:44 - I mean, I'm glad we're back.

00:46 - And it was great people in York that brought in here.

00:49 - 69 years ago.

00:51 - And in, 2000, 94.

00:54 - I'll be happy to be here again.

00:58 - I'm going to get up

00:59 - off the stage here as soon as I can, but I would like to introduce,

01:04 - a man who just recently took over as our president

01:06 - and CEO of the York County History Center, Benjamin Neely.

01:10 - And he'll be doing a welcome to, the great facility that we're in tonight.

01:14 - Ben serves as our president and CEO, and he earned his master's

01:18 - degree in applied history from Shippensburg University,

01:21 - which is represented here tonight.

01:24 - And his career in public history has included leadership roles in various

01:28 - institutions, most recently the Berks History Center, where we got him away.

01:33 - Which we're very happy to do.

01:35 - And the Adams County Historical Society and Gettysburg,

01:39 - where he is executive director emeritus.

01:42 - Ben also served as president of PA museums,

01:45 - Pennsylvania's statewide museum commission. So,

01:49 - Ben, there he is.

02:00 - Welcome, everybody.

02:01 - Show of hands.

02:02 - Who was here the last time?

02:05 - There's going to be a prize.

02:07 - I, I really glad to join you this evening, and I.

02:11 - It's just a real pleasure to to have you here.

02:15 - A chance to reconnect with some folks that Doctor Berger

02:20 - folks I haven't seen in a long time.

02:22 - And to meet some new folks here tonight who are looking to break into the field.

02:26 - And it's it's great to see a mix of such veterans and newcomers coming together.

02:32 - And I think that's one of the greatest things about conferences like this.

02:37 - You said I've only been here just shy of three months.

02:40 - So all this incredible building and exhibits and such, I can take credit

02:44 - for absolutely none of it.

02:46 - But I get to, really enjoy it.

02:49 - And, I know the exhibits are quality because it is,

02:53 - they've been using them to fast track my own knowledge of our local history here.

02:58 - And, so the quality of them is outstanding, and the, really,

03:04 - you can tell that there was, a lot of expertise and

03:08 - and tear and thought about the visitors

03:11 - who would come and enjoy the exhibits when you see them.

03:14 - The History Center,

03:15 - if you're not familiar with it, here we have our steam plant museum here,

03:19 - which is two floors of exhibits, plus this room.

03:22 - I can count it because we have the organ in here.

03:26 - But we also have just down the street here, we have our colonial complex

03:29 - that, features four different buildings, to, feature that area.

03:33 - And then just a little bit further down the street.

03:36 - We have an agricultural industrial museum that shows the innovation

03:40 - of York County and and agricultural and manufacturing history.

03:44 - So really wonderful sights here.

03:46 - I hope if you have never had a chance to take him in, that you,

03:50 - maybe you can do so while you're here or when you come back.

03:53 - And it was a 2094.

03:58 - The, the, you know what?

04:00 - Before I move on to the

04:01 - I want to mention that our research library here is incredible.

04:05 - So it's, a tremendous place for people to come in and,

04:09 - do your genealogy, property, research and everything else.

04:12 - I'm sure many of you spent many, many hours in places

04:16 - like what we have here, but it is a very special place. And,

04:21 - it's one of my favorite things about this kind of work is,

04:24 - is watching people connect with their own history,

04:27 - in the library and making that discovery of,

04:30 - you know, who their great, great great grandparents are.

04:33 - And, and feeling connected and having sort of

04:36 - a, a sense of place and time that, that begins to develop.

04:39 - I think that's a really special thing.

04:41 - And what I love doing it here.

04:43 - And local history museums is not only do we often have,

04:46 - you know, paper documents

04:48 - tracking your life, that occasionally we actually have 3D objects, things

04:52 - that our ancestors produced interact with are also part of the collection.

04:55 - And I think that's just a wonderful combination to bring together

04:58 - to help people get interested in history.

05:03 - So this has been a big year for the organization.

05:05 - We've just, passed our first year of operating within this building

05:10 - and everything that we could have hoped for as an organization in terms of

05:14 - a visitor ship and engagement with schools has all trended in the right direction.

05:19 - And we've seen everything rise by 50% or more,

05:23 - which is absolutely fantastic result given all the years

05:27 - and effort and work that they put into this building.

05:30 - And being the new person I have to be careful.

05:32 - I'm not coming up with any big ideas right away because they're tired

05:35 - and they need a break

05:36 - some time just to get used to it and enjoy what they've accomplished here.

05:41 - I think, working in history right now

05:44 - is it's a really interesting time in here in America.

05:48 - 250 so we're doing, we're seeing and see lots of,

05:52 - publications and programs and exhibits.

05:56 - We're going to get a new Ken Burns documentary, and I think anybody's mad

05:59 - at that.

06:00 - So it's that's really exciting. But,

06:04 - we also, I think particularly here,

06:07 - you know, museums like ours, we have another important job

06:11 - because we're also seeing our colleagues at the federal level who have had to,

06:17 - you know, alter interpretation, remove exhibits.

06:21 - And, I feel like

06:24 - we're in the place where we have to draw the line and make sure that,

06:27 - we're still doing the hard history and we're still telling the whole story.

06:31 - And it's not always a pretty story.

06:34 - But that's our job.

06:35 - That's what we have to do.

06:36 - And so right now, it really matters what we do.

06:41 - And, so it's

06:44 - I think, you know, it's a good place to be.

06:46 - We're in an important spot.

06:48 - And, I know I'm preaching to the choir here.

06:53 - We, we got we just got to really hold that line.

07:02 - So I'm going to

07:03 - close on the applause line that I.

07:06 - I it's a pleasure to be with you this evening.

07:09 - And thank you so much for coming here and and and visiting our facility.

07:12 - I hope you really enjoy your work and I had a chance to,

07:16 - to take in its, its history as, as well as learn from all the incredible

07:21 - panelists and speakers that we have with us during the conference.

07:24 - So let's have a nice evening here.

07:28 - Thank.

07:35 - Come on.

07:44 - Let everybody come and get to see you.

07:46 - Good. All right, all right.

07:48 - Good evening.

07:48 - It's nice to be here with all of you this evening.

07:50 - My name is Jenny Mae, and I'm the president of,

07:55 - very honored to introduce our evening's

07:57 - plenary speaker, Doctor Peter Levy.

08:00 - Professor emeritus Levy taught us history at York College for over 30 years.

08:06 - He specialized in recent American history,

08:08 - specifically the history of the modern civil rights movement.

08:11 - In the 1960s.

08:14 - He is the author of over a dozen books,

08:16 - including The Great Uprising, Race Riots, and Urban America.

08:20 - During the 1960s, which focuses on revolts in three cities

08:25 - Baltimore, Cambridge, Maryland, and York, Pennsylvania.

08:29 - Most recently, he co-edited Black Citizens and American Democracy.

08:35 - Fighting for the soul of a nation, which came out this year.

08:38 - Correct.

08:40 - He's been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships,

08:43 - including York College's.

08:45 - Presidential Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Professional Activity,

08:49 - and three times was selected to participate in a National Endowment

08:53 - for the Humanities summer seminar, including one at Harvard University.

08:59 - In his retirement,

09:01 - he spent time transforming his research into historical dramas.

09:06 - One of his plays, The Second Coming of Harriet Tubman,

09:10 - which examines the life and ideas of militant civil

09:13 - rights activist Gloria Richardson, enjoyed a staged reading at the Baltimore.

09:18 - Playwrights Festival at the Reginald Lewis Museum

09:21 - of African-American Culture and History last spring.

09:27 - Tonight, he will be speaking on the Great uprising

09:30 - race revolts in urban America during the 1960s.

09:34 - York, Pennsylvania A Case study.

09:36 - Please join me in welcoming Doctor Levy.

09:45 - Wow. If I'd known it's going to be

09:47 - this big of a crowd, I wouldn't have come. I.

09:50 - You know, I think one of the last conferences I went to,

09:53 - I actually was on a panel with my daughter who followed in my footsteps.

09:57 - And for those who've ever been to like an H.R.

09:59 - conference, you'll appreciate this.

10:01 - We got the Sunday morning 830 slot.

10:05 - I was on the panel with her.

10:07 - Her mom, our my wife was in as well, was in the audience

10:10 - and maybe two other people.

10:13 - And she's a pretty tough critic, so I'm glad that,

10:18 - I have a little more appreciative crowd.

10:19 - I want to thank the Pennsylvania.

10:21 - Historical Association for inviting me to make this presentation.

10:25 - I also want to thank the York History Center,

10:28 - for hosting this and having me here.

10:31 - I was telling someone when I first came in that, you know, I've done

10:34 - a lot of research at the old History Center

10:36 - and probably most of the photographs and a lot of the images of newspapers,

10:40 - I got from New York History Center, probably off microfilm at one point.

10:45 - Fortunately, some of them have come out on Newspapers.com now.

10:51 - I'm a little out of practice, though.

10:53 - Well, I will admit that.

10:54 - So I have given a lecture in three years.

10:57 - I've been to play readings, which is a lot different. It's

11:00 - a little more nerve wracking, so I will do my best to, you know, keep on time.

11:07 - I want to begin

11:09 - with just a little overview of my book.

11:13 - Just because the lecture I'm going to give is, as was noted, is is drawn from that.

11:18 - So I'm just going to go to the introduction

11:20 - because I think I said it better there than I'm probably going to do from memory.

11:24 - Just to try to provide a sense of, of my overall argument

11:28 - between 1963 and 1972, America

11:31 - experienced over 750 urban revolts.

11:35 - Upwards of 525 cities were affected,

11:38 - including nearly everyone with a black population.

11:41 - Over 50,000.

11:43 - The two largest waves of uprisings came

11:45 - during the summer of 1967 and during Holy Week in 1968.

11:51 - Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

11:55 - In these two years alone, 125 people were killed,

11:58 - nearly 7000 were injured, and approximately 45,000 arrests were made

12:03 - and property damage topped 127 million, or approximately

12:07 - 1 billion, in today's dollars.

12:10 - And this does not take into account a large wave of prison revolts

12:13 - and racially oriented unrest at the nation's high schools.

12:17 - Considered collectively with the advantage of hindsight, these revolts constituted

12:22 - a great uprising, a term neither contemporary pundits

12:25 - and social scientist nor historians have employed.

12:28 - Like the Great War and the Great Depression,

12:31 - the Great Uprising, when one of the central developments

12:34 - in modern American history.

12:39 - As you might have gleaned,

12:42 - I came to this project in somewhat of a roundabout way.

12:49 - Many, many years ago,

12:51 - when I first moved to this area, I grew up on the.

12:55 - West Coast, went to graduate school in New York, had completed my dissertation.

12:59 - Maybe there's a few of you out there who've been asked what your next book

13:03 - project.

13:04 - And I was teaching a course in the civil rights

13:07 - movement, and I had a sense there was a gap in the literature.

13:10 - Not really much had been discussed about the latter half of the 1960s.

13:14 - Most of the focus on the civil rights movement had been in the Deep South,

13:18 - and I decided to do something

13:19 - on Cambridge, Maryland, because I heard there was an alleged riot.

13:23 - They are caused by a man named Mae Brown.

13:25 - I didn't know

13:26 - Cambridge, Maryland, from Cambridge, England, or Cambridge, Massachusetts.

13:30 - I had never heard even of Ocean City.

13:34 - God forbid if you have children.

13:37 - So I wrote a book called Civil War on Race Street,

13:39 - and I'm not going to touch on it here, though the play that I'm writing

13:42 - and Gloria Richardson largely focuses on what took place in Cambridge in the 1960s.

13:48 - Out of that, some scholars and teachers and,

13:52 - administrators at the University of Baltimore asked me to participate

13:56 - in a study of a revolt that it took place, in 1968, in Baltimore,

14:01 - following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

14:05 - It was one of the largest revolts of the entire Arab,

14:09 - particularly one of the largest.

14:10 - It took place after King was assassinated.

14:13 - And out of that, we collected a bunch of our presentations

14:16 - into a book called Baltimore 68.

14:19 - Riots and Rebirth.

14:21 - All along, I was teaching at York College.

14:25 - I never

14:25 - heard of a race revolt taking place in York.

14:29 - Most of the studies of, uprisings, revolt, riots,

14:33 - focused on 67 whites and 65.

14:38 - I knew things had taken place after,

14:41 - King had been assassinated, but usually that was that was the end date.

14:44 - We really, you know, there wasn't a sense of kind

14:46 - of the riots continued on into the late 60s, early 1970s.

14:50 - Plus, York is not a big city.

14:52 - You know, it didn't get all that much fame.

14:55 - And I didn't become aware of it until I taught a,

14:59 - senior seminar course.

15:00 - And one of my students who,

15:05 - was a non trad students and sorry, guys

15:08 - who weren't non trad students, Jamie,

15:11 - notwithstanding here, the non trad students are always your best students.

15:15 - I mean, they really know why they're in college.

15:18 - She wrote a paper called, and I still have a printed copy.

15:23 - This was before computers.

15:24 - You know, this is before the world Wide Web.

15:26 - It's called ten days.

15:27 - The 1969 riots in York, Pennsylvania.

15:32 - She asked when she wrote it, though.

15:33 - Could she not name the names of any of the people?

15:37 - She did a number of the oral histories.

15:38 - She was doing oral histories, which she was terrified.

15:41 - Still,

15:43 - having watched the movie Marathon Man.

15:45 - Now, this is going to be an age thing here.

15:47 - You certain people might remember Marathon Man?

15:49 - It was one of them. Just in Hoffman's early movies.

15:51 - And there's a history student running around.

15:55 - Central Park being chased by the Mafia.

15:58 - Having seen the movie marathon Man,

16:00 - I wasn't going to make Carol reveal her sources for this senior paper.

16:03 - I didn't want one of my students end up like Dustin Hoffman in that.

16:07 - Well, anyway, back to the big point.

16:09 - So I started to learn about the revolt in York, largely through my students.

16:15 - Some of

16:16 - you may know, around the year 1999 was,

16:20 - 30th anniversary of the revolts and the newspapers,

16:24 - some people weren't integrally involved in this, decided

16:27 - to run special edition on it and out of this ultimately came a decision

16:31 - by the DA's office and the assistant DA's office

16:34 - to reopen,

16:38 - some investigations of two people had been killed

16:40 - during this the revolt in York and reopened the those cases.

16:45 - And that's all of a sudden New York was headline news.

16:47 - And so I had more students writing.

16:50 - I still wasn't intending to write or research on York,

16:53 - but then I started to think, well, maybe what I could do is I could do a case study

16:57 - of, of a large town Baltimore, a middle

17:01 - sized town, York, of a smaller town, Cambridge.

17:05 - And out of this, I could test some of the theories that were about

17:11 - the urban revolts of the 1960s.

17:13 - And so I decided to pitch this book, and somehow it was picked up.

17:18 - I asked fairly simple questions, pretty much the same questions

17:21 - the Kerner Commission had asked, in 1967, when Lyndon Johnson had appointed it,

17:27 - following the first national wave

17:30 - of urban revolts, kind of what

17:33 - took place, why did they take place and what should be done?

17:37 - So in my case, it's what was done.

17:40 - And then as a good historian, you know, trained

17:42 - since graduate school, I started to do a literature review.

17:46 - For those who've never been to graduate school,

17:48 - you just try to see what other people have written.

17:50 - So you don't just

17:51 - keep reinventing the wheel and you try to figure out what to do.

17:53 - You can say,

17:56 - most simply, you know, it's never this simple, but most simply,

17:59 - there were there were two schools of thought.

18:06 - My glasses back actually gets correct.

18:10 - On one side, there were those who argued

18:14 - that the riots were created by the riffraff.

18:18 - That was a term developed by a Harvard political scientist

18:21 - named Edward Banfield, and made the argument that people rioted.

18:25 - These are his words for the fun and profit. It

18:30 - on the other side, the Kerner Commission disagreed with that.

18:33 - They they argued, no, it wasn't just a riff raff.

18:35 - And it wasn't for the fun and profit of it that the riots were response

18:39 - to social and economic conditions that existed in America

18:43 - and in its most famous words, that America was becoming two societies,

18:47 - one white, one black, and that essentially white racism had caused

18:53 - the riots.

18:54 - Now, I don't have a picture of Banned Fields book here because most people

18:57 - never read Banfield what they read was a popularized version of it.

19:01 - Eugene Meth and wrote a book called The Riot Makers.

19:04 - No, I didn't know who he met them,

19:06 - but so he was actually the one of the publishers editors of Reader's Digest.

19:10 - And a lot of Americans read Reader's Digest.

19:12 - So this notion that riots were for the fun and profit of it,

19:18 - and they were apolitical, and that people did it really for the fun,

19:24 - got wide play.

19:26 - Now the Kerner Commission got wide play.

19:28 - But we'll talk about this a little bit.

19:29 - But there was also a lot of pushback against a Kerner Commission,

19:33 - including amongst prominent politicians

19:35 - in America, some of whom made their way to York.

19:39 - Now, if you were to go further in time, because there's a vast

19:43 - scholarship, mostly written by sociologists and political scientists

19:47 - at the time and immediately years afterwards.

19:49 - But if you go a little forward in time,

19:50 - there have been some crucial books written by historians over the last 20, 30 years

19:54 - that have, I would say, kind of a variant on the Kerner Commission.

19:58 - The most famous is a book by a guy named Tom Sugrue who wrote a case

20:01 - study of Detroit, and it's called The Origins of the Urban Crisis.

20:04 - And it was in scoring. What you like to do is go back to origins.

20:07 - I remember in graduate school, the most famous book on the revolution

20:10 - was The Origins of the American Revolution.

20:12 - Bernard Baylin had a kind of an intellectual history of it.

20:16 - And, you

20:17 - know, he rooted it in white racism, but really also

20:21 - not just white flight of people, but of jobs, lack of housing,

20:26 - and also of particularly, patterns of policing

20:30 - or kind of what might be considered kind of a, a criminal criminal

20:33 - justice system in a city like cities like Detroit.

20:37 - And others like John Hersey had kind of touched on this

20:39 - when he wrote a famous book on the Algiers Motel,

20:43 - incident in which a bunch of people were essentially slaughtered,

20:46 - you know,

20:49 - another story named Gerald Ford looked at the Watts Rebellion.

20:52 - He went even farther back.

20:54 - He went back to the 1950s and looked at even the way

20:56 - that McCarthyism had impacted the civil rights movement.

20:59 - You know, he's trying to show kind of dialectically how the,

21:03 - the failure of even the civil rights movement to really address

21:06 - economic issues had then led it to turn to a certain direction,

21:11 - which meant that the problems of the ghetto went unaddressed.

21:15 - Most recently, a Harvard historian now Yale law professor actually named

21:19 - Elizabeth Hinton, has focused not just on the 1960s, but takes it

21:23 - well forward and focuses primarily in the ways that police violence, violence

21:28 - was the cause of urban rebellions during the 1960s.

21:34 - Now, if we were to look at polls and I just have to have enough

21:37 - of contemporary polls taken at the time and kind of set

21:41 - what we see as the public, by and large, bought the Eugene methane.

21:44 - Edward Mansfield. Yeah.

21:46 - So the first poll, which I know it's a little hard to read even for me,

21:50 - but it's basically saying, you know, do you agree that the civil disorders,

21:55 - of our nation,

21:58 - were caused because we were to societies

22:01 - only 36% of the national total agrees.

22:04 - You know, 36% of whites agree with us, 51% disagree.

22:08 - They don't think it's

22:09 - because really of racism because or at least historical racism.

22:12 - But then if we go to 2015.

22:14 - So this poll was taken right after the Freddie.

22:16 - Gray, rebellion, we find pretty much the same answer.

22:20 - It's a slightly differently worded questions that, you know, pollsters

22:23 - change the words they use. But, you know,

22:27 - did these rebellions grow out of long standing frustrations

22:30 - about police mistreatment, or did people use this as an excuse to live 32%,

22:36 - of whites say,

22:38 - mistreatment,

22:40 - 60% of blacks say no mistreatment.

22:43 - So there's it just there is this divide in America.

22:46 - So then I say, okay, let's do this case study.

22:48 - Now, we're not going to do a case study of all three towns.

22:50 - I'm going to turn to York to see at least where York falls

22:53 - on this continuum.

22:57 - Just like skip a page.

23:03 - So the first thing I think we find is that most African-Americans

23:06 - who lived in York at the time had concluded by the late

23:10 - 60s, not far earlier, that York was the promised Land.

23:13 - That wasn't,

23:16 - one thing we find in community after community.

23:19 - And this should be pretty well known territory for probably most historians

23:22 - here, is that residential segregation just was predominated in city after city.

23:29 - Particularly in the North, more so actually in the north than in the south.

23:32 - We often hear the term redlining, but redlining was really only

23:35 - one of the reasons why residential segregation predominated.

23:38 - You know, even before redlining and even after redlining,

23:42 - they were real estate practices that that perpetuated that

23:46 - there had been racial covenants, written into people's, housing deeds.

23:50 - I remember once I was talking about this, and one of my students went home

23:54 - and pulled out

23:54 - her old pulled out her deed, and the racial covenant was still there.

23:58 - It just wasn't enforceable.

23:59 - I mean, if you go find old deeds and titles, probably maybe

24:03 - go back to New York history.

24:04 - I know the York History Museum doesn't always have time for deeds,

24:06 - but if we were going to the county clerk's office, we would we would find that,

24:10 - I show this map in part because one of my students became

24:13 - interested in that subject, decided, well, can we use GIS to begin to study York?

24:18 - GIS then was kind of at the cutting edge of time, a little harder to do that.

24:21 - And we did this.

24:22 - But, you know, it showed the dark red is where

24:25 - the vast majority of African-Americans lived and the lighter pink.

24:29 - So where we see that in most of the city, there were, white neighborhoods.

24:34 - And and then there were neighborhoods that were predominantly black neighborhoods.

24:38 - And the image on the right here would show you, give you a sense

24:41 - of what much of the housing look like, in these black neighborhoods.

24:45 - In fact, at one point, the publisher of the new newspaper,

24:50 - you get sat down at the Lafayette Club, which was the club where the scenes

24:54 - of the city used to meet,

24:56 - and, was meeting with Mr.

24:58 - Schmidt, who was one of the

25:00 - get was meeting with Schmidt as one of the other scenes of the city.

25:02 - And Schmidt says, I can't, I can't eat my breakfast.

25:04 - Looking at these pictures,

25:06 - you know, and it's kind of central, take the pictures out of the newspapers and Mr.

25:10 - Get Responded will then do something about the housing conditions.

25:14 - And this isn't new.

25:15 - Nothing really unique about York here, but you know, so, you know,

25:18 - your housing in the black neighborhoods was particularly bad.

25:22 - Now, one thing that's actually misrepresented

25:23 - about this picture, it just because it was the limits of our GIS abilities

25:27 - is if we had looked at the suburbs, we would have found even lower percentage

25:31 - of African-Americans living in the suburbs in 1970.

25:35 - That's where this is a this is a GIS map from 1970 to 19 oh.

25:40 - It's 1965. Sorry.

25:42 - So that,

25:43 - you know, and the suburbs which were beginning to flourish in York,

25:46 - which were beginning to grow, there'll be a picture of that later on,

25:49 - that it wasn't just that it was black and white.

25:51 - The housing quality side was considerably different.

25:55 - There was a

25:56 - dual housing market in America, and part of the trouble of a dual market

25:59 - is African-Americans would pay a disproportionate part of their,

26:03 - income, for, for housing, they had less available, you know,

26:08 - if you if you could only buy in a, narrow market, it's

26:11 - kind of like a monopoly and you pay the price.

26:18 - The second problem we find with the police,

26:22 - we can start with a quote from a man named Robert Simpson.

26:24 - Now, people from York

26:25 - may know who Robert Simpson's people outside York probably won't.

26:29 - Robert Simpson, I believe, is still the head

26:33 - of the Christmas Attucks Center, which is essentially the black y and has

26:36 - had a prominent place in the city now for, I don't know, close to 100 years now.

26:40 - That's probably the best way to think about it.

26:42 - And, but he wasn't really on the route

26:45 - to necessarily be the head of the CIA back in the 1960s.

26:49 - And he said, you know, when we were kids, the Vander Grange, the Swedes

26:52 - and other racist police used to make you get off your front porch.

26:56 - Sweeney would declare you and put his dogs on us.

26:59 - He never gave us any respect.

27:01 - There was nothing you could do.

27:04 - Now. It wasn't just these policemen, though.

27:06 - They were getting their support from the top.

27:10 - The mayor of the city during this period was John Snyder,

27:13 - and he would walk through the streets with his canine dogs.

27:16 - And let's contextualize us.

27:18 - You know, if this wasn't York, we got to remember what was happening

27:21 - in Birmingham, Alabama, in 19, in the 1960s.

27:24 - I mean, I feel sorry for people who had German Shepherds at the time.

27:27 - So when the dogs, it's

27:29 - what they were being used for, they were being used to intimidate people.

27:32 - They were a symbol of of racial oppression.

27:37 - He also was known to call

27:39 - black people women and men darkies openly in public.

27:43 - So there was a little respect then for the black community.

27:47 - There were calls to get rid of, not just calls.

27:51 - It was actually reforms

27:52 - enacted by the city council to get rid of this canine force.

27:56 - But Snyder essentially got around it, refused to do so, just dragged his heels.

28:01 - And as we'll see in a few seconds, there were other examples of of of kind

28:05 - of, distrust of the police and police malfeasance.

28:10 - Now, one thing I found in looking at York and maybe in some other cities

28:13 - I've had in the kind of different a little bit from the Kerner Commission

28:15 - is, is that the Kerner Commission, rooted the rebellions in the conditions.

28:20 - I wrote them in the conditions, and then that blacks protested

28:24 - against these conditions and nothing was done about it.

28:28 - I have a colleague of mine named Jean Theoharis.

28:30 - She just wrote a wonderful book called King of the North.

28:33 - It's about Martin Luther King in the North.

28:35 - And Robert Schaefer asked me to review it, and I just told him tonight,

28:38 - which is thank you. That was a great book to review. But,

28:41 - Jean has looked at, what for years.

28:43 - And when whites exploded in 65.

28:45 - Now you need to remember what happens to voting.

28:47 - Rights Act was passed and everyone was celebrating.

28:50 - We have solved our racial problems.

28:52 - And a few weeks later, whites exploded.

28:54 - And, Pat Brown, who was a liberal governor from California, said, well,

28:58 - if anyone had told me that was a problem, I would have done something about it.

29:02 - And in fact, you know, she documents that, for years

29:06 - there had been protests by Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, by local activists

29:10 - against the police, against housing segregation,

29:14 - for school desegregation on and people hadn't done anything,

29:18 - in fact, one of the causes of rebellion and and what was that?

29:24 - The state had passed an open housing ordinance.

29:27 - This is years before the national government

29:30 - and in a referendum, the people overwhelmingly repealed.

29:33 - It said that, you know, the open housing, open housing law

29:36 - says you cannot discriminate when you sell your home.

29:39 - California passed a similar law.

29:41 - It actually had more loopholes.

29:43 - And the people said, we have the right to discriminate.

29:46 - And, you know, we have a right not to sell our homes.

29:50 - So likewise in York, there were protests.

29:53 - This is a protest image

29:54 - of a protest outside City Hall as early as 1963, 300 people.

29:59 - Now, let's contextualize that 300 people in a city of roughly 50,000

30:03 - multiply that times the size of Chicago, where there,

30:06 - you know, are the total size of the black population,

30:10 - you'd have a pot protest of ten, 20, 30, 40,000 people in the streets

30:14 - that might have caught national attention.

30:18 - So James Farmer, who was the head of core,

30:21 - you know, famous for leading the Freedom Rides, came to York.

30:25 - You know, we can see right here.

30:26 - He's he's slamming slum housing in York, but people aren't paying attention

30:31 - to James Farmer.

30:39 - To make matters worse,

30:41 - even when the state Senate and its Human Relations.

30:44 - Committee to investigate conditions in York and to hold hearings,

30:50 - there was no attempt by most of the leaders around the city

30:52 - to many of the top leaders to cooperate with that committee.

30:55 - This is the press release on the right, top right, you know, warning,

31:00 - HRC warning if you don't do something.

31:03 - This is in 1968.

31:04 - This is after the first wave of of rebellions in 67.

31:08 - This is after what took place after King was assassinated.

31:10 - Warning if you don't do something well, you're going to it's

31:13 - going to happen here as well.

31:17 - Mayor Snyder,

31:20 - he's not just Nonplused.

31:21 - He's he's he's obstinate.

31:23 - He's an obstacle in this.

31:25 - He walks out of the commission hearings, refusing to answer questions.

31:29 - One of the police officers who was most disliked in the community

31:32 - gets up and essentially warns one of the people who's

31:35 - going to testify that essentially they better watch out for themselves.

31:39 - Or else.

31:40 - And his boss doesn't reprimand them, doesn't doesn't,

31:45 - you know, make him take a leave without pay or something like that.

31:49 - Just, just he has the right to speak is the argument,

31:52 - which is a public citizen like it?

31:54 - I think he could have been restricted to a certain extent.

31:56 - Now, this may be,

31:58 - a little unfair, but at about the same time,

32:00 - the Chamber of Commerce,

32:03 - writes a book on your county and its history.

32:08 - It's a chamber of commerce.

32:09 - It's a glowing book.

32:12 - I mean, it's a chamber of commerce job, but, you know,

32:14 - this is York, and its argument is York is, like, perfect.

32:19 - It's the beautiful blend of rural and urban,

32:22 - old and new.

32:26 - And throughout

32:27 - our gleaming pictures, there's brand new

32:30 - suburban malls and, you know, women shopping at the malls,

32:33 - their kids playing, little league baseball, down the line.

32:37 - I mean, this is life magazine, kind of York.

32:41 - There are only 2 or 3 pictures of Black Falcon in that whole thing.

32:44 - There's there's one of a, I forgot, which I think it's at.

32:47 - He's gone in, but it might not be gone.

32:49 - I have in my notes, exchange student here.

32:53 - There's some kids at a local swimming hole,

32:56 - and I think there's one other at the bowling alley.

32:59 - That is it.

33:00 - Now, I'm not necessarily saying they're going to air their dirty

33:03 - long laundry, but this is an example, I think, of,

33:09 - an ostrich in a sand and

33:10 - refusing to kind of like, look at the picture and, and be honest.

33:14 - Now you have to wonder why.

33:16 - Yeah, I can't answer why that option.

33:18 - So even though I can only come up with two hypotheses, one, they thought that

33:22 - it just couldn't happen here.

33:26 - There's York,

33:28 - but the other why is the scarier one?

33:30 - They thought they had the power to stop it

33:33 - in the black population in York, percentage

33:35 - wise, was not that large, was roughly maybe 10 or 15% at the time.

33:39 - So they thought they had the power.

33:41 - Yeah.

33:42 - On the other hand, in cities like Detroit,

33:43 - which were which were approaching majority majority black,

33:47 - black, you had seen a similar obstinacy.

33:50 - You seen a similar obstinacy in law in Los Angeles.

33:52 - So very few places, in fact, that that thought they didn't have the power.

33:57 - Now, you know, usually

33:58 - we think of the traditional depiction of the southern recalcitrance

34:02 - to respond constructively to the first Freedom Riders.

34:07 - So the first settlers, you know,

34:09 - we don't think that northerners are the same traditionally

34:11 - in our conceptualization of perceptual ization of race relations

34:15 - and civil rights, we tend to think, well, race was this southern problem.

34:18 - And Southerners reacted one way and northerners reacted a different way.

34:22 - And unfortunately, most of the newspapers in the media, they perpetuated this image

34:26 - kind of with notions. That's.

34:27 - Well, well, the segregation in the South is what's called

34:32 - de jure segregation.

34:34 - In the North, it was called de facto segregation.

34:37 - That fact, by 1969, the common explanation of poverty

34:41 - or ghettos in America was now the cultural, psychological,

34:44 - sociological ones, that there were these deficiencies in the black community

34:48 - perpetuated by the fact that, black women were the head of households,

34:54 - and kids were just, you know, there were women, red households, and,

34:59 - kids just had no discipline.

35:03 - And this wasn't perpetuated by race.

35:05 - This was perpetual.

35:06 - It was it perpetuate people who are perceived as racist, perpetuate.

35:08 - And people like Daniel Moynihan and other very, quite established

35:12 - liberal scholars and policymakers.

35:19 - Now we can also see York's

35:20 - positions via how they voted.

35:23 - My predecessor at York College was a political science professor

35:26 - trying to catch professor, had never met him, got his desk, you know, remnants of

35:31 - his life and I was there,

35:33 - and, hatch wrote a

35:35 - book in the 60s talking about York and politics.

35:38 - And his argument was York was a centrist town.

35:41 - And one way to prove it is York, in fact, had voted for virtually every winner

35:47 - in every presidential election since the Civil War.

35:51 - Hoover and Roosevelt,

35:53 - Roosevelt and Truman, Truman and Eisenhower.

35:56 - The one exception was 1960.

36:00 - They supported Nixon over Kennedy, and it was actually pretty wide margin.

36:02 - And the argument was, well, York was, pretty Protestant community,

36:08 - and anti-Catholicism drove that vote in 1964.

36:12 - It might surprise you.

36:13 - They swung back to Lyndon Johnson.

36:15 - And it was it was a pretty solid win.

36:17 - I think it's pretty much followed the national average.

36:19 - Well, that was the last time they voted for Democrats on the night in a in

36:23 - a presidential election.

36:26 - So you have to wonder, which

36:27 - is something happening racially in America at this time, even in Home town, which

36:30 - at least contributed to, a political shift.

36:35 - Now, this is not city, this is countywide.

36:37 - This is like a countywide.

36:39 - But, you know, so we see in 64, the Democrats won 57,000 votes.

36:43 - Next time along they went 32,000 votes

36:48 - and nearly 8000 voted for George Wallace in the county.

36:52 - And there was no question about Wallace's political views

36:55 - where I mean, Wallace with segregation now, segregation forever.

36:58 - And he believed there were a lot of what he called Southerners

37:01 - in the North that he could reach out to.

37:04 - I will give you my own personal views

37:06 - of Wallace.

37:10 - This image, which you can't see, that well, talks

37:12 - about a reaction to another politician just south of Pennsylvania.

37:15 - There was this governor named Spiro Agnew.

37:18 - And for those of you who don't know, heard of Agnew when he was first nominated?

37:22 - People said Spiro, he was unknown.

37:24 - He'd been the county executive of Baltimore County is as late

37:28 - as the fall of 1966.

37:32 - I can't I live in Baltimore County.

37:33 - I'm not even sure I know who my county executive is right now. It keeps changing.

37:36 - Okay, I know my last county executive is now is now a congressperson.

37:41 - I certainly don't expect the county executive in Baltimore County

37:45 - to be the vice presidential running mate in two years

37:49 - and three years.

37:51 - Agnew rose as a moderate Republican.

37:53 - His he was elected on the basis of the black vote.

37:56 - His opponent was a guy named William Mahoney, whose campaign

37:59 - slogan was your home is your castle.

38:02 - You don't have to sell it, and you can protect it with a gun.

38:06 - If blacks move into the neighborhood.

38:07 - And Agnew ran as a moderate, but then

38:11 - there was a revolt in Cambridge, and he blanked the sky brown.

38:14 - And then there was one of his beloved city of Baltimore, and he became

38:17 - the nation's number one critic on the Kerner Commission.

38:23 - He had a lot of other kind of fun.

38:24 - Where do you like nattering Nabobs love the press.

38:27 - Since he's an early version of Donald Trump, he really is.

38:30 - You go back to his language and his attack,

38:32 - tack, attack, attack, and you will find it in Spiro.

38:34 - After Wallace too, he comes to York, invited by the Young Republicans.

38:39 - Okay,

38:41 - you know, these are the college to you.

38:42 - People talk maybe a little more moderate.

38:43 - This is 1968, and they just gave him accolade after accolade.

38:49 - They showed they love this guy Spiro Agnew.

38:54 - So in politics

38:55 - we can see this year in the summer of 1968 and then summer and fall of 68,

39:00 - New York experienced what I call three little mini revolts.

39:04 - I didn't have a chance to show you.

39:05 - I actually put together a website of the great uprising across the nation.

39:10 - You can try to go to Google a great, great uprising,

39:13 - maybe Peter Levy, you'll find the website, but on it there's a map

39:16 - and you can go to every place that had some incident.

39:19 - That's the best way to define it.

39:20 - And they'll usually be like a little paragraph describing

39:24 - it, including all the places in Pennsylvania.

39:26 - I'm going to show you that, too.

39:27 - But I was I was worried I would lose my PowerPoint, so I didn't.

39:31 - So anyway,

39:32 - York had a series of mini revolts in the summer

39:35 - of and fall of 1968.

39:38 - The first took place when police decided they wanted

39:41 - to clear, the local park,

39:44 - black youth who had every right to be there.

39:47 - In fact, an ordinance had passed, gave them the right to be there.

39:49 - And they did so using their guns, and, then denied

39:53 - having fired on me until it was uncovered that they did,

39:58 - more seriously,

40:01 - which black youth were outside of on the street on a summer night?

40:05 - Oh, kids out on the streets in summer night in the city.

40:08 - It's no, it's hot inside.

40:11 - And, kind and Chester Roach,

40:14 - who had a meat market and lived upstairs, downstairs, decided to take his.

40:18 - I think it was a shotgun.

40:19 - It may have been a rifle and start shooting at them.

40:21 - The police essentially came in and took Roach away in there.

40:24 - Protective custody and left.

40:26 - Did nothing to homosexuals.

40:29 - And then later that fall, after a football game,

40:33 - the police essentially unleashed their canine dogs on black youths.

40:37 - Though there was no evidence of black

40:38 - youths for being any more boisterous or difficult than white use.

40:42 - It wasn't even, you know, they probably could have gone

40:44 - after people on the opposing team, and at each point

40:48 - there was tremendous uproar in the black community about this.

40:51 - Let's see if I can find my quotes about this.

40:59 - Lost my page.

41:00 - Sorry I told you that out of practice.

41:06 - As one team declared, this is open warfare.

41:09 - Why do you made the statement last night?

41:11 - He said, I hate you.

41:13 - Use the N-word and I'm going to kill you. So, baby,

41:16 - if Whitey is going to start shooting, you better bet I'm fighting back.

41:19 - Still, another teen stated

41:21 - he had never thought much about Black Power philosophy, but that Roach's

41:24 - shooting changed his mind, adding, if he been black,

41:28 - do you think the cops would have left him there firing a gun?

41:32 - Man? If a black man had been in the house, the cops would have bombed him out.

41:44 - At the wrong way.

41:50 - Now, this is a chronology

41:51 - that was put together by the newspaper,

41:52 - and I think it's a pretty good chronology map.

41:54 - I thought it might be helpful,

41:56 - which essentially runs down

41:58 - what took place beginning in.

42:03 - July 17th, 1969.

42:06 - And I'm going to read it verbatim.

42:08 - A false rumors spread that a black youth was burned by whites,

42:12 - sparking gang violence at Newberry Street and Gaye Avenue.

42:16 - When you leave here, when you drive out of wherever, it's not that far away.

42:18 - If you want to go check out.

42:19 - Newbury Street and Gay Avenue, you you're pretty much in a stone stance.

42:23 - Also, that night you were shot at West Philadelphia Street

42:26 - and North Pershing Avenue.

42:28 - I drove down Pershing at Pershing Avenue together,

42:31 - while, talking to a city detective.

42:34 - Six people are wounded by gunfire.

42:36 - Five others are injured by other objects.

42:39 - At 9 p.m.

42:39 - to 7 a.m.. Curfews imposed by the mayor.

42:42 - July 18th.

42:43 - 11 more people hit by gunfire as the violence continues.

42:47 - July 19th city police Patrolman Henry Shot was shot and mortally wounded

42:51 - while riding in an armored truck that's highlighted.

42:55 - He died 13 days later.

42:57 - July 20th three dozen state police join York City police.

43:01 - July 21st Lily Belle Allen, 27, of Aiken, South Carolina,

43:05 - was fatally shot by white use at Newberry Gay Avenue.

43:09 - Governor Ronald Raymond Schaefer called in the guard July 22nd.

43:14 - Schaefer proclaims a state of emergency, imposes a curfew.

43:17 - July 23rd police search homes in the black neighborhood and confiscate weapons.

43:22 - National guard presence increases to 400.

43:25 - July 24th curfew eases by July 20th.

43:28 - This kind of return to normalcy

43:31 - now, I said this is a pretty good chronology,

43:34 - but I would want to point out a few things that are locked up.

43:36 - I think it's significant,

43:40 - the general argument at the time, and I would say even in the articles,

43:44 - by and large, that when they were written 30 years later, what caused the riot?

43:47 - Totally.

43:47 - What sparked the riots was this this first is a false rumor.

43:52 - I had led the gang violence, but I think it's the second incident that

43:56 - or really the that the the second part of that which is

44:03 - the fighting went beyond fisticuffs or

44:06 - so this is probably like gang violence.

44:08 - We could have had examples of black on black violence, white on white violence.

44:11 - There had been gang violence or or fighting in schools across America.

44:17 - But this is different.

44:18 - When a white man named Robert Smith

44:22 - decides to fire upon

44:25 - a black person named Tarquini, Sweeney and I may be mispronouncing that it's

44:32 - in earshot of a policeman.

44:35 - The police don't even go after Mr.

44:37 - Smith at the time,

44:39 - which to me just feeds the distrust of the police in the community.

44:43 - So I think that's that's, you know, the to me that's one crucial.

44:46 - I think that's really to me, that's the that's the spark here.

44:49 - The spark here is it escalates

44:52 - because of that.

44:57 - The other thing

44:57 - it's missing, it's what took place

45:01 - at my direction right north of Newbury Street,

45:06 - where Lily Brown was shot in between,

45:11 - the shooting of shot and Allen being shot,

45:14 - which was a white power rally in far car park,

45:18 - a rally in which police and others

45:21 - rallied whites to defend their turf in their community.

45:24 - And clearly the white gangs got the message.

45:27 - It's okay for you to protect yourself with guns,

45:30 - whether they provided them with weapons or bullets, that's a matter of contention

45:36 - still in this community.

45:37 - Probably.

45:39 - But there is no doubt that they got a green light to protect themselves.

45:42 - They certainly didn't hold a black power rally in Pen Park,

45:48 - telling blacks that they had the right to protect themselves.

45:54 - So there was a, you know, a a difference.

45:57 - And in, in the authorities telling people what was okay, what was not.

46:02 - And the third thing that's missing is it talks here about the seizing of weapons

46:06 - in the black community after the revolt, but not the seizing the weapons.

46:11 - It's the measure.

46:11 - Smith House.

46:15 - And they got a large number of weapons, though they did not locate

46:19 - the gun, go out.

46:22 - They had given them time, either

46:24 - intentionally or unintentionally,

46:27 - to get rid of it.

46:29 - Now I decided to put together.

46:31 - I think this is an Excel.

46:32 - I think this is an old fashioned word document, kind of.

46:35 - Every incident I could document that took place starting on the 27th.

46:40 - Sorry, I'm 17 forward.

46:42 - This is just one page of this, you know, and I just sorted it by, you know,

46:47 - name of the person, what their race was, if they were a perpetrator or a victim.

46:52 - In most cases, we don't know much about it.

46:54 - We just have something happened to this person and kind of location.

46:57 - My my original goal was to do this all in GIS and make a big map.

47:00 - And I didn't know family had the skills to do this,

47:03 - but I show this for a reason.

47:06 - So the one of the things begin to stand out about York is how violent the rebel was

47:12 - in most

47:13 - communities that had, I don't care what terminology used.

47:16 - I don't like the word riot particularly, I think like revolt or uprising is

47:20 - is is a better, more accurate one.

47:24 - The predominant thing that took place was looting.

47:27 - And then there was a good deal of arson in some cities.

47:31 - Awful.

47:32 - Some arson spread, and there was really less firing.

47:35 - In fact, most studies have shown that most of the firings in places

47:38 - like Newark and Detroit was done by the police and National Guard.

47:41 - I mean, in in retrospect, I, I actually had some sympathy

47:45 - for National Guardsmen or National Guardsmen.

47:47 - Most of the people, like not a lot of people remember Danny Quayle,

47:50 - or people who didn't want to go to Vietnam.

47:51 - So they're in the National Guard.

47:52 - They don't have any training.

47:55 - In, urban street warfare.

47:57 - And they get sent to the town. And stupidly,

48:00 - one of the first things they do in Detroit is shoot out the lights.

48:03 - Now, that's a stupidest thing in the world.

48:06 - And then they just start shooting.

48:07 - In many cases, they start shooting themselves or close

48:10 - to that or shooting other people.

48:13 - But the reality was that that

48:16 - intentional violence was not really the norm in most states.

48:21 - I located in Baltimore, a city that had 50,000 arrests,

48:26 - 50,000 arrests,

48:29 - which is phenomenal.

48:30 - It's just unbelievable.

48:32 - It was all over

48:34 - six shootings,

48:36 - 2 or 3 by police.

48:39 - Usually reports of sniper fire were widely exaggerated

48:41 - because quite often they were police records.

48:43 - But, you know, I knew what was taking place.

48:46 - There was arson.

48:50 - So what was not done

48:53 - for the first thing that was not done is no one was arrested for the murder

48:57 - of Henry Shotton was a police officer, the son of a police officer.

49:01 - I may be incorrect. I'm sure Jim will correct me here.

49:03 - I think he was the first police officer killed on duty in the city of York.

49:07 - In its history.

49:10 - You really have to wonder.

49:11 - I mean, it's, given what they found, the right person or not given.

49:16 - Usually what happens when a policeman is shot.

49:18 - A dragnet is is set up.

49:19 - And, you know, the the community is let's go out and find the perpetrator.

49:24 - Nor with the leave out.

49:27 - Killer arrest.

49:30 - 13 days later.

49:32 - Yeah.

49:32 - You know wouldn't it would be taking that much police pressure.

49:35 - I think the public finds because later on there was evidence to locate someone.

49:41 - You know, they did or.

49:43 - And in fact, complaints

49:45 - were made to the Justice Department who told the FBI to go in and investigate,

49:50 - in this case, possible civil rights violations.

49:53 - I and my view, it is that the FBI really wasn't going

49:57 - to push too hard on its local contacts in the in the state police or the city.

50:02 - Yeah.

50:02 - The conventional wisdom that then developed was

50:06 - that they were fearful if they arrested the person who killed shot

50:11 - and not the

50:11 - person who killed Allen, there'd be another rebellion.

50:15 - I just find a specious.

50:18 - I just have no evidence of that.

50:19 - I just I have no evidence of that.

50:21 - I don't think the black community was ready to have another rebellion.

50:25 - I think the better example was they were afraid of what they might find

50:29 - about the police force and its malfeasance,

50:31 - either during the rebellion or before or afterwards,

50:35 - and they didn't want to go that way.

50:36 - I wouldn't call it a wholesale cover up.

50:39 - Hey, you know, because we might have time, but just you just there are choices

50:43 - made of whether or not to pursue this case.

50:49 - There was also a desire to heal,

50:51 - I think, in both parts of the community,

50:54 - following the revolt, within a year and a half,

50:59 - a bunch of what's called threats took place.

51:02 - Threats are dialog.

51:03 - This is an example of the Yorkshire threats.

51:06 - It was a kind of gather people in the community.

51:08 - Not everyone supported it, but it was it would have pretty wide spread support.

51:13 - I went back and forth about how seriously I took the threats,

51:16 - but a local history teacher

51:17 - wrote a really nice piece on the threats, and I'm pretty much convinced.

51:21 - I think they were a good faith effort, and I think they achieved some reforms.

51:24 - They example community health

51:26 - was improved, which wasn't even an issue on a lot of people's radar.

51:30 - I mean, it was on people's radar, but it wasn't one of the the big three housing

51:33 - jobs, police of your kind of growing Hispanic population.

51:38 - But, you know, no one had ever really heard from the Hispanic population,

51:41 - a Latin population, about having, say, Spanish translators.

51:44 - It's in certain crucial places.

51:46 - This began to grow out of the surance,

51:48 - things dealing with, with, with housing and community health.

51:51 - I mean, I think this was good.

51:52 - Now it's going to be fighting an uphill battle.

51:54 - I'm not going to deny that. I mean,

51:57 - overall overarching things are changing in America.

52:01 - We're about we're about to hit a downturn

52:04 - or if we're not already hit it,

52:06 - there was also a suit which really wasn't talked about as much.

52:09 - A lawsuit filed by, various members of the black community with the help

52:15 - of some prominent lawyers and the NAACP and and other progressive attorneys.

52:19 - And the suit tried to lay out kind of not just what took place

52:23 - during the revolt, but the long standing police abusing and called for significant

52:28 - reforms, essentially asked for the state to take over or what will essentially

52:33 - be the same as the consent decrees that were established after the George Floyd.

52:38 - It's a couple of years ago,

52:41 - the judge showed some sympathy, but for a variety of reasons.

52:44 - In some ways, you could say they were good reasons.

52:46 - One, Mayor Snyder had died, so he wanted to give the new mayor a chance to the

52:51 - the remedy, which was essentially a state takeover, was a pretty serious one.

52:55 - And he wasn't willing to go that far.

52:58 - So the suit lost.

53:00 - But later on, there'd be information in that suit,

53:04 - which could be used whether for good or for evil.

53:07 - It could be used.

53:10 - Now, there were long term barriers to reform.

53:13 - There are structural issues that were affecting York and other communities.

53:17 - Most importantly, poverty became increasingly concentrated in the city.

53:23 - Already, you know, industries were moving out,

53:27 - shopping was moving out.

53:28 - This isn't just in York.

53:30 - This is across the country.

53:33 - You know, I live in Baltimore.

53:34 - I moved there after its glory days, but I still hear stories week after week

53:39 - about how many people

53:40 - used to work at the Bethlehem Steel plant down in Sparrows Point.

53:43 - You know, we're not talking five, 10,000, talking 60,000 people in a single place.

53:48 - I think, you know, by the time it shut down a couple hundred

53:51 - and now it's kind of a warehouse district.

53:55 - So in addition to

53:58 - economic disparities, increasing political polarization

54:01 - clearly increased in America during this,

54:04 - as people moved in.

54:06 - And, you know, I think we could see that, you know, even in Hatch's theory

54:09 - that York was was a moderate town, was a bellwether.

54:12 - York became increasingly conservative,

54:16 - community, but particularly the votes outside of the city.

54:20 - So that made reform more difficult.

54:22 - There were people like David Ross who called for a regional approach

54:25 - to the problems that existed, in, in the city.

54:29 - But by and large, those suggestions were not followed here

54:33 - or any of.

54:36 - Not out of the blue, but to a certain degree, as

54:39 - after the newspapers ran stories

54:41 - and the Da decided to reopen the case, a number of people were charged

54:47 - for the murder of Lily Villalon and for the murder of officer shot.

54:52 - Not just any old people.

54:53 - The mayor of the city, Charlie Robertson,

54:57 - was arrested and charged with murder.

55:00 - The argument made by the assistant D.A.

55:01 - Guy named Tom Kelly, who was an out-of-towner

55:03 - which became part of the defense, essentially, he had it out for me.

55:07 - Rival was that Robertson

55:10 - had yelled white power at the rally down in Fort Park

55:15 - had showed them the armored vehicle where shot

55:19 - had been shot, including that it was still

55:21 - bloodstained, clearly, and had

55:25 - given them bullets,

55:27 - or at least the go ahead.

55:33 - A number of white gang members were arrested and charged as well.

55:36 - Most of them pled guilty,

55:40 - to lesser charges.

55:41 - I actually had to go talk to my son, Athens. He's a public defender.

55:44 - I didn't understand because it was always wondered, well,

55:47 - why wasn't Robertson had lesser charges than murder?

55:50 - Well,

55:52 - there was a statute of limitations on the lesser charges, and.

55:55 - Well, the.

55:55 - Why would someone plead guilty to lower charged?

55:57 - I mean, you can plea to something I can't charge you with.

56:00 - And the answer is yes.

56:01 - You do it till you make a deal so you don't serve that much time.

56:03 - You don't have the risk of yourself being charged for murder.

56:06 - And most of the people being charged

56:08 - didn't have high priced, high powered attorneys like Robertson did.

56:11 - The trial consumed York, I would say, for two, two and a half years, almost.

56:16 - Reporters came in from all over the nation, some from all over the world,

56:20 - and it became a very touchy subject, at least

56:24 - really dividing the community once again.

56:31 - Ultimately,

56:33 - Robert Messersmith,

56:35 - who was the person who would charge,

56:37 - you know, Sweeney and one other man were convicted of murder.

56:40 - Robertson was found not guilty.

56:43 - The others served, I think time for time served.

56:47 - And that was pretty much.

56:48 - It was very short sentences.

56:51 - And two black men were arrested and convicted of leave

56:55 - with second degree murder.

56:56 - Upshot might have been first degree.

57:04 - Now, one of the questions that has come to me

57:06 - since I first started to look at York,

57:09 - first started to look at the waltzes.

57:12 - Why should we stay them?

57:14 - Matter of fact, the term used to be by a guy named Frederick Marcus.

57:17 - How many people who have ever driven down

57:19 - across the Bay bridge and through Cambridge, Maryland?

57:21 - Anyone ever done that?

57:22 - Well, if you do, you cross country now.

57:24 - Called the Frederick Marcus Bridge.

57:25 - Frederick Marcus was the state senator from Cambridge for about 50 years.

57:30 - And when he died, he got a bridge named after him.

57:32 - But before he died, I interviewed him about Cambridge.

57:34 - And the first word out of his mouth was, why would you want to go back?

57:37 - That's bad.

57:39 - Which pretty much when the newspapers started

57:42 - looking back at the revolt in 1899, that was a response of a lot of readers.

57:46 - Why do you want to revisit this? How is this going to help?

57:48 - This is going to set us back.

57:50 - This is pretty much Mayor.

57:51 - Robertson response initially, this is going to hurt all the progress.

57:55 - We've we've made most history books in broadsheets, books.

57:59 - Not a bad book. I'm not going to criticize.

58:01 - But they compared to other historical events like the Civil War,

58:05 - they downplay them.

58:06 - They're not they're not kind of

58:07 - they're not going to take up a lot of pages, a lot of space,

58:10 - and I'm not going to generate a lot of discussion.

58:12 - Now, I did discover somehow I held onto this when I retired, that

58:19 - the Black History.

58:20 - Conference in Pennsylvania held,

58:24 - its conference in York in the early 2000 and this is about the time, I believe it's

58:29 - in 2002, about the time that the trial had just settled was taking place.

58:34 - And one of the sessions, one of the sessions was on York's revolts,

58:40 - and the people were a lot more animated than you are.

58:42 - No, I mean, I'm just not as exciting to speak, I will admit that.

58:45 - But there were people in the audience saying, why are you talking about this?

58:48 - Or, you know, can't we move on here past this?

58:51 - This is not helping us.

58:55 - You know, this was still 30 years after the war.

58:57 - So we were talking about the trial.

58:58 - They were talking about the revolts.

59:00 - One of my good friends, Brian Wade, I think it was the moderator

59:03 - of the panelist at this wonderful TV show called Worlds Apart.

59:09 - Now, I think one of the reasons people say this is

59:12 - there is an assumption that the revolt is not in the conventional wisdom

59:16 - that revolts in York, and what Los Angeles and Newark and Detroit,

59:20 - they caused the urban decline.

59:23 - Headline riots contribute to York's decline.

59:27 - Part of the argument is, well,

59:31 - blacks rioted, whites fled.

59:33 - But who hasn't heard of the term white flight?

59:35 - So I just ran a simple graph of population in York over time.

59:39 - And if we look at the white population, it must have been incredibly present

59:43 - that riots were going to take place because it was leaving the city

59:47 - at just as great a pace as did after the riots did before the riots.

59:52 - I should have said that opposite.

59:53 - And it was the the all by all geometric.

59:55 - 297 The slope of the curve was as great before 1969 as it was after 1960.

01:00 - 02.075 In fact,

01:00 - 05.878 the overall population of York held a little bit steady in those years,

01:00 - 07.971 in part because black people were still moving there

01:00 - 10.783 from Haiti.

01:00 - 14.911 Dickinson's sister, sorry, Lily Belle and sister Hattie

01:00 - 18.624 Hattie moved here with her husband, and she loved life here.

01:00 - 22.728 At first, you know, she was leaving behind her kind of religiously strict

01:00 - 26.856 parents in Arkansas, South Carolina, and she was enjoying the good life.

01:00 - 29.068 And then she was traumatized, I think you would say,

01:00 - 32.228 for the next 30 years of her life about what had happened to her sister.

01:00 - 33.173 She was in the car

01:00 - 36.666 at the time her sister was shot, that she had been driving the car.

01:00 - 40.112 Not only she'd been driving the car, she stalled the car on the tracks

01:00 - 44.450 when she saw guns pointed at her head and her sister being her older sister.

01:00 - 48.978 Her second mom, according to her, got out to try to help the man was shot to death.

01:00 - 51.724 One of the defenses in the trial,

01:00 - 54.884 or at least conventional wisdom defense, is that so many people shot.

01:00 - 56.996 We could know who shot her.

01:00 - 59.231 Probably find kind of a strange defense in there.

01:00 - 02.167 All the I guess, they didn't have the weapon.

01:01 - 03.202 They didn't have the bullets.

01:01 - 06.229 They never impounded the car.

01:01 - 08.998 So there really was a lot of evidence missing over the years.

01:01 - 14.246 So I tried also this other thing, you know, I'm not a social scientist,

01:01 - 15.981 but I went to the social science history conference.

01:01 - 19.184 I think I'll try to do some quantitative stuff there, you know, so it's a science.

01:01 - 20.552 I said, what happens?

01:01 - 23.288 It's kind of we can't we can't do controlled experiments.

01:01 - 25.190 You know, I can't I can't have a placebo here.

01:01 - 25.558 But what happens?

01:01 - 29.886 You compare York to another Pennsylvania city of about the same population,

01:01 - 34.767 about the same kind of economic makeup, about the same racial demography.

01:01 - 36.068 And I chose Redding.

01:01 - 39.338 And look at pop population, look at white population.

01:01 - 42.365 I have well, Redding never had a revolt,

01:01 - 44.777 had its white population fell even more

01:01 - 47.870 drastically than York did after the revolts.

01:01 - 51.550 So say white flight just happened because of revolt.

01:01 - 52.909 It's just it's not sufficient.

01:01 - 54.187 There are

01:01 - 57.213 massive causes, but, you know, there are there are

01:01 - 59.024 many, many patterns.

01:01 - 03.662 What does they have the opportunity to buy homes, with the VA and FHA loans outside

01:02 - 07.190 in the suburbs, which offer can Americans really still had difficulty

01:02 - 10.393 doing so?

01:02 - 11.737 So I'll kind of end here.

01:02 - 14.306 So why should we examine the revolts?

01:02 - 15.841 Well, I have my answers.

01:02 - 18.868 And then I'll give you a couple quotes from some other more famous people.

01:02 - 22.739 First, because by ignoring the history of the uprisings in the 60s,

01:02 - 26.509 we perpetuate a false understanding of their causes,

01:02 - 30.956 one which blames those who rebelled against a long history

01:02 - 34.984 of racial discrimination for the problems they were rebelling against.

01:02 - 39.898 And because if we refused to peel back that scab, we undermined efforts

01:02 - 44.193 to consider the conditions to cause revolts to take place in the first place.

01:02 - 47.806 Or, as Martin Luther King put it, I'm not going to quote his most famous quote.

01:02 - 50.809 It about the rights being the voice of the unheard.

01:02 - 51.644 That's a very good quote.

01:02 - 53.846 But is he, quote, Victor Hugo?

01:02 - 56.873 He goes way back when there were rebellions in the 1840s.

01:02 - 01.477 He says, if the soul is left in darkness, sin will be committed.

01:03 - 04.847 The guilty one is not he who commits the same,

01:03 - 08.951 but he who causes the darkness

01:03 - 11.130 like one other.

01:03 - 13.565 I'll bring it a little closer home.

01:03 - 16.592 Maybe the most prescient person was James Baldwin.

01:03 - 20.005 Actually, not in the fire this time, but that's the image I have before

01:03 - 23.199 he wrote The Fire. This time, Baldwin wrote.

01:03 - 28.171 One day, to everyone's astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg

01:03 - 33.552 and everything blows up before the dust to settle for the blood congealed.

01:03 - 37.013 Editorial speeches and civil rights commissions are allowed

01:03 - 40.149 in the land, demanding to know what happened.

01:03 - 43.986 What happened is that the Negro wanted to be treated as human beings.

01:03 - 46.331 And I'll end there.

01:03 - 54.355 Questions. Yes.

01:04 - 02.314 Universally.

01:04 - 04.550 Thank you so much for your talk.

01:04 - 08.353 Me, a Southerner, and I basically, got here

01:04 - 12.248 so when I first came to this area, it's interesting that you said that

01:04 - 15.394 actually, that the story of York, because

01:04 - 18.421 when you read Mississippi, you don't think about York was great.

01:04 - 23.335 So what happens is that when I read the story of York through the story of this.

01:04 - 25.337 Right. So it's interesting and I'm glad.

01:04 - 26.872 Thank you for your talk.

01:04 - 29.474 You mentioned that there were two African-Americans

01:04 - 32.468 who that convicted and, that case,

01:04 - 37.149 was there a sentencing disparity in that in how long did they get?

01:04 - 39.751 You mentioned that some of them got time served.

01:04 - 43.646 They actually, ended up spending time in jail or.

01:04 - 46.058 Well, yeah. Well, they're they're tried that day.

01:04 - 48.594 They're not they're not going to get the plea down.

01:04 - 53.232 And, and the other case, I think, I think there were 12 total charges around that.

01:04 - 55.634 And so they get a number to plead because they need evidence.

01:04 - 56.603 I mean, one of the problems,

01:04 - 59.328 particularly against the mayor, the evidence is not as good.

01:05 - 04.376 I would argue less lessen the sentencing disparity.

01:05 - 05.078 In my book.

01:05 - 10.082 I argue there's a disparity in the criminal justice system in numerous ways.

01:05 - 12.417 One who your defenses

01:05 - 15.420 so that Mayor Robertson has a very renowned

01:05 - 17.389 attorney, guy named William Costa Opolis,

01:05 - 20.416 who defends him, even writes a book afterwards about it, you know,

01:05 - 22.928 and he's done a lot of areas, famous cases.

01:05 - 26.498 So, you know, and there are people who Robertson knew,

01:05 - 29.167 including the next governor of the state, Tom Wolf,

01:05 - 32.304 who had been part of that campaign, that the people who are charged

01:05 - 34.907 by the time they're charged for the shot murder,

01:05 - 38.167 they've had 30 years of a downward trend in their life.

01:05 - 40.712 They don't have the resources to hire attorneys.

01:05 - 43.315 It's easy to paint them in a different way.

01:05 - 46.342 I think there's differences in the judges in the way they treat,

01:05 - 50.346 kind of make maybe some rulings on admissibility of certain evidence,

01:05 - 53.983 in that way or the, the ability to lean on them

01:05 - 57.386 or lean on witnesses, really to testify

01:05 - 00.265 because there are people in the community who know who did the shooting.

01:06 - 01.867 There's I think there's no doubt about that.

01:06 - 05.528 And but they don't they don't want to I'm not going to use the word snitch.

01:06 - 07.639 They don't want to snitch. Okay.

01:06 - 10.175 But can you put pressure on them for other things?

01:06 - 13.712 You know, can you can, in that case, I don't think there's an equivalent

01:06 - 15.314 in the criminal justice system.

01:06 - 17.316 I can't say they didn't do it.

01:06 - 18.450 They were framed.

01:06 - 20.876 But in that case, you know, they pay more for the crime.

01:06 - 24.423 Whereas, well,

01:06 - 27.450 I left one important part out.

01:06 - 32.497 At some point, I don't know if was

01:06 - 35.858 when I wrote the book or news of it came out, I got an interesting letter.

01:06 - 39.471 Address 807

01:06 - 42.498 Holly drive, Green Lane, Pennsylvania.

01:06 - 43.942 I opened it up.

01:06 - 47.503 There was an article and a very short message from Robert Messersmith.

01:06 - 50.682 He's the person who shot Taco.

01:06 - 53.876 Sweeney and was arrested and charged and convicted for the murder.

01:06 - 56.955 Lily Bell Allen,

01:06 - 01.026 it concerns me greatly that your quest to obtain events of the York riots.

01:07 - 04.053 You can address local businesses for experiences rather

01:07 - 07.532 than those of us who lived it and did time for our involvement.

01:07 - 11.269 And he goes on and says, basically, if you interview me, I'll tell you

01:07 - 12.371 the real story.

01:07 - 16.532 We were scapegoated and I was derelict in my duty

01:07 - 17.977 because I

01:07 - 21.003 had seen that movie, The Marathon Man,

01:07 - 24.407 and the image I had of Robert's met this myth is he was not.

01:07 - 26.385 He was kind of an ordinary character, I'll put it that way.

01:07 - 28.387 And I'm kind of a wimp.

01:07 - 31.123 Particular about time I wrote this book and I didn't respond.

01:07 - 32.557 He didn't give me a telephone number.

01:07 - 34.726 I think he just want me to show up his address or something.

01:07 - 38.530 And I didn't respond because I think I don't want to say he was scapegoated.

01:07 - 40.866 I think that's the wrong reason.

01:07 - 42.000 That's the wrong explanation.

01:07 - 43.301 That's the wrong rationale.

01:07 - 45.670 I think he did I think he did participate.

01:07 - 48.974 I think the question was there a wider network of people who are responsible

01:07 - 50.575 for learning about Allen's death

01:07 - 54.913 and that they hadn't been charged from the get go, or could have been implicated

01:07 - 58.483 where they could have been charged for murder is a different thing, you know?

01:07 - 01.153 But he became the fall guy, I think, for what was,

01:08 - 02.537 you know, really a larger problem.

01:08 - 04.624 So there's the other

01:08 - 08.593 disparity, maybe the disparities, long class lines that even he, you know, argues

01:08 - 13.055 he had to pay for what better connected people got away with.

01:08 - 16.625 Now, I will admit, as mentioned, I'm writing plays.

01:08 - 21.139 One is about Cambridge, one's about a woman named Daisy Meyers.

01:08 - 23.341 And I'm going to make a real pitch to you guys.

01:08 - 25.043 This is my advertisment.

01:08 - 25.645 Okay?

01:08 - 28.747 Daisy Meyers, for those who don't know, and her husband, Bill

01:08 - 31.807 and their family moved to Levittown, Pennsylvania, 1957.

01:08 - 34.820 Became the first black family to move into Levittown.

01:08 - 36.955 Levitt was the most famous suburb in America.

01:08 - 38.623 The first new Jersey, a bigger one.

01:08 - 43.428 This is famous outside Philadelphia, and that can be met by the welcome wagon.

01:08 - 44.587 They were met by a mob.

01:08 - 50.035 I'm part of a commission because Stacey was from York, and I lament

01:08 - 53.062 I never met Daisy, but I know her daughter Linda.

01:08 - 56.741 And there's a committee was put together

01:08 - 01.580 to put up a historical marker for Daisy Meyers in, Levittown.

01:09 - 03.548 And we just learned two weeks ago,

01:09 - 05.383 that the Pennsylvania Historical Commission,

01:09 - 07.152 I think I'm missing people here are a part of that.

01:09 - 10.846 Agreed to put this and numerous other historical markers up around the state.

01:09 - 13.225 But we want to do more than just put a marker up.

01:09 - 14.693 We want a celebration at the time.

01:09 - 17.720 We want one also in 2027,

01:09 - 23.292 which would be the 50th anniversary of the incident in Levittown.

01:09 - 25.137 So if you or, you know, students

01:09 - 28.297 or other public historians or others who might want to be involved,

01:09 - 32.043 in particularly building support to kind of commemorate,

01:09 - 35.514 which I think is a, you know, an important event in the study of Pennsylvania,

01:09 - 38.083 you know, kind of the reason she she's been referred to by some,

01:09 - 40.242 including me, as a Rosa Parks of the North.

01:09 - 42.888 But I'm also writing a play about her.

01:09 - 44.322 So if you want to help me with that as well.

01:09 - 48.083 But interestingly, I never knew who story because she didn't talk about it.

01:09 - 51.954 There's the other disparity of of of what takes place in society.

01:09 - 54.799 You know, some historians talk about silencing the past,

01:09 - 56.568 you know, and who stories get told.

01:09 - 00.863 Cost Opolis not only helps Mayor Robertson out, he writes a book about it.

01:10 - 04.409 It didn't become a movie, but some of his books have,

01:10 - 07.512 and it could have, Daisy Meyers, for variety reasons.

01:10 - 12.208 Even her best friends, even some of her family members, never knew what she did.

01:10 - 15.153 She moved back to York, around 1970.

01:10 - 17.389 She didn't speak about it.

01:10 - 20.659 We could talk about why Latino white people silent until she decided

01:10 - 22.384 to write a memoir. In the early 2000.

01:10 - 26.331 But by then, you know, years passed.

01:10 - 27.200 So other questions.

01:10 - 29.868 Sorry. Yeah.

01:10 - 31.703 Yes. It's a wonderful book.

01:10 - 32.971 It's called Sticks and Stones.

01:10 - 36.398 This wonderful of her work.

01:10 - 39.978 The special collections, whatever I, I, you pick me up.

01:10 - 42.514 Yeah. Jimmy Stewart,

01:10 - 45.541 I, I wanted to ask, so

01:10 - 49.721 our, the,

01:10 - 53.282 our pool was segregated until 1860

01:10 - 55.527 as a 60.

01:10 - 58.630 And something I have been trying to document

01:10 - 01.657 is so we've been collecting.

01:11 - 05.894 I created a project called the Ivy Social Justice Project,

01:11 - 11.843 trying to document not only Ivy Special Collections and Archives

01:11 - 14.870 and but also trying to document

01:11 - 18.350 Indiana County

01:11 - 21.377 diversity, equity, inclusion, trying to document,

01:11 - 25.214 you know, our students, you name.

01:11 - 30.486 And I mean, the it really bothers me that,

01:11 - 34.690 you know, places like Black Park.

01:11 - 38.460 Southern, so many other communities were still segregated over.

01:11 - 41.897 So, you know, well as the civil rights movement,

01:11 - 46.011 what's been your experience here?

01:11 - 46.779 It's a covert.

01:11 - 49.547 So there's a very famous,

01:11 - 51.950 political cartoonist who's from York,

01:11 - 56.354 William Party Miller, because his name is Walter.

01:11 - 57.922 Sorry, sorry.

01:11 - 59.224 It's my dyslexia.

01:11 - 02.518 And he has a very famous cartoon of York.

01:12 - 06.622 And after World War two and Truman was president,

01:12 - 10.059 the Freedom Train came through Pennsylvania and other places.

01:12 - 13.705 And he shows the train being derailed at the swimming pool.

01:12 - 16.074 I thought my memory of it in York, Pennsylvania.

01:12 - 19.878 Now, this is late 40s, but that pool remained segregated

01:12 - 22.781 well into the mid 1950s.

01:12 - 25.216 I live in Baltimore County, just south of here.

01:12 - 28.586 And the Baltimore banner, which is really kind of a great paper, has just been

01:12 - 32.457 running story after story about the fact that Baltimore County has no.

01:12 - 36.051 So besides, it's segregated pools, has no public pools.

01:12 - 38.430 So Baltimore County made a

01:12 - 43.935 decision to desegregate, no pools because it didn't have any public pools.

01:12 - 46.938 Instead, you have community pools.

01:12 - 49.974 And of course, like any other club, you got to know someone to get into the

01:12 - 50.643 pool.

01:12 - 53.669 Well, today there are black members at those community pools,

01:12 - 56.414 but the entry fee for a year.

01:12 - 57.882 I know I just did it because I have a granddaughter.

01:12 - 00.585 I wanted to swim with her. It's like $1,000 a year.

01:13 - 04.189 I mean, that's that's that's a that's a barrier to going

01:13 - 05.323 swimming in the summer

01:13 - 08.951 in a region where all of us could probably use a cooling off on the weekends.

01:13 - 14.833 So I think it's this is a widespread from and not just pools but beaches too.

01:13 - 17.635 You know, we all know that Chicago is Chicago, right.

01:13 - 21.606 And, you know, was set off by a black person swimming in the white section.

01:13 - 25.000 But other places all around the country, there's actually very good books about

01:13 - 27.469 both pools and beaches.

01:13 - 31.182 And my understanding is

01:13 - 34.209 one of the reasons why is pools are a place where,

01:13 - 37.021 black men.

01:13 - 37.857 Sorry.

01:13 - 42.451 Yes. And white women, are close and intimate to each other.

01:13 - 46.021 So that's really, you know, that's that's that those are fighting words.

01:13 - 47.633 You know,

01:13 - 49.033 I don't know if you ever seen the movie sandlot,

01:13 - 51.002 but you kind of maybe know, you know, my just if you do,

01:13 - 54.096 you know, a 13 year old boy can be very excited about a,

01:13 - 56.674 13 year old girl at the pool.

01:13 - 59.077 So that was, you know, that that that that is a

01:13 - 01.780 I think I think you're going to find that's really widespread.

01:14 - 04.449 I have run across stuff at the Pennsylvania.

01:14 - 06.518 State Archives from the human Relations Commission,

01:14 - 09.421 where you can see various complaints about pools in the 1950s.

01:14 - 10.445 I mean, that's document,

01:14 - 12.791 and pools aren't the only place,

01:14 - 15.818 but I think that's you can find that.

01:14 - 17.862 Also, in the state archives,

01:14 - 20.989 if you look at the leaders papers and the letters to him,

01:14 - 24.736 complaining about living in

01:14 - 27.796 families, let me tell you, I think I have more copy,

01:14 - 31.800 including many I can't read because they're handwritten, you know, and

01:14 - 34.112 I've decided in my play to have Daisy complain

01:14 - 38.183 because she was a schoolteacher about the penmanship and the spelling mean bad.

01:14 - 39.884 It's bad enough. But, you know, I can't.

01:14 - 42.487 They can't. Why can't they know what to is, isn't it?

01:14 - 44.856 You know, I want to do this. 2 to 12.

01:14 - 47.692 That would drive a crazy up.

01:14 - 51.053 And right here in New York, as you know, and

01:14 - 54.899 most of what I know about these events

01:14 - 57.893 after I moved here three years before the 50th anniversary of

01:14 - 00.605 study

01:15 - 01.474 about it.

01:15 - 05.310 I have to admit, when you use a timeline, what jumps to mind?

01:15 - 08.337 It's not in the timeline which some of the young people

01:15 - 11.883 not think of is July 20th.

01:15 - 14.910 There was a power rally in car park

01:15 - 18.247 and they put.

01:15 - 22.384 So it was a very surreal time for a lot of people.

01:15 - 25.821 By Monday, we had National Guard guard on the streets here.

01:15 - 29.434 But but I wonder,

01:15 - 32.170 I found myself sitting here wondering,

01:15 - 36.241 do you think that anything about, you know, the media coverage

01:15 - 39.301 of how much we were spending as a country

01:15 - 42.747 to do something

01:15 - 45.283 so maybe distant from the practical,

01:15 - 48.310 everyday life?

01:15 - 50.455 To put White Man on the moon

01:15 - 53.157 might not have in some way

01:15 - 55.827 highlighted the disparities, as you have

01:15 - 59.488 people here who didn't even have enough money in our black.

01:16 - 03.468 I my memories, even Martin Luther King.

01:16 - 04.702 You know, he didn't go as far as others,

01:16 - 08.106 but there were lots of black critics of the moon program for that.

01:16 - 12.043 You know, we can put a man on the moon and, you know, look at the disparities

01:16 - 12.978 here.

01:16 - 14.212 I will say this in my media coverage

01:16 - 16.347 because it just clicked in one of those synapses working.

01:16 - 19.083 So, you know, one of the questions with Lily Bell on was

01:16 - 23.078 why did she and her family go out at night and they know a riot was taking place?

01:16 - 26.024 Well, when they were out of town, it spent the day picnicking

01:16 - 29.527 and there was a media blackout, at least TV blackout

01:16 - 32.554 of coverage to the extent because they were afraid that would feed

01:16 - 35.733 more trouble.

01:16 - 37.201 So it is very possible.

01:16 - 40.329 I mean, you drive into town, you visit your relatives, you go have a picnic.

01:16 - 43.007 You know, we I show you that chart.

01:16 - 46.501 But that doesn't mean at every minute for 5 or 6 days,

01:16 - 50.872 you're aware of what's taking place.

01:16 - 54.586 And one of the issues at the trial was with the state.

01:16 - 57.913 State troopers and police supposed to stop her from driving down the street.

01:16 - 59.791 And the answer is yes. They were.

01:16 - 00.858 There were barricades,

01:17 - 04.186 and they moved the barricades and allowed her to drive down the line.

01:17 - 08.190 The family drive down the street and then lied about it for over 30 years.

01:17 - 12.194 And that only came out at the trial the last minute.

01:17 - 14.505 Yeah,

01:17 - 16.674 yeah, I, I attended the Black History.

01:17 - 20.469 Conference in 2000, and the last time I was in

01:17 - 24.148 and, I was introduced

01:17 - 27.952 to the William Allen story at that conference.

01:17 - 30.979 At that session, they referred to.

01:17 - 35.083 I hadn't thought about it, but,

01:17 - 38.620 because of your comments, I'm going back to my memory.

01:17 - 41.332 I remember and there were

01:17 - 44.359 a number of us like that. So,

01:17 - 48.130 who did not know that history?

01:17 - 52.501 But we sort of,

01:17 - 55.113 recited

01:17 - 58.140 kind of, related to

01:17 - 02.477 what we knew and understood about the black struggle in America.

01:18 - 06.591 It is not always angry.

01:18 - 09.851 Poor white people who are angry

01:18 - 13.221 and the scourge of black communities.

01:18 - 17.459 If there's a power struggle, this goes all the way back to the early days.

01:18 - 19.604 The the,

01:18 - 21.706 1890s

01:18 - 22.974 that,

01:18 - 25.276 looks at as it was Ferguson decision.

01:18 - 27.412 But there were a number of other

01:18 - 31.707 court decisions, especially integrity laws, that were trying to be passed.

01:18 - 35.444 And that's, I think I'll be have to a day or,

01:18 - 38.056 pay a big,

01:18 - 41.717 aspect of that in which they were looking to charge

01:18 - 46.621 the white power brokers who were feeding

01:18 - 49.867 poor whites into so poor whites,

01:18 - 54.563 the sort of the foot soldiers of white supremacy and racism

01:18 - 57.742 and the wealthy and power brokers

01:18 - 00.769 was also the sort of orchestrating the whole thing.

01:19 - 04.182 That's the way I maybe I'm wrong.

01:19 - 07.209 The best guess what I came across is,

01:19 - 10.521 this story here in your,

01:19 - 12.824 But there were three of you.

01:19 - 13.726 You're right.

01:19 - 18.653 People who were fairly upset and,

01:19 - 23.935 there is an aspect of the black community

01:19 - 26.962 that doesn't want to back that's that

01:19 - 30.365 they don't want to reopen the they went to.

01:19 - 36.004 And although they know the wrong was done, they just want to move past it.

01:19 - 39.751 And that's the way I kind of came away for this session.

01:19 - 40.775 I wasn't

01:19 - 44.689 personally too happy about that.

01:19 - 47.525 But I wanted to know more about it.

01:19 - 48.460 Yeah.

01:19 - 50.228 So thank you for the help.

01:19 - 53.197 Remind me, and I'm glad you put it that way, because I think

01:19 - 56.258 the reason why the question is, is why do people not want to push back?

01:19 - 00.295 And the the, the word you used was perfect.

01:20 - 05.243 And I think it's similar to the history of lynching in America.

01:20 - 08.270 So for the black community, lynching is a traumatic event,

01:20 - 11.706 and the power of lynching is to traumatize the community

01:20 - 14.652 so that that

01:20 - 17.555 there is equally in the black community to think about.

01:20 - 18.823 How do we deal with lynching?

01:20 - 22.260 I don't know if anyone here has been to Montgomery, Alabama, a lot of historians

01:20 - 25.296 and, and, and, museum people here.

01:20 - 29.191 But to me, that's where what Bryan Stevenson has done down there with his,

01:20 - 31.302 essentially is monument to lynching.

01:20 - 32.204 That's the wrong way to put it.

01:20 - 36.064 It's memorial is just wonderful because he refuses to show,

01:20 - 39.744 images of lynching.

01:20 - 43.714 And instead there is simply a, a glass bowl

01:20 - 47.919 with the soil of every place where a black person has been lynched.

01:20 - 49.387 And then you walk into this area

01:20 - 52.647 and there are essentially these rusted steel caskets going down.

01:20 - 54.826 But the black community is, I think, finally decided

01:20 - 56.294 we want to deal with lynching.

01:20 - 59.788 We, you know, we can't stop even though it is traumatic.

01:21 - 03.258 But the white community didn't want to not investigate, look back at it

01:21 - 05.036 because they said it was going to stop progress.

01:21 - 06.904 It was it was it was going to push us back.

01:21 - 08.472 And I think that's I think there's a different

01:21 - 11.466 they want to very personally felt I think the others an excuse.

01:21 - 13.544 It's real.

01:21 - 17.982 I mean York's battle about how we responded to to the Civil War for years.

01:21 - 21.409 Did did Yorkers sell out the city to Southerners or not?

01:21 - 24.746 They should have wished the Battle of Gettysburg took place here.

01:21 - 26.225 Do you know what?

01:21 - 27.892 I would do it for tourism in this city.

01:21 - 30.228 I mean, you know, just.

01:21 - 31.629 Yeah,

01:21 - 34.966 I it's just it's it's too bad it didn't happen here.

01:21 - 39.461 You know, we we we we've been known by every schoolchild in America.

01:21 - 43.374 You know,

01:21 - 44.442 that,

01:21 - 48.536 Bryan Stevenson's work and I have my students sign up for is,

01:21 - 51.873 frugal, the sign up for the calendar of,

01:21 - 55.577 the history of injustice at the Equal Justice Initiative.

01:21 - 57.822 And it has three campuses.

01:21 - 59.323 Yeah. The museums.

01:21 - 02.350 We have the outdoor memorial. They just

01:22 - 05.887 a year ago, and they have this with the,

01:22 - 09.000 the National Peace Museum is out.

01:22 - 13.571 It is, it's all three campuses, equal Justice initiative.

01:22 - 15.373 But if you really want to see that, because that

01:22 - 18.533 they covered the York incident not that long ago,

01:22 - 22.780 the history of injustice events have been delivered to your mailbox

01:22 - 26.984 every day to see that system that, the two of you were saying

01:22 - 28.209 was basically talked about.

01:22 - 34.158 Well, thank you for coming.

01:22 - 36.527 I know you probably want to go have some drinks

01:22 - 39.664 and all that stuff with it, and I was trying to look at my phone.

01:22 - 42.166 I'm not a Phillies fan, but I don't know if the game is still going.

01:22 - 45.670 For those of you who are, you can check your phones now without being rude.

01:22 - 48.539 Okay. It was it was zero zero when I started.

01:22 - 55.904 That's all I know. Oh,