The ideas expressed in city club forums are those of the speakers and not of the City Club of Cleveland Ideastream Public Media or their sponsors.

Production and distribution of City club forums and ideastream Public media are made possible by PNC and the United Black, Fond of Greater Cleveland, Inc.. Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, May nine.

And I'm Lillian Kuri president and CEO of the Cleveland Foundation.

It's my privilege to introduce today's speaker, Sarah Lewis.

Sarah is the John L. Loeb, associate professor of Humanities and the associate professor of African-American studies at Harvard University.

Many of you many of you may know that Sarah was also a finalist for the 2025 and Distilled Wolf Book Awards.

The only the only nationally endowed prize recognizing books that contribute to our understanding of racism and foster an appreciation of cultural diversity.

Her groundbreaking work of nonfiction, The Unseen Truth When Race Change Sight in America examines America from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of Jim Crow.

A time when the country's conception of race and whiteness was transforming.

Thanks to Professor Lewis's historical detective work, what we see and what's left unseen shapes everything we believe about ourselves and other people.

She uncovers how visual tactics and imagery cemented in a racial hierarchy in spite of its false foundations.

Now, today, we ask, how can we begin to dismantle it?

In addition to an award to being an award winning art historian, she is also the author of the bestseller The Rise, Creativity, The Gift of Failure and the Search of Mastery, as well as her forthcoming book, Vision and Justice.

Moderating today's conversation is Kortney Morrow, the Cleveland Foundation's new program director for the NFL, The Wolf Book Awards.

The foundation is proud to lead and steward the book awards Now in its 90th year.

And we are thrilled that Courtney has joined the foundation as the director of the awards.

Courtney is a nationally recognized poet and writer, and she has over a decade of experience building strategies with a strong focus, advocating for literacy and the literary arts across the country.

If you have a question for our speaker today, you can text it to 3305415794.

That is 3305415794.

And City Club staff will try to work it into the Q&A at the end of the program.

Members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland please join me in welcoming Sarah Lewis and Courtney Morrow.

Lillian, thank you for that incredible introduction.

Sarah, It's an honor to be in conversation with you here in Cleveland.

You truly could be anywhere in the world, but you are here with us, and that means a lot.

It's such an honor to be here.

Last night we had time together.

I've had such a warm welcome from you and from leaders in the community here.

Rick and Graham.

Bessie, this embrace remind me of how much our sense of hope is based on what happened in Cleveland, based on what happened in Ohio and in my night in front of Saint John's Church Station.

Hope the last stop on the Underground Railroad, thanks to two Graham pointing it out to me.

And I was so struck by the sense of the presence of the ancestors that are on this ground.

We all are made from what, 2500 ancestors it takes to make every one of us.

So I'm walking in with them, grateful to be here and mindful of what the future requires from us.

So and that today is a conversation with Courtney Morrow.

Thank you to all those who made today possible.

Thank you to Dan Martha.

Thank you, Lillian Curry.

It's really a pleasure to be here with everyone today.

Sarah, I want to start by just lifting up the fact that you were and are a finalist for the NASA Wolfe Book Award.

It's our first year ever doing finalist.

And as I'm stepping into the program director role and sort of trying to figure out what makes a book and a film and learning the books that enter the canon are books that are cutting edge.

They are not only writers who are confronting race and racism head on, they are writers at the forefront of the dialog, at the forefront of the conversation, producing watermarked texts, landmark texts that will go on to shape how we view race in this nation and beyond.

And I feel like that description is a summary of your text, truly.

Lillian alluded to the fact that The Unseen Truth a beautiful book, if you haven't gotten you need to get it.

You need to read it immediately.

Sort of looks at the ways that images, maps, photographs are used in culture to reinforce a racial hierarchy.

And you also create a parallel path in your book exploring all of these incredible black visual artists who pushed against the fabrication.

They saw the stitching that was happening and they said, Pause.

So I want to I want to route us in a quote.

It's a quote by and a descendant of Kendrick, who we'll get to later.

Yes.

And the quote goes like this The ancestors deserve to know that their struggles were not in vain, that their hopes and dreams for their children and their children's children have in very large part, been realized and will continue to be realized.

The descendants will learn at least partially from this story, what the people of their own blood have lived through and suffered, and that they were strong, competent, persistent and enduring, loving people who deserve much better than slavery disfranchized them.

And worst of all, the lies told to conceal their humanity, intelligence and courage.

And I picked that quote for a few reasons.

One, I think, though, it's a preface to the descendant of Kendrick in her biography, I also think it summarizes very well what you have done here in this text.

I think you have lifted up people's humanity, intelligence and courage.

And I also think you have illuminated some of the lies that the very foundation of this nation is built on.

And we're going to start with the big one.

We're going to explore a lot of lies and truths to this.

In the first one that I would love to start with is this word Caucasian.

Hmm.

So I'm a mixed kid.

I grew up in the nineties in the age of like, quote unquote, colorblindness.

And for me, I learned that Caucasian was synonymous with white.

You could interchange them.

They meant the same thing.

And I never question that I was a kid.

This is what I've been taught.

So I'm hoping that you can start by sort of describing your intervention with the word Caucasian.

Talk us through the history, how the word came to be and what P.T.

Barnum has to do with all of this.

Yes, yes, yes.

This book deals with what I would consider to be the most damaging lie in American history, in history around the world, the lie that there's any basis for the idea that anyone is better than anyone else on the basis of race.

What the book examines is a moment in time when Americans were allowed to see it.

There's a lie underneath this entire regime and chose to disregard it and to move on to cement the fictions that we still live with today and have transformed into fact.

I wrote the book because I know we had the will to overcome these lies and these fictions.

And and I wrote it because it was just too vivid to ignore on the archive the evidence of our ability to see it at one point.

Now, how does this relate to P.T.

Barnum in particular and others and for this I think I might like to call up a slide.

But first let me say this.

The moment occurs in the 19th century during the American Civil War.

There's something happening called the Caucasian War, and it resonates with Americans.

It's not a metaphor.

This is an actual or that takes place in the Caucasus region.

And through it, the reporting on it, Americans are allowed to see evidence that there's no such thing as whiteness in this Caucasus region at all.

And now the slide would be helpful because someone takes advantage of this and creates a performer.

P.T.

Barnum does.

That is the highest grossing performer he has.

And he bills her as a purported exemplar of white racial purity from the Caucasus region.

And she looks like Angela Davis.

But she's black, but she's white.

And so the spectacle becomes a riddle, becomes a way for people to sort out this fiction.

And he capitalizes on it.

And I would have stopped and just thought that was an oddity of the archive.

But I realized that it was, in fact, a symptom.

Society was reckoning with this lie, and Barnum wasn't alone.

So, as you know, the book looks at which even figures like Woodrow Wilson, president, who at the end of World War One, almost as if he is a P.T.

Barnum himself, he asked for a report about the look of women and men from the Caucasus region as he's shoring up this regime of racial domination.

And we're still struggling to undo and then became a question of what I needed to do as a scholar.

I didn't initially want to write a book about this odious history necessarily, but I realized that I had to to also salute so many of the unsung heroes who tried to, even in Woodrow Wilson's administration.

And we'll get to a few of those.

But I thought I might read.

And then people are encouraging.

Read a bit from the book.

To sum up this is this history of the Caucasian ideal and the fiction that it is.

This is from Page five.

When I first came across the history of interest in the caucus, unaware of the full nature of its impact on racial domination, I tried to dismiss it.

After all, we think we know how the story ends.

The idea of the caucus would remain in incongruous relic with the idea of homogeneous whiteness and ignored, curious but irrelevant source of foundational fictions turned into fact.

But what I was finding in the archives, startled me enough to continue the growing unsettled dissonance between the caucus region as a racial emblem on the world stage and the actual appearance of its inhabitants mattered even in Supreme Court cases.

And so this book looks at how the period from reconstruction to the mid-twentieth century and its deliberations about who would be considered Caucasian, preoccupied nearly every federal or Supreme Court case about racial prerequisites of citizenship.

So I'll end all and that quote there.

But so I invite you today to wrestle with the discomfort of what it means to recognize that there's a fiction underneath the entire basis of what we use to cohere social society in the United States.

That's really interesting.

You know, one of the things that stuck out to me about the book was not only that people were going to P.T.

Barnum sort of spectacles, they were also taking photographs with them and disseminating.

And this sort of curiosity in people's mind of what is race, what is my place?

Was central to that sort of spectacle.

And I think what you show in your text is that this sort of curiosity is more than a curiosity and that it can be used as a tool to reinforce that racial hierarchy.

And you do this through a variety of ways.

And I would love to get into mapping and geography.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You don't automatically think of mapping and geography as a tool for reinforcing racial hierarchy, but your text sort of explores the ways that maps are not just mapping of the land and the boundaries.

They're also a mapping of people and their histories.

And so I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about sort of cartography and the way that maps for you were used to reinforce the racial project and all of these great questions.

So what do you do in the face of a fiction, a lie that's going to remain?

How do you force people to not see it?

What I deal with in this book is the way that images and even maps were tools of conditioning, how to see, how to see the world to support this regime of racial ideology, not neutral objects.

So mapping maps themselves became a way to explore this and in short, maps were foundational documents for teaching history in the 19th century to the turn of the 20th century.

You couldn't be an instructor without passing a basic test on how to teach with maps.

It's just requisite.

And what you start to see is how they condition you to not look at the fictions.

Right.

And in part because they're so visual, they make the racial ideology clear.

Maps become ways to script, how to see the world.

We have an image for you because we wanted to just ensure that this was clear.

And and the book took over ten years to write, in part because when I came upon these maps, I thought we would help the press.

Literally, I need to include them in the book.

And I'd like to call up, I guess, the image of five or four excuse me.

So I was in the New York Public Library.

My God, what a gift.

All of our libraries are.

And I want to salute Dr. Carla Hayden, the librarian of Congress, who was who was abruptly fired by an administration just last night.

And it's so much of this work inspired by her and conversation with her in the physical building at the Library of Congress, maps became a way to force students and educators to not see these fictions.

And you're looking at one example.

So this is a image from an 1885 atlas that would have been common in homes in the United States.

And you see this narrative overlaid on a schematic that shows that hierarchy of racial kind in in the world.

So you have a set of individuals that are meant to represent the Caucasian ideal surmounting for other races as soon as the fictions after the Caucasian War about the fact that there's effectively a lie at the basis of this idea that Caucasian, this is whiteness.

You see these templates go away.

You see the erasure that was critical for shoring up racial domination.

You see in all of these atlases.

And so as I started to look at them sequentially year after year, I realize this period we're in where we're looking at censorship in curricula is part of an old blueprint.

And you can see it lay it out even in something as, you know, potentially disconnected as a teaching of mapping in the United States.

We found a way to teach the history of the world by covering up these fictions.

And the evidence isn't all the atlas is that used to surround us in these homes.

So that's one short answer to this great question about how mapping comes into it.

But we are still living with the conditioning process, born of that exercise, and it's in part why mapping and the representational terrain of visual culture and self itself has become a site of liberatory practices.

We know we need to undo these narratives, and we've done that.

Frederick Douglass reminds us that we must do that.

The work of the image, the work of the map, not just through logical argument alone or what happens through dialog.

It's really bound up with the work of visual representation and seeing to.

Yeah.

Thank you for that.

I think you started to touch on this a little bit and maybe let's follow the thread on negative assembly.

Yeah.

Which is a new term and it's all about the excisions.

So you alluded to it a little bit and I would love to hear how also it shows up in the present day and part of what made this book a detective hunt, as it's been referred to as by many, is that I realized I was looking I was looking at a picture without a negative, you know, And I was I realized that so much of what coheres our idea of who counts and who belongs is based on what we've taken out of the conversation.

It so the maps and the experience of witnessing the disappearing of these fictions before my eyes from decade to decade made me realize that we need to start thinking about erasure as a core piece of how we have shored up racial domination.

And to think about the assembly of the world as not just done through the insistence, through, say, if you think of the Jim Crow era signs that would designate areas for racial segregation, the obvious overt declaration.

But on the the negation, the negative assembly, what's taken out.

And so that term became a way to think of the construction of material culture to hide what needed to be kept out of sight, to allow white supremacy to endure and to continue.

So that term is is one that I inaugurate this book.

Yeah.

Thank you for that.

I.

You mentioned erasure and you sort of you sort of dive into Woodrow Wilson and his office and sort of the undercurrents of what was happening behind the scenes.

And there's a big moment of erasure.

So I want to bring Salon Marshall Kendrick into this conversation.

A 29 year old in 1913 headed to D.C. in search of opportunities, advancement.

This is the Great Migration, and within a few few months, short periods of being in Woodrow Wilson's office sort of as disillusioned and disheartened.

So I wonder if you could walk us through sort of what was happening behind the scenes in Woodrow Wilson's office.

And describe a little bit about racial detailing.

So this book has as its spine the stakes of everything that I've described through the narrative of the history of Woodrow Wilson, who is the first, in effect, segregationist president who federalized the segregation.

Mean he is.

He's also, though, created a blueprint that we're still working with today of cohering a regime of the unspeakable without outright decree through the work of subtle visual cues and tactics, dog whistling of all kinds.

This is what's happening behind the scenes in Woodrow Wilson's regime.

What I learn from painstaking archival work is that he was because of his first wife's interest in the arts and interested in creating a way of crafting a regime through visual culture.

And it allowed him to inaugurate federal segregation without out obvious paperwork signs or again, a decree.

It's what makes this history so difficult to study in.

Again, going to the Library of Congress, his archives.

You could read through his papers and not think that segregation happened at all.

And so what would one do like Swan Marshall Kendrick, if you are like him, one of the first black clerks to work in the federal administration and see this is happening.

See that the only way to find evidence of segregation being done as a directive from the president is through what's not being said.

What's not being shown to the public.

What would you do?

What he did and what another colleague of his did.

Freeman Henry Morris Murray, another black clerk who's an unsung hero, is created a counter weight account, a revolution of sorts.

They saw that Woodrow Wilson was cohering this regime through detailing this oppressive regime was cohered through mind new directives that were issued verbally.

Don't, for example, write back and this is in the archive right back to a black citizen using any formal designation.

Don't use Mr. or Mrs.. Minor details don't don't allow a black petitioner to sit in your office.

Force them to stand.

All of these details racial detailing as I describe it, is also the precursor to what we call racial profiling today.

But detailing became this tactic that they used Swann and and Murray used to scour the landscape, looking for the cues that reside in the Confederate monuments that had just started to go up in 1915 and 16.

That Jim Crow rule was still the law of the land.

Detailing became the work of the early civil rights movement, and it forced a pointillist precision on the part of all of these clerks who in their non-existent free time would do things like write to the head of every newspaper that used a racial epithet about a black American and and push them to not do so.

The the archive is just replete with these examples that would make you want to cry, to think of the labor that has gone into the ability for all of us to sit in this room together.

And and one of the so one of the main pieces of evidence we have of this is the work that Freeman Henry Morris Murray did, who was the co-founder of the Niagara movement with W.E.B.

Dubois.

He's a hero of other kinds, but he decides to focus on these visual cues, details in the landscape, and he publishes the first book about race and public monuments in the United States.

Self publishes the book.

No one will publish it, and it's the first account we have of the meaning and symbols behind these monuments that didn't go up after the Civil War but went up during this race and the idea of American life.

Right.

So there they were, racial detailing.

Back to Wilson's regime, offering these counter-narratives and offering us a way to consider the tactics we still need to understand today and work with today as we have a resurgence of them in our administration.

Thank you for lifting up Marie and Kendrick.

I feel like it truly touched me.

Can I pass you?

Yes.

There are images right there, as you say, that.

Exactly as we want to salute them.

It truly touched me and moved me to near tears reading their stories and this image of pointillism.

The little dots that build and coalesce into movement was very moving.

The way that you write is truly incredible.

I want to talk about this moment we're in right now.

You towards the end of the book.

There's a quote, and I won't say who it's from because you have to read it, but it's simple.

It says it takes so long for us to see.

Time has brought us to this point.

It is easy to go to one side or the other, but the center point, that tension.

That's where we go to find answe And this will be I think this will be my last question before we open it up to the audience.

I'm I'm curious what you think is on the other side of the reckoning.

You have done so much to lift up the unseen truth.

And if we have the will and we can face it, what is on the other side?

At times, my imagination is limited.

Yeah.

I love this question.

Thank you for it.

And in coming this morning, you're reminding me of the solace I found in Chimamanda Adichie is an answer to thinking about what we do in the face of authoritarianism.

And I believe, as she said, authoritarianism can't limit the imagination.

And I rest in that belief, and it's why I am so excited to be here.

It takes so long for us to see, and this will get round to the answer to the question that quote.

And you do have to read the book to find out when we will offer a hint.

It's at the end of the book.

Who said it came about when I was in Washington National Cathedral and was asking myself a similar question What's on the other side of this reckoning?

To paint a picture for you, especially for those listening on the radio.

Thank you to all those in the audience there.

I found myself just struck by a vivid example.

I was asked to, with Mayor Mitch Landrieu and other colleagues about these new stained glass windows that they had commissioned by Kerry James Marshall to replace the windows that had been, in fact, dedicated to the Confederacy in the cathedral.

That is meant to be a pulpit for the people created through a declaration of Congress.

I asked for a tour of the space before going, and I was given one.

And before we got to the stained glass windows, I looked and said to my host, What's to my left here?

And it turns out it was a tomb, the grave of Woodrow Wilson there.

His grave is on the ground floor next to the pews for worship only president buried in Washington National Cathedral.

It's an accident of history.

His grandson was the dean at the time and and petitioned to have his body brought up from the crypt.

And it created this moment of tension, this juxtaposition.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy, the organization really responsible for the deployment of all these Confederate monuments, was thrilled at that juxtaposition between the Confederate stained glass windows on Woodrow Wilson.

But now here we had the counternarrative with Kerry James Marshall, but there Woodrow Wilson still was.

And I will mention who at the time stated as I stared and I think he could sense what I was feeling.

It takes so long for us to see it take so long for us to see.

And it did.

It took will and time and dedication for me to see that myself and all the reporting of these new Confederate, the replacement, the Confederate Windows, which was also a tablet from Elizabeth Alexander, I should mention, as part of it.

Not one article had mentioned this tension, this juxtaposition with history and time.

It is a metaphor for all of us.

It takes so long for us to see how many times have we not seen this history.

We've examined today how many times have you used the word Caucasian and thought nothing of the fact that if we're were trafficking in a lie.

Right.

To legitimate these these narratives, it takes so long for us to see.

And the question for me at the end became will, what will it take for us to take that time to slow down enough to see anew and to see ourselves looking at each other anew, to understand the conditioning that's gone into this, to look at those maps, to look at those photographs, to look at the tactics of vision itself that became a federal policy to create segregation.

So what will it take when it's been presented in front of you that we are living with lies, that we legitimate as facts?

It's going to take our will.

I think you spoken with your feet and your bodies here today and coming.

You probably knew a bit about what we discussed, but that Will is on display in this room and I'm encouraged by it.

I know as I thought about the ancestors and coming here excuse me, one, I know that they are encouraged by it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you, sir.

Mm.

We are about to begin the audience Q&A.

So for our live stream and radio audience or those just joining, I'm Courtney Morrow, incoming director of the Neville Wolfe Book Awards and moderator moderator for today's conversation joining me on stage talking about her new book, The Unseen Truth When Race Change Sight in America is Sarah Lewis, the wonderful, extraordinary Sarah Lewis, the John Ellerbe, associate professor of the humanities and associate professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

We welcome questions from everyone City club members, guests, students, and those joining via our livestream at City Club Talk or Live radio broadcast at 89.7 W case you ideastream public media.

If you'd like to text a question for our speaker, please text it to 3305415794.

That's 3305415794.

And City club staff will try to work it into the program.

And with that, I think we can take the first question.

Yes, ma'am.

Could you talk for a minute about how visual culture has influenced our feelings on people who seek the immigrant to immigrate to this country?

Oh, yes.

Yes.

Thank you for this question.

I don't know that this is going to be light listening for those who are driving and listening to the radio.

So you might want to pull over the side of the road for some of this.

Images became a way to legitimate entrance into the United States.

One of the main photographers for that history, for those who who are interested and want to know more, who already do know it is Lewis Hine.

And and you have in his corpus a set of images that showed how subjective the distinctions were between who could come into the United States during the Progressive era at the turn of the 20th century.

You might ask yourself questions about why there were limitations on those who could come from, say, Southern Europe versus Northern Europe.

What what was the basis for these ideas?

Well, eugenics is a part of the answer there.

There was an interest in, you know, things that won't sound familiar at all from our current political moment and interest in and birth rates and fitness for racial citizenship are all all ideas that we are still living with today.

But the work of the image challenged beliefs that eugenics had cohered in society.

And so there were different compositional templates that were used to ennoble different immigrant groups.

I study a lot of them with my my students.

The Madonna and Child template becomes a way to show that immigrants from southern Italy to be desirable entrants for those in the to come into the United States.

But what really vexes the Supreme Court about these naturalization cases is, is how they can work with cohering a regime around as a central category, cognizant that there's a lie at the basis of this whole term.

Supreme Court cases in the 1870s, 1880s were really dominated by individuals who want to claim entrance for citizenship by claiming that they are white.

And those will include individuals who are who hail from India, for example, who are or Southeast Asian.

Why?

Well, racial scientist have cast a really wide net around this caucus region.

So on the basis of the facts, they have a case.

But the Supreme Court starts to say, Wait, wait a minute, wait a minute.

We need to cover up this history of racial science.

Forget what you read from Johann Friedrich Blum and Bach, who is the naturalist who creates this term Caucasian.

We are going to cohere the idea of whiteness and the Caucasian identity around.

And this is fact, quote, common knowledge.

So Supreme Court decisions literally use this term common knowledge, and ask the plaintiffs to disregard what they heard about what racial signs would allow for.

And so the work of the image comes into this, but so does the work of vision and seeing and being conditioned to not see what's right in front of you.

You can read about in any any history book from the turn of the 20th century.

So I hope that answers your great question.

I appreciate it.

As time.

Good afternoon.

Thank you for being here today, though.

Henry Louis Gates calls reconstruction our moment in the sun and having taught in Cleveland many years.

So many history teachers complained about how reconstruction was not covered in the history books or how it wasn't given the respect that it deserved.

So for the sake of the students who are here and for the sake of the adults who also were taught with those whitewashed textbooks, can you just briefly talk about why reconstruction is such an important period in the history of African-Americans?

Thank you for this.

So reconstruction is a period that occurs right after the American Civil War, right after emancipation, in which we have, in effect, what my colleague Sherrilyn Ifill would call the second founding of America.

You have a period of time in which the wrongs of the Constitution are righted by new constitutional amendments that offer the right to vote right to black Americans, that offer that equal protection clause, the 14th Amendment that allows for due process under the law.

And you have in this period a birth of freedom, a new birth of freedom.

You see leadership positions occupied by formerly enslaved.

You see a new sense of possibility about what America could be.

But surely after a ten year period of these hopes being made manifest in these ways I've just alluded to, you have a what we also call the racial nadir of American life emerge, a period in which a retrenchment of the very narratives that legitimated slavery emerged through the black codes, as it's called, to the American South.

Right?

All the tactics that are that are being used to let the North win the war, but to let the South when the narrative war, as Bryan Stevenson has said.

So reconstruction is this period of light, ten year period of light that we we still, a century later, look back on it and say you offered a foundation and a model.

How can we continue that now, despite the retrenchment and despite living in a period in which I think we are experiencing another another nadir, what we do during a nadir is in fact gather at institutions like this one at the the creation of so many institutions, whether it's the sorority return system, the divine nine from historically black colleges, all of begins to emerge during this racial nadir period and and and so on.

So that's a brief, brief lesson.

Thank you for that question.

Hello, I am Eliana Gorman and I am a sophomore junior at Emma System High School.

So earlier the story was brought up about the man who burned 100 books from the Cleveland Public Library.

There's three categories of the books were Jewish American History, African-American History, and LGBTQ education.

Why do you think that it is such an immediate and violent attack when books are burned?

And why?

Why So why do you think that it is such an I know it's hard to write the easy attack for people to make.

It is.

Can I ask you to remain from the podium for a minute?

I just want to salute you.

Just You are a junior in high school and you were speaking as an educator.

You're there's a spirit in your question that lets me know.

You also know the answer that she wouldn't be asking it.

And I want to commend you for also being engaged.

But it's may.

Okay.

I'm sure you you got permission to not be in school, right, right now.

Did it again.

And because this is an education happening in this room for being so engaged outside of your classroom to know the categories and which censorship are taking place.

So I wanted you to stay on because I'd like for you, if you might ask, answer it for me.

I think you do know the answer because knowledge is power, essentially.

I mean, why do you need me?

The resilience is our next generation right here, you know.

What's your first name again?

Eliana.

And then we're going to forget this.

Thank you.

Thank you for that.

It's.

Hm.

It is.

I know.

I need to clap for her again because knowledge is power.

So we have also appeared in which the executive orders that are cropping up very often are offering weekly reminders of that fact.

I when you say knowledge is power, it is and it comes in so many forms.

It comes in the form of books, libraries, archives.

It also comes in the form of the seemingly marginal to some.

It also comes in the forms of what happens in museums and exhibits on national parks grounds to a few.

Well, now, a month ago, on March 31st, maybe 27 Shirt one executive order targeted the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and National Parks.

And in speaking to the curator, well, one of the shows it entitled The Shape of Power, it became clear to me that the issue wasn't with what was being put on the walls, which was a show that looks at the importance of visual culture and sculpture for racial ideology and its formation.

But was the fact that it was being displayed so prominent the curators didn't disagree with the fact that sculpture does have power, that visual culture does have power, that that all of these works are powerful tools and of racial ideology, which is what the executive order was focusing on, what the administration took exception with is making that so known and so prominent.

Because what it does then is, is makes clear some of the tactics that have been used to cohere this regime.

And censorship is about hiding those tactics.

Right.

So we have censorship, but we also have a new a new way in which the censorship is happening.

Right.

Think this executive orders.

So thank you for coming, Eliana.

Thank you for that question.

So much more to say on it, but I want to be mindful of our time and let those who are driving have pulled over, you know, get back on the road.

Hello, my name is Kiara Jacobs.

I'm a creative writing senior at Cleveland School of the Arts.

my questions, I have to actually write.

But the first one was what was the process of writing the book?

And leading into that, as Courtney mentioned earlier, reading, it brought her near tears.

Since racial history is a sensitive topic for a lot of people, were there any moments that made you emotional during it?

Oh, yes.

They already know the drill.

I want I want her to stay at the podium so wait, so is there no school?

And we would I love that we were drawn up for that for the youngest among us to come.

Thank you.

Cleveland School of the Arts.

Is that right?

Yes.

Yes.

I would love to hear more about your work.

And I hope afterwards we can have some time to talk.

Okay.

The journey of writing is isn't one that I expected to embark on.

I only began to write when I realized I had something to say that wasn't coming from me but was actually coming.

I would say through me.

And it and as a as a writer, I first came to Cleveland through that kind of process.

I wrote The Rise, a book about how we overcome failure and how incredibly important failure is for creative pursuits, and felt that process and things coming through me and looked at some lines and thought, gosh, I, I don't think I wrote that alone.

There are ways that I find you.

You feel accompanied when you write.

Do you feel that to a little bit?

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You have a crowd with you.

When you create everything you've ever lived.

All the different ideas and imaginations are with us and so the process of writing dancing truth was was born of that.

But I also felt a commitment to the future in writing the book.

There were moments in which I really had to summon courage, you know.

And I know as a poet you feel the same way, I'm sure, right?

It's if you haven't read Courtney's poetry yet, you really must.

I spent this morning with her poems.

Just beautiful, beautiful and probing and powerful.

And there's a courage required for this work.

So with the unseen truth, I found myself asking if this work was necessary as a contribution for the next generation.

So in receiving two questions from the youngest among us, I had this affirmation and from the beyond that said yes, yes, it was necessary as a contribution.

And that relates to your second question, I think, which is were there moments of can you repeat the second question?

Were there any moments that made you emotional while writing?

Yeah, there were a few.

I limited here to two being in the archive at the Library of Congress, reading about the the work in the office and at home that Swann Marshall Kendrick's put himself through absolutely brought me to tears many times.

And it's eerie about that chapter because I will say I don't have any close friend who's read that chapter, who hasn't told me independently that they were brought to tears, too.

There's there's some and I can tell you a story that would make you think I was lying about I'll tell you anyway, when I was trying to figure out how to get his testimonial in effect in the book, I gave up for a minute and somehow or another I don't know how this happened.

My cell phone voicemail started.

My mother told me and a dear friend told me, started forwarding to the Library of Congress so that when you would leave a voicemail for me, it would go there and I couldn't believe it.

We called Verizon what is happening with us, but it felt like and it only stopped when I figured out how to include Kendrick in the book.

Wow.

You know, well, we're in a place that understands the ancestors, so I know you know what I'm talking about.

So that was a moment that brought me to tears to But there was there were others, and it brought me to tears because you're seeing and reading his archives is love letters between woman.

He is courting Ruby Moyes, but is segregation.

Racial injustice isn't about loss to do with economic opportunity alone.

It's a loss of extraordinary hope, potential leadership.

This is a man who should have been a leading light.

We should have heard everything he said and did and read and wrote about.

Yeah, I was reading texts that I couldn't believe were letters to his wife.

They should have all been published as a compendium to inspire the next generation.

But as as you summarized so beautifully, within two months, he knew he couldn't go anywhere in the administration and was so dejected that he began looking for employment in South America, even though he didn't even speak Spanish.

Okay.

I mean, this is the degree of despair we're talking about, right.

And that brought me to tears.

The fact that he didn't want to get married because he didn't think that he could support her with these blunted hopes that brought me to tears.

Oh, all of it.

All.

But what most did was the fact that all this was hidden, that I was one of the few people who was able to read it because of the kind of work that I do as a scholar and and thought, well, that can't be that can't be said when you're buying the book, you know that it's really a salute to to these unsung early black civil rights heroes.

And the final thing that brought me to tears, all the moments in which I felt thwarted to get this work out, My name is Sean Clarke of the director of marketing for Third Space Action Lab and Third Space Reading Room, Cleveland's Black only Black owned bookstore.

So students, make sure you guys come by and get your discounts.

Okay.

Sorry.

I have been telling everybody that I know that we Oh, yes, we have lost the last election because of these new mediums that have emerged, these new digital mediums.

So I wanted to get your thoughts on those mediums that are being used to subtly and directly promote race hierarchy, i.e podcasts, memes, A.I.

and their associated elements and you know, just a general thoughts on how that's influencing thoughts today.

We have to let them become arenas for dialog and discussion and this is our work.

The question that we've been addressing for the last hour is when are we going to give up the lie?

Are we going to give up the lie that there's any basis for this regime that tells us we're better than anyone else?

And so many other discussions that shore up that lie are happening in the spaces that you outlined.

So if we lean in to them, we can have a discussion of the kind that I'm grateful we had here today.

So thank you.

Thank you so much, Sarah and Courtney.

That was incredible.

I'm Cynthia Connolly, director of Programing here and forums like this one are made possible thanks to generous support from individuals like you.

You can learn more about how to become a guardian of free speech at City Club dot org.

Today's forum is part of the City Club's Health Equity series in partnership with the St Luke's Foundation.

It is also part of the City Club's Authors in Conversation series with support from Cuyahoga Arts and Culture and the Cuyahoga County Public Library.

Also our gratitude to Granby for connecting us to Sarah Lewis.

Thank you so, so much.

And the City Club would like to welcome guests or students actually joining us from Cleveland Early College High School.

Cleveland School of the Arts, An empty square, stem high school.

Superstars.

Thank you so much.

We would also like to welcome guests at the tables hosted by the Cleveland Foundation Collaborate Cleveland and the St Luke's Foundation next Friday, March 16th or sorry, not March, May 16th, the Center for Community Solutions, Emily Campbell will lead a conversation with regional leadership on threats to health care access.

They will unpack the recently added trigger language to the Ohio State budget and what it means for Ohioans if the state does enrolls for Medicaid expansion.

You can get your tickets and learn more about this forum and others at City Club, dawg.

And that brings us to the end of today's forum.

Thank you once again to Sarah and Courtney and to our members and friends of the city club.

My name is the Economy.

This forum is now adjourned.

For information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of the City Club, go to City Club Dawg.

The ideas expressed in City Club forums are those of the speakers and not of the City Club of Cleveland Ideastream Public Media or their sponsors.

Production and distribution of City Club forums and ideastream Public media are made possible by PNC and the United Black, fond of greater Cleveland, Inc..