(upbeat music) - [Narrator] "A Slice of the Community" is made possible by the support of the First Horizon Foundation.

(audience applauding) - Hello, and welcome to another episode of "Slice of the Community."

I'm your host, Jerome Moore.

And today we are joined by a live studio audience.

Before we get into our guests, first we're gonna be talking specifically about the American Coup, Wilmington 1989.

And so, we're gonna roll a short teaser to give y'all at home what we're gonna be talking about a little bit closer.

(gentle music) - [Announcer] On "American Experience"... - [Narrator] We've have taken a city as thoroughly, as completely as if captured in battle.

- [Narrator 2] It was the only armed overthrow in elected government.

- [Narrator 3] This was a coup based on the devaluation of African American citizenship.

What Wilmington tells us is how fragile American democracy is.

- [Announcer] "American Coup: Wilmington 1898," on "American Experience."

(upbeat music) - All right so we're back, and we're here with some esteemed panelists, some guest.

I would say dear friends, as well.

Dr. Franklin, Dr. Hamdallahi, how y'all doing?

- I'm doing well.

- It's good to meet you.

- I got a mission, I call out the universities, too.

You know, Fisk University.

And then my alumni university, the great Middle Tennessee State in Rock City.

(all laughing) I wanna thank both y'all for joining me this evening to talk about Wilmington.

And talk about the only successful American coup that was to ever happen on United States soil.

After watching the documentary itself, for me it was the reconciliation of just thinking about how do, how do the descents, how they coping today with those experiences?

What was some of the things that initially just came out to y'all after watching this documentary?

And I'll start with you first, Dr. Franklin.

- Well, I have an interest in this topic.

And for different reasons of my research.

And I guess the way I would probably situate the Wilmington 1898 coup was as part of a wave of massacres and racialized political violence that goes back from to the 1860s, on up to the 1920s.

All of which deserve attention.

And the Wilmington experience stands out in part because they had Black representation.

Wilmington was considered to be a mecca for African Americans.

And the level of violence was extraordinary heightened.

And to achieve that coup, for me, from the standpoint of what White supremacists did, what racial terrorists did was two things.

Was they destroyed a potential biracial coalition.

an electoral coalition.

And Wilmington, with an attempt to divide populists that were joining forcing with African American voters.

And number one and number two is that, the coup takes place at the same time that you have the gilded age and industrialization, and this idea that maybe with the populists, idea that maybe Blacks can form coalitions with the Whites around working class issues.

I know there's a lot there that we can unpack and dispute.

But the fact that the coup takes place in the late 19th century is part of a wave of coups, a wave of racialized violence, political violence, and massacres, to me is quite telling.

And the one with the story is really the story that really encapsulates those competing political traditions.

- And maybe, Dr. Hamdallahi you can speak to this just from understanding the time period, too.

We're talking about some of the first kind of really free Black folks.

You know that was able to, you know, break away from slavery and then be able to establish businesses, and be able to, you know, build their own schools, and you know, they had the daily newspaper, "The Daily Record."

What were some of the things that stood out from you, and then how does academia?

Because some of these things are hidden stories.

Playing, so making sure we keep amplifying, and making sure these stories are told.

- Absolutely.

And thank you for having me and thank you for this wonderful, wonderful film.

It's been really, I think, illustrative of some of the things that are kind of going on contemporary.

But to your question, I think that well for one, the film does a good job of showing the important role that African American have played in American democracy itself.

Wilmington was perhaps the economic engine of North Carolina for African Americans.

And White supremacy has been one of those tools that has been used to sort of take African Americans off the playing field of politics.

And that worked, you know, very well in this case, unfortunately.

But when you take the, when you take what happened in Wilmington, given that African Americans was so prominent there.

They had one of the largest concentration of Black entrepreneurs in the entire country.

And then after a day all those people are gone.

All that economic clout is gone.

That really hurts, you know, African American economics.

Not only in the state, but in the entire region.

And you know, that doesn't just hurt for, you know, a decade or so.

You know, there's no economic bailout for African Americans in the, you know, in the 1890s, early, early 19th, late 19th century.

And so it's really telling.

And to the second part of your question, I think that ensuring that one of the things that (indistinct), you know, universities and schools can do is to make sure they include these sorts of, you know, things in their curriculum to make sure that students of all colors and persuasions have a healthy understanding of American democracy.

That way we don't take, you know, present things for granted.

- [Jerome] All right.

- Democracy is something that has to be, that must be continuously improved upon and maintained.

The integrity must continue to be maintained through successive generations.

But you know, if we take our eyes off the ball, we feel as if, you know, nothing can happen.

Well, we miss opportunities to learn from our past.

- And this next question is for both of y'all.

Because one of the key things I brought up about community was repair, and restorative justice.

Which are, you know, word, "Restorative justice" has been brought up lately a lot, I think in the social justice space in general.

And we think about what harm is being done.

Especially economic harm, you know, is like what is that repair look like?

Is it just a, as one of decision say is a "Kumbaya?"

We just talk about it, and then who does that really benefit?

You know, who does that relieve?

But what does that real repair look like?

And so I'm curious on the perspective on what is repair in these type of situation where massacres have occurred, and economic and generational wealth have been taken away?

I'll start with you, Dr. Franklin.

- Well I mean, it can tell a number of things.

It could be cold cases, opening up cold cases.

Or announcing them as cold cases, so we can even posthumously engage in prosecutions.

The Truth of Reconciliation Commission models perhaps is a way to do that.

Reparations or some form of repair to justice, or reparative monetary payments.

That we now have enough astute of active admissions, economists that can quantify how much money, what was lost over time, or would of been gained over time, had those businesses and not had Black African, had African Americans been allowed to stay and operate there.

So we can quantify that down to the dollar amount to actually put a number that when it comes to reparations.

But I agree with the sentence in the film.

What I don't, what I'm very cautious about, or at least I struggle with are ceremonies that are kumbaya moments that really are intended to be kind of economic boosters for the city, and the city kind of just like Wilmington, you just, it's almost like a natural evolution that Wilmington forgives and moves on.

Because I think that those kind of kumbaya moments do actually more damage than they do actually are good.

But I mean, I think there's different, different ways, different models.

And then the most important component of some type of restorative, or reparative justice is participatory.

It's let the families that are descendants of the Wilmington massacre victims and coup victims, let them decide what are the best approaches, and forms of reparative justice that are meaningable to them.

- Okay.

- So you need a participatory anchor to that, as well.

- And I'm going to hold that thought.

And I'm gonna come to you, Dr. Hamdallahi right now.

But I wanna keep that to top of mic.

Because we tried something like that similar here.

And (indistinct) and to say and I love to see how that maybe parallels.

- Absolutely.

- Dr. Hamdallahi?

- Oh I think, and those are great ideas, and I totally agree.

I think that maybe posthumous, you know, also degrees, kind of just honoring some of these victims.

One of the victims was a boy.

I mean and so, you know, if the school is still around maybe just posthumous diploma, just to acknowledge that you know, you are here.

We appreciate your presence here.

And this is to acknowledge, you know, what you meant to the community.

I know that they've done a few statues and things like that.

But also I mean, the film brings out, is that a lot descendants they weren't laid to rest properly.

And so you know, I think sometimes ceremonies can be a good thing because it helps to give families a sense of closure.

But also the descendants, they are in a great position I think to become part of, you know, a movement to sort of speak out against racial media.

So they know first hand, or they know, you know directly, what a racist media, a reckless racist speech.

They know directly what type of, what type of adverse effects those things can have on an entire city.

So I mean, just sort of banning together and continuing to speak out.

I think they're in a great position in today's time to be change angers.

- Going back to something you said, Dr. Franklin, (clearing throat) or just making it, kind of localizing it to here in Nashville, about participatory engagement in reconciliation or reparations, and what's that look like for the descendants of the people even still alive?

You know, we kind of tried, I think, the Jefferson Street Cap, you know to when, you know 40 went through North Nashville to Interstate.

And trying to figure out like how do we reconcile?

How do we repair that?

Didn't seem to work out.

And I think a lot of it is because a lot of those people that was harmed, aren't, are no longer here.

Or they wouldn't participate, didn't know much about it.

Dr. Franklin, how do we mitigate those type of things to make sure community members that have been economically hurt through things like that, whether it's a massacre or a massacre via interstate, be repaired?

Or is it like, "Hey, land and a check."

And then, is that the best way or how is that?

Because, how that's been done well?

Is there examples of that being done even well?

- I don't know if there's a example...

I would have to give thought to it.

Especially interstates, 'cause a lot of communities, hundreds of communities or so, hundreds got cut up by interstates.

I don't think that Nashville really tried it with the quote/unquote, "Jefferson Street Cap" that was an idea that came out of downtown.

And was embraced by the Civic Design Center, and many kind of White professionals, many of whom have never stepped foot inside of the Black community.

And then reframed as a reparations, or reparative justice, just for the sole purposes of winning over African Americans.

And Black people saw that con game, or that (indistinct) if I can be honest with you.

But so I don't think it's been tried in the City of Nashville.

But what I do know is just from my academic background, my academic training, is that there are enough experts out there that can quantify the amount of doctors lost because upon the amount of business closures, the amount of homes that were, people that were displaced.

The people who had to change schools.

We can put a dollar amount and quantify that.

And does that mean, what does that mean as outcome?

There are many, many different approaches to how you repair that.

Many different policy interventions, how you do that.

And I'm just, no, more of a fan of argument that to get there, it also is going to require reducing polarization, inside of, you know, effective communities, African American communities.

And one way to reduce that is, is what some refer to as participatory development.

Which is a model that's used often in poor communities.

Where those communities are most impacted can actually decide for themselves what reparative justice looks like.

But what they tried in Nashville with the freeway and the cap, that was a Chamber of Commerce backed a position of Black folks.

- [Jerome] Okay.

- (chuckling) If I can say that.

I don't know if I can say that.

(chuckling) - You said, (indistinct) it's been said.

(all chuckling) He said it.

(all chuckling) - Dr. Hamdallahi, do you have anything to add to that?

- Well I was just going to, I mean suggest.

I mean, it has been done.

It's actually done quite often.

Just not, you know in Black, in the African American communities.

So we see that, you know, after natural disasters strick, especially in prominent communities, those prominent communities are restored.

In sort of of break, you know, record speed.

And so I think that, you know, local government, local communities, state governments, the federal government, I think is, as Dr. Franklin had mentioned, if you know, if we can just sort of continue to drive, you know, partisanship down, continue to develop communities that are, you know, savvy enough to sort of begin to utilize more so, I think more so, some of these, some of these different governmental outfits.

I think that, you know, it's not rocket science to sort of fix these communities.

It's I think, more so just the partisanship of it all.

- And we talk about, I think we get into, look, when you talk about facing the communities.

I think we get, or building communities, I think we get into the organizer aspect of it, too.

Especially it's like well, what can everyday community members, whether they were affected or not, indirectly or directly affected, what is that step?

Is it via policy?

It is talking to your local council, man or woman?

What do y'all feel is probably the best steps for a community to be able to really be able to organize and take action when harm is done?

Especially to this degree.

And even if it's 100, or 200 years after the fact?

You know, there's still derivative effects.

You know, as we know.

I'll let you start with that, Dr. Hamdallahi?

- So in the context of the Wilmington coup d'etat, I think that it's really illustrative.

When those Black people fled their communities, unfortunately.

On the other side of that, a lot of Black communities welcomed those people in with open arms.

They went to different community centers, they went to different churches.

And they welcomed them in with open arms.

We also saw the, you know, a re-emergence, or re-assertion of the Black press during that time.

You know people, African Americans outside of Wilmington really didn't just take it lightly.

They really started to sort of spread their tentacles, they begin to sort of organize.

You had people such as Ida B.

Wells.

You know, even people such as W.E.B.

Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington to a relative degree.

Began to sort of organize in their own different ways, in their own different channels to know have, to sort of muster an appropriate response.

And I think that's really what it's gonna take in contemporary times.

Is that the communities, we're going to have to start reaching out to our brothers and sisters in other communities.

And we're gonna have to sort of play the game the way that you know, you know, organizations, you know around the world plays it.

I mean there are many sort of national organizations that are, you know, ready to kind of step in and provide assistance and things like that.

So I mean, just sort of using the network the way that the people, right after the women in coup d'etat used their network.

I think that's something that could be helpful today.

- Okay.

Dr. Franklin, anything to add onto that?

- Yeah, I think just pulling all levers.

Whether it be harm reduction strategies, community defense strategies... Mutual aid societies that can, or what we used to call "Mutual Aid Societies."

What some people used to later call "Survival Programs."

I think all that matters is part of a cohesive infrastructure that can engage in policy interventions, but also offer a safe space in the form of community solidarity.

And also you know, I think building out, you know, relationships with other groups that are similarly, maybe not the same, but similarly positioned where those kinds of constructive coalitions matter a great deal.

The politics does matter.

Even if you have a holistic kind of community that has a thriving economy, whether it be Tulsa, whether it be Wilmington.

If the other side of what can control the politics, you can call out troops, they can control the ballot box, then the other side then has a way of then penetrating, and ultimately destroying one's economy.

If I could make one more point about the coup.

And this is important for the audience.

That the coup has to be seen also in the context of the Supreme Court.

And the Supreme Court from 1870s on up to 1896, made a series of decisions that devastated the Black community.

We often talk about Plessy, the Plessy case.

But for me for the, well, with coup, one of the worse, if not the worse decision was a case called U.S. verses Cruikshank in 1873.

In which you had a massacre, it was in many respects a worse massacre than Wilmington.

And it was a massacre of African Americans who actually vie for power in New Orleans, not New Orleans, in Louisiana in, at the Colfax Courthouse.

And it came after a similar massacre in New Orleans.

And the Supreme Court got hold of that case and had to decide whether or not a reconstruction law, or series of reconstruction laws called Enforcement Acts allowed for Klan-like figures, the Ku Klux Klan, and White mobs to be brought in under federal indictments and convicted.

And a lower court decided in favor of the civil right groups.

- [Jerome] Okay.

- The Supreme Court came out with might be in the Cruikshank case, the crazy and worst decision.

One of the worse in American history.

Because the Supreme Court effectively green lighted African Americans.

And said more or less that it was okay- - [Jerome] Wow.

- If White mobs, Klan-like groups can actually target African Americans.

And that case in Cruikshank was about African Americans that were vying for power, who were about to gain power in that small town in Louisiana.

And after 1876, that opened up the flood gates against African Americans to be attacked, to be liquidated in politics.

And the Wilmington coup comes 20 years later, but it's partly because of the Supreme Court green-lighted it.

Allowed for it.

- [Jerome] Made it okay.

- Yeah, allowed for African Americans to be slaughtered.

To be slaughtered over politics.

To be slaughtered over their gains for political power.

And so when we talk about what can be done, we have to have holistic methods.

We have to have to have, whether it be mutual aid, whether it be economic strategies, political strategies.

But the politics does matter.

- You talk about power.

When we see events like Wilmington or Tulsa, or the ones in Louisiana, when you, when Black people in power go hand-to-hand, it seem like, you know, this country has a very variable terrible reaction.

Do y'all believe there's still the case in many ways?

And do you think this plays a part in just the Black American experience psyche?

Whether you're trying to build a business, whether you're trying to go into politics?

Some of these events, possibly psychologically going through Black folks' mind.

And that trauma, how do you combat that?

I'll start with you, Dr. Hamdallahi.

- You know, I think you're quite right.

Unfortunately in politics, especially in American politics, there's always this sort of, there's always a quick short-term gain if you can sort of demonize the other.

In American history, African Americans have been the other.

Today I think we're seeing the LBGT community being that other, immigrants being that other.

But when I was looking at this particular case and kind of reading it, most of the sources, they tend to suggest that a lot of it kind of culminated because of a, the demonization of what Black men would do if they were to become in power.

An article written by a White woman, White supremacist woman, who was very politically savvy.

She was the, her husband was a politician.

She was his campaign manager.

So this wasn't some sort of, you know, whatever.

This was a person who knew exactly what she was doing.

So when she wrote, you know, her editorial, sort of just demonizing what would happen to White women if Black men were to allow to be in charge and things like that.

That really kind of set a-blaze, you know, and inflame, you know, people's passion, people's passions back then.

Remember you know, most people really didn't have much more than a high school education in those days.

And so it was really, really easy to sort of drum people up.

Well you fast-forward to today, people have, you know, college education, high school degrees, and they're just as inflamed when things like that come up.

It cost people elections when you bring up, you know, the sexual of the Black man and Black women, unfortunately.

So it continues to work like a charm.

And that's something that, that I've been trying to sort of think about as I watched your documentary.

Is how can we sort of move beyond that?

How can we sort of move beyond that collectively and not be so sort of, allowed ourselves to be picked apart by these sort of old stereotypes and caricatures?

- How about you, Dr. Franklin?

That blackness and power in this country?

- I mean yeah, it matters.

It depends upon the context.

You know, if you're Ayanna Pressley, you come out of Boston, is a multiracial community.

You're experiencing some success, there's Black lawmakers in Congress who are experiencing some success.

In which they're coming out of majority White districts.

Which did not happen 30 years ago.

It was almost impossible for that to happen.

But some of those salient elections, for example, 2008 with Obama, and also the most recent election with Kamala Harris.

We're definitely seeing that race plays a role in priming voters.

And there's an interesting study even about the Obama years written by a conservative, a very prominent conservative person who used to be involved in high-level Republican party politics.

He said, he kind of quoted the number of studies that stated that on every single issue, there was an increasing Black-White divide.

And that many Whites, essentially, let's say for example, Sandy Hook and gun issues.

There's a racial divide.

And many Whites felt that they're experiencing reverse discrimination.

So there was a heightened level of racial resentment to use a fancy words, that we use in political science, emerging in the Obama years.

And we saw that during also in this last election involving Kamala Harris.

So we do see that in certain elections.

And it's still gonna be with us for in the future.

- If y'all can close out, 15 seconds each of just the last thoughts on this documentary, and how it effects race, power, and democracy today.

I'll start with you, Dr. Hamdallahi.

- Well, I'd say that democracy is something that's very fragile.

And it's something that we have to protect.

We have to hold and guard jealously on many different, from a holistic perspective.

We have to be careful in the way we campaign for, in politics.

We have to be careful the way we use, we use media.

We also have to, I think, be very appreciative of the resilience of, you know, of the African American constituency.

Giving everything that they've gone through, the way that they have been able to sort of move forward and try to sort of rebuild some of the things that were taken from them.

- Dr. Franklin, 15 seconds.

- It's important to capture your histories.

Most of the, much of the history of African Americans, or in general, civil rights, racial bias, has not been captured, has not been told.

And the audience, you can start right now with your kids.

Which they can interview their elders, and catalog those stories.

And once you do that, you'll find there's a lot more relevant stories that intersect with politics and the so-called American experiment.

- Let's give our guests a round of applause.

(audience applauding) And thank y'all for watching another episode of "Slice of the Community."

And if you would like to watch more, please visit our YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/@nashvillepbs Thank y'all, again.

- [Guest] Thank you.

- For sure.

- [Guest 2] Thank you so much.

- For sure.

Thank you all.

(upbeat music) (gentle music)