On March 6, 2023, HDS hosted the fifth installment in the the six-part series Religion and the Legacies of Slavery: A Series of Public Online Conversations. The featured speakers were Tracey E. Hucks, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies, Dain Perry, and Constance Perry.
Slavery is most readily associated with the U.S. American South with the geographies of the North often eclipsed. Tracey Hucks lead a discussion on slavery and the slave trade that focused on New England and the DeWolf family of Rhode Island. The DeWolf family was understood as the largest slave-trading family in the United States and Dain Perry, a direct descendant, will be featured in this webinar. The event will also highlight the reparative and healing workshops co-facilitated by Dain and his wife Constance Perry conducted throughout the U.S. at religious, social, and educational institutions.
Full transcript:
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Religion and the legacies of slavery, a series of public online conversations.
SPEAKER 3: Slavers and Slavery, A Dialogue with Descendants. March 6th 2022.
DIANE L. MOORE: On behalf of Dean David Hempton, welcome to our fifth in a series of six webinars on religion and the legacies of slavery co-sponsored by Harvard Divinity School, the Legacy of Slavery Initiative and Harvard X. My name is Diane Moore, and I'm the Faculty Director of Religion and Public Life here at Harvard Divinity School. And it is my great pleasure and privilege to co-host this series with my friend and colleague, Melissa Wood Bartholomew, Associate Dean for our Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging.
On behalf of us both and our many staff and faculty colleagues who have helped bring this series into being, I want to welcome the hundreds of participants who are joining us for this presentation this evening representing over 80 countries worldwide. We are grateful for your presence.
Tonight is the fifth in a series of six critical conversations building upon and beyond the work of the 2022 Harvard and the legacy of slavery report. In this series, we explore through the head and the heart what the academic study of religion teaches us about the tangled histories and legacies of slavery and racism here in the United States and beyond. These tragic legacies are alive and present in many forms as the news on any given day, in any given hour devastatingly reveals.
We hope that by gaining a deeper understanding of the complex power of religion relevant to historical and contemporary manifestations of racism and White supremacy, that this knowledge will enhance our commitment to reparative action and racial justice and healing in our own times and in our own contexts. Ultimately, these conversations are in service of advancing our vision of just world at peace, healed of racism and oppression.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: Before we proceed, we pause. We pause of reverence. We pause to acknowledge and honor those who came before us, who were indigenous to this land, and the African and Indigenous people who were enslaved in this country, including the more than 70 people of African and Indigenous descent who were enslaved here at Harvard University as detailed in the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery report.
As a descendant of Africans who were enslaved in this country, I am aware of the potential impact of hearing this tragic history. We want to remind everyone that as we proceed through these difficult conversations and listen to the exchanges, it is important to be attuned to what might be stirring up in us and happening in our bodies, particularly as we navigate our emotions regarding ongoing manifestations of the legacies of slavery in this country. So please, remember to breathe and take care of yourself during and after this session.
We invite you now to pause and breathe with intention and to focus on your breath as we lift up the Harvard University Native American program's acknowledgment of the land and people. We acknowledge that Harvard University is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay respect to the people of the Massachusett tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusett people.
But for the stolen land and stolen labor, this country and this university would not be. Our acknowledgment of the land and people extends beyond words. It is expressed through our action and is connected to what we are doing through these conversations. The series is a part of the broader work stemming from our school's commitment to reading the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery report as our common text this year. As we engage with this report, we are discerning our institutional actions for redress and ways to support the university in implementing its recommendations and even expanding upon them. And we aim to further our vision of a restorative anti-racism, anti-oppressive Harvard Divinity School. This is sacred work.
DIANE L. MOORE: As I mentioned earlier, this is the fifth in a series of six webinars on religion and the legacies of slavery. Our first presentation was by Professor Karen King who focused on what it means to recognize that Christian scriptures were formed in a social and historical context where slavery was commonplace. Our second webinar featured professors David Holland and Katherine Jin Lum who engaged in a conversation on religion, race, and the double helix of White supremacy with a focus on Professor Lamb's new book entitled, Heathen, Religion and Race in American History.
Our third presentation featured Professor David MacKinnon who explored the complex lives of several of Harvard Divinity School's original benefactors in a presentation entitled, Harvard Divinity School and Slavery, Family Stories. And our fourth presentation just two weeks ago featured Professor Terence Johnson, who was with us to speak about memory, history, and the ethics of reparations.
And tonight, we're honored to welcome Professor Tracey Hucks and her guests, Dain and Constance Perry, whom I will now invite to turn on their cameras while I introduce all three of them. Tracey Hucks, Professor Tracey Hucks is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana religious studies and the Suzanne Yung Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is a nationally known an esteemed scholar of Africana Studies and American religious history. She has served most recently before joining us, lucky us, she just joined our faculty this past fall. But prior to that, she was provost and Dean of the faculty at Colgate University where she has been the James A, Storing Professor of Religion and Africana and Latin American Studies.
Professor Hucks has conducted research in several countries, including Brazil, Cuba, Nigeria, England, France, Trinidad, Jamaica, Kenya, and Tanzania. She is the author of numerous books and articles. Like many of our presenters, if we were to list them all, we would end run out of time in the webinar for no conversation. So again, it is just an incredible honor to have Professor Hucks with us on the faculty here at Harvard Divinity School. We are greatly enriched as a result.
She is joined this evening by two guests. She will begin the conversation first with Dain Perry, and then a little later in the conversation, they will both welcome Constance Perry. But let me introduce both of them now. Dain Perry grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. He and his wife, Constance, traveled the country screening a documentary that they helped create called Traces of the Trade. And in relationship both to that documentary and their own work, they facilitate conversations on racial reconciliation.
Dain served 30 years in the financial services industry in Boston. And previously, he served as deputy director of the Massachusetts Council on crime and correction and acting director of the Crime and Justice Foundation, both non-profit organizations which promoted reform in the criminal justice system.
And Constance Perry grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. For more than 20 years, she managed, designed, and implemented programs for at-risk youth and adults at the municipal state and national level. Constance was a self-employed national consultant for 12 years specializing in training, facilitation, and on-site consultation services to community organizations of a wide variety of types.
We welcome all three of you for this important conversation tonight, and we look forward to hearing your words. Thank you so much for being with us.
TRACEY HUCKS: Thank you, Diane and Melissa. Good evening. I welcome you virtually to the campus of the Harvard Divinity School for our discussion this evening, Slavers and slavery, A Dialogue with Descendants. We will welcome Dain Perry and later be joined by his wife, Constance Perry, in this discussion.
And I wanted to say from the outset that not every institution in the United States nor professional school would be so bold as to engage publicly and openly over the course of several weeks in difficult dialogues regarding slavery, the slave trade, and its legacy. Diane, Melissa, and I are fortunate to work with the Dean of the Harvard Divinity School, Dean David Hempton, who has modeled bold leadership in these discussions on the legacy of slavery at Harvard and has guided HDS in these challenging conversations led by courageous example. And I want to show just a brief clip of Dean David Hempton engaged in this very work.
DAVID N. HEMPTON: Harvard University was directly complicit in America's system of racial bondage from the college's earliest days in the 17th century until slavery in Massachusetts ended in 1783. And Harvard continued to be indirectly involved through extensive financial and other ties to the slave South up to the time of emancipation. In fact, slavery thrived in New England from its beginnings and was a vital element of the colonial economy.
Colonialists first enslaved and sold Indigenous people. And they dispossessed and massacred Native peoples through war. They also enslaved Africans and played a key role in the Atlantic slave trade, building a thriving economy based on an economic alliance with the sugar islands of the West Indies.
This trade involved the provision of food, fuel, and lumber produced in New England for plantations of the Caribbean where those goods were exchanged for tobacco, coffee, and sugar produced by enslaved Africans.
TRACEY HUCKS: Thank you, Dean Hempton. The legacy of slavery at Harvard is just one window into a larger history and legacy of slavery in New England. Many of you may have read the informative chapter in the Harvard report entitled, slavery in New England and at Harvard, and also have joined my HDS colleagues on previous weeks of webinars in this series.
We welcome this conversation tonight on slavery in New England with Dain Perry, a descendant of the DeWolf family of Rhode Island who were active slave traders and the single most lucrative slave trading family in US history. Dain's cousin, Katrina Browne, directed a powerful documentary, Traces of the Trade, which I've used for well over a decade in my courses. And it chronicles the journey of Dain and other family members from New England to West Africa and on to Cuba, tracing their family history and the slave trade. I want to show just a brief clip of the documentary as they begin their journey from Rhode Island.
SPEAKER 4: Let's go to another clip from Traces of the Trade. When you and your relative visit Bristol, Rhode Island, where the DeWolf family lived and operated their slave trade. And this scene, you're visiting with local historians.
KATRINA BROWNE: The more historians we talked to, the more sobering it got.
SPEAKER 5: Slave trade, you got to remember, it's not just a few people taking a boat and sending it out, everyone in town lived off slavery. The boat makers, the ironworkers who make the shackles, the coopers who made the barrels to hold the rum, the distillers who took the molasses and sugar and made it into rum. So literally, the whole town was dependent on the slave trade.
SPEAKER 6 All of the North was involved. All these cities and towns along the coast, Salem, Boston, Providence, New London, New Haven, New York, and the rural areas around them either traded slaves or manufactured goods or raised farm products for the slave.
TRACEY HUCKS: Last fall Dean Perry and I and his wife, Constance, symbolically met for the first time on a boat, a sunset cruise traveling across the waters of Boston Harbor. And that metaphor of the boat, of the water is so relevant for our discussion tonight and to the study of religion. When we often imagine the slave trade, we think often of the auction block on land, but so much of the activity of the transatlantic slave trade was on the water.
One renowned scholar and noted historian of religions, the late Dr. Charles Long, theorized that the water is an essential space for understanding the religious, cultural, economic, racial, political, and moral aspects of slavery and the slave trade Dr. Long remarked quote, "On those boats coming across the water, there were Europeans and Africans on the same boat. They were on the same boat, but they were taken to different journeys." End quote.
And Traces of the Trade, a documentary that Dain and his wife, Constance, travelled nationally and internationally screening tells the story not of the descendants of the captives on those boats but the journey of the captors, the abductors. We realized that not everyone in the audience may have been able to view the documentary in advance, so we wanted to share with you the first few minutes of the documentary and a brief interview with Dain's cousin, Katrina Browne.
[AUDIO LOGO]
SPEAKER 4: Katrina Browne is with us. She documented her roots in the film, Traces of the Trade, A Story from the Deep North.
KATRINA BROWNE: One day, my grandmother traced back. I was in seminary when I got a booklet in the mail that she wrote for all her grandchildren. She shared our family history, all the happy days. She also explained that the first day DeWolf, Mark Anthony, came to Bristol as a sailor in 1744. And then she wrote, "I haven't stomach enough to describe the ensuing slave trade."
[MUSIC PLAYING]
What hit me hard was the realization that I already knew this. Knew but somehow buried it along the way. But no one in my family realized was that the DeWolfs were the largest slave trading family in US history. They brought over 10,000 Africans to the Americas in chains. Half a million of their descendants could be alive today.
SPEAKER 4: A clip from Traces of the Trade, A Story from the Deep North narrated, produced, and directed by Katrina Browne. After the film aired on PBS's POV in 2008, she went on to found the Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery to inspire dialogue and active response to this history and its many legacies. Katrina Browne now joins us from Washington DC. And still with us, MIT Professor, Craig Steven Wilder, author of the new book, Ebony and Ivy, Race Slavery and the Troubled History of America's Universities.
Katrina, take us from there. You discover, though you say you knew, some kind of primal secret, what your family-- how significant the DeWolfs were in slave trading.
KATRINA BROWNE: In our family case, it's a bit of a stand in for the region as a whole because I heard things as a child, but I didn't allow them to sink in because it's basically cognitive dissonance, I would say, for White Northerners to think that we have any relationship to slavery. Because I think all of us raised and educated in our schools to believe the South were the bad guys and the Northerners were the heroes. So it was hard to comprehend and shocking to discover as I dug more into it.
And because of this larger untold story of the role of the North, I decided to produce a documentary. And what we did was basically, I invited relatives to join me on a journey to retrace the triangle trade of our ancestors. And nine brave Cousins came with me and we went to Rhode Island and then Ghana and Cuba, where the DeWolfs owned plantations in that pattern that Professor Wilder was talking about of even after slavery was abolished in the North, even after the slave trade itself was abolished in the North, folks like the DeWolfs continued to be invested in slavery through actual plantations in the Caribbean, in their case, Cuba, as well as through that carrying trade of provisioning the islands on the American South.
TRACEY HUCKS: Thank you. So Dain, I tried to give as much introduction and context to our conversation. And I wanted you to introduce yourself the way you introduce yourself in your workshops. Tell us why you decided to go on the journey with your cousin. And also tell us why you decided to reveal this family history.
DAIN PERRY: Thank you, Tracey. And it's delightful to be here with you tonight. I saw Katrina after several years of not seeing her at her grandmother's funeral. And I asked her what she was doing these days and she said, "I'm making a documentary film." And I said, "Oh, what's it about?" And she said, "Well, you might not want to know." And I said, "Oh, do tell me." And she explained exactly what she was doing and that she was going to be seeking cousins to go on a trip with her examining that history. And I immediately said, sign me up.
I saw it as an opportunity to do precisely what Constance and I are doing right now, even though Constance was not in my life at that point, so I had no idea that I would be doing it with her.
I grew up in Charleston. I was a racist kid in Charleston. But I've been involved in this work of trying to heal the nation for over 40 years. And this has been the mission that Constance and I have been on the last 20 years.
TRACEY HUCKS: Why reveal this family history?
DAIN PERRY: Because it's critically important that we understand where we came from. The efforts to squelch our national history that are going on right now, I think are terribly misguided. We cannot heal as a nation until us White folks truly understand the history and how African-Americans have been impacted over the years. The person who has, I think, the best answer to that question is the former presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori. And she said, once we understand the past we can begin to understand the present or political realities or challenges and/or relationships. And that's why we have to do this work. It's critically important that we do it.
TRACEY HUCKS: Now, Dain, as part of that journey, you travelled with your family to West Africa, to Ghana. And you go into the slave dungeons of Elmina and Cape Coast Castle. And I just wanted the audience to hear your cousin's reflections coming out of those dungeons.
SPEAKER 7: The thing that I guess strikes me more than anything right now is that we've talked when we were in Bristol and we were in Providence and we're listening to historians and scholars, and we've heard people talk about you've got to place it in the context of the times and this is the way things were done, and this is how life was. And I sit in that dungeon and I say, it was an evil thing. And they knew it was an evil thing, and they did it anyway. And I couldn't have said that before tonight.
TRACEY HUCKS: What was it like for you, Dain, to be in Africa and then to move on to Cuba to the plantations of your ancestors?
DAIN PERRY: Being in Africa was devastating. Going through the-- we went through two slave forts. And going down through the dungeons where people were held captive in incredibly inhumane conditions. And to get your mind into that, really allow your mind to get into that space and into the experience as much as we possibly could, what those people were going through was very, very difficult. It challenged who you are as a human being, I think, quite frankly, because of the inhumanity that was clearly taking place.
Cuba was different. Cuba, we visited one of the old plantations, and it was just ruins of the plantation. But we went through the sugar cane fields and understand what it was like in those fields and the intense heat down there doing the kind of work that the enslaved people were doing. So Katrina did a remarkable job of immersing us as much as possible into the experiences that the enslaved were having, though there was no way we could enter that space at all.
TRACEY HUCKS: And I want to thank you and your wife, Constance, publicly for visiting my classes last semester at Harvard Divinity School. As a result of this, one of my students, Reverend Kevin Ross, a student in the Master of Religion and Public Life Program asked you to participate in a memorial ceremony for the formerly enslaved woman, Harriet Jacobs. And I wanted to show your participation in that memorial service and what you disclosed.
DAIN PERRY: James DeWolf and his extended family brought approximately 12,000 kidnapped Africans across the Middle Passage making the DeWolf family the nation's most notorious slave trading family. My name is Dain Perry. I am a direct descendant of James DeWolf, the head of the largest slave trading family in the United States history. And I confess that our family committed unimaginable sins and crimes against humanity with our direct leadership and profiting from the transatlantic slave trade.
TRACEY HUCKS: And Reverend Kevin Ross and my other students expressed gratitude for your class visits. And some of them are probably watching this webinar. But with those class visits also came tough questions that I want to be able to pose to you. And one of them is at your family's peak in the slave trade, what would you estimate was your family's net worth?
DAIN PERRY: I have no idea what that exact number would be, though historical records show that James DeWolf was apparently the second wealthiest person in America. So it was extraordinary wealth at the time.
TRACEY HUCKS: And by and large, is this still significant generational wealth within your family?
DAIN PERRY: Not really. Not really. They were a bunch of rotten people, and they managed to go through that wealth very quickly. It was gone within three generations that they just spent wildly. There was a huge, huge lawsuit after James DeWolf died of different family members contesting as well and trying to break up his trusts. Everybody wanted to get hold of a piece of it, and it was gone within three generations.
TRACEY HUCKS: One of the students rolls this question. Should families like yours have a role in providing some financial or asset-based reparations to Black family descendants?
DAIN PERRY: That's a very good question. Constance and I do giving every year trying to address some of the wrongs. But that's very good question. I hesitate to say, yes, we should. But I think society-- I think our society needs to make major steps in that direction with reparations.
TRACEY HUCKS: Do your other family members share your view and your sense of giving?
DAIN PERRY: I don't know. We don't share it.
TRACEY HUCKS: And I want to welcome Constance. You mentioned Constance, so I'd like to welcome her on.
CONSTANCE PERRY: Thank you.
TRACEY HUCKS: Welcome, Constance. And I wanted to ask a question that may be on many people's minds on the webinar. Dain is a descendant of slave traders in Rhode Island and a descendant of slave owners in North Carolina and Virginia. What do you know about your own family history? And how do you reconcile your family history with that of Dain's?
CONSTANCE PERRY: Well I certainly don't know anywhere near as much about my own ancestry as Dain and his cousins. What I do know is that my mother's side of the family came from Virginia, my father's side of the family came from North Carolina. And I don't know anything about my mother's side of the family. I assume that they were enslaved, but I don't know.
My father's side of the family, I do know that they were enslaved. I know I am a descendant of people who were enslaved. We can trace members of my family, maybe three greats back to the mid 1830s in North Carolina. I also know that many of my ancestors were sold into slavery, we have their names. We don't know what happened to them once they left the county in North Carolina.
I know that some of them learned how to read and write. I know that some were carpenters and mechanics and owned a store. But that's just about all I know about people who lived during that time. My story is no different than so many African-Americans, where we can only go so far back.
TRACEY HUCKS: Your story is similar to that of my own family. Same places, Virginia and North Carolina. What we do know is that my great grandfather was born enslaved in 1852. Somehow, he learned how to read and write. And in trying to teach other African-Americans, there were two attempts on his life by the clan, and he then flees to Bertie County, North Carolina and marries my great grandmother who was a midwife and an herbalist. Going back many more generations than that, very difficult.
CONSTANCE PERRY: That's right. I know that my great, great was a midwife as well. So thank you for telling me a little bit about your story, was a midwife. And apparently, my great, great grandfather was taught to read by the people who were enslaved him. My great, great grandmother was not. Somehow, they managed to raise their families and do the best they could with their life and tried to keep their family together as best they could.
TRACEY HUCKS: And we cherish those stories.
CONSTANCE PERRY: Yes, we do.
TRACEY HUCKS: So how do you, Constance, reconcile that history, your family history with that of Dain's?
CONSTANCE PERRY: I'm grateful for what I know. There's a huge gap. That's just the reality. I'm glad that Dain is able to know what he knows. I wouldn't take that away from anyone because I know what it's like to have those gaps. And there are times when I feel I'm jealous, I'm envious, and I wonder.
And one of the things that I hope that we would be able to do at some point, we know the county where my dad's family came from, we do have some records. And my hope at some point that Dain and I will be able to make a trip to Franklin County, where they were from, and see how much more information I'm able to get. I know that they were recorded on a number of census that were taken. But it's difficult. I feel like something's missing. Something's missing.
TRACEY HUCKS: And some would say, how do you make it work? The descendent of slave traders and a descendant of the enslaved?
DAIN PERRY: Well, it's that four-letter L word, L-O-V-E.
CONSTANCE PERRY: So Dain and I are both Episcopalians. I'm a cradle Episcopalian. My faith is important to me and has always been important to me. And I believe that Dain and I were brought together, not only to share our life as husband and wife and that L-O-V-E word that Dain mentioned, but I also-- God has an interesting sense of humor. And I don't know what he was up to, but I think that we were brought together for a reason.
And I think that visual image of seeing someone who's African-American, who shares the story of being a descendant of people who were enslaved and dating a White man who was a descendant of people who were not only involved in the slave trade but who were enslavers in Virginia and North Carolina, that we were brought together to do exactly what we're doing. And I think that the visual image of the two of us doing that, I think our stories hopefully will help people to see that we can, in fact, have conversation and that we're able to do this work together. And faith, faith is at the core, I believe, of what we do and how we do it.
TRACEY HUCKS: You mentioned the Episcopal Church. And I wanted to talk a little bit about your denominational affiliation and the Episcopalian and slavery. You were present at the historic 237 annual convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts on October 28th and 29th. Please share with us what happened at that historic meeting.
CONSTANCE PERRY: OK. A little background, I currently sit on the Diocese of Massachusetts Racial Justice Commission that was formed three years ago, and I serve as co-chair for the reparation subcommittee. And it is the work of the reparation subcommittee under the umbrella of the Racial Justice Commission that put forward a resolution calling on the Episcopal Church to do reparations beginning in 2024, 2025. And so that resolution that was submitted was on the table to be voted on. We had no idea whether it would pass or not.
When it came time to vote, the delegates were called on to vote in favor. And they all had a piece of paper. Pieces of paper, one green-colored and the other one, red. And when the vote was called in favor, there was a sea of green. A sea of green paper that people were holding up. And I looked around the room and I'd never seen anything like it.
And then there was a call for no, and there were a few. But the overwhelming majority in that room was a sea of green. And I become emotional when I remember that image. And then there was a standing applause, a standing ovation.
Those of us who would work long and hard on that resolution and people who would not, but African-Americans, especially who were in that room found each other. And some of us cried together. Some of us didn't know what to say because we didn't believe that this day would come. It was very powerful.
TRACEY HUCKS: You said that you serve as the co-chair of the Racial Justice Commission subcommittee on reparations. And I wanted to share with the audience the written responsibility of the subcommittee. It says, quote, "In the name of repentance for the harm by the enslavement of individuals and systemic racism, provide resources, experiences, and leadership for the diocese, it's congregations, and its Episcopal communities as we take action to one, change how we tie our own histories and present day story and two, make financial reparations." Can you tell us your role on that committee now that this has passed, now that the committee has its resolution?
CONSTANCE PERRY: Well, we have the resolution but now we need to put substance to it. And the very first part of a piece of our work is to develop the framework for the governing body, the governing body who will actually make decisions about what form reparations will take, what the focus will be, and for whom.
In the resolution that passed last year, we noted that people who are of African-American descent and people who are Afro-Caribbean descent, so we've made that decision. We also have made a decision that we want the impact to have a systemic impact, to begin to redress and repair the harm that was done. It's a beginning, it's a start.
And so the other thing that we are doing in terms of putting the framework together is that this body will need to be responsible for not only how we administer the funds but to be accountable to the diocese and just as importantly, to the communities who will be on the receiving end. We feel an accountability to them as well.
So we're doing other things, we're making sure that we continue to engage congregations in a conversation about the resolution, but that is the major focus of our work during this year.
TRACEY HUCKS: Dain, I saw you shaking your head. Was there anything you wanted to add?
CONSTANCE PERRY: No, no, no. I'm just sitting here in amazement at what they've accomplished and how much Constance has been working on it.
TRACEY HUCKS: I wanted to pose, and either one of you can answer these questions. One of my students wanted to know, what have you learned about wealth that's important for Black families to know?
CONSTANCE PERRY: Well, I don't know that I've learned anything from this experience. But the other day-- I'm reading as much as I can and listening as much as I can to learn about reparations and what other people are doing and what other people are thinking. Many dioceses for example, in the Episcopal Church have been doing the kind of work that the Diocese of Massachusetts has done.
And I want to say this, I didn't say this at the beginning. We worked really hard to put that resolution together. It passed in large part because of the support of our bishop. And I want people to know that you need the support of leadership as well as the people in the pews. So I want to note that.
So one of the things that I was listening to the other day, and they were talking about, should reparations money be used for education, for scholarships, for example, or for housing? And the conversation sort of tended to veer more in the direction of wealth and noted that there is a huge wealth gap, and it continues. There continues to be a huge wealth gap in this nation when it comes to African-Americans. Even those who are college educated and very well college educated, there is that gap.
And so the question that it raises for me-- I'm not giving you an answer to the question, but what it has raised for me is the question of, what do we need to do in order to narrow that wage gap? As we think about reparations, should that be part of reparations? Should it be part of something else? And I think we need to explore that.
DAIN PERRY: Tracey, I think it's also very important that White people do the work to understand why that wealth gap exists. The US government for centuries has created situations, written laws to make it very difficult, if not impossible, for slaves and then descendants of slaves to gain wealth. The GI Bill for one thing, most African-American GIs did not have access because of very specific prejudice and racism to the funds that were available to the White GIs.
The Homestead Act back in the 1850s and 60s when land was being given away to people in the Midwest, it was very difficult for freed slaves or free men to get any of that land. And those are the things that created generational wealth. And so African-Americans slaves, descendants of slaves did not have access to those opportunities.
TRACEY HUCKS: And that's so important. I think one of the key words you said, Constance, was systemic. That this wasn't a matter of African-American self-selection or the equation of wealth, but that it was a systemic, a kind of approach to make sure that African-Americans didn't have access to wealth. And when you have land and housing. In a house, you talk about the GI bill. While many GIs were buying homes, many of those who were African-Americans were then funneled into public housing.
CONSTANCE PERRY: That's right. That's right.
TRACEY HUCKS: They would get no equity and live for generations in public housing but have no intergenerational wealth either through the land, because they didn't own the land that they lived on and they didn't own the resident that they lived in.
DAIN PERRY: That's right.
TRACEY HUCKS: So you had cycles and cycles and years of the lack of generational wealth and being outside of that equation. So that's so important. Oh, one question I wanted to ask you also is in conducting your workshops, you must deal with a lot of anger both from those who do not want you to talk about this issue of slavery. I know you were just in the state of Florida. But also anger from those who are the descendants of slavery. And this is a very hurtful history. And how do you respond to that anger? Where is the space for that? What are the strategies that you use to engage that anger in your workshops?
CONSTANCE PERRY: I think that one of the things that Dain and I do by our presence, our physical presence, the words we use, the tone of voice that we use, we work to set to create a safe and brave space. It takes bravery for people to share their feelings and their stories, which is what we invite them to do during these screenings.
When people are expressing their feelings, you can feel the pain, feel the anger. But people thus far, and we have screened the film over 500 times all over the country, they do it respectfully and they do it listening to what the others have to say. There's space. It's important that we create a space for people to say what's on their mind, to say what's on their heart without arguing or debating or placing blame or shaming. That's the platform upon which we work.
And so although people may have the feelings and do have feelings of anger, it doesn't come out in a way that creates controversy in the screenings that we do.
TRACEY HUCKS: Dain, do you want to add anything?
DAIN PERRY: And the few times where that has happened, it's our job, and it can be very difficult, is to simply absorb it and acknowledge it. We don't debate it, we don't let anyone else debate it. We thank people for their comment and go to the next person.
But at times it's-- we've talked about this. Constance says she's-- what's the word you use? A receptacle for the comments that are made. I see myself as being a conduit for the comments that are made. So Constance tends to hold them, I tend to let them pass through.
CONSTANCE PERRY: And this is where I said earlier that for me, my faith plays a big role in this. And we are all carrying the burden of this history in one way or the other. Either as people who are enslaved or as people of color, not just African-Americans, but people of color also are on the receiving end of issues around race and racism.
And through these screenings, we have learned through the emotions that people share and the stories they share, they too are affected in different ways. We're impacted in different ways. But we all need to be able to have an opportunity to say what's on our minds, to say what's on our hearts in a way that is safe and brave and make room for it. And we believe that that is our way for beginning to break down the barriers that continue to divide us.
And thus far, Tracey, thus far, people have been appreciative of those opportunities.
DAIN PERRY: And one of the things we emphasize is so often when African-Americans speak about their experience, White folks have real difficulty hearing it and feeling it and understanding it. And that creates one of the great gaps in the communication that we have between each other. And we try to create that space where White folks will intentionally be sacredly listening. And we use that term. Even if we're in a high school, we'll say sacredly listen to what the other person is saying. It's important that we have an opportunity to say what we feel and also know that what we are saying is being heard.
TRACEY HUCKS: And say a little more, what do you mean by sacredly listening?
DAIN PERRY: I said it.
CONSTANCE PERRY: OK, go ahead.
DAIN PERRY: Listening with an open heart and an open mind. And it's the open heart. I think, that it's the sacred part of it. And for those people who are people of faith, it's got a very different definition. Means something much deeper for them. And we use the term, open heart and open mind frequently as we get into having the conversation.
CONSTANCE PERRY: I would add to what Dain has said. Listen not only with your ears-- and we say this during the screening. Listen not only with your ears, listen with your heart. And with your heart, when you're listening with your heart, we believe that you're listening with your humanity. So if you're not a person of faith, listening with your humanity hopefully we'll take people to a place of, we're all human. We look different, our cultures are different, but we're human beings.
And if we can connect to each other as human beings, even if it's for that brief three-hour period the people are together, we can just for a moment when you're listening to someone's story imagine yourself in that person's shoes, imagine the feeling, you're connecting with their humanity. And if we can just do that and do that more often, maybe again, we'll be able to break through.
TRACEY HUCKS: One of the things that you and Dain do is that you provide space for these conversations. We really don't have a lot of space in our country that we create to have these difficult conversations about our history, about slavery, about race, about the impact that it has had on us today, about the connection between the violence we saw many centuries ago and the violence that we still see now, today in our culture. Very little space for us to have those deep, open, and honest dialogues.
DAIN PERRY: I'd like to say that there's an umbilical cord that connects slavery with what's going on in our inner cities today. And we have not yet found out how to cut that cord so that one doesn't nourish the other. Our national challenge is, how do we cut that cord so that that painful, that horrifying history of the past can become something else?
CONSTANCE PERRY: And I would say beyond the inner city, it's nationwide. It has been from the beginning, and it continues to be. If people think that they're living in a safe haven place where this doesn't happen, it does. It's everywhere. It has permeated our culture and our life.
And again, it affects every single one of us. The stories, the feelings, the laments that we hear people across all races in the screening sessions that we do, you can close your eyes and just listen to the feeling words and not know whether it is a person of color or a person who is White is saying it. When they tell their stories, you're probably able to guess. But the emotion that we are all carrying deep inside of us.
TRACEY HUCKS: So for those in our audience who might want to just have those three hours of a screening with you, what would you say the goal is that you have in these three-hour screenings and workshops?
DAIN PERRY: To open people's minds to something that they haven't taken the time to be aware of. And I'm specifically referring to White people there. White people, we all, both races, all races have to do this work but White people have got so much more work that we have to do. And I've lived through that. I'm an example of still being on that journey of learning, because it's a forever journey for us White folks. We don't know what we don't know with regard to race. And it's important that we take the time to learn and to understand the slings and arrows and the multigenerational trauma that particularly African-Americans, but all people of color lived through in this country. And that that multigenerational trauma is very significant. And the ignorance of White folks towards it is very significant.
CONSTANCE PERRY: My takeaway would be, if I can use a quote that I share at the start of all of our screenings. And this quote is from Kierkegaard who was a philosopher and a theologian. We live our life by moving forward, but we understand our life by looking back. We live our life by moving forward, but we understand our life by looking back.
I hope the takeaway is to realize that in order for us to begin to understand why we are where we are in this nation with regard to race and racism, that we must look back. We must look back at that history. And our hope, my hope is that with creating the kind of environment that Dain and I work to create with the help of the audience, that we're creating a safe and brave space for people to be able to look back so that we can together move forward.
DAIN PERRY: One of the major goals that Katrina had making the film was to tell the truth. The country has been lied to. Very, very few people in America understand, know that New England was deeply involved not only in the slave trade but people were enslaved here in New England for over 200 years. That's important for us to know. And there is pushback now on trying to stop that effort of learning to tell the truth about our past.
And I said this earlier, but until we're able to look at and know and understand that past, we can't heal as a nation. Cousin Tom likes to say it's like having a wound on your arm and pulling the bandage off to give it some fresh hair. Very much, we need fresh air in our national history, fresh air of truth.
TRACEY HUCKS: In this subtitle to Traces, your cousin, Katrina, talks about the deep North. And I think that's very much important kind of metaphor to understand that the North was very much involved in the slave trade and in this exercise of slavery. And one of the things that is happening here at Harvard is that we are acknowledging that history of what it meant to be Harvard University in the deep North.
DAIN PERRY: And Hallelujah. That's important work and setting an important example.
TRACEY HUCKS: We are at time. So I'm going to invite our co-hosts to come back because we like to hear from our audience and have some questions.
CONSTANCE PERRY: Thank you.
DAIN PERRY: Thank you.
DIANE L. MOORE: Well, thank you, all three of you, immensely for this incredibly rich and challenging and provocative conversation. You just really opened the door to so many different avenues. And there's excellent questions here that we will return to momentarily.
I just want to say Professor Hux asked that we start the questioning, and she asked that we begin with you, Dain. So that's why I'm-- so to be clear that's why I'm jumping in here. And I have a really important question to ask you. I'm so grateful for your witness.
So you've spoken incredibly eloquently about the consequences and the terrible traumas of the legacies of slavery relevant to descendants of slaves and the important work for White people such as myself and you to be attentive to that devastating history. I couldn't agree more. I also wonder, can you please reflect on the consequence of that history for White privilege that continues?
And what are the responsibilities of those of us, even if we don't have descendants of slave owners. I don't personally have that, I have a different background. But I still benefit immensely and have all my life. And my family has benefited immensely from White privilege. And I wonder if you can speak a little bit about that dimension of the work that you do relevant to White people. What does it mean for us to be attentive to that? And then to the extent that you would want to reflect further on the question of, what are our accountabilities if it's not necessarily reparations? Although you might want to reflect further on that.
What is the critical work that you hope that you'll be inspiring people like me to do relevant to the work that you're engaged in?
DAIN PERRY: Thank you for that question. It's a critically important one white privilege is, I believe, one of the most difficult and important concepts for white people to come to understand. Professor Peggy McIntosh at Wellesley wrote a superb article entitled, Unpacking your Invisible Knapsack that deeply gets into White privilege. I had to read that article five times before I finally got it.
Because of the way people are interpreting the term, White privilege, they see it as being privilege. I prefer to use the term, White advantage. We have an advantage because of our white skin. We have a privilege because of our white skin, because of the advantage that we get because of it.
Give a very, very quick example. We did a screening for a 45 high school sophomores here in Massachusetts a number of years ago. And I talked a little bit about White privilege. There was a White girl who leapt up. She didn't raise her hand, she leapt up and said, what are you talking about White privilege? I've got no privilege. I live in a trailer park. My family has never had privilege. And that's where a lot of White folks go.
Constance then talked about being in a clothing store that we would all recognize the name of here in Boston, and someone followed her around the store. And she told that story. A Black girl student in the audience raised her hand and said the same thing just happened to me and my mother the other day. She was sitting right next to the White girl who had jumped up. The White girl looked at her-- they were friends. Looked at her and said, "Oh, my God, you never told me that. Now I understand." Now I understand. I never get followed in a store, Constance does. That's White privilege. And it's very important that we get in touch with that and what that means to us.
DIANE L. MOORE: Well, I think you're right, that the consciousness about that is so key. And then for me, that just really raises the really critical challenge of what to do with that privilege. And that, for me-- and I want to thank you for the work you're doing. But I do think that we as White people have particular responsibilities to be speaking as often as we can and in the circles that we travel to raise these questions and to reckon with this legacy, the legacies of the privileges that we are privileged. Well, I don't want to say privilege, that is the legacy for us of this wretched and horrible history. Thank you.
TRACEY HUCKS: Thank you for that question, Diane, because we have to understand that intergenerational wealth, we can't separate it from intergenerational whiteness in this country. These two are seamlessly intertwined historically in this country.
CONSTANCE PERRY: May I add two things to this? That I would say that it's important. I hope that more people who are White become more aware to learn. Dain mentioned, there's a lot of this history. I can't tell you how many times when we do these screenings, teachers, history teachers say. I didn't know this history.
And so it's really important that we read, we learn, we listen to each other. And when a person of color tells you about their life, their lived experience, to just listen. And for one second, listen with your humanity and not push back that can't be true because it's not true for you perhaps because it's not part of your lived experience as people who are White.
The other thing that I would say is to speak up and speak out and to show up as allies. And not just for a minute, but for the long haul. This is a journey. It took us hundreds of years to get into this situation. Unfortunately, it's going to take us a long time to get out.
And to realize, also, the last thing that I would say, we all have a collective role here. And I implore people who are White to not do this work, this justice work, this racial justice work for people who look like me, but to do it for themselves because it is the right thing to do.
DAIN PERRY: And I'd like to piggyback on something Constance said a couple of minutes ago. Many of the people watching this are ordained. They're pastors, rectors, they have parishes. It is critically important that if you're not already doing it, you muster up the courage to preach about race. And use opportunities that you find in the Bible in the New Testament, in the Gospels, to teach about the healing of what I keep referring to was this national wound.
We constantly hear from priests as we go around, and about 40% of all of the screenings we've done have been in faith institutions of one sort or another. But priests saying, I'm afraid to preach about this. I'm afraid people would get up and walk out. I'm afraid that my stewardship will go down. I'm afraid that I'll get fired--
CONSTANCE PERRY: And I don't know how to.
DAIN PERRY: And I don't know how to do it. Find a group of people can work with and work on how to do it. It's so critically important that our pulpits in this nation talk about this frequently. And not on Martin Luther King Sunday, not during Black History month, but at times that are unexpected.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: Thank you so much Dain and Constance, because this is connected to the question I actually have for you. I just appreciate all that you have shared, and I appreciate Tracey's questions and how she has framed this conversation because it's really a powerful illustration of the practical work that's happening and particularly in the church.
So Constance, I loved hearing you talk about the resolution from the Episcopal Church, the diocese, and the work that the reparation subcommittee did and how the resolution was overwhelmingly voted for favorably. And I know that just doesn't just happen overnight. So connect it to what Dain just said, the charge that you just gave to faith communities and leaders who are watching this and the work that they need to do in their churches, can you say a little bit more about the preparatory work, the work to prepare the communities to vote favorably for that resolution? How were the communities-- how are the church is prepared? How are the people prepared to actually get to the point where they could say, yes, we are in favor of this resolution and then now to then go on to do the work of implementation? What was some of the preparation involved?
CONSTANCE PERRY: We have been on this journey in the diocese for a while. And specifically two years, ago a resolution was passed at diocesan convention that called on our diocese and congregations to research their history, to learn more, study more, so that they would get a better sense of the slave trade, slavery. What impact did that have on the congregation in your town, in your city, in your community? So it began by learning more about your history and using that information as a basis.
Last year, we did a series of what we called listening gatherings across the diocese in the various regions of the diocese inviting anyone in the diocese to come and answer this question. When you hear the word reparations, what thoughts, what concerns, what feelings, what questions do you have? And we intentionally refer to it as listening gatherings.
We prepared a statement that reminded people of the resolution that we were working toward, reminded people that it was listening, reminded people that we would not answer their questions, their questions would be recorded. And we would take that information to help us gauge what concerns people had, what questions they would have. Recommendations, what kind of recommendations would they make?
And so we then used that information to help us winnow down more narrowly not so much the specifics because at this point, we still don't know whether we want to use money for education or housing or health care. That's not our role, that's the role of the governing body. But it began to help us get a sense of what was on people's minds and what was on people's hearts. We know that there are people who may not support this. We know. And we know we've got a lot of work to do.
So to that end, also last year, we put together a toolkit. And it's a document that invites a resource, that invites congregations in the diocese to use that toolkit in learning how to begin to have a conversation about race and racism. Start wherever your congregation is. Some congregations have had these conversations for a while, some have never had them, some don't think we have a problem because their congregation may be predominantly White or they may be in communities that are largely White and very few people of color, very few people of African descent.
So we have given a resource to congregations to use wherever they are on the journey because we're not all in the same place. Wherever you are in this journey, use this toolkit to help engage the people in your congregation to have this conversation.
And then the last thing that we're doing is that there are members of our reparation subcommittee who have started going out to various congregations, who want to learn more. So we're still very much, very much on a path of learning and discovery and educating ourselves.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: Thank you. Thank you for those clear action steps that people can then take and apply in their own settings. Thank you so much.
DIANE L. MOORE: Yes I want to also thank you. And I just want to say, just to expand it, I think that anyone in the room, anyone on the webinar can invite and lead those kinds of conversations in whatever communities they are part of. They certainly can be relevant to religious communities. But this the work you're doing in terms of just even raising the questions, I think is so critical. And that seems to be the work for us, again, as a White person that we need to be doing that in the communities that we travel. So thank you.
There are a couple of questions here relevant to reparations, and I think it would be really helpful. We've got one anonymous question from one participant who would like you Dain and Constance to offer a few more general concepts on reparations and how they might work. And then circling back. And then Reverend Kevin Ross who was highlighted earlier also has, I think, a really important question around the symbolism or the action of what it means for you, Dain, with a family legacy of that to think relevant to that family legacy.
Reparations is a complicated question, I just want to acknowledge that. But I think that one of the fundamental questions that we're wrestling with here at the Divinity School is, what does it mean to take them seriously, particularly given that we know that all of us who have anything to do with the Divinity School are again, reaping the benefits of stolen labor? And what does it mean to take that really seriously in very concrete ways?
And I just wonder, again, I know it's a difficult question but if you two could just kind of reflect on your own thinking about reparations, its challenges but also potentially its possibilities, I think people in the audience would be really grateful.
CONSTANCE PERRY: Do you want to start?
DAIN PERRY: I tend to lean towards the word, repair. I think it gives a better understanding of what needs to be done. We need to repair the damage. And there were many ways that that can be done. We've talked about education, we've talked about housing, employment it's a key area, a key area. Voting rights is a key area. There are so many areas that are so important.
But reparations, is not a, I don't believe, a short-term, one-time thing. It's something that has to happen unfortunately over a long, long period of time, which means many people alive today are not going to receive the benefits from it. And that's painful and it's tragic. But I don't see a way that that's going to happen.
CONSTANCE PERRY: Well, let me say a couple of things. Some of us on another task force that I sat on looking at the notion of reparations, we were asked to share our feelings and thoughts about reparations. Those of us-- I think I'm not speaking here. I will use an I statement. I have known people, I think Conyers, Representative Conyers for decades tried to get Congress to begin to have a conversation about just hold hearings.
DAIN PERRY: HR40.
CONSTANCE PERRY: HR40. To begin to have a conversation on reparations. Not what it is but just to begin to talk about it, to use the word reparations. It never happened. And so when I was given the opportunity to share my feelings and thoughts about reparations, I was stymied because I had never thought about it. I didn't expect that it would happen.
When I was forced to think about it because my work before I retired was about systemic change, I am thinking big picture. This is not about-- and this is my own personal feeling, but it is also the sentiment in our diocese that we also-- and I think it's reflected in the language in our resolution, it is systemic, it is not individually-based in terms of writing a cheque for individuals. Individuals will benefit, we hope, by what is done. But we are looking and I am looking at systemic change that will have an impact over time to redress as best we can, as best we can, and to begin to repair some of the damage that was done in those communities where the people who are the most affected, the most harmed by this history of enslavement and slave trade will be the beneficiaries.
However, I want to say that in-- what's her name? The book, The Sum of Us, Heather McGhee, that we are all-- this is not a zero sum game, we will all benefit. All benefit. Because if we're talking about reparations that will have an impact, positive impact in marginal communities, these communities are not just made up of African-Americans, they're not just made up of people of color, there are also made up of people who are White.
And if we look at it as a systemic and as a whole, wouldn't it be wonderful if every community in Massachusetts could herald their school and their education system as being the best? Doesn't that bode well for all of us? Not just African-Americans, but for all of us.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: Thank you Constance and Dain. And Dain, this is such a powerful conversation. And then you started the conversation by speaking very clearly and firmly about what White people need to do to uncover the history, to learn history, to reckon with the truth. So I want to offer a question from Hunter Limbaugh who asks you specifically, Hunter says, "Dain as a fellow White South Carolinian, I'd love to hear your suggestions as how to get our friends, neighbors, and others to understand our responsibility, to know our real history and our responsibility to participate in the morally necessary reparative work. How do you overcome the reflexive resistance to the truth of our responsibility?"
So if you could highlight maybe some of the examples. So this is really hard work. And unless a groundswell of White folks get behind this, there will be no reparative action. So it's really important to hang out in this area for a little bit. So Dain, what do you have to say?
DAIN PERRY: There is no magic formula. It's one person at a time, and it takes time. If you have someone who was resistant or someone who was out and out blatantly-- someone who's out and out blatantly racist, they probably will never change because that is so deep in their psyche.
But for someone who you think might be willing to open up a little bit, there's a superb book that I consider racism 101. It's the foundational book in my mind. It's called Waking Up White by Debby Irving. She does a magnificent job of telling her own story of waking up to the fact that she was White, she is White, and that that gives her very distinct advantage over other people.
And she deals with it in short chapters. It's not threatening, it's not finger-pointing, it's not shaking a finger at people, it's just telling her story. And we used the book for book study groups and find that it can really open very subtly a lot of eyes. So if you have someone who's willing to take that step, I think you've got them at that point. But the people who are really resistant, that's a tough nut. That becomes a generational problem, I think.
DIANE L. MOORE: Thank you. Thank you so much. We'd like to just turn to you, Professor Hucks, just for some final reflections and just a post, maybe two questions. You can choose which one you want to respond to. One would just be if you have any comments to make relevant to the conversation tonight to help us position ourselves from your own work as a scholar of religion. And the other is a little more general. What insights do you think the study of religion provides for us? Potentially unique insights that the study of religion provides for us to really unpack the systemic issues that we're discussing this evening. So either one of those, but turn it to you for final comments, please.
TRACEY HUCKS: I mean, I'll go back to where I started with a scholar of religion, historian of religion, Charles Long, who really wants to when he was alive, whose work really helped us to theorize and to think about and rethink the kind of history that we want to tell of Christianity, to rethink the connections between religion, slavery, and modernity. For me, it's a wonderful time to be at the Harvard Divinity School having these conversations in our classes, but very much from the leadership on committed to unearthing what it means for the study of religion to have been allied to a legacy of slavery.
What does it mean when we talk about the way in which we interpret the Bible? What does it mean that we have created theologies and theological anthropologies that denigrated Blackness? And what does it mean that we had histories, histories that created a sense of what Dr. Long calls opacity where some people become invisible in this story of the modern West of modernity.
And also, this is always and will always be a moral and ethical question. And I'm hoping for all of the institutions that are here, that the one that I'm connected to will be at the forefront of wanting to make those challenges, to take the courage to say the things that need to be said, to be in the leadership, for what it needs to talk about these very difficult issues. And also what it means for us to-- I love that sense, Constance, you talked about our humanity. How do we really realize our humanity in this country? And I'm hoping that me and my colleagues, the study of religion will be at the forefront of that.
James Baldwin who-- I teach a course called, The Book of Baldwin. And those of you who have read The Fire Next Time, he's very clear that if your God cannot make you more freer, more loving, more full, then it's time you get rid of him. And we want it to be about a conversation that really begins to free us from so many of the prisons of race in this history that have entrapped us in the United States and throughout the African diaspora.
So thank you. I want to thank Dain and Constance again for just joining us. And thank you on behalf of Harvard Divinity School.
DAIN PERRY: Thank you.
CONSTANCE PERRY: Thank you. And thank you for the work that you're doing. Thank you for the work you're doing.
DAIN PERRY: And Thanks to all of the people who are joining in tonight for taking the time and effort to listen to this. And I'd like to say one last thing, and that is that there is no better place than faith communities to have this conversation.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: I just want to echo my gratitude to all of you. Thank you so much, Tracey, Dain, and Constance for this powerful conversation.
DAIN AND CONSTANCE PERRY: Thank you.
DIANE L. MOORE: And I will close this out with a deepest gratitude and thanks on behalf of all of us at the Divinity School for this rich conversation. To let everyone in the room know that this is being recorded, and the session will be available on our website in the coming days. I also hope that you will all join us for our sixth and last session that will take place two weeks from tonight on the 20th at 7:00 o'clock. And it will feature professors King, Holland, McKinnon, Johnson, and Hux for a plenary conversation about the power of religion and the legacies of slavery to give an overview of what we've learned and think about steps forward.
I just want to close to just again remind you what Melissa helped remind us about in the beginning, that these are important and challenging conversations. And that we want to encourage everyone in the room to carry forward what you have learned here, bring it into your communities, bring it into your conversations. And particularly to the extent that this has been a difficult conversation to make sure to reach out to beloveds for support and for processing.
We thank you again and look forward to seeing you all in two weeks time. Goodnight.
DAIN AND CONSTANCE PERRY: Goodnight.
TRACEY HUCKS: And Diane, the lights have gone out in my office to let me know the ancestors are here.
DIANE L. MOORE: I love that. Wonderful. Wonderful. Thank you, all.
SPEAKER 2: Sponsors, Religion and Public Life, the HDS office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging. The Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, Harvard X.
SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2023, Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College.