American Enterprise Institute
Web event — Rescuing American history from revisionists and race hustlers

Welcome and introduction:

Robert Doar, President, AEI

Panel discussion
Panelists:

Stephanie Deutsch, Author

Wilfred Reilly, Assistant Professor, Kentucky State University

Robert L. Woodson Sr., President, Woodson Center

Moderator:

Ian Rowe, Resident Fellow, AEI

Thursday, May 20, 2021
7:00–8:00 p.m.

Event page: https://www.aei.org/events/rescuing-american-history-from- revisionists-and-race-hustlers/

Robert Doar: Good evening everyone. I’m Robert Doar, president of AEI, and I’m very pleased to welcome you to tonight’s event celebrating the release of a new book, “Red, White, and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers.” This volume, produced by the Woodson Center’s 1776 Unites campaign and edited by Robert Woodson, features essays that seek to offer a more complete picture of the African American experience by acknowledging struggles but also recognizing successes.

The current narrative on race and American history in the popular media and in many of our schools tells a narrow story focused increasingly on oppression and discrimination. “Red, White, and Black,” tells a more complete story of black American history. And in so doing, it demonstrates the rich variety of perspectives and achievements in the black American community.

These essays show that although there is a need to be honest about our nation’s shortcomings, progress has been built on courage, work, creativity, intelligence and on aspiration, faith, and hope. These are the same lessons that have underpinned 40 years of work at the Woodson Center in finding local solutions to poverty in low-income neighborhoods across the country.

Now here is where I want to pause a moment and offer a special welcome to Bob Woodson, one of tonight’s panelists and the editor of the volume. Bob’s determined work made this entire project possible. Now, many years ago, before he founded what would become the Woodson Center, Bob was an AEI scholar. But he left here to go on to greater things. And few have done more to help low-income Americans live successful and flourishing lives. He has continued to operate in the world of ideas, of course, but he has also operated in the world of action, making a real and positive impact on the lives of individuals all across America.

Bob knows that, as is true for all Americans who work to make better lives for themselves and their children, individual agency and self-determination have been and will continue to be a defining feature of the black experience in America. Now the essays in “Red, White and Black” reflect these values and the spirit of the Woodson Center’s 1776 Unites Initiative.

To begin this discussion, let me introduce tonight’s moderator, Ian Rowe. Ian is a resident fellow here at AEI where his work focuses on the importance of education and family formation in the fight for upward mobility. Before coming to us, he served as CEO of Public Prep, a nonprofit network of public charter schools based in the south Bronx in the lower east side of Manhattan.

And when he was in that capacity, he came here, and we did a wonderful event with two of really one of his most remarkable students. And it was really a great day for AEI. It’s not often that we have ninth graders and 12th graders on the stage, but it’s good to have it happen every once in a while.

Ian is now launching Vertex Partnership Academies, a new network of character-based international baccalaureate high schools opening in the Bronx in 2022. Ian’s writings can be found in major outlets like The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and The New York Post. He is also a senior visiting fellow at the Woodson Center and a writer for the 1776 Unites Campaign. Like Bob Woodson, Ian operates in both the world of ideas and the world of action. So without further ado, Ian, take it away. Thank you.

Ian Rowe: Thank you, Robert, and I can’t wait to get into our panel. As Robert said, my name is Ian Rowe. I am a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. And I’m also one of the founders of 1776 Unites and one of the essayists in “Red, White, and Black.” But tonight the hat that I’m wearing most prominently is that of someone who runs schools.

As Robert said, I’m launching a new network of character-based international baccalaureate high schools to open in the Bronx in 2022. And for the last 10 years, I ran a network of public elementary and middle schools in the heart of the South Bronx and the lower eastside of Manhattan. We had more than 2,000 students, primarily low-income students, primarily black and Hispanic. But all kids of parents who wanted their kids to live the American dream.

They knew that their kids would likely face some type of discrimination in their lives, but they chose our schools because they wanted their children to develop the skills and habits to become agents of their own uplift and build a better life, even in the face of structural barriers. This background is important because what young people believe about their possibilities in the present is very much influenced by what they understand was achieved in the past.

It’s important that our kids have a complete understanding of our nation’s history, warts and all. They need to know that they live in a good, if not great, country, one that is not hostile to their dreams. And they also need to know that millions of kids of all races have embraced the founding ideals around family, faith, hard work, entrepreneurship, education to move from persecution to prosperity. So that’s why it’s so exciting tonight that we’re discussing a new book “Red, White, and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers.” Bob, I can’t wait to talk to you about why you chose that title.

And let me just read to you from the opening dedication. “No nation is perfect but America more than any other is a place where people from every imaginable background have been able to pursue their dreams and realize their potential. Americans have never met a problem we were afraid to tackle or a challenge we can’t overcome together. In fact, those of us who have faced the most formidable challenges in life often become our strongest leaders and our greatest patriots.

This is as true of black Americans as it is anyone else. During the worst of Jim Crow, we built thriving communities full of families, churches, businesses, and countless civic institutions. On the very soil where we once toiled in forced labor, we found the seeds of our liberation. At a time when many are trying to pull us apart by stoking grievances and sowing discord, the overwhelming majority of Americans remain devoted to our founding principles and to one another. And this book is dedicated to those countless millions who love our country despite its flaws and long to live together in peace.”

And so we’ve got a great panel discussion. First, we’re joined by Robert Woodson. And as Robert Doar alluded to, for more than 40 years, Bob has been an influential leader on issues of poverty, alleviation, and empowering disadvantaged communities to become agents of their own uplift. Bob is the author of several books including “On the Road to Economic Freedom,” “The Triumphs of Joseph,” and now is the senior editor of “Red, White, and Black.”

We’re also joined by the amazing Stephanie Deutsch. Stephanie is an author who followed her interest in biography to study the life of her husband’s great-grandfather, Julius Rosenwald, which helped her develop a strong interest in the life of Booker T. Washington and African American history. Stephanie is the author of “You Need a Schoolhouse,” where she relates the remarkable story which she’ll tell us about of how Booker T. Washington, the founder of Tuskegee Institute, and Julius Rosenwald, the then president of Sears Roebuck, met in 1911 at a Chicago luncheon and proceeded to build nearly 5,000 schools in the segregated south.

And finally, we’re joined by Dr. Wilfred Reilly, author, political scientist, and as I like to say, a truth-teller. Dr. Reilly is an associate professor of political science at Kentucky State University, a historically black college. He’s the author of two great books, “Taboo” and “Hate Crime Hoax.” If you’re looking for an interesting Twitter feed to follow, Dr. Reilly regularly publishes views that frequently contrast with the dominant narrative, but it’s always backed by solid data.

So let’s get into it. I’m very excited to have this discussion. And Bob, let me start with you. The book is entitled “Red, White, and Black” with the subtitle “Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers.” That’s a pretty provocative title. What was the impetus behind that name and tell us why this whole thing is so important?

Robert L. Woodson Sr.: OK. Before doing so, I’d like to again thank Robert Doar for inviting me. I spent five years at AEI. I came as a practitioner with little appreciation for policy that I realized that winners and losers in the marketplace are determined by the rules of the game. So therefore, policymakers set the rules of the game. And so by spending five years here, I was able to blend policy with practice and come up with new policies and better practice. So I want to thank AEI for that opportunity that I spent five years.

But as Robert indicated for 40 years, I have run the Woodson Center, and we have assisted 2,500 low-income grassroots leaders in 39 states to overcome the challenges of poverty in their communities. And a large percentage of them are black. But when 1619 Project, when The New York Times issued its magazine charging that 1619 is the only legitimate and real birthday of the country and that America therefore should be defined as a “slavocracy.” And that all white people are villains to be shamed, blamed, and punished. And all blacks are to be pitied and patronized.

I think since the progressive left was using the black community and the birth defect of slavery as their bludgeon against the country, we felt that the count of messenger should also be led by blacks affirming the fact that 1776 is our legitimate birthday. But we did not want to engage in more tribal conflict by offering a debate. We wanted to offer an alternative narrative that is more inspirational and aspirational.

And so we assembled 28 scholars like yourself and Will and the rest to offer a more realistic and a more honest assessment of how were we. One of the basic propositions of the radical left is that the problems facing black America today with out-of-wedlock birth, crime, and disorganization in many low-income communities was the direct legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Well, our essays refute that. In our essays we proved that when whites were at their worst, blacks were at their best.

And we give evidence in our essays, examples of how with the Rosenwald Schools the education gap closed from three years to six months over a 20-year period between 1920 and 1940. That when we were denied access to hotels, we built our own. When we were denied access to schools and universities, we built 100 before the year 1920.

And so we felt that we wanted to challenge again with an alternative and inspirational narrative that affirms that no one — if everyone watching this show if I asked you what is your credit card debt, your mortgage payments? If I just assembled all of your liabilities and I say these people are in bad shape. The only way that I can really tell your net worth is to compare your assets to your liabilities and that determines your net worth.

Well, the same is true with black America. We must look at not just our liabilities but what net worth is determined by what we accomplished in the face of discrimination. And then finally our overall. And we do this not just by writing essays, but also we believe that people are motivated to change when they can see evidence of the value of the principles and virtues. People don’t want to hear another sermon; they want to see what it looks like. And so by assembling a group of activists to work alongside our scholars, we’re able to convince the American people that these principles, in fact, are valued.

Again, our overall goal of the project is to de-racialize race and desegregate poverty. That is our goal because we have many challenges facing us. The low-income black mother who lost their child to homicide, the Appalachian mother who lost their daughter and son to prescription drugs, and the mothers at Silicon Valley where the suicide rate is six times the national average. All of that, they’re different sides of the same coin.

As long as we have to look at each other through the prism of race, we won’t really have an opportunity to get to the deeper problem facing this nation. And that is the moral and spiritual freefall that is causing our young people to devalue themselves to the point where they want to take their own life or take someone else’s. We want to lead a multiracial effort to heal those wounds, but we can’t do it until we get race off the table. And so that is our goal.

Ian Rowe: Wow thank you, Bob, thank you, Bob. Well Stephanie, you know, as an educator, you know, we have lots of conferences, lots of events where we talk to each other. And I often cite the Rosenwald Schools as one of the most incredible examples of selfdetermination and resiliency in the most heinous days of Jim Crow. And even many educators aren’t familiar with that story. So tell us a little bit about how this came to be in your own life, and what you ultimately wrote about in “Red, White, and Black?”

Stephanie Deutsch: Well thank you, Ian. It is true that this story, which touched so many lives, is very under the radar. It is not known in a lot of places. There are even places in the south where the schools were where people don’t know this story. As you said, I was interested in writing a biography. One of my husband’s cousins suggested I look at the life of Julius Rosenwald. And my reaction was I don’t know. A businessman? That doesn’t really sound like the kind of thing I’d be interested in writing about. But when I started to explore his life, I found this remarkable connection with Booker T. Washington. And I can almost remember the exact moment when I was writing the chapter about their meeting. And I thought gosh, they liked each other. They met, and they had something in common.

So the story of the Rosenwald Schools is not just about the cooperation between an American businessman and the foremost — a wealthy American businessman and the foremost black leader of his day. But it’s actually the story about their cooperation and their connection to thousands and thousands of African American men and women across the south who came together and joined forces to create these remarkable schools. And this was during a time of extreme hardness and, as you say, extreme segregation.

So for those who don’t know the basics of the story, Julius Rosenwald was the son of German Jewish immigrants born in 1862 in Springfield, Illinois, never graduated from high school, but learned the clothing trade from his father, from his successful uncles. In 1895, he had the opportunity to buy into a small, unknown mail-order company called Sears Roebuck. And that astute decision combined with Rosenwald’s expert management because he really was a good manager, and Sears had been a promoter of genius. But Julius Rosenwald could actually get the packages delivered on time. That made him an extremely wealthy man.

So both his Jewish identity — from his Jewish identity he had a sense of social responsibility. As a newly wealthy man, he was looking around for how he might use his wealth in productive ways. But from events bubbling up around him in the first decade of the 20th century, he was getting a sense of the African American experience. In 1908, there was a major race riot in his hometown in Springfield, Illinois. And he began to think of racial animus in this country as a little akin to the antisemitism and the lack of opportunity that had driven his parents and so many others out of Europe.

So in 1911, when he had the opportunity to meet Booker T. Washington, he was anxious to do it. He had been given a copy of “Up from Slavery,” and he had read it and was very interested. So Washington was going to be in Chicago, Rosenwald gave a luncheon for him. They met. As I say they liked each other. I think they recognized they were both pragmatists. They were both — they weren’t let’s sit around and talk about ideas. They were let’s sit around and talk about things we can do.

And they were very pragmatic and they were also — they each had sort of a domain to show off. Rosenwald took Washington to tour the enormous Sears compound on the west side of Chicago. And so, Washington said, “OK, now I want you to come down and visit Tuskegee.” So in the fall of 1911, he filled a private railroad car with family members and friends from Chicago. He had Jane Addams and his rabbi, Emile Hirsch, and they all went down and spent three days at Tuskegee.

And what they saw there astonished and favorably impressed them. What they saw there was the beautiful campus that had been designed at Tuskegee. It had been built by the students of bricks they made there themselves. They saw the very committed faculty, the staff, hundreds of eager students. So Rosenwald was very impressed. He agreed to serve on the board of Tuskegee. He agreed to make financial contributions generous. But he also engaged in kind of an ongoing dialogue with Washington. And they visited in each other’s homes, and they exchanged letters. And the conversation expanded to sort of what more could I do? And it was then that Washington presented to Rosenwald the information about how few schools there were for black children to attend.

Now, public education was mandatory at that point throughout the country. But the southern states divided their money very unequally between their black systems and their white systems. And what Washington told Rosenwald was that there were many places in the South, where people, black people were getting together and talking about raising money to build their own schools. If the state won’t give us schools, we’re going to build schools. We want schools.

These were children and grandchildren of slaves, who had been systematically denied the opportunity for education for generations. What they wanted the most in the world was education for their children. And this new book of photographs that’s come out, photographs of Rosenwald schools, is called “A Better Future for Their Children.” And that’s really — that was what they wanted.

And Rosenwald was a big believer in I don’t give you something, I help you achieve what you want. So when he heard that they were already raising money, he was very interested and very hooked. So out of this connection came a program that, between 1912 and 1932, built over 5,000 schools, teachers, homes, and shop buildings in 15 states across the American South.

Overall, it was the local jurisdictions that gave the most money. These were public schools. And this program had actually attracted the participation of the public school systems. But after that, dollar for dollar, it was African Americans in the communities the schools were built to serve who donated more than Julius Rosenwald. Not a lot more, but it was more.

So the ongoing care and concern for the schools is an aspect of the story that is fascinating. The schools were built with participation from the communities. People donated land; people donated materials. In many cases, they had worked on building the schools, but they also helped to take care of the schools. Well, that same spirit is alive today in a very vibrant movement to preserve the schools that remain.

And in the last 10 years, I’ve had the opportunity to be with many, many alumni groups, and they’re working to preserve their schoolhouses. Or in some places, they’re just working to preserve the memory of the school. The school is gone, but they still get together to celebrate the school. And the schools had to close when segregation ended, but they are still celebrating them and there are places that they regard with affection and pride. Several generations of families often went to the same school.

I’ve heard former students recite the Gettysburg Address, which at some schools was something they did every year. I’ve heard about Soup Day at a school in Rappahannock County, where once a week a parent would bring lunch for the whole school. I’ve heard about the close bond between teachers and the families. There were lots of places where the teacher would live with the family during the week and then go home on the weekends. Heard about the cast-off textbooks from the white school and the long walk to and from school several miles that the kids did together. And I’ve seen the legacy of the schools in the men and women I’ve met, who many of them, the majority of them went on to high school, many of them went on to college. They went on to careers in education, in the military, in public service. And that sense of pride and affection and connection to their communities, in many places, sent people back to the communities where they grew up, where they’ve now become involved in these Rosenwald School efforts.

So this is an incredibly powerful story. It’s an incredibly positive story. And it’s one that has kind of slipped below the radar screen. So many people don’t know about it, even educators, even African Americans, even Southerners. And I’m happy to say that there’s now a campaign to create a Julius Rosenwald and Rosenwald Schools National Historic Site. The special resource study has been mandated by Congress and so that’ll — that will be ongoing. And so I expect we’ll hear more about the Rosenwald Schools in the years to come.

Ian Rowe: It is one of the most incredible stories. One thing I want to get back to in this conversation is ironically after building nearly 5,000 schools, incredible academic achievement, the assumption though that separate meant unequal and inferior, actually led to the demise of the Rosenwald Schools. We definitely need to come back to this.

Stephanie Deutsch: Yeah, interesting.

Ian Rowe: So Dr. Reilly, you know, one of the ideologies that’s very dominant right now is that America’s you know, starting in 1619, 400 years of oppression, and the history of slavery is a straight-line connection to many of the contemporary issues that face the black community. You’ve done a lot of writing around, you know, is slavery the entirety of the black experience. Tell us a little bit about what you wrote about in “Red, White, and Black?”

Wilfred Reilly: Well, I suspect you’d be a little irritated if this was my only answer, but no. Slavery and historic racial conflict oppression are obviously not the sole or the primary explanations for contemporary problems in black and, for that matter, white communities. The example that I use very often online is fatherlessness. I mean, in 1938 through 1945, the great economist Walter Williams pointed out that the quarter — he said legitimacy — the out-of-wedlock birth rate for African Americans was about 9 percent, might have gotten as high as 11. For Caucasians, it was actually even lower, it was around 4 percent if I recall correctly. But the 90-plus percent majority of men of all races were expected to simply take care of their families, and they did 90 to 99 percent of every group in the country.