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Welcome to our Doc Talk. We're going to wait just a minute or two to give everyone who's coming a chance to join the Zoom. While we're waiting, can I make a comment?

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Of course. That is a good looking jacket. (laughs) I'm just trying to keep up with you, Dr. Byrd. We don't often dress this well for Doc Talk.

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Well, this is a special Doc Talk. Of course, this week is the Altogether events. And from all I've heard, it's been a great week. There has been some outstanding events.

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There was one that the Woodson Research Center put on Monday night that I attended, about the task force and about the research that's happening in the library. And it was well attended and well done, as well.

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So I'm just thrilled to hear that so many community members and alumni have been coming back to learn about what's happening at Rice and connect, even, in this virtual space with old friends

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and the faculty. It's been a great week. Yeah, agreed. Altogether looks to be going really well.

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I participated in an Aruba Function a couple nights ago and had the opportunity to talk a little bit about the task force. And it's just, all things considered,

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I think it's been a great week. Well, kudos to all of the people in the alumni office and the Association of Rice Alumni for putting on this event and spotlighting our Doc Talk

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as part of the Altogether schedule. As you said, we don't often wear jackets to these but we do do these very regularly. I think this is our eighth Doc Talk,

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if I'm counting right. And every Friday at noon Central, you can join this same Zoom link. It doesn't have to be an Altogether week.

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We hope you'll come back in future weeks, as well. On our Doc Talks every Friday, we take this lunch hour to pull up some documents from the research that the Task Force on Slavery,

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Segregation, and Racial Injustice is doing, to talk about them. It's very much a work-in-progress kind of conversation. The goal of these is not to give the final word

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on the documents that we're looking at, but to raise questions about them and sort of open up what the work of historians looks like as it's happening in real time.

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And of course, we're aware that you might not always be able to join these Doc Talks live, but we've also been working on producing recordings of the Doc Talks into a podcast.

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And so, I think, Dr. Byrd, you were going to point out that and maybe some other things that our audience could find about the task force on our website?

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Yeah, I wanted to, I'll share my screen for a moment here, if I can make it all work. And so, hopefully you're now seeing the screen. But I just wanna take about three minutes for our visitors,

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just to give you an idea how you can stay in touch with the work of the task force. And so, there's our URL to our website, taskforce.rice.edu. And whenever you go there,

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you'll see the events that we have forthcoming. You'll see, already, that November 5th, next week, we have a webinar on the legal battle over desegregating Rice.

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And so, we really hope that all of you who are able to be with us here today will also join us on November 5th. On that website, you can also reach some of

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our past programming efforts, Movements, Monuments and Racism on Campus being the first. And the two most recent ones being two panels on the black experience at Rice, from an alumni perspective

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and from a black student perspective. And all of those are recorded. So if you don't make the webinars live, you can see them on the university's YouTube channel.

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And here, of course, is the link to our weekly webinars. Just point to that every Friday and you'll get right here. And here is the link to the podcast that Dr. McDaniel was speaking about.

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And that link, as the podcasts go up, you'll be able to listen to them. We're very glad to have our very first webinar now out as a podcast, called "A Photo and a Mortgage."

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So take a look at that. A look and a listen. And we really have to- A look and a listen. We have to express our thanks

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to our undergraduate media fellows in the task force who have been helping us with producing that podcast. And also, Kate Coley from the Association of Rice Alumni.

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And so, we're excited to see those episodes starting to come out. Hopefully, eventually, you'll be able to get them from your podcast provider of choice.

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But I think we have to have a few episodes on the web before we can push them out to things like Spotify and iTunes, but that's our goal. So we hope that you will listen in

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and participate in this ongoing conversation. I think we forgot to introduce ourselves, but we are the co-chairs of the Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice.

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And we're very grateful for your interest in the work that we're doing, and excited to give you a glimpse of some of the documents that we're looking at as a group.

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So why don't we jump right in? And I can share some very recent research that I was doing in the Woodson Research Center yesterday. And what I was looking at was a book of letters

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written to and by William Marsh Rice in 1900. And if you know your William Marsh Rice lore, then you know that that means that these are letters from the very end of his life,

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because in September of 1900, he was murdered. And so these books contain letters from the last months of William Marsh Rice's life. And you can see a picture of the books here.

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Basically, they're scrapbooks. You can see in the top of that photo that they're sort of a black scrapbook. And then in the spine, there are little pieces of paper

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so that the owner of the scrapbook could take the letters, put them between those two little pieces of paper, and paste them into the book. And so it became a way

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of collecting correspondence over time. And then at the end of the book, there would be an index where you could keep track of which page had the letters that you needed to find later.

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So you can imagine, for a businessmen like Rice, keeping track of correspondence was very important because that's where all of the deals that he entered into were made.

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And by this time, correspondence was especially important to him because he was living in New York City, he was on Madison Avenue, but he still had a lot of business connections to Houston and Texas.

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And so a lot of these letters from 1900 deal with his correspondence with friends and business partners back in Texas, where he still owned a lot of real estate

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and was increasingly interested in clarifying his assets in Texas because of his plans to leave the bulk of his estate to the board of the Rice Institute. And so, these are important letters for that reason.

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They're also important because, or I wanted to look at them because they promised, maybe, to give a window into Rice's thinking in 1900, at the end of his life,

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about a variety of matters. And so I went into the Woodson Research Center yesterday and got my hands dirty, literally, on these books, because they're very old and they've collected dust

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and aren't looked at very frequently. I have to say, I was somewhat frustrated in my effort to find out much about William Marsh Rice's personal views about things because

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the bulk of the correspondence are very short letters dealing with his business. So this is kind of a typical one that came from his nephew, Benjamin Botts Rice, who was also a member of

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the board of the Rice Institute, the first board, and who was an officer in the Merchants and Planters oil company. You can see the letterhead at the top of this page.

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And you can see, also, a picture, a sketch of what the buildings of this particular mill looked like around this time. It's a very industrial scene, with smokestacks.

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And then there's a sort of a ship down on the bayou that's connected to the warehouse of the mill by a tunnel where goods could be shipped up and down from this ship,

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and then produced in the factory. Basically what they were doing was they were taking cotton seed and they were rendering that cotton seed into a variety of different products.

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Some of them are listed over here, on the right. Cotton seed oil, oil cake, meal and linters, soap and glycerin. And at the top, you can also see that the vice-president

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was James A. Baker, Jr., Captain Baker, who, of course, was also William Marsh Rice's lawyer and a member the first board of the Rice Institute. But this letter is good- I'm going to be Googling

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oil cake, Dr. McDaniel. (Daniel laughing) If it looks like I've looked down, that's why. Oil cake, yeah. Let me know. (laughs)

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Okay. In this letter, Benjamin Botts Rice is basically informing William Marsh Rice, who was one of the largest stockholders in this company,

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about an inquiry that Rice had made about cotton bailing in Texas, and a new method of bailing cotton in round bales. And it seems like we could kind of infer from this letter

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that Rice was wondering whether that would impact the cotton seed supply, and that would impact this cotton seed industrial plant that he was invested in. And so, Benjamin Botts Rice is writing back to say,

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"As far as we can tell, this new way of bailing cotton "isn't really gonna affect our business." But most of the letters in this book are along these lines. They're either Rice asking questions about

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a piece of land or dealing with negotiations about one of the business that he has a stake in. A lot of the letters, a lot of the letters, were about installing an elevator

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in the Capital Hotel in downtown Houston, because Rice owned the building, and the lessee who ran the hotel and the building wanted him to lay out the money to replace the elevator.

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And Rice was sort of notorious as kind of a skin flint and he didn't to replace the elevator. And so there's a lot of back and forth correspondence about that in the letters.

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But there's not really a lot about how Rice thought about things outside of business. And in fact, in one of the few exceptions to that, which was a personal letter that he wrote to his sister,

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Charlotte Rice McKee, in 1900, this is in June, 1900, he commented on that fact. He said that, "I seldom write social letters. "I have my hands and mind pretty full."

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And so he says, "I seldom write other than business letters." And I found that to be true. (laughs) And there's very little of a social nature

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in these letter books. Most of them are business letters. And he goes on to defend his forward-looking approach to things.

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It seems like his sister has been writing him some reminiscent letters about their childhood and about their family life. And he says, "Thoughts of the past may absorb

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"and interest us, but do not make us happy. "It is the great future which brings no regret." And so he, I think, is there saying that he'd rather write about his business

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and the future than to look back on the past. And of course, they're both aging now, he and his sister. And so, I think in some respects, as an older man, he's wrestling with the aging process,

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and does it make him happy to look back or not? But despite that line, he does say on the next page, he talks a little bit about his brother, Frederick A. Rice also a member of the first board of the Rice Institute.

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And he does report on Fred's age. And he says, "Fred was born in 1830 "and came to Texas in 1850." So, despite what he says on the first page,

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he is looking back to some extent and sharing some memories and reminiscences of his family and of Texas from before the Civil War, when both he and his brother moved from Massachusetts,

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as we've seen in previous Doc Talks, to live and work in Houston. There's also some other evidence in the letter book. And I promise, I'm getting to the letter

00:14:16.910 - 00:14:26.950

that I really wanna talk about in a minute, but I think this is important- This is all part of the one document. It's all part of this letter book from 1900.

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And it's interesting that some of the letters do talk about the past and talk about his history. This is a letter from the recording secretary of the Texas State Historical Association,

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which is still in existence today, but was founded around 1897, and began, in 1898, publishing a quarterly journal of articles written by local historians,

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people who had lived through the history. You can see here, Francis R Lubbock, who was a former governor of the state of Texas, was a vice president of the association.

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And in this letter, it becomes clear that William Marsh Rice was a member of the Texas State Historical Association. He had paid the membership dues and subscribed to the quarterly.

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And here in June, 1900, he's receiving some bound copies of the first two volumes of this quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association. And there's some-

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Can I say something quickly, Dr. McDaniel? Please If you'd scroll back just a little, I want... I'm going to use this line in the second paragraph

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where the writer from the Texas State Historical Association is explaining his tardiness. So I'm taking a picture of that, because I plan on... "It is useless to try to offer reasons

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"for our delay in this matter." (laughs) I just should just put that in my signature on my emails, just to cover up- There are none sufficient from a business standpoint.

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Yeah. You can kind of read between the lines there, perhaps, that Mr. Garrison, in this case, has gotten some sternly worded letters from William Marsh Rice,

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who was known to write some pretty prickly letters. And in fact was kind of an icy personality, especially when it came to his not getting what he had paid for.

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And so here, he finally is receiving these journals. But I think it's interesting that here, in 1900, despite what he said to his sister about not looking back on the past

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and only looking to the future, he was clearly interested in reading about and investing in the history of Texas and the study of these early years

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that he had spent in the state. And there's some other evidence that he was still connected to people that he knew from that time,

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people that he knew from the antebellum years, even here at the very end of his life. This is a letter, for example, from Charles T. Adams. And that's interesting because, on the very first Doc Talk

00:17:21.370 - 00:17:36.410

that we did, Dr. Byrd, we looked at a mortgage deed involving enslaved people that William Marsh Rice and his business partner, Charles Adams, entered into with James Love and Alfred T. Burnley.

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And this is that Charles Adams' son, I believe, rather than the original Charles Adams. But it shows that Rice was still in contact with some of the relatives and actual business partners

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from his antebellum years. In this case, Charles T. Adams is talking about sending William Marsh Rice a gift of some world maps to hang on his wall.

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And also, he's including a little map of the South African republic that he's sending, as well. So I just thought that was interesting why William Marsh Rice was interested in having maps.

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Perhaps we can imagine him reading his Texas State Historical Association Quarterly, and then turning to the maps on his wall to reference different locations and think about the past.

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One more letter before I get to the main one. And this is also from someone that he knew from antebellum Texas, H.R. Marx, who, like William Marsh Rice, was from the North.

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He was born in New York, but moved to Texas in the 1830s and made his fortune there. In Marx's case, he fought in the Confederate Army. And he returned to New York after the Civil War,

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and William Marsh Rice also moved to New York after the Civil War. But they clearly remained in touch with each other. And in this particular letter,

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William Marsh Rice is saying that... He's talking about some developments around the city of Austin. And he asks whether this particular place

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is about the location where some people that they all knew, including Marx himself, quote, "Fought the Indians in 1839. "Can you remember that far back?

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"And are you and I the only persons left from so long ago?" I think it's sort of an evocative question, again, that suggests that Rice was reflecting on his past and thinking about, in his old age,

00:19:40.140 - 00:19:56.050

who was still around, who could remember those times. So all of that shows that even though most of the letters in these ledger books are business-related, if you go through them page by page and turn every page,

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you do find little glimpses of the way that William Marsh Rice thought about other things. And some suggestion that in this year, in particular, he was thinking about the past,

00:20:07.360 - 00:20:17.270

thinking about history, and his history in particular, in Texas. And all of that is, to me, as a historian, interesting context for this letter,

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which is what I really wanna focus on, from May, 1900. And it's a letter sent to W.G. Rucker in Groesbeck, Texas. And Rucker, we learned from other letters in this book, was an attorney and a real estate agent who was managing

00:20:36.220 - 00:20:46.890

some of Rice's landholdings in the state and dealing with debtors and creditors, paying bills for Rice. And in this particular letter,

00:20:46.890 - 00:21:01.660

we out that Rucker was responsible for selling cotton that was grown on some land that William Marsh Rice still owned. And it's clear from this letter that there's been

00:21:01.820 - 00:21:14.540

some disagreement between Rucker and Rice about when to sell the cotton. And I'm just gonna read the second part of this letter. It says, this is Rice to Rucker,

00:21:14.540 - 00:21:28.080

"They have had terrible rains, as you say, "but it is not likely it will happen soon again. "Everybody was scared last year at the low price of cotton, "but it did not remain down long.

00:21:28.080 - 00:21:42.690

"Persons controlling or owning cotton should be prepared "to take care of it and let it lay. "The lower it drops, the greater the advance." And then he concludes, "I have been familiar

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"and handled more or less cotton for more than 50 years. "Yours, W.M.R." I read that last line, speaking of that kind of icy personality sometimes.

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He had almost a flex. He's kind of saying, "I'm the one who knows "what he's talking about when it comes to cotton, "because I've been handling cotton for more than 50 years."

00:22:08.070 - 00:22:19.660

And we've talked in previous Doc Talks about how Rice made his fortune in Texas as a commission merchant and the cotton factor, selling cotton for planters around Houston

00:22:19.660 - 00:22:30.570

in exchange for supplies and lines of credit that he would extend to them. He could then sell the cotton on commission. So he did have a lot of familiarity with this.

00:22:30.570 - 00:22:42.270

And he also seemed to think that it was important to be able to play the markets. If you had a crop of cotton and you were worried the price was low, maybe because there had been

00:22:42.270 - 00:22:53.950

a lot of rains, you needed to be able to store that cotton until the market returned and you could sell the cotton at a better price. But what's really interesting about this letter is that

00:22:53.950 - 00:23:06.900

after he signed off on that, if you zoom in, you can see that he's added an interesting post-script here. And he's run out of room on the page, so he starts writing at the bottom of the page

00:23:06.900 - 00:23:18.810

and then he turns the letter and he writes all around the outside edges of this little piece of paper a postscript about a memory that he has

00:23:18.810 - 00:23:26.870

from antebellum Texas. And when this- We have arrived. We've gotten to the part that I think is really relevant

00:23:26.870 - 00:23:40.530

to our work as a task force, because in this postscript, he refers to African-American laborers, enslaved people from antebellum, Texas.

00:23:40.530 - 00:23:50.960

Of course, he doesn't use any of those words in this postscript. He refers to this group of people repeatedly in this postscript as, quote, "Negroes."

00:23:50.960 - 00:24:02.320

And I'm going to, when I read the postscript, paraphrase a little bit, so as not to just continually repeat that word, that of course we would not use today

00:24:02.320 - 00:24:12.640

to talk about African-American people. But I think it's important that that's the word he uses repeatedly in this postscript. And he does it to reflect back on

00:24:12.640 - 00:24:30.420

what was his view, and what was the general prevailing view, of enslaved people in Texas before the Civil War. And so he says, "In 1842 or thereabouts, "cotton was hauled from Bastrop to Houston

00:24:30.420 - 00:24:48.260

"by teams and sold for four and a half cents good cotton." I'm craning my head here, Dr. Byrd, to read it because it's going up the right side of the edge. Well, you've got that very nifty rotate the PDF

00:24:48.260 - 00:24:53.260

over there- That's true. If you'd wanna. Let me try that. Take advantage of the programming.

00:24:53.260 - 00:24:57.500

Nope, that's- Oh, maybe not. That's messing- The old fashioned ways are best.

00:24:57.500 - 00:25:03.440

Oh, wait, no, it did do it. It did do it. Okay. So he says, "The cotton was hauled

00:25:03.440 - 00:25:19.890

"and sold for four and a half cents, good cotton. "Enslaved labor," he then adds, "Did not cost much, "only to feed the enslaved people "and give them a course cotton suit,

00:25:21.240 - 00:25:28.980

"which the enslaved people made." (Dr. Byrd humming) And then the last line he says, and here I will quote him directly,

00:25:28.980 - 00:25:55.800

"In those days, raising Negroes was the most profitable." The end, and it sort of trails off there. So, I guess one question to start with is, why this postscript that is so important

00:25:55.800 - 00:26:09.220

that he's going to encircle the entire letter with it, right? Can't mail it without this. Didn't look at the page and say, "I'm out of room,

00:26:09.220 - 00:26:22.050

"I think I'll just send it." So what are you thinking? Well, I had the same thought that, given that what I've been saying about

00:26:22.050 - 00:26:35.630

how rarely Rice does go beyond the business details that he's writing about in the correspondence, it kind of adds an additional significance that he took the time to write out this recollection.

00:26:35.630 - 00:26:44.700

I mean, I showed you basically the handful of times in the whole books, there's actually five volumes of these letters from 1900, where he reflect on the past

00:26:45.760 - 00:26:58.320

or he does refer back to those pre-war days in Texas. And so, it's interesting just because of the scarcity of those comments that he took the time to add this postscript.

00:26:58.320 - 00:27:10.220

But I think that's a good question that I'm not sure I have the full answer to, why, in this particular letter, he decided to put that postscript in.

00:27:11.510 - 00:27:23.550

It does seem to have something to do with the discussions he's been having with Rucker about cotton and the sale of the cotton that Rucker was trying to place on the market for him.

00:27:24.550 - 00:27:35.960

One of the things I would do as a historian, if I found a letter like this, and speaking truthfully, I came to these books because there was a note in the Andrew Forest Muir papers

00:27:35.960 - 00:27:47.840

that referred to this letter from Rucker and quoted in part from that postscript. And so, Will Jones, who's the postdoctoral research associate working for the task force

00:27:47.840 - 00:27:57.350

in the Woodson managed to track down the letter in this book. But I wanted to go to the letters around the letter and see, is there any context that would explain

00:27:57.350 - 00:28:11.410

why he's talking about slavery from the 1840s? And I did find that there was correspondence from W.G. Rucker, the recipient of that letter from earlier in the year

00:28:11.410 - 00:28:22.590

where he's trying to get Rice to make a decision about selling this cotton. You can see here, he tells Rice in January of 1900 that, "The weather continued wet so long

00:28:22.590 - 00:28:34.050

"I fear our cotton will damage and less sheltered. "I very much doubt the wisdom of holding longer, "unless it is shipped, "and this I don't believe would prove profitable.

00:28:34.050 - 00:28:45.840

"However, if you think best, I will ship it." So he's trying to find out from Rice what to do with this cotton. And there's a little note on the back of that letter,

00:28:45.840 - 00:28:57.590

where Rice basically says, "Go ahead and sell it, "but I understand it won't be profitable. "I'm just telling you to sell it because "there's no easy way to shelter it

00:28:57.590 - 00:29:09.870

"that wouldn't be very expensive at this point." And that gives some context for his later comment to Rucker that anyone who grows cotton ought to be prepared to shelter it for long periods

00:29:09.870 - 00:29:20.330

of time to keep it from getting wet. So that's in the background of that letter, that Rice is having this debate with Rucker about when to sell the cotton, whether to shelter it.

00:29:20.330 - 00:29:32.660

And there's also this letter from February of 1900 where Rucker reports on the price that he got for the cotton. He says, "Enclosed herewith, I send you a copy of statement.

00:29:32.660 - 00:29:48.440

"I got $0.07 for the cotton." And later on, he also adds that he's kept a little money on hand to make some advances to some tenants, about $800. "We'll report it a little later on,

00:29:48.440 - 00:29:58.680

"don't know just how much the advances will be yet." Okay, so the chronology's interesting here because that's a letter from February, and then Rice is writing back to Rucker in May

00:29:59.730 - 00:30:13.270

about the price of cotton. And so one question I have in my mind is, is there something about this comment about the tenants that prompts Rice to think about African-American

00:30:13.270 - 00:30:24.880

enslaved labor from before the Civil War? Because in that postscript, you remember, he talks about what the price for cotton was in 1842, four and a half cents.

00:30:24.880 - 00:30:35.880

So maybe that's a response in some way to what Rucker says here about the seven cents he got. But he also talked in that letter about how the lower it drops, the greater the advance,

00:30:35.880 - 00:30:48.160

if you remember that line. And here, Rucker's talking about holding some money to make advances to some tenants, I'm assuming tenant farmers, on Rice's land.

00:30:48.160 - 00:31:00.840

Perhaps the farmers who were actually growing this cotton. It's not clear from this letter whether those tenants were themselves black farmers, but that's a question that this correspondence

00:31:00.840 - 00:31:14.580

has raised for me. And it might shed some light on why Rice decides, sort of out of nowhere, in a way, to bring up the history of slavery in Texas

00:31:14.690 - 00:31:27.700

and his memory of what it cost to have enslaved labor growing cotton in the 1840s in Texas. So I think the question for us as historians

00:31:27.700 - 00:31:35.620

or as a task force, with this letter, it's clearly an important document because it speaks to Rice's thoughts at the very end of his life.

00:31:36.460 - 00:31:48.920

One question that many people often ask when we're talking about William Marsh Rice is, how did he think about things like slavery and segregation? Did his thinking about those things evolve over time?

00:31:49.810 - 00:32:01.580

Did he think one way before the Civil War and then think differently at the end of his life? Was he thinking differently at the end of his life, even, than he was when he chartered the Rice Institute

00:32:01.580 - 00:32:13.830

for the white inhabitants of Houston? I think all of those questions about change over time versus continuity are important ones for us to address. And so this letter speaks to that in some way,

00:32:13.830 - 00:32:24.300

but you can kind of see by how much I've had to contextualize it, that it's a difficult source to draw some firm conclusions about. My question, I guess, is sort of,

00:32:24.300 - 00:32:44.430

what's the least that we can conclude from this and what's the most that we can conclude from this? I think, clearly, one of the things that we see continued, or at least a theme that we see continued

00:32:44.430 - 00:33:01.320

in a lot of our work with Rice's material is this continuing theme of commodification of black people. Right. Right, thinking of them in terms of profit,

00:33:04.120 - 00:33:17.520

thinking of them in terms of the ways in which they add to his portfolio. I'm gonna do a thing that historians shouldn't do and just kind of make a...

00:33:19.560 - 00:33:30.430

Well, we should think out loud. But it's not a conclusion, right? If the $800 advance from... One question is, is that $800 advance,

00:33:30.430 - 00:33:47.470

would Rice had considered that steep, right? And if he would have considered it steep, is part of this postscript speaking to A, how valuable black laborers were in slavery.

00:33:48.300 - 00:33:59.550

and B, how little investment it took to get that value out of them, right? That cotton was this much. You didn't have to put that much into them.

00:33:59.550 - 00:34:11.730

You had the clothe them, but get this, you just had to provide the course cloth. They would make the clothing to basically clothe themselves and then continuing on.

00:34:11.730 - 00:34:20.740

So that's one of the things that it brings to mind for me. Could be. So then maybe he's complaining that he's having to advance this money to these tenants.

00:34:20.740 - 00:34:27.400

Again, that's... It requires a speculation of sorts. We don't even know if the tenants are black, right? Right.

00:34:27.400 - 00:34:38.630

But it would maybe make this little postscript seem a little less disconnected from the rest of this correspondence with Rucker. It could be, too, that he's, in thinking about cotton,

00:34:38.630 - 00:34:52.120

and we know, from the other letters in the year, that he's been having these reminiscences of these days in Texas and he hasn't yet received his Texas Historical quarterlies when he wrote this letter,

00:34:52.120 - 00:35:06.470

but maybe he's expecting them. And maybe that helps explain the context, too, that he's just thinking back to the antebellum days, and in some ways how different the cotton market is now

00:35:06.470 - 00:35:18.930

than it was then. It would be making the same point, I think, that you're making, that he's saying that in those days, you, as a slave holder, could invest very little

00:35:18.930 - 00:35:29.980

in the maintenance of your labor force while still having a huge investment if you did own enslaved people. I mean, his comment at the end here that,

00:35:29.980 - 00:35:44.360

in those days, quote, unquote, "Raising Negroes was the most profitable," I think speaks to commodification, again, that it wasn't just that the cotton produced by

00:35:44.360 - 00:35:56.440

enslaved labor was profitable to people who cultivated cotton, but because that cotton was profitable, simply owning enslaved people could add to your portfolio,

00:35:56.440 - 00:36:06.410

as you say. And we've seen that in other documents in the Doc Talks. Even just last week, the fact that Rice gifted his half share in

00:36:06.410 - 00:36:18.180

a particular enslaved woman to the son of a business partner, that speaks to the fact that enslaved property made up the wealth of people like William Marsh Rice

00:36:18.180 - 00:36:32.080

and his business associates in the 1840s. So it doesn't seem that he, in reflecting back on this time, is kind of questioning the morality of that. He's more thinking about the economics of it

00:36:33.140 - 00:36:43.930

and thinking about how that's changed in the present, and it's something that people growing cotton now have to deal with, playing the market and trying to get the best price they can,

00:36:43.930 - 00:36:53.350

doing every little thing like sheltering their cotton from the rain to make sure they can get the best price. So it's hard to tell if this is kind of a wistful recollection.

00:36:54.920 - 00:37:04.870

And again, we could say, what's the least we can draw? It's certainly not evidence of some shifting moral view on Rice's part about what he had been engaged in

00:37:04.870 - 00:37:14.170

before the war. Yeah. That's my document. That was a good doc.

00:37:19.010 - 00:37:25.030

(laughs) There's a lot there. And I could go on. There's other letters in the book that I think warrant our discussion

00:37:25.030 - 00:37:31.940

and consideration, too. But I'm curious just to hear what you've brought to talk about. Okay.

00:37:31.940 - 00:37:51.850

Well, I'm going to go back to the well one more time on "The State of Black Rice." And our viewers who weren't here last week can get some background on this event from February of 1990

00:37:53.530 - 00:38:04.720

by following that URL. It'll take you to the thresher. But I wanna return to this document. And before I do, remind people that this comes from

00:38:04.720 - 00:38:21.160

the Chandler Davidson papers at the Woodson Research Center, and Dr. Davidson is professor emeritus of sociology at the university, and a long time advocate of black students and black life at the university.

00:38:21.160 - 00:38:33.820

Last week, we focused on Professor Edward Cox's contribution to this volume, "The State of Black Rice." And to remind people, it consists of

00:38:33.820 - 00:38:44.960

collections of very short essays written by faculty and staff and students, reflecting on the present condition of blacks at the university, but also casting forward

00:38:44.960 - 00:39:01.340

and making recommendations about what the university can and should do and what black students and alumni and faculty and staff can and could do to improve black life on campus.

00:39:01.340 - 00:39:15.140

We focused a good deal last week on Professor Cox's recommendation about the institution of a presidential level task force and the ways in which Dr. Cox's recommendation

00:39:16.740 - 00:39:35.210

kind of foretells the work we're involved with now. Today, I'm gonna focus on an essay that was presented by Professor Atieno Odhiambo. Professor Odhiambo, like professor Cox,

00:39:35.210 - 00:39:50.260

represents this kind of second wave of black faculty at the university. Professor Odhiambo was professor of history at Rice. He came to Rice after a visiting position at Stanford.

00:39:50.260 - 00:40:08.120

And before that, had spent some time at your old stomping grounds, the Johns Hopkins University. So he comes to Rice as a historian of Africa, and East Africa in particular.

00:40:08.120 - 00:40:24.020

Professor Odhiambo was from Kenya, educated at Macquarie University in Uganda, got his PhD from the University of Nairobi. There are three years between the awarding

00:40:24.020 - 00:40:42.830

of his first degree and his PhD. Always like to say that whenever I can. And these are some of the examples of his scholarship. He was particularly interested in

00:40:44.050 - 00:41:06.100

the place of knowledge and local knowledges in post-colonial and independence politics in Africa. So I highly recommend his work to you. As a youngster, "Siaya" just kind of blew my mind.

00:41:07.000 - 00:41:23.830

And I think if folks in our audience take a look at it, their minds will probably be blown, as well. But here is Dr. Odhiambo's contribution to "The State of Black Rice."

00:41:23.830 - 00:41:40.860

And I'll run quickly over the things that he calls for. One, like Dr. Cox, he calls attention to the fact that diversity and the coming diversity of the university should be understood as

00:41:40.860 - 00:41:55.620

a central part of its mission, and something that could potentially make Rice into a great university. He suggests that the administration,

00:41:56.980 - 00:42:15.360

he uses this word, pay regular attention to the retention of minority faculty that are on campus now. He moves from there to making some recommendations concerning the pipeline of minority faculty on campus.

00:42:16.210 - 00:42:29.000

So, makes a suggestion about using fellowships and post-docs to create a kind of pool of minority faculty who would be introduced to Rice and would be interested in, perhaps,

00:42:29.000 - 00:42:44.970

working or teaching here. Also make a recommendation about the university considering funding undergraduate students who are interested in earning their PhDs,

00:42:44.970 - 00:43:05.170

and sending them out to other universities to get those. He recommends that the university take seriously its ability, and also, I think he would use, responsibility to be a community center on campus,

00:43:05.170 - 00:43:24.540

to be a place where minority citizens of the city of Houston would feel like they had a place there to present their own work. And he made a similar point about Black and Brown people

00:43:25.560 - 00:43:38.380

worldwide, and the importance of bringing high achievers and people in the arts and sciences who had made great achievements in their fields all over the world.

00:43:38.380 - 00:43:51.450

It's a very global perspective here, in his sixth point, and featuring and highlighting the work of those people at Rice. And his last point underlined the importance

00:43:51.450 - 00:44:05.870

of Rice investing in what he saw and he thought the university should see as the importance of the current moment, right? And for him, he pays particular attention

00:44:05.870 - 00:44:19.410

to what was going on in South Africa in the late '80s and the early '90s, and the birth of this racial democracy, or what he saw as the potential to develop

00:44:20.570 - 00:44:39.610

a profoundly important racial democracy in Southern Africa. And as an aside, I'll say that professor Odhiambo attracted and educated South African PhDs to come to Rice. And so, that's the basis of his work.

00:44:42.990 - 00:44:54.000

And I wanna spend maybe about two minutes talking some about what I find interesting about it. One, it's incredibly cogent, right? He's got these seven points, he's gonna lay them out for us.

00:44:54.000 - 00:45:00.830

He even says who should do each action, it's- Yes, right. In case there's any confusion, right? (laughs) The only thing that's missing here

00:45:00.830 - 00:45:08.120

is some price tags, right? If he really, right? That would be the next step, just to be clear.

00:45:09.640 - 00:45:23.470

And this also, Dr. Cox does this as well, right? He doesn't do it as directly in his essay as Professor Odhiambo does in his, but you might recall that Professor Cox says,

00:45:23.470 - 00:45:34.640

"There needs to be clear lines of responsibility "about who's going to do what," in terms of improving black life at Rice, and that folks need to be held accountable

00:45:34.640 - 00:45:49.440

is the language that Professor Cox used in his essay. But one of the things I find interesting, you see I've cut this document up, that at least four and maybe five

00:45:49.440 - 00:46:05.000

of Dr. Odhiambo's recommendations are extraordinarily structural. They're really four points that are interlocked and do many of the same things.

00:46:05.340 - 00:46:17.780

His charges are all focused on the heart of how a university does business. And I may have gone too far, now that I've said that, because the question I have for our audience

00:46:17.780 - 00:46:36.490

and also for us to discuss that I think is fruitful, is there's a theory of the university that Professor Odhiambo is either drawing from or arguing for in the way that he he's made these points.

00:46:36.490 - 00:46:49.670

He has a theory about what matters most at a university that I think we and folks in the audience can agree or disagree about. But he's made some choices about,

00:46:49.670 - 00:47:02.610

if you're going to improve black life at Rice, he's clearly made some choices of where those investments should be. And one of the things that I think is interesting

00:47:02.610 - 00:47:14.660

for people on the task force and people who are following the task force to consider here, is to engage what they see as the efficacy of this theory of the university

00:47:14.660 - 00:47:28.980

that is at least implicit in Professor Odhiambo's work here. So before you asked me a question, I'm gonna run and ask you a question. (laughs) Oh boy.

00:47:28.980 - 00:47:38.600

What do you think? I mean, what do you see is Dr. Odhiambo's theory of the university? And that's for people in the chat and the Q and A, as well.

00:47:38.600 - 00:47:50.040

And of course, it's a question for me, too. Well, I mean, he's talking about the organization having a responsibility, certain moral responsibilities.

00:47:50.040 - 00:48:01.610

So there's the academic functions that the university carries out, but it also has responsibilities, and moral responsibilities at that,

00:48:01.610 - 00:48:20.250

to produce students who will be certain kinds of citizens and will go out in the world to change the world. I'm struck by, at the end, how he says that bringing in, for example, South African students will prepare them

00:48:20.250 - 00:48:37.800

to serve their country better by the year 2000 and beyond. And here we are in that beyond time. And so, this also, I guess, makes me reflect back on asking how well Rice did the things

00:48:37.800 - 00:48:53.440

that have been proposed here, and what it can still do or do better to meet that same mission today? Absolutely. And I think it would be valuable, right?

00:48:53.440 - 00:49:07.880

Or it would be valuable to go through this point by point, Professor Cox's essay, as well, and see whether we can find aspects of the university's current programming

00:49:07.880 - 00:49:24.510

that speak to these. So for, Professor Odhiambo makes this proposal about funding undergraduates who are interested in the professoriate, right?

00:49:24.510 - 00:49:41.770

Who want to be scholars and teachers. And I imagine there are people in the audience, I know my mind goes to an important collaboration on campus, and that's the Mellon Mays Program.

00:49:42.360 - 00:49:58.560

Which was a program that Dr. Cox was the first lead on, and professor Roland Smith runs now. That's not a perfect mirror for what Odhiambo is proposing, but it's along those lines.

00:49:59.410 - 00:50:13.430

It invites that sort of comparison between what was laid out here and what followed it. So I think what I like about this document, Dr. Byrd, is it gives us a sense of the large scope

00:50:13.430 - 00:50:29.030

of the task force's work, that we're wrestling at one in the same time with letters from the 1900s that talk about the 1840s, and at the same time wrestling with documents like this

00:50:29.030 - 00:50:42.830

from the 1990s that envision the 2020s. So I think we have our work cut out for us. And this document shows chronologically, but also just conceptually,

00:50:42.830 - 00:50:57.160

the sorts of things that the task force is thinking about and investigating and preparing to make recommendations about, that's part of our charge as well, to learn what we can about the history of the university.

00:50:57.160 - 00:51:10.870

And then, just as Professor Odhiambo did, make recommendations about the future and see how we can become even better. And one of the things that strikes me

00:51:10.870 - 00:51:31.490

about Dr Odhiambo's recommendations is one, how structural they are, as I've already said. But two, and he's clearly privileged the faculty, right? He's clearly privileged the maintenance of a faculty,

00:51:31.690 - 00:51:50.980

the recruitment of a faculty in the work of the university. So he has these very important foci on community, and local community and world community. But it also seems he's operating with a theory

00:51:50.980 - 00:52:07.560

of the university that privileges the work of the faculty and what the faculty are able to accomplish. Right, right. We're gonna rush...

00:52:07.560 - 00:52:16.870

I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah, well, we just have a few minutes left, should we take some questions from our Q and A? Can I raise one question before we take a question?

00:52:16.870 - 00:52:29.870

And I just wanna do this, right? I just wanna show and to send people to, because one of the questions that Odhiambo's work raises for me is, what is the history of minority faculty

00:52:29.870 - 00:52:40.280

in general and black faculty in particular at the university? And we can start from now, right? And we should.

00:52:40.280 - 00:52:55.210

And work our way back and see where we've come from Odhiambo's time. And also, seeing the ways our faculty in comparison with our student body has changed

00:52:55.210 - 00:53:11.060

raises some of the structural issues that Dr. Odhiambo is trying to raise for us. And that, again, I think, speaks to the scope of our work and the kinds of things that we're considering.

00:53:12.260 - 00:53:21.840

So we would invite you, if you have questions, to drop them in the Q and A bubbles at the bottom. We just have a few minutes before the top of the hour to take a look at them,

00:53:21.840 - 00:53:33.690

but we would encourage you to reach out to us. Our emails are on the task force website, as well, if you have questions for us about our work. One of the questions here is about,

00:53:33.690 - 00:53:47.170

from an economics perspective, how much of Rice's property value was in enslaved people? And I think that's the kind of question that we are charged with trying to answer.

00:53:47.170 - 00:54:01.000

It's also one that's very difficult to answer. And the reason has to do partly with the ways that documents were preserved. Even though Rice was a stickler for his business

00:54:01.000 - 00:54:10.020

and preserved that correspondence that we saw at the first part of the Doc Talk, even there there's gaps in the correspondence. And in those letters that he writes to Rucker,

00:54:10.020 - 00:54:20.220

a few times he refers to letters that Rucker has written him, but they don't exist in the book. So there's gaps in the record that we have to deal with.

00:54:21.110 - 00:54:33.810

There's also the ways and places that Rice would have recorded the value of enslaved people, it depends on the particular business transaction that he was engaged in.

00:54:33.810 - 00:54:43.520

So we could look at tax records, for example, from the antebellum period for a particular year to get a snapshot, but that wouldn't necessarily tell us

00:54:43.520 - 00:54:58.770

about how Rice was benefiting from the use of enslaved people as collateral for loans that he was extending to people in the Houston area. So, in other words, you can see from that postscript

00:54:58.770 - 00:55:11.440

that we saw in the letter that the value of enslaved people to him financially went beyond just the people that he himself owned as property. If enslaved people were profitable, as he said,

00:55:11.440 - 00:55:25.460

then they could serve as assets in a variety of ways that would benefit his business dealing. So it's difficult to kind of put one number on that, but it is worth the effort to try to build

00:55:26.740 - 00:55:43.760

a picture of that. And so, it's one of the things we're working hard on. So we have a question that we can answer really quickly. What role does the task force have

00:55:43.760 - 00:55:56.120

in responding to student demands to remove Rice's statue from the quad? I'll just rush to say that that's an issue that's part of a larger issue

00:55:57.120 - 00:56:14.750

that the task force has taken on. And that is studying the racial geography, the racialized space of the university. And so, the statue falls within that

00:56:16.140 - 00:56:31.390

as something that, you'll see from our webinars and some of our public programming, that we are studying. But I also want to make clear that we see that as part of a larger work

00:56:31.390 - 00:56:49.100

about the physical plant of the university. And I think that our role is laid out in our charge on the website, that we can make recommendations as a task force and those recommendations then,

00:56:50.400 - 00:57:01.380

the decision making, if we kind of go back to Professor Odhiambo's letter, he lays out pretty clearly in his action items. Different parts of the university have to take up the action

00:57:01.380 - 00:57:12.530

to do different things. And that remains as true today as it was in 1991. But I think where we can play a role is in providing the kinds of historical context

00:57:13.500 - 00:57:25.410

that would inform both our recommendations and the decision-making of the university on a wide range of issues. And the way that the larger community

00:57:25.410 - 00:57:37.200

thinks about it themselves, but also the ways, we hope, the way the community engages with one another over these questions. That's so true.

00:57:37.200 - 00:57:48.220

I mean, one big part of our charge is to try to facilitate discussion about these issues: slavery, segregation, and racial injustice. And so, that's very much what we hope events like this one

00:57:48.220 - 00:58:01.160

with the Doc Talk, and also our webinars like the one that's coming up in about a week will do, is facilitate that sort of dialogue and conversation. And so, I'm just thrilled that we have so many people

00:58:01.160 - 00:58:13.650

who tuned in today to learn about the work that we're doing and to join that conversation. And we certainly don't want this to be the last time. We hope that you will come back to the Doc Talks,

00:58:13.650 - 00:58:27.430

that you'll reach out to us if you have additional questions or suggestions, and participate in this work and join these dialogues. While you were finishing,

00:58:27.430 - 00:58:36.680

I was typing a quick answer to a question. Okay. (laughs) But it looks like we're done. I think we're done.

00:58:36.680 - 00:58:47.370

I'm sorry that we didn't get to all of the questions, but I'll put in our chat, again, our website, taskforce.rice.edu. And hope that you'll check it out,

00:58:47.370 - 00:58:58.440

that you all tune into the podcast and the webinars, and that you will reach out to us if you have questions that didn't get answered, that we can answer for you.

00:58:58.440 - 00:59:08.340

Thanks again for joining the Doc Talk and hope to see you next Friday at the same time and in the same virtual place. Though, maybe not in jackets.

00:59:08.340 - 00:59:12.690

Maybe not in jackets, that's true. Have a great weekend, y'all. You, too.