- As the credits roll, you're gonna find my name among the consultants to the filmmakers. Of course, the reason that list is so long is because everybody on the staff was a consultant to the filmmakers as well. It's also true that I had no idea what a consultant to a filmmaker was or did. So, there was no way of me to figure out what this finished product was going to be. I just knew that over about two and a half or three year period, on occasion we'd receive from the filmmakers who are at Harpers Ferry on the east coast and 'cause we were on the west coast and they'd send us a block of text to be wordsmithed or we'd get stills from the library of congress or the national archives, and I'd say okay. But I was really in over my head. I had no idea what this finished product was gonna be. It was of somebody had sent me a box of tiles and told me that in that box was a sunset over the Golden Gate Bridge. I mean, how do you know? When the film was finally released to us finished, just before the opening of the Vidger Center and I saw it for the first time, it may interest you to know that I was disappointed. I didn't like it at all. Partly because the history as I had lived it was nowhere in sight. Not anywhere in sight. But if you're gonna try to tell a story with as many moving parts as this story had, in 15 minutes, what do you do? You go for the Hollywood ending. And we all got together for the sake of democracy and we set our differences aside, and he built the ships and we won the war, and that tends to be pretty much the way history gets written. And our filmmakers hadn't resisted that temptation. And that's what they had done. The real truth was that I was here I was here in Richmond. I was a 20 year-old young woman of color, working in a temporary building somewhere in the middle of Richmond. Somewhere, some people say it was the 17th and Nevin. Others say it was 37th. I've never been certain, but it was torn down immediately when the war ended. So I'm not sure where it was. The reason I was working there was because this would have been at least a decade before the labor movement would be racial integrated. And in order to comply with the demands of the Maritime Commission, the Labor Union had created auxiliaries. One at Marinship in Sausalito. Another in West Oakland, Boilermakers Auxiliary 26 and in Richmond with Boiler Makers Auxiliary 36. Into which all the black workers were dumped. Jim Crow was really the other name for auxiliary. Came in everyday in a carpool, no where near the shoreline. I lived in Oakland, I mean, I'm sorry in Berkeley. Came in everyday in a carpool no where near the shoreline. Never saw a ship under construction, never saw a ship being launched. If you'd ask me at the time, I'd of told you that all the shipyard workers were black. Because the only people I saw were the people who came up to my window to have their addresses changed, which was what I was doing on three by five file cards to save the world for democracy. As you can see it worked. It's also true that I had know idea what that larger story was. It simply had not, I'd never experienced it. Not for one minute. But if you'd known me, two years before then you've known little Betty Charbonnet, a Cajun Creole child growing up in Oakland, East Oakland where I had arrived in year 1927 as a six year old. That was the year that the City Fathers in New Orleans which was our ancestral home, chose to bomb the levees against the rising Mississippi, to save Saint Charles Avenue and the Garden District, and they sacrificed the seventh and ninth wards and the Treme, which was our home. In that year my mother arrived at Six Street Southern Pacific Station in Oakland, with three little girls, everything we had left in a couple of cardboard suitcases, and a crucifix, to join George Allen her father, my grandfather, Poppa George, who had settled out here at end of the first World War. And was at that point sharing a little shotgun bungalow out on 76th Avenue with my mother's two pullman porter brothers, and a sister, and Aunt Louise, who was poppa's third wife. And so, we were no longer required to call them grandmother. She was Aunt Louise. And there we would wait for my father who would join us in a couple of months. And I would begin life in East Oakland as a child of the service worker generation. Our fathers and our uncles were the red caps and pullman porters, and the cooks and the waiters, and the bellhops, and the janitors, and the laborers. And our mothers were 50 cent an hour domestic servants. Cleaning white people's homes and taking care of white people's children because that's who we were as a nation in those years. That's who we were. I graduated Castlemont High School in Oakland, with two opportunities for employment open to me. I could've worked in agriculture. Or, I could've been a domestic servant. My older sister Magaery who's a beautiful young woman and a talented artist spent the first five years of her marriage as half of a domestic team. Her young husband was a chauffeur and Margaery was a housekeeper for a family in Piedmont. And because they lived in, on the premises, with Thursdays off, which was traditional, they could save every penny the earned toward a down payment on their first home. And this was the traditional pathway into the middle class for African American. This was what my life would have been. This is what the prescription was. Except there's a third choice, and it was one I was wise enough to take, I married Mel Reid, who's family had made its way out across the country from Griffin, Georgia, at the first sound of cannon fire, the Civil War. And in 19, Mel his father and his grandmother were all born in Berkeley General Hospital on Dwight Way. And in 1942, Mel was in his senior year at the University of San Francisco playing left halfback for the San Francisco Dons and what 19 year old wouldn't prefer that. So that's what I did. And I completely escaped the life of my sister. But I share that history with you in order to illustrate that being a clerk in 1942, even under those circumstances, even in a Jim Crow segregated union hall, somewhere in a little temporary building in the middle of Richmond, even then that was a step up. My folks were proud of me. I wasn't making beds in a hotel, I wasn't cleaning white people's homes, I wasn't taking care of white people's children, I wasn't emptying bed pans in some rest home or hospital, I was a clerk. Which in 1942 would have been the equivalence of today's young women of color being the first in her family to enter college. That would of been the equivalence. Because that's who we were. That's who we were. Now scroll ahead with me to 15 years ago. And 15 years ago I'm back in Richmond, I'm back after more than 20 years as suburban housewife. Living out in the Diablo Valley. Living out after raising four kids in a redwood designed house. After out living two husbands. After decades of friendships with powerful people who were my church members and friends. I'm here this time as a field representative for a member of the California State Assembly. I'm working for Dion Aroner. And when Dion term limited out I stayed on as a field representative for her successor Loni Hancock who only recently term limited out of the California State Senate. I'm in a one person satellite office somewhere again, in the middle of Richmond. I'm doing constituency work. And along with the rest of field staff I am helping to determine what kind of legislation might be need out of the five cities of Contra Costa County over which my office sat. And if you're wondering whether I became a genius between the time I was 20 and 15 years ago, may I quickly assure you that that's anything but true. That dramatic arc of my life from 20 to 15 years ago in no way is a sign of personal achievement. Not for one minute. Instead, it's a solid indication of how much social change occurred in this country over those intervening years. Something we all did, all of us. Black and brown, and yellow and red, and straight, and gay and trans. It's what we all did. All of us. And some of us did it kicking and screaming. And some us are still kicking and screaming. But enough of us, because of what happened right here in Richmond during those years of 1942 and 1945, because of that social change continues to radiate out of the Bay Area into the rest of the country. And that's enough to build a park around. That's true, that's true. Now, long, I guess it was during that time 15 years ago where the planners were gathered here in Richmond in my legislative district, and that was when the memorial had already come into being. It lay less than a mile from my office but it had never dawned on me to visit the Rosie Memorial because that was a white woman's story. The women in my family had been working outside their home since slavery because it had always taken two salaries to support black families. Few black men could do it alone. Few black men. And, that arc, that arc had never been entered into in many parts of the country, but even here even in the greater Bay Area, we had peeled off on issues, a lot of folks peeled off on open housing. You know, not ready to have a family that didn't look theirs living right next door. What about property values. And then more of us peeled off on the decision of Brown versus The Board of Education, and not ready to have their children to be bused across town to suit my social agenda. And then more of us peeled on Affirmative Action. Which was incidentally never a case of quotas. Either because they had forgotten or had never none that in 1942 it took $47.25 a week to support a family of five. And let's repeat that. $47.25 a week supported a family of five if you were white. But remember our fathers and our uncles were all members of the service workers generation earning 25 to $35 a week. Pullman porters earned $18 a week plus tips for a 12 to 15 hour day, because that's who we were in those years. So the fact that the memorial lay less than a mile from my office that I had never visited it, certainly rose out of the fact that I could not identify with Rosie's story at all. Because we were on a completely different plain. A different one. Now, 15 years ago, the planners were gather here in Richmond because this park had become into being through legislation at a time when I guess it was around 1966, it accord to someone in the Department of Interior that every single taxpayer was funding the creation, the development, and the maintenance of this incredible system of national parks, but it was only the people who had the leisure time and the financial resources who could afford to visit them. And somehow they began to get a notion that they needed to begin to plan urban parks. But, there were no models for those. How do you prepare an urban park without any federal lands? How do you do that? This park had been created in the legislation on paper with scattered sites that lead throughout the city of Richmond. Sites that were either owned privately, commercially, by none profits civically. We were to own nothing. Can you really develop a national park that only exists on stories. Only exists under the hats of the Rangers. How do you do that? How do you create a national park that doesn't have any boundaries? This one didn't have boundaries. The only park that vaguely resembled it may have been the park in Lowell, Massachusetts but in that case the federal government went in, purchased the textile mills, transformed them over time into arts and cultural centers and in time the entire city of Lowell, Massachusetts becomes a national park. And maybe that's what happens here in Richmond. But, the planners were gathered here to begin to figure with the owners of the said site, and the community, the answers to some of those questions. And that's when I discovered the national park. That's when I discovered it. I sat in on my first PowerPoint presentation in the main library on McDonald Avenue. And met this incredible building next door for the first time. The Ford Assembly plant, design by Albert Kahn, built between the years of 1929 and 1931, to assemble Model A Fords. But turned out 49000 tanks and jeeps for the war in the pacific during World War Two. So it was an important piece of the home front story. But that building had been constructed on state owned land. It was built on air rights. So a seat opens up on the planning table for the State of California. And I'm in it. And I'm the only person of color in the room and the only person who could look at the PowerPoint at the scattered sites that laid throughout the city and instantly recognize 'em as sites of racial segregation. Because what gets remembered is determined by who's in the room doing the remembering. There wasn't any grand conspiracy leaving my history out, there simply wasn't anybody in that room that had any reason to know that but me. Nobody, nobody. Atchison Village named in the legislation built by the Maritime Commission to temporarily house Kaiser management. But, they would've been no black managers at the time, so the question was moot. Nystrom Village, also built to be restored to show how workers lived, but you could not live in Nystrom Village unless you were white. HUD built segregated housing for the workers that were brought in from the south. You could not buy or build living quarters if you were not white except in North Richmond. A place where there were no streets or sidewalks. But that's the way we were. That's who we were. The Maritime Child Development Center which show prominently in this film was the work of one of the Kaiser geniuses Dr. Catherine Landis, who believed that little children were capable of learning. That care-taking wasn't enough. And what she developed there turned out to be the progenitor for headstart right here in Richmond. But you could see from the film that there were no children or families of color serviced by the Maritime Child Development Center, none. Now fortunately for all of us all of those planners in that room were graduates of Sesame Street. And you're laughing. But in my pantheon of civil rights leaders, there has always been place for Jim Henson and his children's television workshop. And Mister Rogers. Because we were all back in the 50s, back building the television sets and building the suburbs with our GI Bill and building the automobiles. Our kids were all sitting in front of the television sets being humanized by those geniuses. And Jim Henson and Mister Rogers really had always had a place in my heart. And by in, 15 years ago, those kids were all grown up. And by then they're sitting around corporate board rooms throughout the country. And in the forestry service, in the State Department. And they're in the National Parks Service and they're the Department of Interior. And now, they're in Microsoft and Apple, and Twitter and Facebook, and they all knew that it wasn't easy being green, and they knew that one of these things is not like the other, it doesn't matter one bit. And those planners were not only willing but anxious to know what was missing in their PowerPoint. And for the first time since I was that 20 year old young unknowing naive young woman of color in that segregated union hall, I'm in a position to witness the history that I missed. And it was a marriage made in heaven. I read everything I could about the period. The studies were just beginning to come out of the University of California. Studies by Leon Litvack and Fred Cribbick and Margaret Archibald, Donnor Graves, and Gretchen Sant'angelo, and Shirley Ann Moore. I read everything I could, what was existing about Henry Kaiser. I read. Though the books had, I don't think have yet been written that are going to do him justice. I fell in love with Henry Kaiser. I mean, how could you not. He was a man who had dropped out of school at 13, who had never built a ship, had never built, had to go to the library to figure out how you do that. Came into Richmond as a cement contractor in 1941 on a contract with the Maritime Commission to build ships for the British under lend-lease. He knew that if he could introduce that mass production, prefabrication techniques that Henry Ford was using in auto manufacturing he could revolutionize ship building. Nothing I ever read about him would have convinced me that he was a social reformer. Just a smart businessman. He knew all he needed was enough hands and he didn't care what color they were. He didn't care who they were attached to he just need enough hands, and he knew where the greatest pool of available labor existed in this country. In the five southern states of Mississippi, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas and Louisiana. Whites coming off the dust bowl. Blacks from the slow mechanization of cotton. Everybody coming up from the great depression of the 30s. Possible for black man been standing on the sidewalk in Jackson, Mississippi, where southern tradition would demand that he not only not make eye contact with a white person, but they step into the gutter if a white person approached. And that man could tapped on the shoulder by a Kaiser recruiter and find himself two weeks later in the city of Richmond riding in the front of the bus 10 years before Rosa Parks would refuse to give up her seat in Montgomery, Alabama. Into a city with a population of 23000, imagine how small the city was, into a city with a population of 23000 only a man with the audacity of Henry Kaiser would choose to import for his four Kaiser shipyards a workforce of 98000 black and white southerners, who are not going to be sharing drinking fountains, schools, housing, hospitals, even cemeteries, or any kind of public accommodations for another 20 years back in their places of origin. That's not going to happen until the 60s. We're talking 1942. And no time for focus groups and diversity training. They are all living under the common threat of fascist world domination. No time to take on a broken social system. They have to negotiate at the individual level every hour of every day in order to get through it without killing each other. If you knew the sequence in which people were hired because there was not an enlightened Henry Kaiser who was hiring people, it was segregated unions. And first they hired the men who were too old to fight. Followed by the boys who were too young to be drafted. And then single white women. And when that pools exhausted, married white women. And then, in 1943 the first of black men hire to do the heavy lifting. For the women that they brought on board. Hired as helpers and trainees only never to go above that. And though there were some few black women hired as janitors to sweep the decks and pick up trash where other people worked, it wasn't until late in 1944 and early in 1945 when black women began to be trained as welders. And if you know that sequence and you look at that picture on our wall upstairs or in this film, with all these people standing together like brothers and sisters, color, all color and sizes and shapes and ethnicities, and ages, and we come from more enlightened time and we look at that picture and we think look how they got along back then in 1942. Why can't we do that? What you have to know is that those pictures have to date from late in 1944 or early in 1945, because in 1942 you couldn't have gotten them to stand together to have their pictures taken. But you also see in those pictures is that acceleration of social change. They came in as sharecroppers. As you could see by this film. But by the time the war ended they were ship builders. And working around the clock on three shifts a day for 364 a days with only Christmas off, behind a man who referred to the battle ship as the pointed end, you gotta love Henry Kaiser. They had completed 747 ships in three years and eight months. 747 ships in three years and eight months. By way of comparison, Mr. Moore at Moore Dry Dock, who was a traditional ship builder, Mr. Moore had been building ships since the first World War. Mr. Moore completed 100. Bechtel Corporation at Marine Ship, completed 93. And Henry Kaiser completed 747 ships in three years and eight months. And right here, right here in Richmond in his four Kaiser shipyards, helped to turn the course of the war around and bring it to an end by out producing the enemy. That's enough to build a park around. That's enough to build a park around. It began to dawn on me because I stopped working for state and started working for the National Park Service on a four year contract as a consultant, when I realized that if we had a place on the planet where we could go back and revisit that era not by the myths that we made up about it, none of this greatest generation stuff, or today's skin crawling American exceptionalism. But if we go back and revisit that era, in truth, as it was lived by those of us who lived it, only then can we get a baseline against which to measure how far we've come. Remember that arc that we all shared. If we don't know where we started, we have no conception of where we are or how we got here. Only if we go back and retrace our steps. And that's what the park became for me. That's what it became for me. I'd like to end my talk with my personal history which is also forgotten, also forgotten. But so many people lived my history. My great grandmother Leontine Breaux Allen was born into slavery. 1846 in Saint James Parish, Louisiana. She was enslaved until she was 19. At which time she was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation and married George Allen who was the corporal in a Louisiana State Co-ed Troops fighting on the side of the North in the Civil War. Together over time, they produced and raised 13 children. And in their home my mother was born to their oldest son George and his 14 year-old wife. Who only lived until my mother was seven months old. But by great grandmother lived to be 102, not dying until 1948. Three years after my experience in that Jim Crow union hall. My mother was born 1894 and lived to be 101, dying in 1995. And I was born in 1921, and the three of us were all adults at the same time. All of us. I was 27 years old, married and a mother by the time slave ancestor died. I knew her as the matriarch of my family. And she had raised all of the significant adults people of my life. And our lives, the three of us, our lives spanned everything from the Dred Scott decision and the Civil War. And the emancipation Proclamation and Reconstruction, and Plessy v Ferguson, and Sacco and Vanzetti and the Rosenbergs and Lindbergh's flight and Amelia Earhart's loss, two World Wars and Korea. House Un-American Activities Committee and Kent State and People's Park and Martha Luther King and Malcolm X, , and Emmett Till. The moon landing, the mars probe, assassination of the Kennedys. All the way to World Trade Center bombing. 20 kids in a Connecticut classroom in San Bernardino and nine people in a prayer circle in South Carolina. Micheal Brown and Treyvon Martin. And, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Black Lives Matter, and 26 people in small church in Texas. And all that happened within the lifetime of three women who were all adults at the same time. And to add to that the fact that on January 20th of 2009 as a guest of George Miller, I'm a seated guest on the Capital Mall, with a picture of my great grandmother in my breast pocket, witnessing the inauguration of America's first African American president. In the shadow of the Lincoln memorial. Lincoln who's life was contemporary with the life of my great grandmother. And that's how fast the time goes. Can you imagine, can you imagine. I know how my generation confronted the threat of its day, a very real threat. World War Two I'm not sure we could of avoided. We did that, we fought that war. We did it both on the battlefield where we lost 54.8 million lives. On a home front where there were 37600 causalities in industrial accidents. We did that under a completely flawed social system. But we none the less prevailed. We none the less prevailed. Our kids are now facing a new threat, that of rising sea levels and global warming, and climate change, and they're gonna have to match and exceed that great mobilization. This time, internationally, in order to save the planet. And they're going to do it under a still flawed social system because the nature of democracy is so it'll never stay fixed. It wasn't designed to. It's a participatory form of governance. It requires all of us. Every generation has to recreate democracy in its time or it will die. The 39% turnout four years ago in the general election was predictive of the 40% turnout in the most recent general election. An election in which only 17% of those between 18 and 24 voted. But 52% of us over 51 did vote so we were opting for yesterday rather than tomorrow. Democracy cannot be sustained in that way. We have a constitutionally protected right to be wrong. A constitutionally protected right to be bigots if that's what we wish to be. But, we also have created this incredible system of national parks, where though they were not designed for the purpose it is now possible for us to visit almost any era in our history. The heroic places, the contemplative places, the scenic wonders, the shameful places, and the painful places, in order to own that history, own it, that we may process it because I do not believe that we have yet as a nation processed the Civil War. That we may begin to in time forgive ourselves in order to move toward a more compassionate future together. And this why 85 I became a park ranger. Because you guys have forgotten all that good stuff. But is that not an amazing, amazing story? There's a place on the film where Agnes Moore a still living Rosie, says, "It was the greatest coming together "of the American people that I have ever lived through." And during the first months when the film was released I used to stand against the wall and watch the faces in that half light, every time she'd say that and I'd think, how can Agnes say that? She knows that isn't true. I mean I've just talked to that woman. And one day after my 90th birthday, I became aware of the concept of conflicting truths, that we all create our own reality. And that there are many truths. There are truths that raise out of religious conviction, there are truths that raise out education, truths that raise out of life experience, there are many truths, and many of those truths that we all harbor, are in conflict. And I knew from that day forward that as long as there was a place on the planet where Agnes's truth and mine can coexist, that that was gonna be enough for me. And that I get to sit on the kitchen stool in the uniform of the National Parks Service and share that insight with the 14 year olds that come through here is a privilege that I'm granted by the public. And thank you very very much for coming, thanks.
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