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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Coming up later this hour, we're going to play our first-ever edition of Brian Lehrer Show, What's in the Box? When you call in, guess what's in the box, we're going to have a conversation about it. That's coming up. Right now, we're in the second week of Black history month and there are so many Black leaders, past and present, celebrated and recognized for their contributions to American history.

Obviously, what do these have in common, these folks? Booker T. Washington, WEB Dubois, Thurgood Marshall, Langston Hughes, Tony Morrison, David Dinkins, Roberta Flack, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. What's one thing that list all has in common? They all attended HBCUs, that's historically Black colleges and universities, which of course have helped build generations of Black leadership in America. Now we're going to take a look at the history and significance of HBCUs in America.

Our guest is an Academy award-nominated filmmaker, who as of this week became Oscar-nominated. More on that later, whose documentary in 2017, Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities, traces the history of HBCUs from the civil war era through reconstruction to the civil rights era and finally, to today, a time when they're around 100 HBCUs in the country. There's probably three or four or five, six that you always hear about. There are a hundred of them. Let's listen to a clip to start out from the opening montage of the documentary.

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Speaker 1: Black colleges are spaces where Black people are affirmed.

Speaker 2: You could be yourself and develop yourself in this rich soil.

Speaker 1: It's a space that is an unapologetic Black space.

Speaker 3: These are places where there's incredible freedom to explore.

Speaker 4: We wanted to better ourselves. We wanted to have an institution where they're people like us, all want it to be more than the status quo.

Speaker 1: The question for African Americans has always been, what is education's purpose? Who controls it, and what is the relationship of education to the broader aspirations of our people?

Brian Lehrer: Joining us now is Stanley Nelson, documentary filmmaker of many films, including Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities. As of this week, Stanley is also an academy award nominee for his latest film Anika, which we'll talk about later in the segment as we launch our annual series on the full-length documentaries, nominated for Oscars. Stanley, thanks for joining us, and welcome back to WNYC.

Stanley Nelson: Thank you so much for having me on.

Brian Lehrer: Is there an identifiable first, what we now call historically Black college or university?

Stanley Nelson: That's in dispute. There are a couple of them that basically started at the same time, but the vast majority of the colleges started somewhere right after the civil war.

Brian Lehrer: Why?

Stanley Nelson: Black folks wanted to get an education. African Americans coming out of the time of slavery really looked at education as a way to change their lives. Most African Americans, weren't allowed into white colleges, not only in the south, but also into the north and when they were allowed in the north, they were one or two or three or four. As I could say maybe there were one or two at Yale and Columbia and eight at some other schools, but mostly Black folks couldn't attend white colleges.

Brian Lehrer: Your film touches on something called contraband schools, which are a precursor to the HBCUs, right?

Stanley Nelson: Yes. One of the things that I find fascinating is just the term contraband because during the civil war, African Americans who escaped slavery, or were freed from slavery and went over to the north side, they were called contraband. They were contraband of war and in those, the Union soldiers had contraband camps in those camps, education was started and that's where so many people started their education in what was called contraband camps.

Brian Lehrer: Let's talk about an individual, Booker T. Washington, in this context. He went on to be the founder and president of Tuskegee University in Alabama. What was his role in what one speaker in the film describes as dictating the terms for Black education?

Stanley Nelson: Yes. Booker T. Washington as the head of Tuskegee was in many ways, the most powerful African American in the country. We're talking about 1890s or so. Tuskegee was backed by so many industrialists, Carnegie and others. He really set the terms. What his terms were, he made a famous speech called the Atlanta compromise where he basically said that African Americans, for the time being, could best serve and best be served by being subservient and in many ways, lower-class citizens, almost helpmates to white folks. This sounded good to a lot of people, especially a lot of white folks, it sounded really good.

One of the things that one person in the film says is, what they wanted was to be educated in a way so that they were-- They were educated, they could read signs that said, " Explosives, don't touch," but he also said, what good are the classics for most Black people. They don't need to read literature in the same way. Booker T. Washington was a very constructive figure. In some ways, he was very destructive.

Brian Lehrer: The second half of the film really focuses on the role of HBCUs and undoing racial segregation in schools up to the brown board of education Supreme court ruling in the 1950's. People may find that a little counterintuitive because this was in its way, a separate education system in its own right. Let's talk about that. Let's kick it off with a minute and a half clip from the film. This is a few speakers on the importance of HBCUs to overturning segregation in schools from Stanley Nelson's documentary, Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities.

Speaker 5: We felt it was incumbent upon us because we were young people. We were students, and we had a responsibility that we were going to be future leaders. Now was a good time to begin to demonstrate what good leaders we could become.

Speaker 6: We started out the first day, four, the second day, 16, the third day, 24, then 64, and then the Saturday occurred. We had pretty close to a thousand students demonstrating peacefully, and it kept growing until this thing just had a life of its own.

Speaker 7: It is being replicated throughout the south, and largely among Black college students, the revolution had actually begun.

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Watch me, Watch me.

I got it. Hey--

Narrator: The target of the students were the lunch counters of the city's two largest department stores and four variety stores. For the first time, the community was confronted with Negros in places where they had never been.

[music] I'm super bad, and I'm super bad.

Speaker 8: If you weren't out there demonstrating, then something had to be wrong with your school.

Brian Lehrer: Again, that montage from the film Tell Them We Are Rising, the filmmaker, Stanley Nelson with us. You want to talk about that clip and the larger role of HBCUs in integrating other schools and whether that extended to colleges and not just K-12.

Stanley Nelson: Yes. That clip is really about, in some ways, the beginning of what we call now, the civil rights movement and the sit-ins, which were started at HBCUs, and then exploded across all HBCUs. I think that one of the things that gets overlooked is the role, that Black colleges and Black college students had in the civil rights movement that so many of the actions that happened were led by Black college students. When you think about it, it's natural, Black college students, they were sitting around in dorms and saying "It's not right that we can't go to the Woolworths lunch counter in our town. Let's do something about it." They started sit-ins.

Also, Black college students are thinking about the future, and they're not beholden to their jobs, they don't have families for the most part. In many ways, Black college students were leaders. Black colleges were a breeding ground that the students would talk about the dilemma, and how to make change, and a lot of times we forget the roles that they had in the Civil Rights Movement. That's what that clip is really about, about the explosion of the Sit-in movements, where Black college students would just go and sit at lunch counters, or go use stores that they were not supposed to or that banned African-Americans, but Black college students just would sit-in, or take action to make change.

Brian Lehrer: Now that colleges and universities in the US are so much more integrated than when Black colleges and universities were first founded, what's the role of HBCUs in today's world, different than in the past, as you see it?

Stanely Nelson: I think the role has slightly changed, but in many ways, it's the same. Our K-12 educational system is so bad, and so skewed away from African-American accomplishment in most places, that many times Black colleges serve as the only place that African-American students coming out of high school can go and flourish, and get into. I think also right now the HBCUs, so many times are seen as safe space where, in many ways, the racism that exists in the United States, that you're not going to be exposed to that for just four years of your life at least.

One of the things that's somebody said to me was that "If you go to a majority white school, let's say you go to Harvard, well, you might not try out for the lead in Hamlet, or the lead in some other play but if you go to an HBCU, everybody in the play is Black." Everybody on the writing, on the newspaper, is Black. There's more of a tendency to go for it that students have at HBCUs. I think that one of the services that HBCUs now give at this point is just for African-Americans to say, "Just for four years of my life, I want to live in a place that's not racially motivated." For many people, it's, "I want to live in Wakanda for four years."

Brian Lehrer: Before we turn the page and talk about your new Oscar-nominated documentary, what's been your reaction to these disturbing bomb threats. It was reported that on the first day of Black History Month, 12 HBCUs received bomb threats and more have continued throughout the month. So far, we're nearly 200 years since the first HBCU was established and somebody, or some group of people, still thinks that there's a reason to, whether they bomb them or not, to call in bomb threats. What's going on, how do you react to this even in a historical context?

Stanely Nelson: I think it's very scary. I think that obviously, this country is taking, in many ways, backward steps. I've done a number of historical films, and I try to remember that the history of this country is not this upward movement constantly. There's dips and valleys, there's steps backwards, and we have to understand that and look at it, I think, to understand maybe what's happening now. It's very scary. I think it's just part of the tensions that are happening in this country. The license that's been given in the last five or six years for people to take actions, and say things, and do things that they would not have done probably for 100 years.

Brian Lehrer: Let's turn the page. With filmmaker Stanley Nelson, we now kick off our yearly series on Academy Award-nominated documentaries. That's because after we invited him to talk about his older HBCU film, which we've been discussing, he was nominated just this week for his first Academy Award for Best Documentary, Best Feature-Length Documentary, for his latest film Attica, which came out just last fall. This month, Showtime has made the film available for free on YouTube for anybody who wants to see it.

Attica tells the story of the prisoner uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility in Upstate Attica, New York, 35 miles east of Buffalo. It happened in 1971, for those of you who don't know. The prisoners overpowered the guards and took over the prison for five days demanding reforms. By the end of it, 43 people were dead. It marked a watershed moment for the prisoner rights movement. The film highlights many of the issues that our society is still confronting today, race, class, power, prison reform. Let's listen to a clip where a number of former prisoners describe the conditions of the prison.

Speaker 2: A roll of toilet paper would have to last you a month. You have to be a magician or tear up papers out of the books and stuff like that to wipe your behind and stuff like that. Guys were complaining about the basic things, like toothpaste, toilet paper, a change of sheets more than once a month, things like that, clothes being cleaned, personal hygiene things, being treated like human beings.

Speaker 3: No school program. Attica was-- I can't describe it. It was dead. It was just dead.

Speaker 4: There was no religious freedom then, particularly for the burgeoning Muslim movement. They were denied the right to worship. They were fed pork because the prison also had a farm where they raised pigs, so that's what you got.

Speaker 5: They fed us on 63 cents a day, so that's 21 cents a meal. How can you feed somebody on 21 cents?

Speaker 6: They wait until everybody's locked up at night, and then they come for you, come for you as a goon squad.

Speaker 7: These are the beat-up police. These the guys, they come 9, 10 deep, real big guys with real big sticks.

Speaker 8: Then they come in, and they beat you up in your cell, and then they take you to segregation, and sometimes, you don't come back. Attica was-- It was fear. They ran the prison with fear.

Brian: Stanley Nelson's film Attica produced that clip. Attica has now been nominated for an Academy Award. First of all, Stanley, congratulations. How does it feel to be an Oscar nominee?

Stanley Nelson: Good. [laughs] It feels really good. I'm just in shock and amazed. I'm just really so happy that Attica is getting recognition and that more people are going to see the film because I think it's a film that says so much about what happened back then but also about where our country is today and how we got here.

Brian: I guess you did it last year because 2021 was the 50th anniversary year of the Attica prison uprising. Did you learn anything new about it or were you mostly trying to bring the story from the past that's important to be remembered into the present?

Stanley Nelson: I learned everything new. I learned, as you hear in the clip, it's why the prisoners rebelled because we didn't really know that, the horrible conditions and the beatings that they were taking in Attica. We learned of the kind of heroism of the inmates at the prison, the way that they became united when they took over the prison, the white, the Black, and Puerto Rican prisoners.

We learned, as we go on in the film, the role of Nelson Rockefeller who was the governor of New York who could have ended it or helped ending it and then refused to, and then that Richard Nixon, the president of the United States, was in his ear. Thankfully, for us, Richard Nixon recorded all his phone calls, and we have phone calls in the film between Rockefeller and Nixon that are just unbelievable, the racism and the way that they are trying from the beginning to manipulate the story and what the public knows.

I knew a little bit about Attica, I knew that it happened, and that it was a tragedy, but I learned so much more in making the film.

Brian: One more clip from the film, another montage of prisoners.

Speaker 9: There was this culture clash that came together at Attica. You had all-white guards and a population of prisoners that was 70 or more percent Black and brown. What could go wrong?

Speaker 10: Attica's reputation was called the last stop. This was the most strict prison in the state of New York, it was known. The word was there, that when you got there, you knew what you was in for.

Speaker 11: A hard place. The last place. Attica was the last place. You had to really be there to see why.

Speaker 12: There was no Black guards in Attica, there was no Spanish guards. They were all white. People, men that come from the local neighborhoods that don't know nothing about people who come from Brooklyn, people who come from Manhattan, people who come from the Bronx. They don't know nothing about this culture. Most of them don't even want to talk to you. They're giving you the straight, "No, no, don't talk to me." It was like that, "Don't talk to me."

Speaker 13: The only thing was right was being white, and I mean that in all sincerity. Everybody was so delight, not so much mixing with other cultures but staying together for the purpose of survival.

Speaker 14: I was white, so I got the best jobs. I was always given a little bit more leeway than the Blacks. I could get an extra meal if I wanted one because I was a white guy. "I'm a white guy, give me a little extra," and I got it. I always was able to manipulate the system inside the prison because I was a white guy. I'm almost ashamed to say that I took advantage of that back then, but it was the only way to survive.

Brian: Former prisoners, obviously many years later, interviewed for the film Attica by filmmaker Stanley Jordan. We're almost out of time in the segment. Interesting to hear even a former Attica inmate admit his white privilege. What do you think it could mean, if anything, to prison justice in America if your film wins the Academy Award?

Stanley Nelson: I think the very least more people will think about the people that are incarcerated in this country. I think there's over 2 million people incarcerated. That's the start. Prisons are spread out all over the country like Attica, far from the cities so that we don't see them or we don't have to think about them, but I think that the start is that we think about them.

One of the things that you hear and see in the film is the humanity of those that are incarcerated, and you've just heard it in those clips, the humanity of the former prisoners. I think if we just think about them, that's the start. I'm all for that, that the film can at least do that.

Brian: Stanley Nelson whose film Attica has now been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary. We are inviting all of the directors of the Best Documentary nominees on between now and Oscar night, March 27th. Stanley, thanks so much for sharing this and your earlier film on the HBCU.

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