Rachel Flor: Good evening, I'm Rachel Flor, Executive Director of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. On behalf of all my Library and Foundation colleagues, I'm delighted to welcome all of you who are watching tonight's program online. Thank you for joining us this evening.
I would also like to acknowledge the generous support of our underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums: Lead sponsors Bank of America and the Lowell Institute; and our media sponsors, the Boston Globe and WBUR. Tonight's program is also supported in part by the Mass Cultural Council.
We look forward to a robust question-and-answer period this evening. You'll see full instructions on screen for submitting your questions via email or via comments on our YouTube page during the program.
We are so grateful tonight to have this opportunity to explore this important story in American history with our distinguished guests. I'm now delighted to introduce tonight's speakers:
Gretchen Sorin is distinguished professor and director of the Cooperstown Graduate Program of the State University of New York. She has curated innumerable exhibits, including with the Smithsonian, the Jewish Museum, and the New York State Historical Association while working as a museum educator, a director, and a consultant to more than 200 museums over 30 years before returning to lead the Cooperstown Graduate Program. She is the author of, Drive While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights, and with Ric Burns is director of the forthcoming PBS documentary, Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America.
Ric Burns is an internationally recognized documentary filmmaker and writer. Burns has been writing, directing and producing historical documentaries for over 25 years, since his collaboration with the PBS series, The Civil War, which he produced with his brother Ken and cowrote with Geoffrey Ward. Since founding Steeplechase Films in 1989, he has directed some of the most distinguished programs for PBS and his work has won numerous film and television awards. Most recently, he is director with Gretchen Sorin of the forthcoming PBS documentary, Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America.
Emir Lewis, producer and editor of the documentary, Driving While Black, has built an exceptional editing career with credits spanning documentaries and narrative genres, beginning with the 1998 film, Slam, which received both the prestigious Sundance Grand Jury Prize and the Cannes Caméra d'Or. Most recently, he has parlayed his editorial experience into a supervising story producer role for the acclaimed Netflix docuseries, Rapture. In between filmmaking projects, Emir also teaches the fine art of storytelling at both NYU and Brooklyn College Feirstein Graduate School.
I am also so pleased to introduce Spencer Crew, acting director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, who will moderate this evening's discussion. He has worked in public history institutions for more than 25 years, and has served as a professor of history at George Mason University. He was president of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center for six years, and worked at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History for 20 years, including nine years as director. At each of those institutions, he sought to make history accessible to the public through innovative and inclusive exhibitions and public programs. He has published extensively in the areas of African American and public history.
Please join me in welcoming our special guests this evening after this brief clip from the documentary, Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America, which airs next Tuesday, October 13th. We look forward to the discussion with this distinguished panel. Thank you so much.
[video clip begins]
Video Clip, historic footage: ...see some ID please?
Video Clip: The notion of driving while Black reminds us that that’s not available to all Americans
Video Clip: Living while Black, sleeping while Black, eating while Black, moving while Black. That goes back to day one.
Video Clip: The power to choose to move freely in a space. We live in a country where it’s never been everybody’s right.
Video Clip: If you’re an African American and you can afford a car, it provides a powerful alternative.
Video Clip: What the automobile allows is personal freedom.
[music plays]
Video Clip, Gretchen Sorin: I think the automobile allows us to understand the way that African Americans have moved forward in this country and the way that African Americans have been pushed back.
Video Clip: For African Americans, trips across country are not adventurous. They can often be trials.
Video Clip: With a car full of your family whom you love and your wife is saying we gotta stop for the night, and what do you do?
Video Clip: So that’s where the Green Book is indispensable to give you some way of finding a place where you could get some rest, get something to eat without being violated.
Video Clip: Once they were inside this building, nobody was going to worry them.
Video Clip: People are not going to let themselves be paved over. They will insist that their voices are heard.
Video Clip, historic footage: “I am giving you to the count of three”
Video Clip: There are still so many dangers African Americans are feeling a similar fear as their grandparents felt.
Video Clip, historic footage: that’s how you y’all treat Black people, huh?
Video Clip: We have to engage history with a kind of brutal honesty.
Video Clip: And until we get to a place where we actually are trying to live up to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness for every human being who is in our society, then we’re not they’re yet.
[video clip ends]
Spencer Crew: Well, thank you for that preview. I think we're all looking forward to seeing the full version of the film. I'd like to take a minute just to thank the Kennedy Library Foundation for sponsoring this and for bringing us all together this evening. What I'd like to do is start with Gretchen Sorin and just ask her, what caused you actually to want to investigate this particular topic?
Gretchen Sorin: Well, professor, I think my initial idea for just doing this research was because a scholar friend of mine handed me a copy of the Green Book. It was actually not even a copy; it was the cover of the Green Book. And I was intrigued; I had never heard of it and I thought, I've got to find out about this. Can you imagine a travel book, a travel guide just for African Americans? And this was probably about 25 years ago. So it was long before there was a film, it was long before anybody had even thought about the Green Book.
And then, it became kind of a personal discovery. I started to realize that the story that I was uncovering, bit by bit, as I was peeling back the onion, was really my story. It helped me to understand my parents and their behavior when we went on trips, when we traveled. And as you're aware, since you are one of the people that I interviewed, the more I dug into it, I found out that our generation, we were the kids sitting in the back seat as our parents were driving through what was really dangerous territory. We didn't know anything about it; we didn't know it was frightening. But these were scary times. And their behaviors were something that were foreign to all of us. We didn't quite understand them. So I would say it was an opportunity for me to learn about, and to understand my parents.
And then, I would say there was another reason, as we got deeper and deeper and as Ric and I started working on the documentary, and that is, it became an urgent issue of national concern. And this is a film that is so important right now, and a book that was so important right now because of the condition of our country and the relationship in our country between African Americans and law enforcement.
Spencer Crew: It's interesting talking about how important it is now. Now, how long have you two been working on the– you say it's been 25 years for the book?
Gretchen Sorin: On and off for 25 years. [laughter] And Ric and I have been working together for five years.
Spencer Crew: For five years. So when you started, the country wasn't where it was today. What prompted you to want to turn the book into a film? And why did Ric agree to join this project?
Gretchen Sorin: Ric agreed, I think– I mean, I'll let him speak for himself, but for me, he was the storyteller that I wanted to work with me on this project. I think he is an absolutely incredible storyteller. And, I just so love his documentary films that it was no question; I wanted him to work with me. I also call him my accomplice because I feel that African Americans, we're only 13% of the population of this country and we really need white allies and white accomplices. He calls himself my partner; I call him my accomplice in this project because it's so important. And there are those times in American history when white Americans have joined with African Americans to make amazing things happen.
And then having Emir come into the process was a little icing on the cake, to have this very talented African American man who is this wonderful editor come in, that topped it off. I think it’s spectacular. I think it's a spectacular film. And very important at this time.
Spencer Crew: So Ric, what about it got your attention?
Ric Burns: You know, I was listening to what Gretchen just said and it made me feel really clear that I think the same thing that every time something really significant and meaningful has happened by the way of major transformation in American history, African Americans have drafted white Americans into a coalition to make change happen. I think if you just looked back at the last 160 years, you'd see that was the case. Not that things haven't changed otherwise, but when the big wheels have turned, African Americans have turned to white Americans and said, "It's now or never." That happened in the 1860s, and it happened in some of the first decades of the 20th century, it happened in the 1960s, and it's happening again now.
And it wasn't the same time as now five years ago when Gretchen came to me, but, you know, we'd worked together before on the series my colleagues and I did about the history of New York. Gretchen, among her many, many gifts is seriously versed in the Colonial history of New York and the slavery revolts of 1741 and 1712, and helped us immeasurably with that. So we were kind of unindicted co-conspirators going back 25 years.
Spencer Crew: So Emir, how did you get drafted or talked into or enticed into this project?
Emir Lewis: I'm familiar with Ric's work. You know, just the documentary community in New York is very, very small, so eventually you wind up meeting everybody or working with everyone. So when the call came through, I answered it. I said, "Yeah, I'll come check this out and see what this is all about." And then they started telling me what this story was about, and I was partially interested in a Green Book film, but much more interested in the larger discussion of race, space and mobility because, to be perfectly honest, the term "driving while black" didn't start until 1993/1994, and the Green Book goes up until, generously, the mid-'70s. Feel free to correct me, Gretchen.
Gretchen Sorin: '66.
Emir Lewis: With that in mind, the term, we weren't really addressing that. So when Ric sort of mulled around in his head and said, "We need to expand this story." Especially since the Hollywood version did such a not good job of addressing the Green Book in its entirety and its depth. And so, we knew we wanted to do that, but we wanted to make the story larger. So that's what really sort of pulled me in.
Spencer Crew: Emir, did the story have any personal resonance for you in terms of your own life history or story or family history?
Emir Lewis: I don't remember my father using the Green Book. He was a musician, so he was on the road a lot. I don't think that was particularly a thing for him. But having his movements policed, having my own movements policed, sure, yeah.
And another thing that Ric brought to the table was this idea of the double helix, the recombinant DNA strands and how history sort of bends back on itself in this way. I just wanted to do that on camera, I think. [laughter] If we can find these moments where history was bending back on itself and sort of link them together, that was a very, very powerful thing. We then started sort of referring to it – I think I told Gretchen when we interviewed her one time – that the condition of black people in America is akin to the worst game of Chutes and Ladders ever invented, where we take one step forward and then we're asked to slide six steps down the ladder, and we fight back and come back another two or three steps. So that was the thing that, those were the things that really pulled me in and connected my own personal experience to it.
Spencer Crew: The title of it is Driving While Black, so why do you pick that title? You could have picked a lot of different ways of describing what you are talking about in your work. I'm interested why that title.
Ric Burns: Could I jump in, Gretchen?
Gretchen Sorin: Oh, absolutely. But as long as you take credit for coming up with the name.
Ric Burns: I think it really emerged out of the work that we were doing, and a sense that the film is about race, space and mobility in America, as Emir puts it, and that's why it's the subtitle. It's also about African Americans on the road during the era of Jim Crow, roughly from the 1920s down through the early 1960s. But "driving while black" as a contemporary phrase has this provocative, in-your-face, now feel to it, "driving while black." But the fact is, it's not a contemporary phenomenon. It is that, but has this deep, deep set of roots that go back and back and back and back, spiraling in that double helical way. So we wanted to have a title that spoke to now and then suggested that there's a history to this. You've got to find the history of this, as Herb Boyd, an incredible activist says. It's not just driving while black; it's living while black, it's eating while black, it's moving while black. And you've got to get to the roots of it. What are the roots?
So the point is, to get to the roots of driving while black, you have to go all the way back to 1619 when the first Africans were mobilized against their will, immobile in the hull of the slave ships, to come here and to have their mobility restricted so that white people could make money out of their labor. That's the beginning, and we wanted to take it all the way through, concentrating on this revolutionary moment in the first 50 years of the 20th century when automobility offered African Americans the ability to self-locomote outside the context of Jim Crow. So that was, driving while black became inevitable for us, I think, pretty soon into the process.
Spencer Crew: Gretchen, as you were starting this work for the book and then the film, did you think about it being as broadly impactful as Ric has described? How did you initially see this unfolding?
Gretchen Sorin: It's interesting, it started as out as my dissertation. And as a dissertation, it had an incredibly academic title, and it–
Spencer Crew: What was that?
Gretchen Sorin: What was the title? The title was, African Americans on the Road in the Era of Jim Crow. [laughter]
Spencer Crew: Very academic, yes! No colon?
Gretchen Sorin: [laughter] Yeah, I know. And it was funny because I got a lot of pushback from my committee because usually the higher you go in academia, the more narrow your topic. And yet, my topic began with slavery, because I felt you had to being with slavery, but it also was national. It was national in scope. And it wasn't just Newark, New Jersey: 1710-1712, which is the typical dissertation topic. So I did get a lot of pushback, but, for me, this story is also about the automobile, a story that is so– when talking about the automobile, you've got to be talking about roads, you've got to be talking about space, you've got to be talking about mobility, you've got to be talking about movement. And it was movement across the country, north to south, east to west. It was movement going back home for African Americans who had come north during the Great Migration; it was about going back home. And it was, when you're talking about movement and mobility for African Americans, it was showing how that was different for white Americans than it was for African Americans, how African Americans, that movement was constantly restricted and they were constantly having to find ways to make do, to go around, to find ways of preventing violence, really.
And so, the project was big from the beginning. It was very difficult, I think, to figure out, both in the book and in the film, what places do we talk about? Because there are so many places–
Spencer Crew: Could be anywhere.
Gretchen Sorin: Right? There were so many places. We had, I think our very first list of places, there must have been 25 or 30 different places that we thought we could include as vignettes within the film.
Spencer Crew: It's interesting because in reading the book, and I'm sure as people see the film, they'll see that it does cover a long period of time. It's almost as though you're telling African American history from a motorized point of view. Would that be a fair way to describe it?
Gretchen Sorin: I think so. I think absolutely. You're seeing the expanse of African American history as told through this lens. And it's crystal clear; I mean, I think that's one of the things– I've had people say to me, "It's just so clear, it makes it so incredibly– the story is so compelling and yet so clear."
Spencer Crew: Emir or Ric, what did you learn new in this process of creating this film?
Emir Lewis: I learned a tremendous amount. Obviously, if you're not an academic, you learn things as you experience them or as you have a need to discover them. So I'd say over the last 20 years most of my knowledge has come from working on various films. Not that I don't read, although with the advent of the cell phone I read less and less every day, unfortunately. I see your stack of books behind you, Spencer; I also have a stack of books in my house. Unfortunately, many of them are just for show. I'm quite sure that you've read all the ones that are actually–
Spencer Crew: Of course, cover to cover, every one, that's right.
Emir Lewis: I have a tendency to buy all of my friends' books, most of my friends are in arts or academics, and I have to have the book on the shelf in case they ever come to the house. And then you're, "Oh, I loved it, I loved it." That sort of thing. [laughter]
But one of the things about making a documentary film is that you inhale an enormous amount of information that you need to make the film. And so, I was very indebted to not only people like Gretchen who create these incredible works of nonfiction, but also to the incredible team we have at Steeplechase, co-producers Emily Pfeil and Kathryn Clinard, who went through all of these books, all of these books, highlighting and creating and starting to cobble together, along with Ric and with Bonnie Lafave, our other head of Steeplechase. We needed that to then be able to start to sit down and craft the film.
So I can't even begin to– I wish I could come up with one particular thing where I'm like, ooh, I learned that and that really changed the course of my life. But like I said, it really is more a matter of bringing in all this information and saying, that thing that happened in 1942 is so eerily similar to something that I went through in 1987. Or looking at older photographs and older pieces of archival footage and realizing that that's your family; like you can see your family in these people. And I think that’s always really important.
What would be really great is if we start to see our family pass the boundaries of race. I hope that people watching this film who aren't African American can see their family in both the positive and negative moments in the film. And so it's like, ooh, yeah, I dealt with something like that and I now connect with the film in that way.
Spencer Crew: Ric, how about you?
Ric Burns: Well, you know… In The Shining, incredible movie, there's the Overlook Hotel, and the amazing thing about The Shining is, in the story of it, is that it's a place that is haunted continually by another place that's also there at the same time. But the people who enter it don't necessarily know that that other space is there as well.
I'm trying to find a way to characterize what it was like to be– I was born in 1955 in Baltimore and lived until I was eight in Delaware when there were still colored fountains, white fountains, in Delaware, above the Mason-Dixon line. And I'm a child of the automobile on the highway, the family vacation. Get in, go from Newark, Delaware, to Rehoboth. And I had this uncanny feeling like when it gets kind of like summer afternoons as a child, where you kind of feel a little floaty, a little like, you go up to your bedroom, it feels like there's something else there, like there's something in the air. And what I learned in this project was that that something else that's there for white Americans is this entire parallel experience; that is, aspects of it might be news to African Americans, but the general experience that it alludes to is completely familiar. For white Americans, it's either been intentionally denied, totally unknown, or willfully obscured from themselves, as if we're floating through the Overlook Hotel, hearing the presence of ghosts and fellow travelers and somehow not aware of them.
So for me, it was uncanny. It was kind of exhilarating and grounding to understand, right, that's why there was always this feeling of multiplicity. When Mrs. Jennings, our cleaning lady, went home in Newark, Delaware, across to the other side of the tracks, what was that about? You know, I knew Mrs. Jennings from the time I was four years old. And then Virginia took her place.
So wow, there's that space and our space. And the two only meet – surprise, surprise – over issues having to do with work and labor. Oh, my god, suddenly, through the optic of the work Gretchen has done, you realize that this uncanny convergence of spaces has been there the whole time, that it is not just an American story; this is the American story. Every aspect of American history comes together in this.
So for me, I felt, having been so blessed to work with my brother Ken from the 1980s onward, I feel like this, for me, a kind of culminating, revelatory kind of experience. Because everything comes together in it.
So it has that kind of quality of what Freud called the uncanny. It both is completely known, but completely unknown at the same time. And that doubleness is part of the experience of it.
So I just say, to my white American colleagues, fellow citizens, come on in and freak yourself out with this because what you'll do is recognize our world with a dimensionality and a clarity that you've never seen before. And when you go into Newark, Delaware, in 1960, in your parents' car, you will not only see the Rotary Club sign, "Welcome to Newark, Delaware," you'll see the Ku Klux Klan sign as well, hovering there side by side. And the doubleness of that iconography is just astonishing.
The thing that I'll leave you with right now is, there was a banner proudly strung across Main Street in Greenville, Texas. The kind of thing all of us see. So there's a version of that in everybody's mind. This one said, "Greenville, Texas, the Blackest Soil, the Whitest People." So this eternal doubleness of the American experience, this kind of parallelness of it is something which – and perilousness – is something which I think is, Gretchen's work schools us all in a really extraordinary way.
Spencer Crew: I want to come back to you on that, but I want to go to Gretchen for the next question. Gretchen, you are what we call a public historian. And is that what prompted you to take a book and want to make it into a film? That's not normally the pathway followed by a scholarly book. What prompted you to go in that direction?
Gretchen Sorin: You know, I think of myself as a storyteller, too, because I do exhibitions. And exhibitions are about telling good visual stories. And I'm also an oral historian; I like to gather, as you know, being one of my subjects [laughter], I love to have people tell their own stories and tell their own history. And so this project, as I went through the research, every time I met someone, I asked them to show me their snapshot, their family photographs, the pictures they took on vacation, the pictures they took as they traveled with their family. All of those I had assembled. And I even had some home movies. My father was a photographer, so we always had a darkroom in our house and he always had a camera around his neck. He was always taking pictures. So I loved to gather those pictures.
Ric and I were together at OAH on a panel for the NEH, for the National Endowment for the Humanities, and I asked him, I said, "Ric, can we have lunch afterwards," and we went to a little restaurant in Manhattan to have lunch. And after we finished eating, I pulled out my laptop and I flipped through some of these photographs that I had digitized. And I said, "I think this should be a film. It's about movement, it's visual, it's so visual." The book has 75 images in it because– usually dissertations, my husband teases me all the time, that academic dissertations do not have pictures. But mine had pictures. [laughter] Because I'm a public historian and because the subject is so visual. The 20th century is about the camera and the automobile.
And so, I flipped through the pictures that I had gathered with Rick and I said, "I think this should be your next project." And he said, "I agree." And that's how we got together.
Spencer Crew: I've always said to say no to Gretchen is very hard to do. [laughter]
Ric Burns: It's impossible, Spencer, it's impossible.
Spencer Crew: So Emir, Ric. Ric, you were talking about the special nature of the story you were telling and how it connected between different communities and different worldviews of life. So how do you think about bringing that through in the film? And Emir, how do you think about that in terms of your editing and production of the film, give it that sense of the separateness and the need to be aware of how that plays out?
Emir Lewis: There is a separateness to the post-production process. Because first of all, the film is broken up into many processes, right. There's the research stage where there's all that collating of information, preexisting information; looks like Dr. Sorin's and your own, et cetera, et cetera, you bring all that stuff together. Then there's the production stage where you shoot interviews with esteemed people like Spencer Crew, and you get them to sit down and tell you all of the brilliant things that they have going on in their head in a clear and concise sort of way. And then, you have the post-production process.
So I really sort of came in at the tail end of things, and I'm looking at everything that's been done before and saying, Okay, I know you thought this was the story, but it's actually over here. Or, let's look at that. And then that leads to a lot of fighting and bloodshed in the edit room and it's very ugly. And then you sort of kiss and make up, and you have a film after that.
So there's a lot going on. It's really interesting because Ric was just talking to the audience about the sense of two worlds and inviting his white brethren to come into the world, and that's a new thing for a lot of white people. But the Du Bois has been talking about double consciousness for black folks pretty much since we got here. We've always had to learn to exist in your world and exist in our own. So that's not necessarily a new thing for us, but it is interesting seeing moments, those brief intersections in history where white people have come in and worked with black folks. It's good for people to see another way of doing things, but that's sort of a Tuesday for black people. I mean existing in two worlds.
Spencer Crew: Ric, what about you? How did you navigate this in terms of connecting the audience to these issues?
Ric Burns: I think the genius of the inspiration of Gretchen's work is that it's so integrative. It's bringing so many things together across time and across space. And so, the imperative to connect is built into the topic itself. The topic itself is about making connections. And I think that just the way the Negro Motorist's Guide, Victor and Alma Green's extraordinary way of navigating the complex double space of America, was about making connections across space.
I think that our kind of MO was, we're going to follow Gretchen. This was going to be like the Airbnb of American knowledge. This was going to be a way that you could navigate from Mobile, to Denver, to Minneapolis, to Los Angeles, to Detroit, so that the way we made the selection of what– since you could go anywhere and tell this story in America, but you can't go everywhere in a two-hour film.
So what are the wheres you want to boil it down to? Well, each one had to be a place where this story, race, space and mobility, was concentrated in a particularly powerful way, and in a different way:
New Orleans; its extraordinary and kind of transportation break at the foot of the Mississippi, which had its own special early role in the migration of peoples, and especially peoples of color.
Detroit, Motor City; the place where the automobile world began, where African Americans migrated in the Great Migration, the greatest movements of people in American history. Happened during the African American Great Migration between 1916 and 1970. And they were drawn to better paying jobs in places like Detroit first.
Los Angeles, the international home of the car, but also of the highway. So the interstate highway system was a crucial part of this story.
So each place had its own story to tell. But they were all connected; they were different in space, but they were all connected by this. So that's why I say it is like the film itself is a natural Airbnb. What we're doing is we're using the airwaves, in this case, to make connections among disparate peoples, different places, et cetera.
So I think that that was deeply embedded in the modus operandi in the material and, I would also argue, in the medium itself. Motion pictures, the form of photography that turned static photography, images that are fixed in place and then "snap, snap, snap, snap," released them, dispersed them into a world of motion. That was exactly contemporary with the invention of the automobile.
So in a way, just as those wheels start moving, so does the image start moving. And so, I feel there's something almost in the DNA of the art form itself which doesn't exist without motion, which suggests to you that a subject that is intrinsically about mobility and mobilization and how things need to be released from one space and allowed to move into another was built into it.
So I think that what we found, what my colleagues and I found working with Gretchen, working with Emir, working with, I have to say, Spencer, you and this incredible cadre of talent that Gretchen brought into the project, I mean, really, the most extraordinary group of writers, thinkers, academics, activists, et cetera, were assembled by Gretchen for this project.
And I think that what really kind of came out of that was this thing which was like, there's a kind of a choral harmony that comes out of it because they're all speaking in different accents from a different places, and yet at the same time they're singing the same story.
So at the end of the day, that's why I say I feel like we should all stand up and sing hallelujah. There is a kind of integrative harmonics that comes out of this story that should be thrilling. It should be liberating to people, it should be thrilling to them, and they should go because they're seeing the truth. And truth is hard, but the truth is clean. And that kind of getting to that cleanliness of reality is built into this story.
Gretchen Sorin: It also has resonance with people. One of the things that I have noticed about this film, as Ric and I have shown clips and earlier versions of it all over the place. And it has incredible resonance, not only for black people, but for white Americans, because everybody relates to the automobile and going on summer vacation with their family, going to the beach, going to the national parks. It has resonance with everyone because everyone remembers those times very fondly.
But then we're saying, oh, but it was a little different for African Americans. Yes, there were happy times going to the beach, but they were going to the black beach. They were going to the beach that was called Ink Beach. They were going to the black guest house because they couldn't stay at the white guest house. So it was a little different. But I think the topic itself has incredible resonance for everybody.
Spencer Crew: Thinking about that, what did you learn new from all this, since you said it's part of what your family had done, and you are African American. Ric talks about what white Americans can gain from this. What can you as an African American, and others gain from this? You might say, well, this is my history, I know it, why should I have to dig into this?
Gretchen Sorin: I grew up in this incredibly middle class family. And my parents never talked about the segregation that they faced at Fort Bragg; my father was stationed at Fort Bragg. My mother was from Fayetteville, one of the most racist cities in the country. They never talked about that; they talked about the good people.
And I have listened to my academic colleagues talk about the black middle class and how the black middle class has failed the black lower class, and how the black middle class has abandoned the black lower class. And for me, this was about understanding how the black middle class was working and pushing for civil rights every single day of their lives. Every time they went out in their automobiles, every time they went on vacation, every time they pushed the limits, they were working for civil rights. And so many of the people who owned these businesses were protecting civil rights workers. They were taking the money from their businesses and putting it into the civil rights movement. They were housing the civil rights workers. They were feeding the civil rights workers. They were selling sandwiches, women were selling sandwiches to put into the civil rights movement.
The black middle class has shown that they have worked incredibly hard to support civil rights. Maybe they've done it in their very middle class, quiet, polite way. But they have been vigorous. And I really realized that about my parents and about all of these other African Americans who were doing this day in and day out, and taking really their lives in their hands when they went out on the road, when they traveled.
Spencer Crew: I know for me, seeing the film and reading the book, the light bulb that went off that you talked about earlier is recognizing what our parents were going through as we were relaxing in the back of the car and not being aware of the world in which they were a part.
The other part of it, it strikes me, is how this wasn't that long ago, one of the most difficult eras that existed, that you and I and others – me, it's probably much younger – were born right on the cusp of that change, and our live could have been a lot different had we been born five, ten years earlier than during the time we were. I figure there's lots to be learned about the life of African Americans in this country not so long ago.
And speaking of that, can we talk about the Green Book. What is that? Who was that? Why should we know more about it?
Gretchen Sorin: It's funny, the people who used the Green Book, there are very few of them left. Most of them have died because it stopped being used in 1966. But Victor and Alma Green created this tiny, little guide that fit in your glove compartment that was– it was almost like a phone book; it really only listed name, address and then later on phone number. So it was really very much like a phone book, listings by state, of places that you could stay – hotels, motels, restaurants, guest houses, tourist homes, and then pharmacies, physicians, dentists. And the Green Book was only one of many, many guides that existed. So you can imagine, there's a host of these guides; almost none of them are extant because they were made to be thrown away.
So even most of the African American historians that I talked to didn't know about it. Twenty years ago, when I was asking people about the Green Book, people had not really heard of it. They were printed on terrible paper and they were made to be thrown in the trash. If you think about the AAA guides; you get one for every year and then you throw it away because it's no longer useful. Then they created another one for next year. Well, the same thing with the Green Book and with the other travel guide and the traveler's guide. All of these things were made to be tossed.
Ric Burns: I think, too, that the automobile allowed African Americans a way to evade the indignities of Jim Crow. They didn't have to ride in the back of– in the colored car, in the smoking car. They could now travel when they wanted, as they wanted, and where they wanted. So that's the good side of the automobile.
The challenge of the automobile, this new form of self-locomotion, with mobility being the defining aspect of freedom, is that you're traveling across this complicated haunted space of America. When you go back from Detroit to your family's home, for your grandmother's funeral in Mobile, where are you going to stay on your way? You can't stay everywhere. You can't eat everywhere. If your daughter has to use the bathroom, you can't use the bathroom. You can't get gas everywhere. So you have this complicated experience, entirely different from the experience of white motorists.
And so, the Green Guide then comes up as a way of filling that gap. Well, here is how you're going to navigate that space. You're going to be able to– when you're in Chattanooga, Mrs. Smith has two clean bedrooms in her house on the other side of Main Street; so that's a place you can go. And later you can call her up. So it is a way of making connections along the road. And not only is it a way of finding the available places that you can sleep, eat, get your hair dressed, et cetera, go to a hospital. God forbid your car should get into an accident. Ambulances came first for the white people who were hurt, not for the black. So it's an entirely bifurcated reality.
But it didn't just respond to that; it also generated the culture so that precisely because people were now connected and could know where to go, there was now a greater market for Marsalis Motel in New Orleans, or places everywhere across the country.
And so, it not only provided a place to go; it provided a surge of commercial activity and enormous creativity across the country. So that by the '40s, '50s, early '60s, you have this vibrant Black commercial culture across the country.
So that, too, is this remarkable aspect which, the Green Book is not just a responder, it's a generator of productivity.
Spencer Crew: That's what struck me about the film and about the book, is that it talks about the industries and businesses that grow up around the ability of African Americans to travel by car, which I think is sort of amazing. One of the quotes I remember having been said by Green or others – the goal was to bring an end to segregation. Did that happen?
Gretchen Sorin: Travel is fatal to prejudice. He's quoting Mark Twain when he uses that as his mantra. Does it happen? Does he bring an end to segregation? The end to segregation comes with the civil rights legislation. It comes with many, many people and organizations fighting against segregation.
Spencer Crew: One of the things that I want you all to think about and what you talk about in the film is that the end of the Green Book and the end of segregation also brings about the demise of the whole industry connected to it. So think about this; is it a good thing, a bad thing? Is desegregation good or bad, do you think or say in your film?
Gretchen Sorin: At the same time this is happening, the NAACP, the Urban League, all of these national organizations are fighting to desegregate public accommodations. So when they successfully desegregate Hilton and Howard Johnson's, African Americans go there and stay there because they can. They have worked so hard to break open these institutions, they go and they stay there. It's not that all African Americans abandon black businesses. It's that some African Americans abandon black businesses but white Americans never go and support those black businesses.
That's not what we're seeing right now though. We're seeing white Americans say, "I want to support black businesses." I'm sorry, Ric, go ahead.
Ric Burns: No, no. I think to that and to your question, Spencer, there's this important, did emancipation end the immobilization of African Americans? Yes and no. For a while you had, thanks to the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, the Civil War Amendments, which came right out of the Civil War, you had an expansion of mobility in every sense for African Americans, who are now no longer pinned to plantations. But they got, with the collapse of Reconstruction– and there was also amazing political mobility of thousands of African Americans now in local, state and federal positions. Then Reconstruction collapses because the wholeangry backlash against that, very much like the backlash we're going through right now. I mean, having had an African American President, now, whoa, we're going to really take that back because we're going to lose some of the perquisites of whiteness if we don't watch out.
So that back and forth takes place again and again, and the three big places it takes place in American history is during the Civil War and then the collapse of Reconstruction, and with the segregation movement. That legal remobilization, where it makes it against the law, well, there's a powerful kind of anti-Reconstruction-like backlash to that that takes place, where it's now technically illegal.
As somebody says in our film, you can make laws, but you can't legislate people's hearts and minds. You can't legislate treatment. So now we've been living in the post-civil rights world of how people treat each other. And within that world, while segregation has ended as a legal phenomenon – I live in New York City and proud New York City, so proud of its liberal tendencies; it's as segregated any place in the country – by neighborhood, by employment. I'm here at 110th and Riverside; it's just– it is amazing how in the work world it looks all like a multifarious utopia, but when people go home at night, they go home to neighborhoods which are remarkably still segregated.
So, did it end segregation? It ended segregation as something that could legally be done to black people by white people. It did not end the perquisites of whiteness that come from the wages of whiteness, as WEB Du Bois said, that come from the fact that we want to live– white people continue in alarming numbers to want to live in a world in which they get something merely by being white that people who are not white don't get. You get more options, you get better schools, you get better pay.
And so, those remain things that are vulnerable to transformation if segregation were complete. And we live in a world in which there is a mighty and ferocious resistance to it. And I think what we're going to do now is we're now at the third great breakpoint, the 1850/'60s, the 1950/'60s, and now it's going to be the 2020s and what comes after. And it will not end it, for sure, but what I know in my heart – thanks to the kind of work that Gretchen has done – is that we are taking a major step forward. George Floyd got murdered this year; there'd been a billion George Floyds before this. Why did that catch hold? Something's happening here in this COVID-ridden, Trump-ridden, really impossibly toxic environment.
And as Walter Benjamin said, it is moments of danger when the past and memories leap up and you seize hold of them that the real change can come. So we are now on the cusp of some kind of change, and I guarantee us, I know we're going to move something forward. Will it end this phenomenon? No. But it will take it forward.
Spencer Crew: I think that's encouraging to us all. Emir, I've got a quick question for you. So is this a film for American audiences only, or do you see it as a film that has international impact or usefulness as well?
Emir Lewis: Oh, it's definitely an international story. Yearning for freedom, yearning for mobility, there are caravans all across the world where people are trying to get free. So I think that people will see a similarity in that. So yeah, no, definitely. Plus we know that the BBC mines American stories all the time. [laughter] It's not like the Brits– you'll start seeing black American stories told on their public television. I wish we could get the BBC budgets to tell our own stories; that would be nice.
Gretchen Sorin: It was interesting to see the Black Lives Matter protests in Europe as well this summer after George Floyd was murdered. That said to me that there's an interest in this story abroad.
But I think what Ric said about COVID is so important because one of the things that white Americans and all Americans learned about this summer was what happens when your mobility is restricted. They had just a little taste of that restriction – you can't go any place, you have to stay in a particular place, you're prohibited from moving. And I'm not suggesting that it's at all the same as segregation or as the restrictions in mobility that African Americans faced. But it was a little taste that kind of laser focused our attention on the George Floyd, the Breonna Taylor, the stories that were coming out this summer, and this restriction of mobility that we all faced. A confluence of those events that really made this kind of focus in on this, on mobility.
Spencer Crew: Well, I hope you two get international distribution of it when the time comes.
Ric Burns: I think we will. I think we really will because it was amazing to see what happened in June after George Floyd's murder. This became an international social justice movement. Because the issues of race and labor and wealth in America are part of an international reality. Colonialism, imperialism, this is not– we're not in some isolated bubble here. We are in an entire world in which these kinds of dislocations and hierarchical suppressions have been going on for a thousand years. And ever since people could actually reach out and begin to act predatorially on a global basis.
And so, I think that we really are, this is a story that is the American version of a global story. And that it will join hands with versions of this story that people will recognize in Morocco and in Pakistan and in, really, I think, around the world. Just as it is a story that is a national American story in which no part of the American experience is out of it, there's no part of the world experience. And that's what I think is really potentially so hopeful, because it is kind of like– you can try to stop it, Spencer; the ripple is going to grow.
Spencer Crew: I think that's true. I know at the end of the film, I've been lucky enough to see parts of the film in advance, you end with a quote from James Baldwin. Why did you decide to have James Baldwin sort of give a summary or an overview to the film?
Ric Burns: You know, I'd like to say something about that and then hand it over to Emir for a second as well. There's a huge team of people that make these films. Spencer, you were a part of it. Gretchen started it. Emir, producer, editor. Emily Pfeil, an incredible producer. Kathryn Clinard. My wife Bonnie Lafave, who's been the producer in multiple senses in our shared lives, and is an extraordinarily gifted producer. Bonnie found, she came in and, as Emir knows better than anybody else, kind of really knew the certain way in which the film really needed to be kicked in the ass starting last May, and she kicked it in the ass really hard. She oversaw the final four months of the post-production. It was Bonnie who came up with the James Baldwin quote.
And you could end it so many, many ways. It's an amazing quote. Baldwin, as lionized, correctly, as he is, I feel he's underrated, underestimated. I feel that he is possibly, probably, the greatest writer America has produced, his slender corpus, filled with a very calibrated rage and extraordinary brilliance. And the quote in its full – if I may read it, Spencer?
Spencer Crew: Sure, please!
Ric Burns: Baldwin wrote in 1963, "This past, the Negro's past, fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone, doubt that he was worthy of life since everyone around him denied it, this past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity. Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands. We have no right to assume otherwise." And here's the kicker at the end: "If we, and now by that I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on and create the consciousness of others, do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare and achieve our country and change the history of the world." James Baldwin wrote that in 1963 in a book with an extraordinarily sort of Old Testament title, The Fire Next Time.
And I just want to say that this idea of this extraordinary coming together of this history and the need for coalitions and accomplices and allies and the idea that it is the exposure of a reality which is the reality of us all, conscious Blacks and conscious Whites coming together in an effort precisely by doing so, if we have enough tensile strength and enough kind of physical stamina to change the world to achieve – I love this phrase – achieve our country.
So Bonnie throws that in there late one day and they clip it in, and, sure as shootin', it shoots like a bolt of lightning back to the two hours of the film. And you feel- I feel like our sound editor, incredible Polish American woman, Marlena Grzaslewicz, said to me that when she saw a still unfinished rough cut of the film she began to weep, and that she felt in that quote such rage, it made her angry and deeply sorrowful and deeply hopeful, and deeply aware, all at the same time.
So I feel like when someone has the genius that Baldwin had to core sample the reality of the world as deeply and powerfully as he did, get out of the way, put it at the end of your film, and salute it and say goodnight.
I mean, Emir, man, if you could just talk a little bit about this process of working on this film because Bonnie was pointing out, you have been this really crucial intermediating pilot, weaving between all your colleagues as you've woven together the film. And you sat there for months and months and months with Kathryn Clinard and Emily Pfeil, sometimes with Gretchen when she was there, a lot of times with Bonnie, sometimes with me. And so in a way, no one is more than midwife of this film; no one knows more intimately the blood on the floor, the shots left out. I would love it if you could speak to that process because I think work is the thing that brings us all together.
Emir Lewis: Sure. You're not the first person to think of editing as midwifery. That is a very apt comparison between the two. I mean, you are–
Gretchen Sorin: Have either of you ever had a baby? [laughter]
Emir Lewis: I have not.
Spencer Crew: Good answer!
Gretchen Sorin: Quite a painful process, so I will–
Ric Burns: Maybe, Emir, given the amount of cutting that's going on, it's more like Caesarean section than actual natural childbirth. [laughter]
Emir Lewis: But I will say that the relatively conscious husbands do have a role in helping to bring their babies into this world. So I have been there for the birth of both of my children and hopefully was not a detriment. I was definitely a detriment after they got here, but in terms of helping to get them here– so I do sort of understand that hand holding process. But it is a rather unique thing to help raise something that, at the end of the day, is really not your child. Right? You are sort of walking the scenario where you are like helping this thing to take its first steps, but then stepping out of the way so that the parents could be there with the child to run to. So it is this really interesting thing that as an editor you sort of get used to. I'm going to help somebody– people, a lot of people do use the midwife comparison; I always think of myself as the captain of the boat, which sounds really important right up until you realize that someone else owns the boat.
So a lot of times, you have these conversations where your director or the owner of the boat says, "I really want to take the yacht to Cancun." And I'm like, "That's a great idea, except there's a really big storm right in between us and Cancun. Why don't we go around and instead we'll go to Puerto Vallarta, or something like that." "No, no, we have got to take this boat to Cancun. There's amazing ceviche there, we've got to go. We've got to go, we've got to go." And I'm like, "I can see the storm on the horizon, and then you're always sort of faced with the scenario where you're like, do I hand the wheel to him or her and jump off this boat because I don't want to go down with the ship? Sometimes you just put your head down and you go through the storm and it all sort of dissipates and then you're chilling in Cancun eating ceviche, and then you have to turn to your director or the owner of the boat and be like, "You were right."
So it's always that process that's sort of give and take, of sort of going back and forth, back and forth. It's a great one. It can be exhausting one, but it is ultimately a really, really satisfying one. And particularly dealing with historical projects because you are attempting to weave together this history and tell this story in sort of a new and fresh way or refocus the lens. And we did a lot of that in this film where we're sort of, you've seen this footage before, you've seen this headline before, you've seen this image before, but did you ever look over here? So we're trying to get people to look at these very familiar things to them in a slightly different way.
Ric Burns: I want to say very quickly; I promise I won't motor mouth too much here. First of all, it's an astonishingly brilliant way of describing the process. And what I would say with this particular topic, the topic– and I think this happens when films don't fail, the topic itself becomes the owner of the boat. So the directors are themselves intermediaries and midwives and co-captains. And the real ownership is that content. And sometimes the captains can over-dominate and the boat lists to one side or another. But what happens in the process and there are really rocky shoals and storms about, is that as the film itself begins to take its own form and shape, it begins to tell the editors, the directors, the producers what it's going to be. And the really stormy stuff is when someone is so pigheaded and wrong-minded that they can't hear what the film is telling them it must be. And those are the moments where the person who has most control is the most frightening Ahab-like person on deck. That's the director.
And so, what I have to say is that finally everyone becomes disciplined to the film itself and what it needs to be. And in this topic, with this extraordinary ballast of the most important and most contentious aspects of American history, I approached it in a both overbearing way, but also like J. Alfred Prufrock: "Dare I wear my trousers rolled? Dare I eat a peach? Dare I wear my trousers rolled and walk upon the beach?" Because the more you get into it, the more you realize you are in really this– it is so complex.
Spencer Crew: Ric, I'm going to have to interrupt you, I apologize so much. But we've got a ton of questions from the audience and I want to leave some time for those. So please forgive me.
Ric Burns: Not at all.
Spencer Crew: Well, the first question I have here is: Will there be teaching material with the film and the book? Because people are feeling that this was a great thing to get in front of children.
Ric Burns: There is an addendum to Gretchen's book which was published earlier this year in February, Driving While Black. And, really she's been on the road more or less constantly since then. There's also the Andrew Mellon Foundation, who have supported the film itself, have also supported a very powerful public engagement and educational outreach. Initially, that educational outreach and the public engagement was going to be non-virtual pre-COVID. And so there's been this massive reorientation. And so we're in the process now of creating and working to create the digital version of what would have been much more analog and bricks-and-mortars.
So the answer to that is, absolutely yes. And we have enormously high hopes that the film, more importantly than the film, that the material will live on in educational situations and in online situations as well.
Spencer Crew: Are you creating a specific curriculum and those kind of things for this?
Ric Burns: Absolutely, yes.
Spencer Crew: Gretchen, I know you've been a museum educator. I'm sort of curious about your take on that.
Gretchen Sorin: It's something that we've actually prepared– we have numerous ideas before COVID hit, and then a lot of those ideas, which included a lot of public discussion, opportunities for getting people together, because people in this country don't talk to each other. People that are different don't talk to each other. So our original ideas were all about having dialogues around this topic. And now those dialogues are not going to be able to happen. So to create something that can go online that people can access that way is going to be much more important, I think.
Spencer Crew: I think you're right. One of the questions I have here is, are there elements of this story that were easier to explore in film than in writing?
Gretchen Sorin: Oh, that's a great question.
Spencer Crew: It's a terrific question.
Ric Burns: I think that writing, no matter how many times it quotes multiple voices, always comes across like a single flow of discourse. Film brings together a colloquy of voices. And so, this subject which is intrinsically multiple, man, we really feel it. And I'll tell you, I think it's really the much maligned talking head– oh, come on, talking heads are the most powerful things in the human sphere. When you were a baby, when you were born, the most important thing as you sit in your mother's arms is you look up into her head. That the power of the expression, the things that you're getting from it, the subtle– and when our cohort of on-cameras, I mean, Emir had them all up on the wall. It was amazing to see it Emir's editing room. There was this whole group of people.
To hear Christopher West talk about, "I'm a father, I have a 17-year-old son, good kid, smart kid," and then talk about the fear he has that every time he goes out in his automobile, something's going to happen to him. That's going to be powerful on the page, but I'm telling you, the witness that film allows reality to bear is crucial.
And so, the book is fantastic, and at the same time the film, which has vastly less information, has- there are real people, men and women, now and then, talking and communicating about this experience. And I'm telling you, if you listen to these people talk, whether it's James Baldwin or Gretchen Sorin or Spencer Crew, and you are not riveted and struck to the bottom of your soul, you ain't alive.
Emir Lewis: Ric, if I could just jump in for one quick second. The power of those moments, especially at the end of the film, is that you come to a PBS film – you being the audience – to see smart, academic people tell you smart, academic things about their particular fields of expertise. So having Gretchen Sorin [inaudible] a number of things about the Green Book in the 1950s, we're expecting that. And she delivers fantastically. But it's sort of like Michael Jordan scoring 30 points; you expect Mike to put up 30 points on the regular, even though I hate him as a Knick fan. But you expect that to really happen. For Spencer Crew to say anything intelligent about any aspect of the African American experience, you absolutely expect that. That's sort of the price of the admission.
The interesting thing that our film does is there is a moment in Act IV where they're talking about their lives. And that's something that academics don't often do in PBS films. They tell you, "In 1935, this happened, and this happened in this way," et cetera, et cetera. And you expect that you crave that. But then to see that same person who talked to you about Reconstruction, that same person that talked to you about the civil rights movement, say, "I have a son. This happened to me. Or I'm worried about this happening to him. Or to her," that was a really interesting turn. I've been doing this, like you, I've been doing this for a long time and a lot of PBS films with a lot of academic people, with a lot of bookcases and plants in the background. And I very rarely see the person turn and get real in that way. So that was extremely powerful.
Ric Burns: I would say to add to that, what you know, because of the nature of the story, is everybody has skin in this game. From the beginning. Even with voices, you hear the opening quote from Alfred Edgar Smith, writing in 1933, and it's clearly an African American voice about an African American experience, and you go, "You know what, that's not Alfred Edgar Smith himself speaking, he's long gone. They got an actor." You realize that even that actor in the studio as he was recording it, he was, he had skin in the game.
And so, there's this powerful sense in which the conveyors are vibrating with what they're conveying, even before it's revealed that it was their daughter. Fath Ruffins, your colleague, saying, "The thing I would say to my kids was, Your job is, if you get stopped by the police, your job is to stay alive long enough to get to jail, and then we'll take it from there to get you out." Fath has been talking throughout the whole thing. And you know that she's African American and you know that she's been part of this story herself. Then it turns out she's doubled down in how invested she is in it.
Spencer Crew: There's a question for you specifically, Dr. Sorin. They ask, could you say more about your research process? What was it like? Did any primary sources jump out at you as being either surprising or very important?
Gretchen Sorin: I would say that one of the most important sources for me was reading all of the black newspapers. The New York Amsterdam News, the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Baltimore Afro-American. Reading those newspapers because they had an alternative take on the events of the day. So when a young soldier was murdered at Fort Bragg in 1944, that story didn't make national news. That story made all of the national black newspapers.
So those stories, many of the stories that I was trying to expand upon I could find in the pages of the black press. And so, those were very important.
The oral histories were essential, talking to people, doing work, oral interviews. The ones that I started with for the book were only done, as you know because you were one of them, with a tape recorder. But I interviewed funeral directors and ambulance drivers and the kids sitting in the back seat, now grown up and sitting in the front seat. [laughter] And gathered those stories and then expanded from there.
And I learned a lot about cars that way.
Spencer Crew: Another question is, do you expect to create an exhibition about this?
Gretchen Sorin: I'm actually working on an exhibition about this topic with the Amistad Center in Connecticut.
Spencer Crew: When do you expect it to be available?
Gretchen Sorin: I don't know. I've got some of my graduate students doing some research into their collection. I don't know, we'll see. But I really like when you look at contemporary art as well as historical artifacts because there are so many works of contemporary art in response to this summer's events.
Spencer Crew: Someone asked, what happens to the Greens?
Gretchen Sorin: I think that Victor Green– this is speculation because I couldn't find out exactly. But he gets sick in the 1950s and he steps back from managing the Green Book. And his wife Alma steps up. And at that point, there are four women operating, publishing, writing the Green Book. And they continue until they sell the Green Book in early 1962/'63. And the Greens didn't have any children, so they had only nieces and nephews, and I think someone probably went into the office and shoveled everything into a dumpster and all of the records were lost. So, there are no records for the Greens' business. Which is a very sad thing. But it was at a time when people didn't see the value in African American business records, and they were just tossed.
Spencer Crew: Which is really a tragedy. It's something you often face trying to do African American history.
Gretchen Sorin: It's a very difficult history to do for that reason.
Spencer Crew: Well, absolutely. It also strikes me, there's an interesting story about the women in this saga. Can you talk a bit more about them and how we should see how they're contributing in important kinds of ways?
Gretchen Sorin: So, women were crucial to this story. In addition to Alma Green and the four women that were working for her, publishing the Green Book, women were essential players in the Montgomery bus boycott. Because they're working every day, they don't want to take the bus. In order not to take the bus, someone's got to drive them to work. So they purchased a fleet of cars and the fleet of cars keeps these women working. But what are they doing on the weekends? On the weekends they're making sandwiches, they're frying chicken, they're making coconut cakes and they are selling all of these wonderful foods to unwitting people, many of whom are white, and they're taking that money and they're using that money to support the civil rights movement.
And one other thing. If an African American family had a spare bedroom, or two, they would open their home and they would use the– it was basically an early bed and breakfast, an early form of the bed and breakfast or of an Airbnb. You would use that extra money to support your family.
So women were taking that business initiative, and you would see Mrs. Jones' Guest House, or Mrs. Smith's Guest House. And often you would get a breakfast and perhaps dinner if you were staying at these places. And the very earliest places in the Green Book were primarily these women who were operating guest houses all over the country.
Spencer Crew: There's always that back story that doesn't get the kind of attention you'd like it to get along the way.
So as people see the film and are impacted by it, what is the takeaway you hope they have with them as they go back and reflect on what they've seen?
Gretchen Sorin: You know what both Ric and Emir were saying, this is a call to action. We don't want people to watch this film and say, Well, that was a really good film. I think we want them to say, That was a terrific film and now I'm going to do something. This film has motivated me, has moved me to do something, to take some action, some positive action.
So I really see it as a call to get involved, to participate in our democracy, in whatever way you can. I hope people will think, Oh, I need to go out and vote. But I also need to go out and do something in my community, because this is– there are 17,000 police departments in the United States, and they're all independent. There's no overarching police institution. There's 17,000 and they're all operated in local communities. And that's the place where people can effect change in their own local community.
Spencer Crew: Ric? Emir?
Ric Burns: You know, I- Emir, go ahead.
Emir Lewis: It's hard for me to come in on the thoughts because my thoughts of community policing are very complicated. There are over 17,000 police departments. They are all sort of run individually, but they do all sort of share a fraternal link and operating as a larger organization. And that is one of the problems. But that's not necessarily a problem that our film was tackling directly, but tangentially– if you're asking me what I on a personal level want, I would like to just be able to get a ticket for speeding and go about my day and not have to worry about anything past that. You know? If I was speeding, as I am wont to do, because I have a lead foot, I just want that ticket and I want to be able to live to, as I've heard many times from people in law enforcement, go home to see my family. That's what I would like to do. If they can see me as human in that way and allow me to go home to see my family, because they saw this film and they were able to sort of contextualize some of their own decisions about policing, especially the roads in America, that would be great.
Spencer Crew: Ric, you get the last quick word.
Ric Burns: Okay, listen, Willian Faulkner said the past isn't was, the past is is. But a lot of us instinctively feel like, the past is back then. But the past is now. And anybody who tells you the past is back then wants to keep things the way they are. And what I've really felt really strongly with this material was the way in which things that have a slightly sepia-tinged sound to them – lynching. Come on, man. I hope our film makes words that sound like they have a historical kind of tempo are absolutely contemporary. People are being lynched day in and day out. And what I feel in this film is that the past is coming rocketing right back into the present, where it was always to begin with. And that that inspires anger and it inspires activity, that it hopefully inspires agency, and it inspires hope.
Spencer Crew: That would be wonderful. Gretchen, you are the instigator of all this. Any last comments you want to offer to the audience?
Gretchen Sorin: I would just like to say how grateful we are to the Kennedy Library for giving us this opportunity to chat together about this film and about the book. And I hope that people will enjoy the film, will watch the film, and will read the book and be inspired to act.
Spencer Crew: I, too, want to thank the Kennedy Library for allowing us all to gather together. For me, it's a chance to get together with friends and sit around and have a wonderful conversation.
Thank you to our panelists, you've all been wonderful, insightful, and I think people gained a lot from our conversation back and forth. And I do want to encourage people to see the film when it comes out because I think it's an important one and one from which you will gain a lot as a result of viewing it and experiencing what it has to share.
So to all of you, a big thanks. Have a great evening. And thank you, audience.
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