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-Understanding our diverse and sometimes painful history is not just about honoring the past, but shaping a more inclusive and unprejudiced future.

Hello, I'm Don McCorry.

On this edition of Tennessee is Talking, the topic is the importance of Black history.

Understand the significance of teaching an honest and comprehensive history that fully recognizes the contributions and struggles of Black Americans.

Let the conversation begin.

-We are rolling.

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Standby camera two, take two.

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-West Tennessee PBS presents Tennessee is Talking.

Let the conversation begin.

-Thanks for joining the discussion here on Tennessee is Talking.

Hello, I'm Don McCorry.

A group of students and faculty at UT Martin are driven by a passion for education, advocacy, and social change.

Here to tell us more is the founder of the Black History Matters Coalition, Dr. David Barber.

Thanks for joining us.

What inspired you to create the Black History Matters Coalition at UT Martin?

-First, thanks for having me here.

At the end of 2019, just around Thanksgiving, some White supremacist group distributed flyers.

They were putting the flyers on parked automobiles.

Of course, they were immediately caught and the chancellor at the time, Keith Carver, had them all rounded up.

I looked at these flyers and one of the flyers was particularly striking to me.

It involved a Black man, a big hulking Black man with his arm around a very dazed looking White woman.

A White man was in the background with his head bowed and very ashamed of himself.

That was the message of the flyer, the old sexual stereotype.

I looked at that and I said, "You know what?

This is a dangerous--" Obviously, it was dangerous.

It's dangerous because it reverses history.

The real rapists in our history were the slave owners, their families, their brothers, their sons and so on.

Most Americans don't know that.

Most Americans don't understand that.

-But they reacted to the images.

-Yes, but they continue to react to the images.

Exactly right.

I felt like it was particularly dangerous because we are living in hard ti.. for many, many people.

Many people in rural West Tennessee, Wheatley County where my.. is located.

Wheatley County is 90% White and about 25% of the young people.. to the public schools are on free or assisted lunch.

That's a lot of poor White people.

A lot of White people having great difficulty in their life, not understanding what they're seeing, not having been given any significant sexual education.

I remember when I was 19 and 20 years old and I remember how confused I was with sexuality.

I felt like the answer to this is not only collecting all the flyers that have been distributed or trying to prevent their distribution, but the real antidote to the kind of poison being promoted with these White supremacist groups, the real antidote is education.

-That's true.

-First and foremost, education around the study of Black .. -I just have to ask, this was a French group.

These were not students at the school, were they?

-Right, it was a foreign group, yes.

-Good.

Could you share a little bit about the mission of your organization?

-All right, so the Black History Matters Coalition, we worked for about a year before it dissolved in the face of the intransigence of the administration and the Faculty Senate to do anything about the problem.

They steadfastly refused to even discuss the issue publicly.

One question that we repeatedly asked both to our chancellor and to our Faculty Senate leadership is, is it possible to be a responsible citizen in the United States today without the study of Black history, without understanding Black history?

They wouldn't even answer that question.

-They would not have the conversation.

-They would not have that conversation, right.

In the face of that ongoing intransigence, and remember, this was at the time of COVID, everybody was isolated and so on, we basically dissolved.

In 2022, I gave a talk at UT Martin titled Is UT Martin Institutionally Racist?

-That was pretty risky title.

-[laughs] I don't know if it was a risky title, but it was the title that I felt best articulated the problem that I saw.

We had a lot of students.

There were a lot of people there at the talk.

On the basis of that talk, we founded a new organization called People for Black History.

People for Black History has been working since 2023.

We've done a bunch of different things.

One thing that we did was in relation to the divisive concept laws.

Do you-- -You can share that with our audience.

-All right, the divisive concept laws were the laws that were passed in the immediate wake of the George Floyd demonstrations.

In that, in those George Floyd demonstrations, everybody and their uncle, [laughs] I guess I am allowed to use-- -A family reference.

-Everybody and their uncle and their aunt too, was talking about systemic racism.

I felt that, "Let's take advantage of this.

Let's understand this."

Many people felt that way.

The other side, Donald Trump, who was then president, Donald Trump issued an executive order denouncing as divisive concepts, really the study of systemic racism, of institutional racism.

In Tennessee, they generated a law.

It was the same law that was generated in about 20, 25 other states, which among other things say that in a K-12 school-- The first law applied only to K-12 schools.

In a K-12 school, you can't teach that this country is fundamentally racist.

You can't say this country is not a meritocracy.

You can't make your students uncomfortable with stories of the past.

There's a bunch of other provisions.

We challenged the People for Black History beginning in the spring of '23.

-Were these legal challenges or were they administrative challenges?

-We challenged the laws and we challenged our Faculty Senate to condemn the laws.

The first time I ever raised the issue of the divisive concept laws.

I should back up and say, the divisive concept laws were advertised under the umbrella of critical race theory has invaded our schools.

That was the way that it was put forward.

-That was a- -buzz phrase that this country really took to task and created a lot of misconceptions.

-Absolutely.

The thing about that phrase is they didn't want to say what they were really targeting because what they were really targeting was, of course, the study of Black history.

-Correct.

-We conducted a petitioning campaign directed at the Faculty Senate demanding that the Faculty Senate condemn these laws and condemn these laws as White supremacist laws.

The first time I appeared before a Faculty Senate committee on these laws, it was a 45-minute session.

There were about 20 people in the room and almost the entire conversation, almost the entire 45 minutes was, "If we use this phrase, White supremacist, they're going to cut our funding.

This state legislature will cut our funding."

Ultimately, we, People for Black History, the group that I advise, gathered 1,400 signatures demanding that the Faculty Senate condemn the laws.

-Condemn the laws, correct.

-The Student Government Association passed a resolution condemning the laws and when it reached the Faculty Senate, the Faculty Senate revised the wording- -The language.

--the language, and they took out one of the therefores.

The language was revised from White supremacist to racist.

All right, it's still strong.

That's still strong.

They took out the demand, the therefore, that the Faculty Senate ask the administration to also condemn the law.

All right.

We brought to that meeting students.

-There's a combination of both students and faculty.

-This is a meeting of the Faculty Senate and students don't usually attend.

There were a total of about 20 students attending and we also invited the press to attend.

One member of the-- I can't remember the call letters, but the Paducah television station came down and she came into the room and she starts filming and her cameraman is someplace else, he hasn't gotten there.

They kick her out of the room.

They say, "You're not invited and so therefore you cannot."

She said, "This is a public meeting, it's a public--" "No, you're out."

[laughs] We were condemned at the time by the Faculty Senate as one of the Faculty Senate leaders as Dr. Barber's intimidation tactics.

Intimidation meaning that we have the press there to watch and see the debate.

-Making someone uncomfortable will make you antagonistic.

-Yes.

-The hard part is getting the conversation started.

Once the conversation begins, views can change.

Speaking of which, how have you personally been changed by your growth and expansion of Black history?

-I'd answer in a couple of ways.

First of all, this is an exploration for me.

My relationship to Black history and its importance goes a long way back.

I'm a veteran of the 1960s.

I was very young in the '60s.

I was 18 at the height of what was going on and that was a tremendous experience.

It was for the first time that I was introduced to W.E.B.

Du Bois, who is without doubt the greatest intellectual, academic and activist of the first part of the 20th century.

His book, Black Reconstruction, is mandatory reading for anybody .. American history.

I also got involved with James Baldwin's thinking.

James Baldwin is so insightful.

He's the master of understanding what race has done not only to Black people but to White people, what racial oppression has done not only to Black people but to White people.

It has taken a terrible toll on White people.

Baldwin has an essay, The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King.

In that essay, he quotes Dr. King or he recounts something that Dr. King had said saying that who Dr. King really feels is harmed most by racism are White people because their souls have been corrupted by this White supremacist society.

-That's a very, very tough lesson for a White person to accept.

I'm sure you've gotten some pushback on that subject.

-Absolutely.

What I have learned, and it's not like-- Baldwin insists that we have to snatch our salvation from the reality of what we do every day.

That's certainly true for me.

I've grown up in this society.

I've been shaped by this society.

I share the prejudices that I was raised with.

It's only by being aware, trying to be aware of the stereotypes that I am seeing that allows me to try to deal with those stereotypes and try to see people not as colors, but as individuals.

-What is it that you want the students to take away from the work that you have done with the coalition?

Students and staff.

-Students and staff and faculty.

-Faculty.

-[laughs] Let me tell you a story.

When I first started talking about the divisive concept laws and said in a faculty meeting I was in, "We need to do something about this."

The divisive concept laws, the American Historical Association, which is the largest association of American historians, condemned those anti-CRT laws as having as their real goal the suppression of the teaching and learning of the role of racism in American history.

That's pretty much a direct quote.

I said to the faculty, in this faculty meeting I was in, very early on, very shortly after the first law was passed, the K-12 law, I said, "We need to say something.

This is compromising our role as educators.

This is compromising our role in relationship to our students, to whom we owe the truth."

One of the people in the meeting I was in said, "If we do that, it'd be like putting a target on our backs."

-What do you see as one of the biggest gaps in the teaching of Black history in higher education?

-All right.

Number one, it's rarely taught.

Number two, oftentimes the way it is taught, I know historians around the country who will say, of course, Black history is American history.

What they mean by that is, we're going to include- -a number of Black faces in the history that we teach.

We're going to maintain the same basic narrative of American history that we've been teaching for a long time, the land of the free, the home of the brave, America as the last, best hope for mankind, but we'll add a few Black faces to it.

That's what I call-- It used to be called the contributionist's history.

Now I call it inclusion.

I think inclusion is oftentimes meant in the same way.

-Who gets to decide- -Exactly.

--who's included?

-If we don't change the narrative, then we're simply including a few Black faces or a few Native American faces and not really changing the narrative.

That's the principle shortcoming, that to whatever extent Black faces are included in American history, we're not changing the narrative.

When I say changing the narrative, The 1619 Project, which Trump, when he put out his executive order on divisive concepts, also created the 1776 project to counter the 2019 Project.

2019 project, the book that was issued off of that initial run of the 2019 Project in The New York Times, the book is wonderful.

The editor, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has three essays in that book.

Every one of them is wonderful.

In those essays, she puts forward exactly what I'm trying to get across here, that the real history of this country doesn't begin with the settlement of Jamestown.

It begins in 1619 with the arrival of the first Africans, because that's what makes America.

Before that, it's English settlement.

What makes America is the role that Black people have played in it.

One thing that I have been talking about lately is the year 1917.

I'm trying to give you an example here.

The year 1917 is the year that the United States went to war to make the world safe for democracy.

It was the war that Woodrow Wilson said, "We stand for justice.

We stand for peace in the world."

This is the American narrative.

In the year 1917, 50 miles from where we are sitting right now in Dyersburg, Tennessee, there was one of the most brutal lynchings in a long history of extraordinarily brutal lynchings, a man named Lation Scott.

I could go on for a while about it, but let me just say this, they strapped Lation Scott with his arms and his legs chained around a large axle that had been driven into the ground so he can't move.

They put straw and flammable material around him.

They lit that.

They kept the fire very slow.

They took hot irons that you would iron clothes with.

They heated those red hot.

They branded his back and they branded his chest with the iron.

They gouged out his eyes.

There were anywhere between 5,000 and 8,000 good citizens of Dyersburg.

It was a Sunday afternoon.

The Sunday schools were letting out.

Parents were hoisting their children onto their shoulders so they could see.

Something's wrong with those people.

Something's wrong with the society.

-I would like to leave our viewers with a sense of hope.

Can you quickly give me your vision for the future of African-American history or Black history in higher education?

-I think Make America Great Again is looking at-- What gives Make America Great Again its power is that our people don't know the real history of this country.

I certainly have hope, but I can't tell you that I have a lot of confidence.

Our country needs to understand its history and the history of this country as it's been experienced by Black people first and foremost because until we know that, until we understand that, we're headed for a train wreck of unbelievable proportions.

-Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Sadly, we are out of time for this edition of Tennessee is Talking.

We want to thank Dr. David Barber for stopping by and telling us the importance of teaching Black history.

If you want to watch or re-watch this program or share it with a friend, remember it can be streamed anytime on the PBS app along with all local Channel 11 programs.

You can also watch it on westtnpbs.org.

Keep the conversation going by following West TN PBS on social media.

Until next time, keep on talking, Tennessee.

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