The lectures from 2008–2011 covered a wide swath of history—1960s urban race riots, a coal miners’ strike, and single women homesteaders in late-19th-century North Dakota. Together, they represented the key social relationships of race, class, and gender. In distinct ways, they bridged into new territories for my lectures—the history of race and contemporary racism, public history, and gender in transnational history.
My 2008 lecture focused on the race riots that erupted in cities throughout the United States during the summer of 1967. In more than one sense it covered old ground. In 1967 I had worked as a research assistant at the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, popularly called the Kerner Commission for the Commission Chairman, Illinois Governor Otto Kerner. Established by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the riots, the Commission released its report in March 1968, famously suggesting that racial inequality created the conditions for the riots. The fortieth anniversary of the Commission report invited a retrospective reflection on the riots and their interpretation. The more immediate powerful context was then-Senator Barack Obama’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, the first presidential bid by an African American that appeared to have substantial chance of success. Inevitably, race was an issue in the Obama campaign, sometimes overt, always an unspoken subtext that continued throughout his presidency. I had found that Canadians were sometimes unsure how to ask me about the underlying racial politics of the election, for fear it might be a difficult subject. The lecture allowed me to address some unvoiced questions.
My 2009 lecture bridged a different divide, between academic scholarship and public history. I spoke again about a Colorado miners’ strike. This one occurred a decade after the Cripple Creek strike of 1903–1904 that I discussed in 2002, and it involved coal miners, not the gold miners of my own research. In 1913–1914 coal miners struck three large coal companies in southern Colorado and were evicted from their company housing. They established tent colonies on land that their union, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), had leased, anticipating the evictions. The strike is best known for its horrific climax, when the Colorado National Guard shot into the Ludlow tent colony and then set it on fire, killing women and children as well as striking miners, an event known as the Ludlow Massacre. The UMWA bought the tent colony site and erected a monument to the dead, represented by statues of a miner and a woman holding a baby.
I knew the history of the Ludlow Massacre but became personally involved with it after May 2003, when someone vandalized the monument, decapitating the male figure and severing the woman’s arm. The UMWA vowed to restore the monument, and the Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA) promised to seek National Historic Landmark (NHL) status for the Ludlow site. At the time, I served on the LAWCHA board of directors. In January 2004, LAWCHA President James Green asked me to co-chair a committee to secure NHL designation for the Ludlow site. My 2009 lecture covered the strike itself, and the five-year odyssey working to win the NHL designation. I lectured that year shortly before I spoke at the official NHL plaquing ceremony at the annual Ludlow Memorial Commemoration.
Winning National Historic Landmark designation had required extensive coordination, negotiation, and translation among a committee of labor historians, the UMWA leadership, Colorado politicians, local stakeholders, U.S. Park Service personnel who would interpret the site, and the U.S. Department of the Interior and its site selection criteria. A challenging and rewarding project, it required diplomacy as well as scholarship and provided a textbook introduction to bridging academic, political, and public interests.
Another research leave in 2009–2010 created a one-year pause in my lectures. Having dealt with race and class in my two previous presentations, it seemed appropriate in 2011 to consider gender. Race, class, and gender operate together in most social relationships, in concert with other perceived social differences—religion, age, sexuality, and many others. These three lectures provided lenses into the intersections of race, class, and gender in three historical contexts, extending the focus on those intersections I had begun with my Cripple Creek research in the 1970s. In 2011, I was happy to turn from race riots and violent strikes to women homesteaders, to remember that most Americans are not violent and lead prosaic, even dull, daily lives. I spoke from a work in progress that probed what difference the 49th Parallel had meant for women, focusing on single Canadian, American, and Norwegian women who claimed North Dakota homesteads. The project followed 121 women whose lives bridged the boundaries of nations and gender to claim homesteads near the Canada-U.S. border. My lecture was based on the homestead claim files of every woman who won title to her own land during the first decade that the Devils Lake, North Dakota, Land Office operated, from 1883–1893.1 That project has so far expanded to include 773 women who gained title to their claims by 1903; a portion of that research appears in my 2016 lecture.
That “to be continued” aspect of ongoing research leads back to my 2008 lecture, which more than any other demands a postscript.
* * *
One of the challenges of an ongoing conversation between past and present is that it is ongoing. I chose, for the most part, to maintain my 2008 perspective as I prepared my lecture for this volume. But the long history of racial injustice in the United States predated 1967 and did not end then, or in 2008, or as I revised my lecture for publication, or the moment I sent it off to be published. By the fiftieth anniversary of the Kerner Commission report in 2018, the racism and poverty that the Commission named as chief causes of the 1967 riots remained pervasive problems according to “Healing our Divided Society,” a report released by the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, which has continued to study, fund, and advocate for efforts cited in the Kerner report. Its 2018 report acknowledged progress in closing economic, social, and political gaps among U.S. racial groups, and significant growth of African American and Hispanic middle classes. And, of course, the United States had twice elected Barack Obama president. But, the report continued, since the 1960s an increasing proportion of American children lived in poverty, income inequality and the wealth gap among classes had widened, and residential and school segregation had again increased.2
I concluded my lecture in 2008 by noting that despite continued poverty, racism, and widening class inequality, no one was rioting that year. It was a special moment, as the nation witnessed the ultimately successful Obama presidential campaign. The Obama presidency fueled African American hope and rising aspirations. It also energized a White backlash. Protests, demonstrations, and some riots have occurred since 2008, often sparked, like those in 1967, by excessive police force. A list of only a few of the better-known assaults and deaths since 2008 includes: Oscar Grant, killed in Oakland, California, by a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer New Years Day, 2009; Eric Garner, choked to death by a New York City police officer July 17, 2014; Michael Brown, fatally shot by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer August 9, 2014; Laquan McDonald, dead in a Chicago police shooting October 20, 2014; Tamir Rice, age 12, shot to death by Cleveland police November 22, 2014, who mistook his toy gun for a real one; Freddie Gray, killed by Baltimore police April 12, 2015; Sandra Bland, hanged in a Waller County, Texas, jail cell July 13, 2015, three days after her arrest on the pretext of a traffic violation; Philando Castile, fatally shot during a traffic stop in a Saint Paul, Minnesota suburb, July 6, 2016; Stephon Clark, killed March 18, 2018, by Sacramento police who mistook his cell phone for a gun; Anton Black who died September 15, 2018, under the weight of three Greensboro, Maryland, police officers; Atatiana Jefferson, killed October 12, 2019, by Fort Worth police officers who shot through her window after a neighbor reported that her door was open; Breonna Taylor, killed March 13, 2020 when police broke into her Louisville apartment; George Floyd, suffocated May 25, 2020 by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin; Daunte Wright, fatally shot April 11, 2021 by a Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, police officer during a traffic stop. At least twenty-three more unarmed African Americans were shot and killed by police officers in the remainder of 2021 after Duante Wright died, including three-month-old La’Mello Parker, killed May 3, 2021 in a gun fight between Biloxi, Mississippi police and the infant’s father. At least thirty-five were killed in 2022; thirty-three in 2023; twenty in 2024; and another four died in the first three months of 2025.3 This list will, sadly, be outdated long before this volume goes to press.4
Since 2008 we have witnessed a continuous litany of murdered African Americans, many dead at the hands of the police, many documented by courageous witnesses who used their cell phones to record history in the making. The realities of vigilante racism and police brutality that African Americans had always known became undeniably real for sympathetic Whites. As the hopes for the Obama presidency collided with the painful realities of yet another death, African American youths founded the Black Lives Matter movement. The violence and death generated protests throughout the nation and internationally, in hotspots reaching from Atlanta, to Seattle, Ferguson, Washington, D.C., Portland, Kenosha, Tulsa, Tahlequah, and beyond.
These protests were more focused than most of the 1967 riots; they were multi-racial; they were not always peaceful, nor was the violence confined to the protestors. A Princeton University study of some 10,600 demonstrations during four months in 2020 surrounding the George Floyd murder found that 93 percent were non-violent. Peaceful protests were reported in 2,400 U.S. communities, while demonstrations in 220 communities turned violent.5 As in 1967, these protests were ignited when rising expectations collided with internalized and systemic racism.
I responded to some of this unfolding history in my 2013 and 2014 lectures, and in my classroom teaching. In the fall of 2009, I introduced a graduate seminar, “Race in American History,” and two years later, an undergraduate course, “Race, Film, and History,” that examined the history of race relations in the United States through the lens of movies. The first time I taught “Race in American History,” the course description began: “As the 2008 U.S. presidential election amply demonstrated, race has been central to American history and American identities.”
I edited my 2008 lecture for this volume during the 2021 trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, accused of murdering George Floyd by pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, a brutal death I witnessed because a courageous teenager, Darnella Frazier, recorded it on her cellphone and broadcast it on Facebook.6 During the Chauvin trial, my thoughts inescapably went to Emmett Till, whose brutal murder and mutilation in 1955 had indelibly etched the human face of racist brutality in my child’s mind. I thought of Marquette Frye and John Smith, whose arrests and beatings sparked the 1965 Watts riot and the 1967 Newark riot. I pictured the photos of lynchings, of the “strange fruit” hanging from southern trees I had used in classes about the violent aftermath of post-Civil War Reconstruction. I pictured the televised images of police brutality against Civil Rights activists, of “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Alabama. I thought of the daily humiliations of African Americans I witnessed as a child.
I completed the last footnote for my 2008 lecture, “Race in America,” on April 20, 2021, an hour before the jury found Derek Chauvin guilty of two counts of murder and one count of manslaughter. Philonise Floyd immediately connected his brother’s death to the longer history of racist violence, referring to Emmett Till as the “first George Floyd.” Speaking shortly after the jury rendered its verdict, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison put George Floyd’s murder in the explicit context of the Kerner Commission:
This verdict reminds us how hard it is to make enduring change. In 1968 [sic], the Kerner Commission was formed to investigate the causes of uprisings in cities across America. Dr. Kenneth Clark—the famous African American psychologist who, along with his equally accomplished psychologist wife Mamie, contributed compelling research to the Brown v. Board of Education case—testified at the Kerner Commission. He said:
“I read that report … of the 1919 riot in Chicago, and it is as if I were reading the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of ’35, the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of ’43, the report of the McCone Commission on the Watts riot….
“I must again in candor say to you members of this Commission—it is a kind of Alice in Wonderland—with the same moving picture re-shown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction.”
“Here we are in 2021,” Ellison continued, “still addressing the same problem. … It did not need to get to this point. There are far too many more names. Each is painful to name. This verdict reminds us that we must make enduring change.”7
Documenting the history of racism does not make enduring change. When I taught Canadian students the history of American racism, I also taught the histories of African American resistance and of the abolitionist and Civil Rights Movements in which White allies had joined. I did not want to inflate the history of White anti-racism, but I did want to complicate students’ understandings of American racism and the ongoing historical resistance to it. There are some bridges between past and present that cannot remain unchallenged. I offered these histories in the hope that we might someday disconnect the legacy of the racist past from yet another painful present.
Notes
1 Dakota Territory was established in 1861 and was carved into the separate states of North Dakota and South Dakota in 1889. I use “North Dakota” for convenience here, though the land office was located in Dakota Territory until 1889.
2 Vanessa Williams, “Fifty years after the Kerner Commission, a new report cites some of the same concerns about race and poverty,” Washington Post, February 26, 2018.
3 “List of unarmed African Americans killed by law enforcement officers in the United States,” a copiously footnoted but probably still incomplete list, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unarmed_African_Americans_killed_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_States, accessed May 26, 2025.
4 This grim litany is hardly exhaustive, nor does it represent African Americans killed by armed civilians. I do not mean to imply that all, or most, police officers exert excessive force against people of color, but I do mean to demonstrate a pervasive and repeating reality that fuels African American fears, inspires the Black Lives Matter movement, and that has engendered renewed protests and demonstrations.
5 “Demonstrations and Political Violence in America: New Data for Summer 2020,” U.S. Crisis Project, a joint effort by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project and the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University, September 2020, https://acleddata.com/acleddatanew/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/ACLED_USDataReview_Sum2020_SeptWebPDF.pdf, accessed September 2, 2021.
6 In 2021 the Pulitzer Prize committee awarded Darnella Frazier a special citation for the video. She testified that it has haunted her ever since. See Jonathan Allen, “Pulitzers honor Darnella Frazier for cellphone video of George Floyd Murder,” New York Times, June 11, 2021.
7 “Accountability ... is the first step to justice,” Attorney General Ellison’s remarks after the verdict in State v. Derek Chauvin, Saint Paul, April 20, 2021.