Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC and we're so happy to have back with us now Elizabeth Alexander, the poet, and writer, memoirist, scholar, author of 14 books, and president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She was last here, some of you may remember, last year for her New Yorker article, the Trayvon Generation, which just last week won a national magazine award.

She has a new major piece in National Geographic called This Is How We Can Envision Black Freedom. Dr. Alexander, we always appreciate when you come on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Elizabeth Alexander: Thank you so much, Brian. It's always great to talk with you.

Brian Lehrer: Your article begins with the story of artists and activists Bree Newsome Bass at the South Carolina State House in 2015. Would you remind us of what she did there that day and why you led your piece with her story?

Elizabeth Alexander: Yes, on that day, Bree Newsome Bass climbed the flagpole at the South Carolina State House and took down the Confederate flag that had flown above the people of that State for a very long time. She did that 10 days after a white supremacist murdered eight Black parishioners and their pastor at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, which as we know, was grown from a congregation first organized by enslaved and free Black people in the late 18th century.

In response to that, I don't know how many people have to be killed to call something a massacre. In response to that horrific event done in the name of white supremacy, Bree Newsome took down that flag, knowing that she was going to be arrested, knowing that it was State property, knowing that she was doing something illegal. She submitted to arrest when she came to the bottom of the flagpole.

She said that enough was enough that having this symbol that taught white supremacy to the people of that State and implicitly, was part of the ideology that led to Dylann Roof's horrific actions, that it had to go, it had to stop. She was asked at that moment, as she was being arrested, why she did what she did. She said, "I did it because I am free."

I think that that freedom, even in the face of horror, even in the face of ongoing racist ideology, with murderous consequence, to say that as a Black woman, she was free to act, that she was free to speak, and that she was free to try to change the face of how our collective identity was told, was an incredibly indelible, powerful. I call it a monument and a memorial even though it was an action that took place in a few minutes.

Brian Lehrer: You posed the direct question, which I think you were just suggesting. What does it mean to be Black and free in a country that rejects Black freedom? Could you describe what you mean by the word freedom in that context? Again, I know you were starting to get at it in your last answer, but some people might say, well, there's still a lot of racism that affects people's lives to be sure, but freedom had to do with enslavement. How do you think of the word?

Elizabeth Alexander: I think that surely freedom does have to do with the condition of being enslaved or not being enslaved. I think we also all know and experience that there is much more to it than that. Do we have the freedom of movement, the freedom to be able to live, to go to school wherever we want to, do we have the assured freedom that we can cast our votes? We are no longer enslaved, but there are still real encumbrances, some of them under the letter of law, that keep us from being able to exercise our freedom.

Then there's another level of freedom which is, what is it that we feel we can and can't do? What I love about Bree Newsome Bass was most people don't think they can climb a flagpole and take down a flag that is over a State house. Accepting the consequences, she did that outlandish thing to make a much larger point. What about the fear of moving freely.

There's amazing essay in of all interesting places Runner's World by Mitchell Jackson that I have been really taken with about Ahmaud Arbery. The essay just won the Pulitzer Prize. He asks the question, "Who is free to run? What class? What race? What gender is free to jog without fear?" That fundamental idea of the freedom that we hope that children have to just run into the sun, run free.

When you think about the message of something like Ahmaud Arbery, and what happened to him, there is a real fear of exercising our freedom of movement, which sometimes has a deadly cost. With Tamir Rice, free to run 12 years old play and wave a plastic toy gun in the air, what did that cost him? His exercising a child's freedom.

I think also what's important to understand about freedom, and what I'm most interested in as a person who's a teacher and a writer, and someone who believes in the power of ideas, and in the power of creativity and the power of the imagination is Langston Hughes asked in 1925 in his essay, The Negro Writer and The Racial Mountain, what does it mean to be free within ourselves, free within ourselves.

I think that while we have to continue to fight hard for all of the legal and societal freedoms that everyone deserves, I think that also freedom of the mind, freedom of knowledge, the ability to critically evaluate your situation and condition. Freedom to imagine something other than the way you might be living, freedom to express with joy and exaltation, what you love about who you are and what your culture is, and the way that you are living, that freedom is real. I do think that is the freedom that I want us to celebrate, elevate and remind people that they have.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we're going to talk mostly to Elizabeth Alexander in this segment, but we can take a few phone calls for her as we discuss her article, This Is How We Can Envision Black Freedom. After that wonderful answer, maybe you have some thoughts of your own along those lines for yourself, or maybe you want to answer another of her central questions from the piece, which we'll get to, which is how do we move forward with this contemptible knowledge, she uses that phrase, about some of the awful things in hopefully no longer submerged history, and its antidotes as our guide?

What are some antidotes or any other questions for Dr. Alexander at 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. Referring to things like the lynching of Emmett Till, and the Charleston massacre, yes, that certainly qualified as a massacre. In 2015, you write that as an educator and field builder in African American Studies, you believe that knowledge from the field sits at the center of any genuine understanding of the United States. You ask that question that I just repeated for our listeners, how do we move forward with his contemptible knowledge and its antidotes as our guide? How do you begin to answer that question for yourself? What might be some antidotes since you use that word?

Elizabeth Alexander: Well, I think there are a lot of antidotes. For me personally, one of the antidotes has been knowledge sharing, exploring, research, and teaching. I really and truly believe that deep study and knowledge sharing bring us the truth that can set us free in our understanding. That is why I am so concerned right now as many others are to see the legislative impediments, that are being attempted now to keep history from being taught to us to keep Black history from being taught to us.

To keep certain theoretical ways of understanding American history from being taught to us. We are really in trouble if we let that happen because I think that part of the power of this moment is that more and more people are hungry to learn that which they have not been exposed to and hungry to have the tools. By this, I mean, everybody hungry to have the tools to unpack the ideologies that would have us understanding our history only partially. I also think and this is some of the work that we're doing at the Mellon foundation so much teaching takes place in our public spaces. That's why a lot of what our work is right now and I'm so excited about it is in our biggest initiative ever, which is called the Monuments Project.

That is where we are thinking about our built environment. We're thinking about our public spaces and the histories that are told there, and about the preponderance of Confederate monuments that offer a false version of our history. They don't give us a clear history of the civil war. They venerate white supremacy. They were erected decades and decades and decades and decades after the civil war was over and yet they persist.

If you look at all of the monuments and memorials that venerate war and acts of violence and aggression, there are so many more stories to tell that are so rich and so compelling and for everyone. I think that in monuments and also in public teaching places like the many great Smithsonian museums, like the National Museum of African-American History and Culture these are places where everyone can come and not only learn but be enthralled by learning and be inspired by the stories of ingenuity and survival, truly against the odds.

Brian Lehrer: You talked a minute ago about the attempt by some to hide or bury parts of American history, or keep them submerged, or even constructs ways of looking at American history. I imagine you're referring to things like this the Juneteenth Holiday Bill passed overwhelmingly in both houses of Congress, but there were some Republicans who voted, no. One of them said, "This is an effort by the left to create a day out of whole cloth to celebrate identity politics as part of its larger effort to make critical race theory the reigning ideology of our country." Would you speak a little bit to how ahistorical it is to say that this holiday is being newly invented out of whole cloth and maybe a little bit of your take on, as an educator, what should people understand the term critical race theory to mean?

Elizabeth Alexander: Yes. Let us just open the whole can of worms. First of all, Juneteenth, to be responsive to that particular legislator it is not created out of whole cloth. It was June the 19th, 1865 Galveston, Texas when Black people there, former slaves were informed of their freedom. Understood as the endpoint of American slavery when everyone was finally free. That is cause for great celebration. Now let's be clear. The emancipation proclamation was January 1st, 1863.

To me, the importance of understanding and marking Juneteenth is that those people were kept in bondage for two and a half years after they were in fact free. We've got to understand the push-pull of history. We've got to understand the importance to continue to quest for our freedom. We've got to understand what it means to be in precise about history. If we're just hooting and hollering and carrying on with excitement that now everybody's free today, I don't know how you forget the two and a half years that that knowledge was kept from people.

I think that Juneteenth is a wonderful opportunity to celebrate freedom but talk about the struggle and how thorny it is. To these legislators who voted against it, I am more concerned, frankly, with legislative efforts to curtail voting, to curtail the teaching of history. It's wonderful to have this national holiday. I celebrate it. I think that we just can't look at it outside of what's happening in the same building on the same day to keep people from having their rights. We've really, really not got, "Don't get it twisted, don't be distracted." All of these things are true at the same time and we have to understand them that way.

Now, critical race theory. Critical race theory, it's kind of amazing to me having come up in the academy with the brilliant teachings and writings of the original critical race theorists, Kimberle Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Derrick Bell. All that they taught us from legal studies and legal theory about the endemic nature of race, racism and its attendant structures through all aspects of American life. From that critical race theory, that which basically sort of says, "You can't analyze and understand America unless you also understand racist structures." There also were people in literary studies and history studies and other studies who continue to make really important work that gives people fantastic critical tools for understanding our country.

That's critical race theory. That's what it is. Now, it is an umbrella term that is used for anything that has to do with diversity and inclusion and equity, and teaching diverse histories. It has been demonized. I think that in some ways it's evidence of the power of ideas and scholarship to have people scared that if everyone has these tools for understanding, then there might be a different kind of empoweredness in our society, but critical race theory as such has been distorted far from what it actually is.

Brian Lehrer: In your opinion, to envision and then move toward Black freedom and again, if you're just joining us, listeners, my guest is Elizabeth Alexander, President of the Mellon foundation whose new article in National Geographic is called How Do We Envision Black Freedom. In order to do that, are we now going through a necessary truth-telling where these so many stories from the submerged history as you call it? So many people never heard about Tulsa until this year, and we could go down the list, need to become better known so it's like, "Hey, kids of the next generation, this is how bad it really was," in order to deal with the inequalities that are still rampant today and born of that history?

Elizabeth Alexander: Well, yes Tulsa, it's been fascinating and really wonderful to see how that story, which many people have always known, but the majority of people had not known has made its way into a mainstream conversation aided by mass media. There's been a lot of conversation about Tulsa in mass media aided by government officials. Having President Biden visit and tell that story and acknowledge that story and recognize that history.

I think not so much to understand how bad it was, but to understand the fullness of our history and to understand the progression of our history. I was listening to a wonderful Clint Smith on your show before and his work on all fronts is so extraordinary. When he spoke at the end about how slavery and its legacy is not far away. He's younger than I am, but he talks about, I think great, great grandparents who were enslaved.

I could talk about my mother telling my grown children about her grandparents who she knew, some of whom were born enslaved. This is close history, and it has fallout in ramification and slavery is not the only thing that we have had to fight against. Here we get back to freedom the curtailment of the freedom to vote, the redlining that has curtailed where we're able to live, and the segregation that has curtailed how our children are able to be educated and with what resources. All of these we've got to understand them. History doesn't start when you wake up in the morning and we just have to understand it. That is my speech. Brian Lehrer: That's a good speech. We're almost out of time and our next guest as we usually do on the show on Fridays is the mayor of New York City. Let me make a bit of a segue or invite you to in this way if Juneteenth is about informing people of their emancipation in Galveston, Texas in 1865, a story tell in the article is much closer to home for many of our listeners in space and in time, and it's about five corncobs laid out in a distinct shape that were found in a house in Brooklyn in 2001. Would you tell some of that story?

Elizabeth Alexander: Yes. I learned about that story from an article that the great Brent Staples wrote. I love how he brings so much history to the pages of the New York Times so that people can learn in the day-to-day about our history. When this what I call corncob cosmogram was found in a house in Brooklyn it was-- what we need to remember is that New York, save Charleston, North Carolina had the most enslaved people of any city in the country at a certain point. Let's just remember that.

I think there are some kind of dichotomous ideas about slavery being all about the south, but we need to understand that slavery actually was a much wider phenomenon than that. When those people were emancipated and it was found in a space that was cramped, that was airless where these enslaved people and their families lived, no windows, no light, no air. The cosmogram of corncobs under the floorboards showed how they held on to their religious practices.

They traced the patterns directly to West African systems of belief that among other things gave people an understanding of their connection to their ancestors, that the living were in connection and communication with the dead. That was a way of worshiping when people were living under the worst of circumstances, that to use the beautiful words of the spiritual, that is how we got over, how I got over. My soul looks back and wonder how I got over. That was one of the ways that people sustained themselves.

Eventually, they did attain their freedom and they were immediately put into sort of a peonage. They became paid laborers, but laborers who were not paid in a significant way. When that signed was significant in 2001 because it began to tell us a more complicated story, not only of where slavery was in this country. How people endured and how people within themselves to go back to our theme, found the freedom to supersede their conditions.

Brian Lehrer: We could go so much further to so many other places, to so many other points in time and listeners if you want to go there further with Elizabeth Alexander, President of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She's got a new major piece that deals with the things we've been talking about in National Geographic called This Is How We Can Envision Black Freedom. Thank you so much for making time on this Juneteenth holiday observed for us. We so appreciate it.

Elizabeth Alexander: Thank you so much always for just a deep conversation. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you.

[00:23:53] [END OF AUDIO]

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