Kimberly Williams Crenshaw

My mom was a warrior, but also a griot.

So she would take me around town and show me the palace theater that

didn't want to allow her to sit in the middle of the theater and try to make her go up to the balcony.

She showed me the root beer stand that wouldn't serve them in the glass mugs, but would try to serve them in paper cups.

So passing on that history was...

was important in understanding that some of the consequences of discrimination, if we aren't available or don't know the story about how it came to be, we're more likely to infer that this is just the way things have to be, or this is a product of our failures, as opposed to it's the product of power, sometimes racial power, to over-determine the work that we do to make a good life for ourselves.

So my brother miraculously survived the Vietnam War.

And my mom, the warrior that she was, was able to get him honorably discharged, in part because some of the things he encountered as a black soldier.

Her hope was that he would now get back on track as a college graduate eventually.

He wanted to go to Kent State.

She didn't want him to go to Kent State because in the year or two before, the National Guard had opened fire on protesters at Kent State and it killed four students.

So the last thing she wanted him to be involved in was anti-war demonstrations.

She knew he would be in the middle of that.

So she sent him to Wilberforce where she thought he'd be safe.

About six weeks after he got there, as we were told, there was a fight between Wilberforce students and Central State students.

And for years, we'd been told that there was some kind of a scuffle over a movie on Halloween, which made no sense to me.

And my brother was a bystander, and someone shot into the crowd and hit him.

For years.

That's the story that you believed.

That's the story.