Dan Snow's History Hit - The Civil Rights Movement

Episode Date: August 28, 2020

In this episode Dan Snow is joined by Chris Wilson, Director of Experience Design at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Chris specialises in the Civil Rights Movement and has written about the intersection of non-violence with the self defence mentality of that time.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. This week in 1963, Martin Luther King and other civil rights activists led the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It was a call for civil economic rights, a call to end racism in the United States of America. We commissioned several shows on history at both TV and audio to mark this anniversary and to also mark the renewed calls for those civil and political rights following the death of George Floyd and others in the United States. We've got a documentary going up on history here on the history of policing in the US and this podcast is an interview with the excellent Christopher Wilson. He's a director at the National Museum of American History. He's a director at the National Museum of American History.

He's director of Experience Design African American History Program. And this is one of the live history hits that we do on YouTube, on Timeline. Check them out. If you do want to go and watch that policing documentary on History Hit TV, please head over there. Use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, and you get a month for free, and you get the second month just one pound, euro, or dollar. So it's a pretty sweet deal. So head over and do that. In the meantime, everybody, enjoy the excellent Christopher Wilson.

Chris, thank you for joining us. Thank you, Dan. It's wonderful to be here today. thank you for joining us. Thank you, Dan. It's wonderful to be here today. Thank you for having me on. Let's start with this discussion about the civil rights movement of the 1960s by giving a very brief history, if you may, of what happened really between that moment when slaves are freed, even all the way down in Galveston, up until the 1960s, because Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King didn't suddenly invent this struggle for emancipation. It had been a battle fiercely contested. That's a really good point. Historians are starting to talk about the civil rights movement as more of a long civil rights movement as opposed to we generally think of that Rosa Parks Martin Luther King initiation of the 1950s and 60s movement and think of it as a Montgomery to Memphis story the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 to King's assassination in Memphis in 1968 or even earlier

to the Voting Rights Act in 1965 we We think of it as that 10-year period. But that Black freedom struggle really began as long at the beginning of the lack of freedom. So during, so there were Black and white abolitionists working for formal emancipation and abolition during the period of slavery. Also abolitionists in the sense of people like Frederick Douglass before he became an orator, freeing themselves. As I mentioned, African Americans were trying to end slavery either personally or collectively during its period. And then that abolition movement really became a freedom and civil rights movement in the late 19th century through the reconstruction period

and into the late 19th century. What the case, the Supreme Court case that was, that eventually was overturned by the Brown versus Board of Education Supreme Court case that ended desegregation in public schools in the United States in 1954. The Supreme Court case that they were working to overturn was the Plessy versus Ferguson case in the 1890s. And that case was initiated by Homer Plessy doing a very similar act as Rosa Parks eventually did, refusing to give up a seat and

test on a streetcar and testing laws that enforced public, enforced segregation in public, public proceedings. So that was really a movement that had begun at that point, you know, after the end of, after emancipation, people started testing, well, what will freedom really mean, and started pushing the boundaries of that definition. And is that where the NAACP come in and are testing out through the courts and pushing on some of those deeply restrictive and recidivist practices. Exactly. So people like W.E.B. Du Bois, working to found the NAACP in that period, are working on several fronts. And that's, I think, one of the things that we have to understand about even the 1950s and 60s civil rights movement, that people were working on many different fronts

at the same time. There was not one monolithic type of movement in a particular time, and then it switched to another tactic a few years later. But many people were trying many different tactics all at once. The NAACP certainly began that legal work in the early part of the 20th century.

But at the same time, people like W.E.B. Du Bois were working with more or less publicity, things like the New Negro Movement and the Harlem Renaissance working to change the way African Americans are viewed if he felt we could have great achievement in art and literature and other expressions, even sports, the Harlem Rens basketball team and the Harlem Globetrotters and so forth, starting at that time. If we could use those avenues to be seen as human, then things would change and things would be better. So there were all of those tactics were

being used really at the same time. But yes, the NAACP began in earnest a process to test the laws, particularly around school segregation. So I want to talk more about the sort of transition, if you like, from testing those laws to taking direct action. After we to talk more about the sort of transition, if you like, from testing those laws to taking direct action. After we actually talk more about those laws, the so-called Jim Crow laws, we've got a clip from a timeline documentary here, fascinating documentary, explaining just what those laws were. More than troops withdrew from the South, the states enacted Jim Crow laws to keep blacks in their place. These laws made sure that blacks and whites did not have to come into close public contact. Facilities such as public bathrooms, water fountains, seating areas on buses, restaurants, hotels, hospitals, and schools. Every public necessity and service in the South was segregated and seemingly

designed to make blacks feel inferior. It was common to see signs that read for colored or white use only. These laws were considered fair and constitutional for many years. However, the reality of segregation was far from fair. It was profoundly destructive emotionally and psychologically. So there you can see some, just visually, the impact of some of those laws, the segregation that was enforced on communities across those southern states. Christopher Wilson, I'm back with you, the historian of civil rights and curator at the Smithsonian. Can you tell me, what was the impact of these laws on the lives of African-Americans in those states?

They were infuriating and debilitating. And oftentimes, sometimes they were laws, sometimes there were laws, sometimes there were customs. But all of them were really intended not only to separate people and to do what they sort of functionally did and keep people from using drinking fountains. And we had an exhibition at the Smithsonian about the 50th anniversary of the Brown versus Board of Education case. And we had the opening of the exhibition was a listing of many of those laws, and they went all the way to the ridiculous of blacks and whites couldn't play checkers and so forth. But in addition to just the fact of the law, there's the impact and the way that they were meted out.

For instance, in Montgomery, Alabama, in Rosa Parks' case, in the Montgomery bus boycott situation there, the laws were not only just to separate people, but to just enforce an ideal of white supremacy. So in Montgomery, not only could, and it's generally well known that blacks couldn't sit in the front of the bus and had to sit in their own section, but it was really more worse than that. Blacks had to pay at the front of the bus, get off and go to the back entrance of the bus, because not only couldn't they sit with white people in the front, they couldn't walk past them after they'd paid their fare. There was, because more black people rode the bus than white people, there was a section in the middle that was a varying section. white people, there was a section in the middle that was a varying section. And that section was blacks could sit there until there were enough whites to fill up the white section and need to move back and take another row, which is what happened when Rosa Parks was arrested. And so

that those sort of things like the, in fact, at the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott, folks were really, Coretta Scott King says this, that they were really initially working only for a more humane system of segregation and not really because they didn't feel like there was any chance to get rid of segregation entirely. They thought, let's at least make it more humane. at least make it more humane. It's funny you talking about the pettiness and the detail of these laws. And it makes me think that, I always think racist people have made these laws, but these laws also made people racist. I mean, of course, if you were in that system,

that institution, you would look upon the other as something, well, with huge difference, wouldn't you? Well, exactly. Well as a as a with with huge difference, wouldn't you? well, exactly, uh the uh Many of the folks that I have spoken to uh, who have been a major part of the civil rights movement Uh folks like the greensboro four who began the sit-in at the greensboro, uh, north carolina woolworth's lunch counter said those laws and

the entire atmosphere made them feel not only angry, but suicidal by the time they were children. Frank McCain said when he was 12 or 13 years old, he felt suicidal because of all of this weight that was coming down on him by everything around him that told him he was less than everyone else and reinforced that constantly. Lord, you mentioned that one of the remarkable things about your career is you've interviewed a huge swath of these activists, Rosa Parks, Congressman John Lewis, Diane Nash. That is, well, just try and, if you can, give us a summary. Let's start with Rosa Parks, internationally famous. My kids here in the UK study her in school.

What was that like meeting her and hearing her story? So it was really interesting. So I met Rosa Parks when I was working again at Henry Ford Museum. Later in the early 2000s, we collected the bus on which Rosa Parks was riding when she got elected or got arrested. Interestingly also two of my Smithsonian colleagues who were really involved in collecting that bus were also with me at Henry Ford Museum doing that work then, Bill Kretzer who's now at the National Museum of African American History and Culture,

and Malcolm Collum who is the Chief Conservator at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. So we were working on collecting that bust, but well before that, by the 2000s, everybody sort of, there were many people who were remembering and honoring Mrs. Parks. In the early 1990s, I was director of a program looking at the history of African Americans in slavery in Georgia, just outside Savannah, Georgia,

and also running an exhibit that was a working farm of an African American landowning family in that same area in the early 20th century. And Rosa Parks wanted to visit the museum. You know, I'm a 21, 22 year old kid working there at that point. And this sort of says, talks about kind of how we viewed as a society Rosa Parks at that time. She was just, you know, a lady working in Congressman John Conyers office in Detroit. And it was thought she's a special visitor, but not to the point that they should have someone more important than a 21 year old kid to take her around. So I got the benefit of that and was able to spend several hours with Mrs. Parks driving her around in a 1931 Ford Model A station wagon and taking her to see these things, see this exhibit. And as we spoke, two amazing things happened.

First, as I said, not too many people, you know, it was really just us going around, but children, it was a day when many school children were visiting the museum. And as I went from building to building, Henry Ford Museum also includes an outdoor space called Greenfield Village. And that has many houses, historic homes, and so forth. And as we went from place to place, it became a de facto parade of kids following the car because that face of Mrs. Parks is in so many textbooks. And they knew her story and wanted to get her autographed. But in addition, the biggest thing that I took away from it was she did not at all seem like the demure Mother Rosa

that we learn about in school. She, in 1992, I think it was, was still angry. She looked around at, I asked her to talk about what 1955, 1956 were like, she was angry about that. When I asked her to talk about what 1991, 1992 was like, and she was just as angry about that. And really a fiery person. And, and, you know, I'll never, I'll never forget that. And what about Congressman John Lewis, who was terribly injured as well during the struggle? I mean, he must have a remarkable story. Congressman Lewis, yes, has, has, first of all, been a huge friend of the Smithsonian and, and,

and the many of the programs that I've done, we've brought him in to do programs related to the Greensboro Lunch Counter, to our Freedom Rides and Freedom Summer programming that we did in the last few years. And his devotion, he's one of those people who in the civil rights movement during the nonviolent, the rise of the nonviolent direct action campaign, there were some folks, many folks who felt like that idea of nonviolent direct action that Gandhi, that they learned from Gandhi,

that they learned from people in the United States like Reverend Jim Lawson, from Gandhi, that they learned from people in the United States like Reverend Jim Lawson, felt like it was a powerful tactic. It was certainly a tactic that was possible when they felt like self-defense was not a possible tactic because there was so much power on the other side. But not everybody took it to heart as a way of life. And Congressman Lewis has been one of the icons of that. He, despite being injured in numerous activities in the Summit of Montgomery March, in the Freedom Rides, he was beaten over and over again fighting for justice. He not only didn't fight back, but has always taken that love into his heart and taken that to the United States Congress. And I think that that is just one of the most remarkable things about him.

Garpol 51, thank you very much for your donation. All donations, everybody, go to the COVID International Relief Fund. So thank you very much for your generosity there. Let's talk about nonviolence. You've mentioned it there. When you've interviewed these people, how unusual was it? How hard was it? Was this a revolutionary idea, do you think, that was being embraced? It was certainly a revolutionary idea.

Just recently, I've interviewed several times, and most recently in January, Reverend James Lawson. Reverend Lawson was working in Ohio and had taken trips around the world and began studying Gandhi, as well as other freedom movements all around the world, but was really taken by the teachings of Gandhi and began teaching that at Oberlin in Ohio. Martin Luther King eventually met him and said, we don't have anybody like you in the South. Martin Luther King was coming to understand in a really full way, the power of nonviolence and the commitment that it took to practice it in the way that Gandhi, took to practice it in the way that Gandhi, in the really traditional, the way that Gandhi had developed it, and asked Lewis S. Lawson to come to the South. And he ended up going to Vanderbilt University in Nashville and was studying divinity.

In 1958 and 1959, primarily, he began a really a study group where he called a number of students together to start learning and learning and studying those practices with a view toward nonviolent direct action. That study group was one of the most amazing college study groups you can imagine. It included John Lewis. It included Diane Nash. It included James Bevel. It included the leaders, the people who became the leaders of not only the civil rights movement, but people who then inspired the peace movement later and many of the tactics that we see arise in and debates around which that we see arise in the 1950s and 60s and into the present. But folks like Diane Nash have told me she immediately was not taken with the idea of nonviolence, didn't necessarily think it would work. Of course, we're also talking about a generation just removed from World War II, who had, and

hundreds of thousands of Blacks were involved in the war effort, people like my father, who said nonviolence just never, you know, never, I never understood the idea of I won't hit back if you hit me. And so a lot of people had to be convinced that this was a tactic that would work. And even more difficult was convincing people that taking it into your heart as Congressman Lewis has or Diane Nash was necessary, that it couldn't just be a tactic. It needed to be a way of life in order to be successful, which is what Gandhi would have argued. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History,

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There are new episodes every week. But it's interesting you use the word tactic because there is, you know, it's not just a lifestyle. It was designed very cleverly to provoke confrontation that they would then, which would then allow the world to see who actually the aggressors in this situation. Talk me through what nonviolence meant in terms of the tactics, as you say, that they would then go and use on the streets or dining in Woolworth's counter or whatever it is. Certainly. Well, one of the things that veterans of the movement say quite often is that the first thing that nonviolence did was change the person practicing it. And for many of the moments of the civil rights movement, the non-violent direct action didn't directly result in changes and didn't, were not the only thing that resulted or that would result in a change. For instance, the Montgomery bus

boycott, ultimately what ended it was a court decision argued by attorney Fred Gray, still alive, and that really expanded the idea of separate is not equal, that separate can never be equal, that separate can never be equal that the Supreme Court had said about public education in 1954 and expanded that into a broader realm in terms of public transportation. But what happened in Montgomery was people, again, who had been a community who had undergone oppression, even mental oppression, as we've talked about with the impact of the segregation laws, it ended up proving to the Montgomery community that they had power. And so that was one of the effects of nonviolence. In addition, it definitely disarmed the opponents. And when it was a really radical idea to say, we are going to put our bodies on the line to force a change and you can kill us.

This is one of the things that Diane Nash said to me that she eventually understood and had to come to this realization of ourselves that you had to be willing to say, well, you can kill us, but now you can never segregate us again because we will not be segregated. We are taking that power and we may not be taking all of the power

because again, you can incarcerate us, you can go all the way up to uh putting us to death but you cannot enslave us in the same way that you did before and so that and and you know that power goes both ways i think you know power uh empowers the people saying it but it also uh deflects and uh and and uh uh and and makes impotent the people on the other side. And then lastly, I think the nonviolence really allowed, as I think we are seeing today with some of the protests, a lot laid bare the violence and the oppression

that people were seeing, were facing, and that that became so clear because it was covered in the news media and so forth. And so when they courted arrest, when they courted violence, and when that violence then happened, many people came around saying, well, I can see on television, this is just not fair or right. Well, we're going to watch another little clip now. We're going to see Martin Luther King himself. He's called to protest following Rosa Parks' arrest on that bus as he's watching.

But first of all, I want to say hello to Abdul Karim Abu Bakr, who is watching from Somalia, which I think is our first, the first time I've seen someone watching from Somalia. So thank you very much. I hope you're enjoying this stream. But let's take a look at this documentary from Timeline now. A number of years the negro passengers on the city bus lines of Montgomery have been humiliated, intimidated and faced threats on this bus line. Just the other day, one of the fine citizens of our community, Mrs. Rosa Parks, was arrested because she refused to give up her seat for a white passenger.

Mrs. Rosa Parks was arrested and taken down to jail, taken from the bus, just because she refused to give up her seat. At present we are in the midst of a protest the Negro citizens of Montgomery representing some 44 percent of the population 90 percent at least are the regular Negro bus passengers are staying off the buses and we plan to continue until something is done. So there, Christopher Wilson historian and Smithsonian museum curator. We've just seen Martin Luther King. He is such a towering figure. How important is he within this movement? And does he overshadow some of the other activists that you've been talking about

and that you've met and interviewed? You know, I think the answer is yes to both questions. I mean, he certainly is a towering figure and the movement wouldn't have been the same without him. His oratory, his manner of bringing people together and coalescing around the cause, his political activism certainly was hugely significant in it. He certainly also does overshadow the full understanding of the movement as a people's movement.

of the movement as a people's movement. There have been other individuals in American history, Frederick Douglass and so forth in the African American freedom struggle who have had similar impact. But one of the things that was different really about 1950s and 60s was how many people were involved and how much't think that we as a country and as a society understand him fully, understand his greatness as fully as we should. We certainly don't, we certainly don't understand him as a person who was as radical as he was. We think of

his statements like the dream speech, for instance, during the March on Washington in 1963. And we remember it as a, many times, as a call for a colorblind society and people should not be, should be judged by the content of the character, of their character, People should not be, should be judged by the content of the character, of their character and not the color of their skin. But we also have to remember that that speech was about ultimately a sort of reparations. That speech, in that speech, he said the United States had passed a bad check to its citizens of color. And we were coming to collect that check.

And that check was, had been returned for non-sufficient funds and so forth. And, you know, the March on Washington was the March on Washington for jobs and freedom. And that's what one of the things he was really talking about. So I don't think we remember him in a fully, in a full way, but in another way, we, we, we remember the movement as too much related to him, as too much of Martin Luther King's movement. And I think that that is a bit troubling in the sense that people, and I hear this many times from civil rights movement leaders and activists from the time who say, if you think of it as a movement led by an influential leader like Martin Luther King, a one-of-a-kind leader

like Martin Luther King, people like Rosa Parks and so forth, you think, well, I wish we had a person like that now, and I wish we had a leader who could lead us out of this, of these problems that we're in today. But if you think of it as ordinary people doing it, then you think, what can I do? And so I think that it's, we have that issue of public memory sort of in both directions. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies

teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week thanks a lot now we need to let's move on from Dr. King, because there was also, there was a debate famously between, you know, represented on one side by Malcolm X. It wasn't just a given that the whole African-American community embraced nonviolence. There was also, there were voices advocating a more sort of stringent self-defense, weren't there? Certainly. One really strong voice. And, you know, when we're talking even about that sort of

Montgomery to Memphis or Montgomery to Selma idea of the civil rights movement, then we often think that that period was really about the South and really about segregation and really about, and the tactic used was nonviolent direct action and sermons and voter registration drives and so forth. And then the way we publicly remember it is you have more of the Malcolm X, Black Power, Black Panther Party, self-defense model leading us to the violent clashes that we saw in 1967 in Detroit in 1968 after King's assassination. And we think of it as this bifurcated story with tactics changing with the period. But those ideas were all alive at the same time. In 1958, there was a case known as the Kissing Case in Monroe, North Carolina. Two black children, James Thompson and David Simpson, were accused of, well, kissed a white girl of the same age. These were kids under 10 years old.

They were all playing together. I've been seeing a little viral video going around of two, of a black and white toddler playing together today, and that being used in different political ways right now. Well, kids played together, you know, during the spirit of segregation sometimes too. And at this point, someone kissed someone else. And when the white kids' parents found out about it, white girls' parents found out about it, they first set out to kill the children, the black children themselves, and then the police were involved. The kids were taken without really legal representation, taken without being able to see their parents, and put in jail, eventually sentenced to reform school. Again, they're

between seven and nine years old. They were sentenced to reform school until the age of 21 for kissing a girl. Actually, in fact, I think actually she kissed them. So, you know, there was no crime, but yet they were sentenced to reform school till age 21. A man named Robert F. Williams really got involved and became more or less a publicity arm, trying to get publicity in Europe to really push to get the details of this case out. And eventually they were freed after a number of months in jail. Robert Williams moved on from that activity to another similar case where a white man raped or attempted to rape a black woman, also in Monroe, and was then acquitted of doing that. It's happened in broad daylight. There was no doubt about it. He was acquitted. But Williams came away from both of those cases deciding that

nonviolence was not the way to go, that if the government and represented by the police, by the courts, by every governmental agency was going to oppress people in this way and use violence and intimidation in that way, the only way that he felt things could get better was to meet violence with violence. So he applied for membership to the National Rifle Association to create a rifle club and began what he called the Black Guard in Monroe

and decided to protect the black community with self-defense. He eventually was forced out of the country. to protect the black community with self-defense. He eventually was forced out of the country, trumped up kidnapping charges were levied against him and he fled to Cuba and then later to China. And while in exile he wrote the book in 1962, Negroes with Guns, which I was able to know very well and interview his partner and widow, Mabel Williams. And we did a program with her on Negroes with Guns at the Smithsonian in 2005 and talked about her story of self-defense and what she then did in exile. And it's just really amazing that that idea and those thoughts were happening at the same time

as nonviolent direct action is being developed as well. So there is this debate about which way to move forward. And it's often thought of as sort of Malcolm X versus people like Bayard Rustin, but it wasn't just them. It was many people talking about what is the right path forward. Now, and it also feels like those debates continue.

When you're looking at the Black Lives Matter movement now, when you're looking at the protests on the streets of the US and other countries around the world, what are the bits of history that are being flagged up in your head, or that you think we need to know, that you think people in the streets need to know, and people in governments need to know? Well, one of the things that I'm noticing that is a really important aspect of what is happening today is the diversity that we're seeing. There was diversity in the civil rights movement.

There were many white activists who were drawn to come to the South and become active in things like Freedom Summer and even before that in Freedom Rides. I was able to interview a really remarkable man, Jim Zwerg, who was beaten during the Freedom Rides in 1961. He was part of the second sort of group of folks to get this Freedom Rides going. Again, the Freedom Rides really were started by the organization, the Congress of Racial Equality.

And that initial moment, that initial part of that movement took buses, they boarded buses, interstate buses, where there was already, there had already been rulings to say that segregation in interstate transit was unconstitutional, but states in the South were not, were still enforcing unconstitutional laws. And so they decided to test this and try to, as we mentioned before, constitutional laws. And so they decided to test this and try to, as we mentioned before, not only court sort of potential violence, but also force the federal government into a situation where it either had to enforce its own laws or let lawlessness exist in the South. And that happened. The initial Freedom Rides organizers probably did not expect the level of violence

that they saw in Alabama, and those buses were attacked and firebombed and so forth. And then really led by Diane Nash, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee decided, well, we can't let violence overcome nonviolence. Even though this isn't our fight, we didn't start this, we didn't start the Freedom Rides, we aren't at all involved. When she saw it on television, they decided we have to continue the Freedom Rides. And so they did. And people like Jim's word came down and decided to not only join that movement, but go attend as a white

person, attend a historically black college. So we saw white activists come into the movement, but not really, I don't think in the numbers that we're seeing, but one of the, today, and one of the things that I think that has really affected, that really affected people in this time, someone again, like Jim Zwerg or Joan Mulholland, who lives here in the D.C. area, and and she's a person who was in a really famous photograph of a sit-in in Mississippi where they were violently attacked. Those folks definitely understood the violence and the oppression against them, against African Americans in a really personal way because they saw it themselves. I think one of the things that is happening that

is different today is that many people are out in the streets and they're seeing police brutality firsthand. They're experiencing it, unfortunately, sometimes firsthand, but they're also seeing it when they're in protests and through social media. My own son has, you know, came to me. I wasn't, I thought he was a bit more sheltered from some of this, but on his iPod, apparently he had seen some of the protests and came to me and said, how can someone, how can a police officer just run someone over who's just standing there with a mounted police officer, run someone over with their horse or their car and so forth. And so I think that more and more people across the racial divides, across the political divides are seeing

some of the issues firsthand and feeling some of those issues firsthand in the same way that that Jim's work and John Mulholland had done in the 60s but there's just so many more experiencing that today well Chris I could talk about this all day but I'm going to let you go so so Christopher Wilson thank you for joining us and a director of experience design at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History I can't wait to get to that museum as soon as this lockdown ends, buddy. But thank you very much for coming on. Hi everyone, it's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request.

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