How urban spaces can preserve history and build community | Walter Hood

95,494 views ・ 2018-08-31

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:13
How can landscapes imbue memory?
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When we think about this notion "e pluribus unum" --
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"out of many, one,"
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it's a pretty strange concept, right?
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I mean, with all different races and cultures of people,
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how do you boil it down to one thing?
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I want to share with you today this idea of "e pluribus unum"
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and how our landscape might imbue those memories of diverse perspectives,
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as well as force us to stop trying to narrow things down
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to a single, clean set of identities.
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As an educator, designer,
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I'd like to share with you five simple concepts
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that I've developed through my work.
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And I'd like to share with you five projects
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where we can begin to see how the memory around us,
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where things have happened,
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can actually force us to look at one another in a different way.
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And lastly: this is not just an American motto anymore.
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I think e pluribus unum is global.
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We're in this thing together.
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First, great things happen when we exist in each other's world --
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like today, right?
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The world of community gardens --
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most of you have probably seen a community garden.
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They're all about subsistence and food. Right?
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I'll tell you a little story,
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what happened in New York more than a decade ago.
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They tried to sell all of their community gardens,
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and Bette Midler developed a nonprofit, the New York Restoration Project.
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They literally brought all the gardens
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and decided to save them.
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And then they had another novel idea:
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let's bring in world-class designers
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and let them go out into communities and make these beautiful gardens,
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and maybe they might not just be about food.
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And so they called me,
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and I designed one in Jamaica, Queens.
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And on the way to designing this garden,
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I went to the New York Restoration Project Office,
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and I noticed a familiar name on the door downstairs.
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I go upstairs, and I said,
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"Do you guys know who is downstairs?"
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And they said, "Gunit."
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And I said, "Gunit?
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You mean G-Unit?
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Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson?"
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(Laughter)
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And they said, "Yeah?"
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And I said, "Yes."
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And so we went downstairs, and before you knew it,
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Curtis, Bette and the rest of them formed this collaboration,
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and they built this garden in Jamaica, Queens.
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And it turned out Curtis, 50 Cent, grew up in Jamaica.
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And so again, when you start bringing these worlds together --
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me, Curtis, Bette --
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you get something more incredible.
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You get a garden
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that last year was voted one of the top 10 secret gardens in New York.
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Right?
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(Applause)
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It's for young and old,
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but more importantly, it's a place --
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there was a story in the Times about six months ago
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where this young woman found solace in going to the garden.
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It had nothing to do with me. It had more to do with 50, I'm sure,
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but it has inspired people to think about gardens
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and sharing each other's worlds in a different way.
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This next concept, "two-ness" --
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it's not as simple as I thought it would be to explain,
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but as I left to go to college, my father looked at me,
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and said, "Junior, you're going to have to be both black and white
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when you go out there."
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And if you go back to the early parts of the 20th century,
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W.E.B. Du Bois, the famous activist,
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said it's this peculiar sensation
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that the Negro has to walk around
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being viewed through the lens of other people,
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and this two-ness, this double consciousness.
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And I want to argue that more than a hundred years later,
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that two-ness has made us strong and resilient,
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and I would say for brown people, women --
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all of us who have had to navigate the world through the eyes of others --
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we should now share that strength to the rest of those
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who have had the privilege to be singular.
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I'd like to share with you a project,
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because I do think this two-ness can find itself in the world around us.
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And it's beginning to happen where we're beginning to share these stories.
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At the University of Virginia,
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the academical village by Thomas Jefferson,
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it's a place that we're beginning to notice now was built by African hands.
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So we have to begin to say,
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"OK, how do we talk about that?"
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As the University was expanding to the south,
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they found a site that was the house of Kitty Foster,
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free African American woman.
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And she was there,
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and her descendants,
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they all lived there,
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and she cleaned for the boys of UVA.
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But as they found the archaeology,
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they asked me if I would do a commemorative piece.
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So the two-ness of this landscape, both black and white ...
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I decided to do a piece based on shadows and light.
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And through that, we were able to develop a shadow-catcher
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that would talk about this two-ness in a different way.
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So when the light came down,
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there would be this ride to heaven.
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When there's no light, it's silent.
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And in the landscape of Thomas Jefferson,
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it's a strange thing.
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It's not made of brick.
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It's a strange thing,
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and it allows these two things to be unresolved.
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And we don't have to resolve these things.
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I want to live in a world
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where the resolution --
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there's an ambiguity between things,
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because that ambiguity allows us to have a conversation.
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When things are clear and defined,
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we forget.
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The next example? Empathy.
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And I've heard that a couple of times in this conference,
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this notion of caring.
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Twenty-five years ago, when I was a young pup,
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very optimistic,
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we wanted to design a park in downtown Oakland, California
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for the homeless people.
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And we said, homeless people can be in the same space
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as people who wear suits.
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And everyone was like, "That's never going to work.
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People are not going to eat lunch with the homeless people."
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We built the park.
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It cost 1.1 million dollars.
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We wanted a bathroom.
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We wanted horseshoes, barbecue pits, smokers,
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picnic tables, shelter and all of that.
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We had the design, we went to the then-mayor
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and said, "Mr. Mayor, it's only going to cost you 1.1 million dollars."
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And he looked at me.
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"For homeless people?"
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And he didn't give us the money.
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So we walked out, unfettered, and we raised the money.
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Clorox gave us money.
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The National Park Service built the bathroom.
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So we were able to go ahead
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because we had empathy.
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Now, 25 years later,
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we have an even larger homeless problem in the Bay Area.
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But the park is still there,
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and the people are still there.
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So for me, that's a success.
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And when people see that,
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hopefully, they'll have empathy for the people under freeways and tents,
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and why can't our public spaces
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house them and force us to be empathetic?
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The image on the left is Lafayette Square Park today.
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The image on the right is 1906, Golden Gate Park after the earthquake.
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Why do we have to have cataclysmic events
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to be empathetic?
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Our fellow men are out there starving,
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women sleeping on the street, and we don't see them.
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Put them in those spaces, and they'll be visible.
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(Applause)
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And to show you that there are still people out there with empathy,
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the Oakland Raiders' Bruce Irvin
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fries fish every Friday afternoon
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for anyone who wants it.
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And by going to that park, that park became the vehicle for him.
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The traditional belongs to all of us,
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and this is a simple one.
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You go into some neighborhoods -- beautiful architecture, beautiful parks --
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but if people look a different way,
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it's not traditional.
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It's not until they leave and then new people come in
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where the traditional gets valued.
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A little quick story here:
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1888 opera house,
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the oldest in San Francisco,
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sits in Bayview–Hunters Point.
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Over its history,
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it's provided theater,
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places for businesses, places for community gatherings, etc.
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It's also a place where Ruth Williams taught many black actors.
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Think: Danny Glover --
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came from this place.
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But over time, with our 1980s federal practices,
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a lot of these community institutions fell into disrepair.
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With the San Francisco Arts Council, we were able to raise money
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and to actually refurbish the place.
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And we were able to have a community meeting.
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And within the community meeting, people got up and said,
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"This place feels like a plantation. Why are we locked in?
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Why can't we learn theater?"
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Over the years, people had started putting in chicken coops, hay bales,
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community gardens and all of these things,
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and they could not see that traditional thing behind them.
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But we said, we're bringing the community back.
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American Disability Act -- we were able to get five million dollars.
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And now, the tradition belongs to these brown and black people,
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and they use it.
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And they learn theater,
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after-school programs.
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There's no more chickens.
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But there is art.
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And lastly, I want to share with you a project that we're currently working on,
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and I think it will force us all to remember in a really different way.
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There are lots of things in the landscape around us,
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and most of the time we don't know what's below the ground.
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Here in Charleston, South Carolina,
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a verdant piece of grass.
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Most people just pass by it daily.
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But underneath it,
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it's where they discovered Gadsden’s Wharf.
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We think more than 40 percent of the African diaspora landed here.
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How could you forget that?
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How could you forget?
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So we dug, dug, and we found the wharf.
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And so in 2020,
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Harry Cobb and myself and others
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are building the International African American Museum.
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And it will celebrate --
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(Applause)
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this place where we know, beneath the ground,
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thousands died, perished,
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the food chain of the bay changed.
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Sharks came closer to the bay.
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It's where slaves were stored.
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Imagine this hallowed ground.
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So in this new design, the ground will erupt,
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and it will talk about this tension that sits below.
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The columns and the ground is made of tabby shales
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scooped up from the Atlantic,
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a reminder of that awful crossing.
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And as you make your way through on the other side,
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you are forced to walk through the remains of the warehouse,
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where slaves were stored
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on hot, sultry days, for days,
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and perished.
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And you'll have to come face-to-face
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with the Negro,
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who worked in the marshes,
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who was able to, with the sickle-cell trait,
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able to stand in high waters for long, long days.
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And at night, it'll be open 24/7,
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for everybody to experience.
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But we'll also talk about those other beautiful things
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that my African ancestors brought with them:
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a love of landscape,
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a respect for the spirits that live in trees and rocks and water,
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the ethnobotanical aspects,
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the plants that we use for medicinal purposes.
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But more importantly,
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we want to remind people in Charleston, South Carolina,
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of the black bodies,
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because when you go to Charleston today,
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the Confederacy is celebrated,
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probably more than any other city,
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and you don't have a sense of blackness at all.
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The Brookes map,
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which was an image that helped abolitionists see
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and be merciful for that condition of the crossing,
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is something that we want to repeat.
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And I was taken by the conceptuality
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of this kind of digital print that sits in a museum in Charleston.
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So we decided to bring the water up on top of the surface,
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seven feet above tide,
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and then cast the figures full length, six feet,
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multiply them across the surface,
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in tabby,
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and then allow people to walk across that divide.
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And hopefully, as people come,
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the water will drain out,
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fill up,
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drain out and fill up.
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And you'll be forced to come to terms with that memory of place,
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that memory of that crossing,
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that at times seems very lucid and clear,
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but at other times, forces us again to reconcile the scale.
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And hopefully, as people move through this landscape every day,
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unreconciled, they'll remember,
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and hopefully when we remember,
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e pluribus unum.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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