00:00:03.010 - 00:00:18.730

(mouse clicks) (mouse clicks) (mouse clicks) (wood thumps)

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(man inhales) (mouse clicks) (man sniffs) (mouse clicks)

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(man inhales) Dr. Byrd. How are you today? You know, it's, it's it's pandemic.

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It's just, there's a pandemic. (man laughs) Oh, yep. But it's Friday.

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It's another Friday in the pandemic. And- Well, I don't know about you I'm scrambling today.

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I, I feel that. I was six minutes ago, I was at the university of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (man laughs)

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See, if there wasn't, if there wasn't a pandemic going on, you wouldn't say sentences like that. No one would not say sentences like that. That six minutes ago I was at UNC, but-

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Zooming around the country. Yeah. Just zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, zooming. I think it's right where we're all, we work at a college

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and almost all colleges and universities have kind of shifted to operate under the special circumstances. And we're working on a calendar that is compressed.

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And, and so I know this is a moment where probably students, not probably, I think students are really feeling the pressures of this compressed calendar,

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but still just, you know, working hard and pressing through to the end of the semester. So. We'll get there.

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We will. (indistinct) will be well. And, um.... Let's do a Do Talk.

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What do you think Let's do that. That's a great day for a Doc Talk. We had, we, I think we had a wonderful event.

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A very informative, and challenging webinar last night on "Black at Rice" focusing on the experiences of eight of our current students and also hearing from Catherine Clack,

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who's been here almost 40 years, shepherding on black students in, first in her post in admissions, And then later as Director of Minority Affairs

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and then Director of Multicultural Affairs. And it was just a really moving and challenging and informative conversation moderated by Dr. Eden King,

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who is also on the task force. So, um.... It's been a great week for webinars. There was a wonderful cast webinars as well on Wednesday.

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So it's been a busy week for programming related to the task force, but I always look forward to having these talks with you as well about some of the documents that the task force is working

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with as we perform our charge. If this is your first time attending the Doc Talk our format is pretty informal, but we want to give you a window

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into the ways that historians work. And some of the research that's ongoing as part of our charge, which is to investigate and develop a plan for sharing the history of Rice University

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as it relates to slavery segregation and racial injustice. And I'm guessing since you were just in Chapel Hill 10 minutes ago and are collecting your thoughts,

00:04:02.090 - 00:04:11.460

you might want me to talk about my document first. Is that an accurate assumption? That is very, very correct. Yes, please. Okay.

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(man laughs) Well, the document that I wanted to discuss today is from the earliest part of the chronological span that we're working on in the task force

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and it's a legal document that was entered into by William Marsh Rice. So I'm going to share my screen here. Can you see that?

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I see it. I see it The last few weeks of our Doc Talk we've had newspapers from the eighties

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and the seventies and the nineties. So I thought, you know, why not challenge ourselves a little bit with some 19th century handwriting?

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Again, we talked on our very first Doc Talk about the importance of clear handwriting in the 19th century before there were photocopies. And so legal documents like the one we're seeing here

00:05:06.830 - 00:05:18.290

were very carefully copied out by clerks who had to get every word just right because these deeds, these legal documents related to property.

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And so it was important that they be easily, easily read but of course a century and more later it's maybe not as easy for us to make out the words as it would have been for clerks in the 19th century.

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Well, we don't even, my kids were never even taught cursive. (man laughs) That's true.

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My son is learning cursive right now in school. So I guess it's still there as sort of a vestigial lesson, but certainly we're not as familiar with it.

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I have to say that there are some students on the Racial Geography Project Collective, and we heard from some of them last week who have been doing a lot of great work

00:06:03.390 - 00:06:14.770

trying to transcribe some of these documents so that we can more easily share them and read them. But because I'm scrambling today, as I mentioned earlier, I didn't pull up the full transcription of the letter

00:06:14.770 - 00:06:23.410

so that we're looking at the original. And let me zoom out a little bit so that you can see that this document is part of a large book.

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And it's a book of deeds from Harris County in the 19th century. And so this is a book where any kind of property related transaction would have been recorded

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if it was a certain kind of property. So real estate transactions would have been recorded here. And also because this is from the antebellum period transactions

00:06:45.880 - 00:06:58.040

involving enslaved people would have been recorded in this book of deeds. And as you look through this book you can see that in the margins the clerk has put the names

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of the people involved in the deed to make it easy to locate a deed later and find out who owned what and how the property was moved. And so in the bottom right-hand corner

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of this particular opening of the book you can see that in the left-hand margin there's a mention of William Marsh Rice and E. B. Nichols who was his business partner at the time.

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Ebeneezer B. Nichols are transferring some property, conveying some property to F. R. Nichols and William H. Nichols who we learn in the deed itself are sons,

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young sons of Ebeneezer B Nichols. That's why they share the same last name. Can I ask you a question about this book of deeds, Dr. McDaniel

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for people who are interested in how historians work through this? So how does a historian approach this document? Where do they get it from?

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What is the physical, I'm doing air quotes now, but the physical process of search, right? If, if, where do I go to get this? And then if I'm interested in William Marsh Rice,

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what does search look like here? Great questions. And the answer varies a lot depending on the particular county

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and the way that its records have been preserved. There is a project that's underway, in fact, that Stephen F. Austin University, that's trying to collect as many deeds

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related to enslaved people as possible in Texas. But I was just talking with the librarian there at SFA, who's working on this project last week and he's sometimes the search involves literally getting

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in his car and driving a county courthouse in a rural county and asking them if they have any really old books lying around that they're not sure what to do with,

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and he's turned up some of these deed books that way. Some of the larger counties have had these deep books digitized and made available on genealogical websites.

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And so if you go to familysearch.org or com or ancestry.com and you are interested in finding information about your family history, sometimes you can enter

00:09:29.530 - 00:09:41.750

in the name of the person you're looking for and a record will pop up that has to do with your ancestor. And that I believe is how this particular image came

00:09:41.750 - 00:09:52.980

into my possession. The image was provided by a librarian at the Clayton Genealogical Library here in Houston because these images aren't available on Family Search.

00:09:52.980 - 00:10:05.450

They'll let you can see that the record is there but you can't see the image unless you go to the library itself and use their computers. Of course, we are in a pandemic, as you mentioned earlier,

00:10:05.450 - 00:10:16.180

and so the library is not as open to researchers as it would be. Thankfully a librarian there was willing to pull these images and share them with us.

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But you know, that way of searching is fairly recent for historians. And so if we were to go back to the years when the very first biography

00:10:26.050 - 00:10:39.760

of William Marsh Rice was being written by a professional historian, Andrew Forest Muir in the 1960s, his process would've involved going down to the Harris County Clerk's office, I'm assuming,

00:10:39.760 - 00:10:52.990

and actually paging through these large deed books. And he would have had to turn to the first pages of the book or sometimes the last pages of the book where there would have been an index.

00:10:52.990 - 00:11:05.270

And there, the clerk would have listed the names of any property holders that are in the book and then the pages of those deeds, so that you could flip to the relevant record in the book.

00:11:05.270 - 00:11:15.110

So it's changed over time. And I think we're fortunate that we can take advantage of digitization to look these primary sources more closely,

00:11:15.110 - 00:11:26.930

especially since in this particular case Muir in his biography of William Marsh Rice mentioned this transaction that's recorded here between William Marsh Rice and E. B. Nichols,

00:11:26.930 - 00:11:38.810

and two of Nichols's sons, but he didn't go into detail about the text of the record. And so it's good to be able to lay our eyes on the original source, because I think there

00:11:38.810 - 00:11:48.470

there's some interesting things that come up in this deed that Muir did not include in the text of his biography. So before we talk about that,

00:11:48.470 - 00:11:59.420

let me just go to the second page so you can see the deed goes onto a second page of the book and it's at the bottom of the record that you learn a little bit more about

00:11:59.420 - 00:12:13.770

when this deed was entered into. And so you can see that at the very end, it says that the record was recorded September 12th, 1848. And there's another line here that says

00:12:13.770 - 00:12:25.480

that it was recorded in Houston. So this record dates from 1848, and that's an important. It's somewhat early in the history of William Marsh Rice in Texas.

00:12:25.480 - 00:12:38.310

He had been in Houston by that point for about a decade. And so he had established himself as a businessman. He had entered into this partnership with Ebeneezer B. Nichols,

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and it was by this point, I think his longest standing partnership at the time. And so it's not surprising to see William Marsh Rice and E. B. Nichols side-by-side and in this particular book.

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So I'm going to try to transcribe on the fly here a little bit and read the handwriting so we can make some sense of- Always, always risky.

00:13:03.880 - 00:13:15.970

That's why we do these live, you know, try to try to make it interesting. So it says this deed of gift made by William M. Rice and Ebeneezer B. Nichols

00:13:15.970 - 00:13:30.730

to Frank Rice and William Hamilton, sons of said Ebeneezer and Margaret C. Nichols witnesseth that the said William M. Rice in consideration of the love and affection he has

00:13:30.730 - 00:13:46.950

to said Frank Rice Nichols has granted, donated and delivered possession and does hereby donate and deliver possession to said, Frank, his heirs and assigns the half interest owned by him

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in and to a certain Negress slave named Ellen, aged about 17 years and of light black color. And also in and to her infant child named Louisa, aged about one year and of yellow in color.

00:14:10.300 - 00:14:23.310

Now that's the part of the deed that relates most directly to William Marsh Rice. But it goes on in the second page of this deed to say that Ebeneezer B. Nichols is doing something similar

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at the same time. He is also donating and delivering possession of two other people that someone named Lucy and her child named Evie, aged about five years.

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Lucy, it says here, has aged about 40 years to a William Hamilton. And then the second half interest of Ellen and her child Louisa that were described

00:14:52.410 - 00:15:03.540

in the part that I read are donated by Ebeneezer B. Nichols to Frank and William. Did you catch all that? (Dr. McDaniel's laughs)

00:15:03.540 - 00:15:16.860

I caught at least half of it. There's a lot going on in the deed. And that's not all that it's interesting here. It goes on to say that

00:15:16.860 - 00:15:30.640

while Frank and William are in their minority, during the minority of the said Frank and William, we do hear by appoint, invest the control and management of these enslaved people

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to Mrs. Margaret C. Nichols, their mother, as guardian or trustee for the use and benefit without any account or liability to them for the rents and profits during the minority of Frank and William.

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And that speaks to the fact that although it doesn't say here in this deed how old Frank and William were at this moment in 1848, that's where these genealogical sites

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like Ancestry and Family Search can be helpful because we know from the 1860 census that Frank and William were 15 and 17 years old in 1860. And so if my math is correct

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that means that at the time of this deed in 1848, they would have been three and five years old. And so we have here is William Marsh Rice and Ebeneezer B. Nichols is his business partner

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transferring two adult enslaved women and their very young children into the ownership of a three-year-old and a five-year-old, the sons of Ebeneezer B. Nichols.

00:16:51.250 - 00:17:01.790

So, I mentioned earlier that Muir talked about this particular transaction in his biography which is why I was interested in finding the original primary source

00:17:01.790 - 00:17:12.160

and looking at it more closely. Even the first time I read it though, I have to say that I missed what I think is one of the most significant parts of this deed,

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which is that William Marsh Rice is granting one-half, the half interest, owned by him in Ellen, aged about 17 years and her infant child named Louisa.

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It's telling us that William Marsh Rice owned one half of each of those people. And later in the deed we learn who owned the other half: Ebeneezer B. Nichols.

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But in this deed record, it was necessary to record that, you know, both halves, both shares of these enslaved people were being apportioned and assigned and delivered to these two sons of Ebeneezer B. Nichols.

00:18:01.390 - 00:18:11.720

And that, to me, it gets to the heart of something we've talked about in the Doc Talks before which is the commodification that was at the heart of the institution of slavery.

00:18:12.750 - 00:18:23.000

You know, it's a common misunderstanding, I think, of the "Three-Fifths Clause" in the constitution that that clause says that enslaved people were worth

00:18:23.000 - 00:18:34.000

only three-fifths of a person. If you look at the constitution, it's talking about how population is going to be counted for representation that in Congress,

00:18:34.000 - 00:18:46.870

that you had determined a state's representation in Congress by counting up all the free inhabitants in the state and then three-fifths of all other persons. Right.

00:18:46.870 - 00:19:00.060

And free persons, right? And people too often, come with that, right? In the way that you just described as being well, well, as I'm speaking directly to a kind

00:19:01.570 - 00:19:15.820

of dehumanization, whereas we wouldn't have wanted or I think freedom loving people would not have wanted all other peoples counted as five-fifths of a person for political purpose.

00:19:15.820 - 00:19:25.070

Representation. Exactly, 'cause that would have given the slave states with a large enslaved population even more power than they already had

00:19:25.070 - 00:19:34.870

in Congress as a result of that clause. But when you look at a deed like this, it's easy to understand too why that clause has come to be understood

00:19:34.870 - 00:19:48.660

as dehumanizing and as treating enslaved people as three-fifths of a person because this deed is telling us that quite literally in the the laws and property transactions of the time,

00:19:48.660 - 00:20:08.300

a person could be split into fractions for the purposes of ownership and financial profit. I was reading this morning, this book by Daina Ramey Berry at UT Austin, "The Price for Their Pound of Flesh"

00:20:08.300 - 00:20:19.160

and she has some other examples of this kind of thing happening in different places. She talks about a particular enslaved woman who was sold on the auction block

00:20:19.160 - 00:20:34.100

and one person purchased three-fourths and another person purchased one-fourth. She also tells a story of how faculty members at the Medical College of Georgia in the antebellum period

00:20:34.100 - 00:20:45.450

who were interested in basically digging up graves to find corpses on which they could perform medical procedures and autopsies and do their training.

00:20:45.450 - 00:20:56.410

They purchased an enslaved man to do that work of digging up the graves and bringing corpses into their medical school. And because the seven faculty

00:20:56.410 - 00:21:09.240

at the Medical College of Georgia entered into that sale together each of them owned one seventh of this particular man. And if they left the faculty, she says they would

00:21:09.240 - 00:21:20.840

give up their share or seventh. So this, I think, speaks to the fact that what William Marsh Rice was doing here was not uncommon but I think it's important to highlight

00:21:20.840 - 00:21:34.820

because it gets to the essence, I think, of slavery as people like William Marsh Rice and Ebeneezer Nichols understood it. And it's a part that Muir didn't include in his biography.

00:21:34.820 - 00:21:47.260

He mentions that William Marsh Rice gifted these to enslaved people, to Ebeneezer Nichols, his sons. And it's interesting that I believe the part he chose to quote was the part about Rice's love

00:21:47.260 - 00:21:58.410

and affection for Nichols's sons, which, you know, cast Rice in a certain light. Here he is gifting enslaved people to his business partner's sons,

00:21:58.410 - 00:22:18.410

but he did not touch on the half share the way that what this signifies is how an enslaved woman like Ellen and Louisa were regarded in the property, the political economy of antebellum Texas at the time.

00:22:18.410 - 00:22:31.800

And it doesn't consider, you know, the perspective of Ellen and Louisa and of Lucy and Evie, who are mentioned in the next page. And I think it's important for us

00:22:31.800 - 00:22:46.170

to read between the lines of this document and imagine if we can, what their lives were like and build out from other sources some understanding of what this transaction would have meant to them.

00:22:46.170 - 00:23:07.150

Well, and it encourages us to contemplate, right? The relationship between Nichols and Rice's happiness and the nature and depth of their relationship

00:23:07.150 - 00:23:28.620

with people in their circles and the ways in which that love and commitment and providing for potentially depended upon, right? The misery and insecurity of others

00:23:30.750 - 00:23:50.100

of enslaved African-Americans. There is a there is a depressing kind of poetry in those first lines that you read. I agree, (indistinct)

00:23:50.100 - 00:24:01.260

that's one of the questions I have about this document is that language about love and affection and deed of gift. You know, was that language itself common

00:24:01.260 - 00:24:12.200

in these kinds of property transactions? You know, it may be that if we were to flip through this book, we would find many other deeds of gift that were described in the same way, perhaps

00:24:12.200 - 00:24:23.180

because that was the legal ease, the legal boiler plate that one had to use in this kind of a transaction. Normally you would come before the clerk, you know,

00:24:23.180 - 00:24:35.010

if you were conveying property for money in exchange. And so you would say I'm conveying this property in due consideration of the amount that you would be receiving from the buyer

00:24:35.010 - 00:24:47.250

but in indeed of gift, you would fill in that blank of "indue consideration of." Instead of the price you would put a phrase like "love and affection" to indicate

00:24:47.250 - 00:25:02.810

that you're not receiving any money for this. It's just a deed of gift similar to the way that, you know, if we bring it up to the 20th first century of, you know, if I wanted to give my daughter a car

00:25:02.810 - 00:25:13.480

and transfer the car to her name, I might transfer the title, but, you know, sell it for a dollar or something like that. And that would be nominally a way

00:25:13.480 - 00:25:23.270

of recording this transaction. So I do wonder, you know, whether those words do give us insight into how Rice felt about these two young boys

00:25:23.270 - 00:25:39.370

that he was giving his half interest to or if it was, again, just part of the prosaic legal language that would have surrounded what was a system of commodification and

00:25:39.370 - 00:25:49.780

and immiseration as you put it for enslaved people that were subject to these transactions. One of the things that makes me wonder about that is the second page where it talks

00:25:49.780 - 00:26:04.330

about the mother of the two young boys, Ebeneezer Nichols's wife because another book that I've recently been looking at is Stephanie Jones-Rogers's award-winning volume

00:26:04.330 - 00:26:17.410

"They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South" And one of the chapters of that book delves into the fact that even though women legally in the antebellum period

00:26:17.410 - 00:26:32.920

in most Southern States could not own property, there was a principle known as coverture that held that that women were in a sense subsumed under their husbands legal standing and legal profile.

00:26:32.920 - 00:26:44.170

And so their husbands could own property and they would cover their wives property. And so a woman could not own property herself but what Jones-Rogers shows is when you go the deed books

00:26:44.170 - 00:26:57.400

of Southern States you find all kinds of evidence that what women were in fact, controlling enslaved people, owning enslaved people, and that sometimes these kinds of deeds were a way

00:26:57.400 - 00:27:14.490

for men to shelter some of their property as it were and prevent that property from being held to their account. You know, if the creditor was pursuing them you could look at a deed like this and say that,

00:27:14.490 - 00:27:27.670

well they've transferred this property to the control of Margaret Nichols. And it says here without any account or liability to Frank and William,

00:27:27.670 - 00:27:41.010

because they would have been controlled by Margaret Nichols. And so that just raises more questions for me about what were the intentions here of William Marshall Rice and Ebeneezer Nichols when they made this transaction?

00:27:41.010 - 00:27:56.050

Was it a sign of the close family relationships or was it a way to kind of shelter property? Was it a way to enrich and invest in the future of Ebeneezer Nichols, his sons,

00:27:56.050 - 00:28:06.970

and give them a kind of standing, even as three and five-year-olds, who are taking possession of, in this case, a child who is exactly the same age

00:28:06.970 - 00:28:17.610

as one of them, and maybe that's a way of transferring generational wealth but there's a lot of questions. I think that just looking at the record itself

00:28:17.610 - 00:28:28.730

doesn't answer including how it was that Rice and Nichols ended up with half shares. You know, that could mean that thinking back to one of our earlier Doc Talks

00:28:28.730 - 00:28:40.770

where there was a mortgage that Rice and his earlier business partner Adams had entered into with sugar planter and the enslaved people on that sugar plantation were put up

00:28:40.770 - 00:28:52.200

as collateral for the loan. And so it could be that Nichols and Rice had also had some other transaction where that these particular enslaved people

00:28:52.200 - 00:29:06.780

were Ellen and Louisa were collateral in a mortgage. And if that, that loan was defaulted on then because Rice and Nichols jointly had linked the money, they would jointly receive ownership

00:29:07.920 - 00:29:15.980

of the collateral and end up with, you know, these half interests. That's speculation, I mean, I think we have, we'd have to do some more digging

00:29:15.980 - 00:29:24.600

through books like this one to see if we could learn more about the context and we might not learn about the context. You know, this could have been a transaction

00:29:24.600 - 00:29:36.920

in another county or, you know, or they could have purchased these people as a partnership and with an understanding that they would each have one interest.

00:29:36.920 - 00:29:46.460

So lots of questions. But I think at the heart of all of those questions, I, for me is a desire to understand and learn better what this meant

00:29:46.460 - 00:30:00.030

for the women whose names are presented to us here very briefly. And, you know, we can only glimpse what their lives were like and begin to imagine what it was

00:30:00.030 - 00:30:16.130

for a 17 year old enslaved woman and her infant child to be treated as property in this way. (furniture moves) Excellent selection.

00:30:17.730 - 00:30:23.870

So what do you want to talk about today, Dr. Byrd? Do you have a documentation to share? I do.

00:30:25.170 - 00:30:44.790

And we may end up talking about 12 things, but we'll see. I want to say I've been having a little trouble with my share screen function on Zoom lately. So I'm not going to go into presentation mode

00:30:44.790 - 00:31:01.730

'cause I can't make it work, but let's see if it, if I can get anywhere with this. So I want to see not getting anywhere. I want to begin with a couple of documents

00:31:03.440 - 00:31:12.760

and then drill down into one of them. Now we agreed that we were going to move away from the Thresher for a little while. I just threw a Thresher in there.

00:31:13.940 - 00:31:23.530

I'll allow it. I'll allow it. (Dr. Byrd laughs) No, we won't focus on it for context and for the listeners, viewers,

00:31:24.040 - 00:31:40.190

if you want to get that context just take a picture of that QR code. And it'll take you to a February number. February 16th, 1990, issue of "The Rice Thresher"

00:31:40.440 - 00:31:52.410

where that the headline for that edition is "BSU Forum Raises Awareness of Hurdles Facing Blacks at Rice." And so you'll get some information

00:31:52.410 - 00:32:09.670

on a Black History Month forum held in 1990 where a number of students presented their thoughts about the state of Black Rice and also made recommendations concerning the future

00:32:09.710 - 00:32:19.550

and improving on the state of Black Rice and what I want to focus on- I believe you know the editor that book quite well, if-

00:32:19.550 - 00:32:33.540

I just started this research. So I'm not at a point yet where I can speak to that but I have prepared a different presentation on faculty because I think one of the things

00:32:33.540 - 00:32:47.670

that this document allows us to do is to begin speaking about black faculty at Rice which is a question that has been around the periphery of some of our discussions,

00:32:47.670 - 00:33:04.350

especially when we're talking about coursework at Rice. And so what I, what I'd like to do is focus on this. This piece comes from the Chandler Davidson papers that are held at the Woodson Research Center.

00:33:04.350 - 00:33:23.140

Professor Davidson is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Rice, a long time advocate of black students and dedicated to the improvement of the condition of black students on campus:

00:33:23.140 - 00:33:38.990

their recruitment, their experience while here, et cetera. And so in one of the folders of Dr Davidson's papers is this small booklet called the state of black rice.

00:33:38.990 - 00:33:55.200

It's a kind of yellowish book that's been bound as one would bind the document at Kinko's. And it's printed by the Office of Minority Affairs. And when you turn through it

00:33:55.200 - 00:34:17.260

it has essays written by professors, staff, students of the university, all speaking to an aspect of black life on campus. And I want to focus on one of those today that was written

00:34:17.590 - 00:34:30.610

by Professor Edward Cox, which is who is someone that if you've been at Rice for a little while, you, it's a name you know, if you haven't been at Rice that long,

00:34:30.610 - 00:34:44.400

we'll introduce them to you. Professor Cox is Professor Emeritus of History. He belongs to what I think we might call a second wave of black faculty at the university.

00:34:45.410 - 00:34:55.030

Dr. McDaniel, you might want to ask me the size of these waves. They're not large waves, but they are, there are, some waves are small.

00:34:55.030 - 00:35:04.440

And when it comes to waves of black faculty at Rice he is, Professor Cox was one of the second, part of the second wave, which I think we could probably date

00:35:04.440 - 00:35:21.340

around the mid to late, mid to late eighties. He's an award winning teacher and author historian of the Caribbean. He's the first director of the Mellon Mays program

00:35:21.340 - 00:35:31.500

which doesn't yet exist at Rice when writes this essay. My long time office neighbor. I miss having him around. (men chuckle)

00:35:31.500 - 00:35:41.220

Good. And a member, I think we should probably add, a member of the Steering Committee Members for Task Force on Slavery, Segregation and Racial Injustice.

00:35:41.220 - 00:36:02.310

But here he is not many years into his tenure at the university setting forth on what he thinks what he thinks we should be doing at Rice to improve the state nature of black experience here.

00:36:05.410 - 00:36:14.280

And I'm going to highlight a few things because I think they raise questions for what we do here, right, in our Doc Talks?

00:36:14.280 - 00:36:28.580

They, um, Professor Cox raises larger questions actually about what a taskforce like ours should be about. He's doing this in the 1990s because he's a historian, of course,

00:36:28.580 - 00:36:42.420

he begins this essay with the kind of teaching, right? With this, this comes out of an original presentation that happens during Black History Month. And Professor Cox makes sure

00:36:42.420 - 00:36:55.620

that take some time that we don't just celebrate. He puts celebrate in quotations, as we celebrate another Black History Month. He wants to make sure that we're also

00:36:55.620 - 00:37:11.410

about some of the hard work around improving black life at the university and beyond. So after teaching us a bit about Carter G Woodson and an African-American History Week

00:37:11.410 - 00:37:22.390

and African-American History Month, then he gets down to the business of asking, how will we know, right? What are some of the questions we would ask

00:37:22.390 - 00:37:35.090

and we'd need to know the answers to in order to know when we were making improvements at Rice and what I'd like to do, what I'd like to do now is go through some of those questions

00:37:35.090 - 00:37:52.290

and just kind of go back and forth with you on what the significance of these questions are. This is, this is peak Dr. Cox, right? When Dr. Cox is asking a question,

00:37:52.290 - 00:38:03.470

he's not asking a question, or not just asking a question, right? His questions often contain arguments. And so here we go.

00:38:04.420 - 00:38:15.490

So as first question is "what are the numbers of African-American students at Rice?" I think the significance of that is obvious. So we would probably don't have to

00:38:15.490 - 00:38:28.800

spend too much time on that. That there's a density that we probably need to reach. He's probably arguing in order to give black students a chance

00:38:28.800 - 00:38:42.220

for an equitable experience of Rice. But then he asked a question who's significance may not be obvious. And that question is "what percentage

00:38:42.220 - 00:38:58.900

of African-American students are athletes?" And I don't know that it's immediately, right? I don't know that it's immediately obvious why why he's raising that question,

00:38:58.900 - 00:39:12.480

but it's the lead in some ways it's the lead question of his entire take. And I think what, he's, what he's getting, you know, if I asked the question, I always feel bad.

00:39:12.480 - 00:39:23.800

If I run to answer it, that's, my colleagues tell me that's terrible pedagogy in the classroom. It reminds me of one of the earlier documents you brought

00:39:23.800 - 00:39:35.160

where, I think it was the Archival Windfall, the documentary Windfall that you shared with black students writing into the Thresher about their experience.

00:39:35.160 - 00:39:44.650

Was this around the time of the controversy over the creation of the office? (crosstalk) A few years later, maybe two years after.

00:39:44.650 - 00:39:55.470

A few years after, and I think one of the students was talking about the way that as an African-American student at Rice he was often asked, what sport do you play?

00:39:55.470 - 00:40:07.780

Or, you know, are you an athlete? And so this reminds me of that document as well. Yeah, he's raised, he's definitely are, I think, raising questions about where,

00:40:10.610 - 00:40:25.280

how are black students come to the university? Whether the ways they come to the university might set up additional problems for their experience at Rice.

00:40:26.130 - 00:40:36.210

There's also a flip side to this question, I think, and maybe Professor Cox is making this argument but it's definitely an argument that others would, would hold.

00:40:36.210 - 00:40:50.340

We've focused on some of the potentially problematic aspects of an over-reliance on the athletic department for the recruitment of black students at Rice. But the other thing that the question

00:40:50.340 - 00:41:11.160

might raise is the, what the university owes athletics and the Athletics Department for the diversifying of the university and whether the Athletic Departments are given their due for that kind of work.

00:41:13.230 - 00:41:21.240

I'll rush through a few more of them 'cause he's making similar points just outlining I think some important categories for us to follow.

00:41:21.240 - 00:41:36.730

"How many African-Americans are in the tenure eligible ranks of the faculty?" "Where are the African-American administrators?" That's toughly put,

00:41:36.730 - 00:41:42.980

like I don't know if he's asking, right? He could be asking that in two different ways. Where are they? I don't see any.

00:41:42.980 - 00:41:48.160

(men chuckle) Right? How many to where are? That's right.

00:41:48.160 - 00:41:55.460

Kind of answered the question of how many there are. Yeah. He may not be. And that's peak Dr. Cox, right?

00:41:55.460 - 00:42:07.700

Again, he's he, there may not be any. And if there are, where are they? "How does the percentage of African-Americans among the support staff compare with the percentage

00:42:07.700 - 00:42:20.290

in the professional staff category?" Raising questions I think about work life at the university and what work trajectory looks like at the university.

00:42:20.290 - 00:42:32.510

And I think also pointing us to the very important point that when we think about the black experience at Rice, though I think folks often rush to think

00:42:32.510 - 00:42:48.310

about the student experience that the, perhaps the largest ways in which black people experience the university is as employees, is as staff of the university.

00:42:49.810 - 00:43:02.960

I think the answer to these questions, says Dr. Cox, will indicate that the racial composition of the campus community is not as diverse as it ought to be and could be.

00:43:02.960 - 00:43:14.910

So there he comes clean for us but he has laid out, I think, where what are the important kind of human categories on which we are to focus

00:43:15.930 - 00:43:29.030

if we want to make progress in these areas Questions that. Questions too, that the Taskforce needs to be asking about different moments in the history of the university.

00:43:29.030 - 00:43:37.160

He's done our work for us here in way in charting out some of the questions that would fall under the charge that we have. Well, he's setting up, right?

00:43:37.160 - 00:43:56.800

I, and I think one of the things we have found and others in the audience will find if you look at reports out of committees and task forces like our own is they very rarely begin

00:43:57.650 - 00:44:09.540

as if this is the starting place, right? In the 21st century, it's rarely been that this an investigation into black life at a university is the first one.

00:44:09.540 - 00:44:25.550

Right? And so in some of the more challenging reports that they might first gesture backwards to two and three reports that have gone heated or unheated

00:44:25.600 - 00:44:41.110

over the past 30 or 40, 50 years. And this is, I think Professor Cox's essay here could count as an example of that for us. So as our task force begins to generate recommendations,

00:44:41.740 - 00:44:56.100

one of the things that we will need to do is to consider the ways that black faculty and students and staff have formalized this type of work before this presidential level task force.

00:44:57.220 - 00:45:10.650

I think it's important. You'll see, on the next page on number two in 1990, one of the recommendations that Dr. Cox has for getting to the bottom of all this

00:45:10.650 - 00:45:22.540

is there needs to be an examination of what has been done since 1965 to promote desegregation and integration at Rice. And in evaluation of the results of those efforts,

00:45:22.540 - 00:45:33.060

a useful mechanism for conducting this self analysis might be the appointment of a broad base presidential commission whose task it will be to conduct this study

00:45:33.060 - 00:45:41.820

and to make recommendations for action. Here we are. (Dr. McDaniel laughs) So. 30 years later.

00:45:41.820 - 00:46:02.030

[Dr. Byrd] So a little, a little while later, here we go. And he goes into further kind of laying out a charge for that commission. And the the fourth charge in the fourth point is that those

00:46:03.140 - 00:46:15.180

in decision-making positions with respect to implementing this blueprint for improving the status of African-Americans at Rice must be held accountable for their actions or lack of.

00:46:16.470 - 00:46:37.070

So the idea that recommendations need to land in places and the places that they land need to then have their own plans for doing the work moving forward. And for some type of self-reporting on that work.

00:46:41.200 - 00:46:54.090

So Professor Cox has a lot of answers, I think. I think we can see, even though he says he doesn't, "I do not profess to have all the answers to this vexing problem"

00:46:54.090 - 00:47:07.930

but he certainly has some of them. And he, I think he raises for us and especially for me giving my particular focus in the work of the Taskforce

00:47:07.930 - 00:47:22.800

is the the importance of getting a broad handle on the kind of demographic questions through time that Dr. Cox is asking for, that it's making the point

00:47:22.800 - 00:47:43.420

that it's not possible to do this work well without some agreed upon kind of facts or statistics around the evolution of black presence on this campus. And so one of the charges for us, right?

00:47:43.420 - 00:47:59.460

In the weeks ahead is to begin to present that picture of that broad Byrd's eye view concerning how the scope and nature of black life at the university has shifted.

00:48:01.390 - 00:48:10.610

Well, thank you for sharing that and thanks to Dr. Cox for lighting the way for us in this essay. We have a few minutes to take some questions.

00:48:10.610 - 00:48:20.550

If you have a question for us about either of the documents you can click on the Q and A bubbles at the bottom of the Zoom screen and we'll see if we can answer some of them

00:48:20.550 - 00:48:34.880

either here or later. We have, I guess, more of a comment than a question, about how it would be interesting to see if the situation with regard to women owning enslaved people was different

00:48:34.880 - 00:48:45.790

in community property states, like Texas. That's a really helpful suggestion. Yeah. To see, it was very different in Louisiana just across the state line from Texas.

00:48:45.790 - 00:48:55.970

And so just as these documents in these deed records exist differently in different counties and different states depending on the laws and legal practices

00:48:55.970 - 00:49:10.040

of that jurisdiction in the same way. We need to know a little bit more about the laws surrounding deeds of gift and trustees and women being trustees of why it was

00:49:10.040 - 00:49:24.490

that Frank and William could not own enslaved people outright in their minority. And what was the age of maturity where a young man could own enslaved property outright?

00:49:26.240 - 00:49:38.100

So those are all excellent questions for us to pursue in thinking about in thinking about a document like this one (indistinct) Jan West, our colleague

00:49:38.100 - 00:49:52.840

from the Steering Committee raises in the Q and A, I think offering another point of departure for moments of reflection. That's the first time my daughter has made it

00:49:52.840 - 00:50:01.480

into the Doc Talk. I'm very proud of that. She's usually hyper careful during these moments. You never know

00:50:01.480 - 00:50:09.840

what you're going to see when you come to a Doc Talk and that's that's why we encourage you all to please talk about it. That's the first rule of Doc Talk,

00:50:09.840 - 00:50:22.310

is talk about Doc Talk, share what we're doing with your circles, your colleagues, your friends and let them know we're here every Friday at noon.

00:50:22.310 - 00:50:34.300

And we've been saying it for the last few weeks but we're getting very close now to releasing the podcast that will provide recordings of our past Doc Talks.

00:50:34.300 - 00:50:49.460

And so if you go to our website: taskforce.rice.edu/doctalks keep your eye on that page because we will be posting podcast episodes along with links to the documents that we've been discussing

00:50:49.460 - 00:51:02.650

so that you can look at them up close. Thanks again, for your interest in the Taskforce and for your attendance today. Let me add, Dr. McDaniel,

00:51:02.650 - 00:51:18.810

just to make sure I get Jan West's point out is that one of the moments that she's offering that we also need to look at as a kind of hallmark moment where black students and alumni

00:51:18.810 - 00:51:28.900

and faculty and staff are coming together to reflect on the university is the documentary "Young, Gifted and Black: Reflections of Rice University Black Alumni."

00:51:28.900 - 00:51:38.750

And I encourage you, you can actually, it's produced by the university. And I almost, I think I actually know the name of production company

00:51:38.750 - 00:51:49.720

but I hesitate to state it in case I'm wrong. But if you, if you look up, if you Google "Young, Gifted and Black" you can find the full documentary on YouTube.

00:51:49.720 - 00:52:01.570

And I encourage you. I encourage you to take a look. I see, there's also one other question from Norma about the very specific color distinctions

00:52:01.570 - 00:52:12.540

that were used in the deed. And that does open up a lot of questions that we could think about both why those color distinctions were there

00:52:12.540 - 00:52:23.660

in the document from the perspective of a property holder like Rice or Nichols, you know, that would've been important as a way of identifying people.

00:52:23.660 - 00:52:36.200

But at the same time historians can read those color distinctions against the grain and think about what they tell us about the sexual economy of the Antebellum South

00:52:36.200 - 00:52:55.310

and the ways that those distinctions might give us some insight into the experiences of enslaved women as survivors of sexual assault. Some of the people in that particular deed

00:52:55.310 - 00:53:02.990

were mentioned as of yellow complexion for example. Yellow complexion. And there's other deed records that Rice enters into the youth

00:53:02.990 - 00:53:12.730

that use some even more specific designations like (Dr. McDaniel's speaks French) which is a French word that was frequently used in Louisiana.

00:53:12.730 - 00:53:31.160

That was again, supposed to kind of communicate a certain quantum of blackness, I guess, is the best imperfect way of saying something about what was really a very twisted system

00:53:31.160 - 00:53:46.660

of racial classification. But when you see people or children who are described as of of yellow complexion, it does indicate perhaps that white men were among their forebears.

00:53:46.660 - 00:54:02.620

And, you know, it's another window onto commodification in this period to see that the laws of slavery at the time held that the the children of enslaved women would themselves be enslaved.

00:54:02.620 - 00:54:17.260

And so it, that's another reason it talks about sometimes the transfer not just to the enslaved woman but of her increase to a particular property holder because any children that she would have would also belong

00:54:17.260 - 00:54:30.440

to the person who owned the mother. I can't remember if that deed mentioned increase. It may have, but it again sort of spotlights how on the one hand property is being given to Frank

00:54:30.440 - 00:54:48.030

and William for their heirs forever and in perpetuity. So a wealth is being inherited by Nichols's sons while on the other hand, enslaved status as being inherited by women like Lucy and Ellen.

00:54:48.390 - 00:54:58.730

So thank you for that great question. That's obviously a huge subject that I'm not sure I did justice to just in a few minutes but I think it's important to note.

00:54:58.730 - 00:55:09.080

Oh, remarkably challenging and sobering document. I think both of them Yes. in ways today.

00:55:09.080 - 00:55:25.970

you look at Professor Cox documented and you can see that the unfolding and a kind of long-ish history of black students, faculty and staff asking questions and making suggestions

00:55:26.080 - 00:55:38.640

about how to make this a better university. Okay. Well, thank you all so much for being here for your questions, and I hope to see you again next time

00:55:38.640 - 00:55:43.990

at the next Doc Talk. Have a great weekend, Dr. Byrd. Take care of Dr. McDaniel, See you.