This is the first video on the Four Quadrants of History. Before I share my screen, I just want to again go over how we're thinking of things here. This is your first Workshop, so the question is, why is it called "Tough on crime" and what does that mean? Tough on crime is the dominant narrative. The dominant narrative itself is something that is defined by the history of criminalization and the history of injustice related to communities of color. Tough on crime is just an idea. We're going to start to shift that and get at the foundations of that. Again, this is a diversity work that's localizing around a systemic issue. So starting with the four quadrants of history, it is important to recognize that each of these quadrants are related to a specific moment in time in which there might have been a relevant to this day, racial crisis. So here's my screen. What you see here are images from the Alabama Montgomery Memorial to peace and justice. This is a memorial created by a mass design in concert with the Equal Justice Foundation. This first one is basically the memorial as you're walking in. You're seeing a narrative sequence start to unfold. You'll notice that I'm calling it quadrants. So to the extent that here this represents the initial proximity you have to this history of slavery and this history of racial violence that the Memorial actually highlights. So you're on a hill, you're looking at it, and it's an initial reckoning. Quadrant one is the dominant narrative, is actually liberty. Why do I say that? Well, liberty here during the time of slavery was the liberty from England, the American Revolution. Even though there's a dominant narrative of liberty, of course, the underlying systemic narrative is that of slavery and the triangle trade. In this sense, when we read about everyone in all of our workshops, I'd like us to see it as just an initial proximity, initial moment of reckoning. Quadrant two. As you go into the actual memorial, this is really important and touching. This is our theme of Sitting With Discomfort. Era two is the era, dominant era known as Emancipation in the 13th Amendment. After the 13th amendment, obviously there was the abolishment of slavery as an institution. However, as a reaction to that, a lot of southern states had Jim Crow laws, and even without the laws, there was interpersonal violence against communities that culminated in lynching. What you see here is the actual room. You're sitting on only one or two chairs and it's pretty sparse, but what is hanging over your head are these copper blocks that represent the names of everyone who have been lynched. This process legally, Bryan Stevenson took a very long time to do, why is that? Well, legally to find the evidence and to find the names and the counties of where these individuals had lost their lives to the law quite literally was a very long process, and this is defined by plaques on the wall here, a lot of times what you have for a recourse are things like looking at someone the wrong way, a child was accused of stealing from a store, saying something, speaking when not asked to be spoken to or to speak. These are all basically the lead-up to this racial terror, this event. Thematically, this theme I'd like to pull all attention to when we're in era two is Sitting With Discomfort. Sitting With Discomfort itself was an anti-racist tool that we use in Workshop, which is the ability to sit with either a racial crisis or an event that has a racial charge. Now we're moving to era three. Going closer to the civil rights era. This is the era of the Great Migration. You don't really see it in this picture, but right behind here are pine trees. The pine trees represent the long path of the Underground railroad North. Also represents the movement North during the Great Migration. Specifically as to the changes to industry. When the North factories were now offering new jobs basically to individuals, Americans who were in the cotton industry, and cotton actually crashed because of the fall of slavery, combined with the fall of the actual crops fail due to a natural event. The second piece that you see here is a long migration North.
