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[MUSIC PLAYING] STEVEN JOHN: Welcome to MPR News Presents. I'm Steven John. Longtime civil rights activist Josie Johnson says that not only do we need more justice, fairness, and opportunity, but we need a commitment to believing that social justice work matters and is long-lasting. She spoke at an event with her granddaughter, Josie Duffy Rice, about the importance of passing the activism torch. Former Minneapolis mayor Sharon Sayles Belton moderated the discussion last fall at a Habitat for Humanity event. Former Saint Paul Mayor Chris Coleman is the president and CEO of Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity, and he welcomed the speakers and the virtual audience.

CHRIS COLEMAN: Thank you for joining us for our Women of Habitat Hope Builders luncheon. We have an amazing conversation just ahead with civil rights icon Dr. Josie Johnson, her granddaughter and criminal justice activist, Josie Duffy Rice, and Habitat board member and former mayor of Minneapolis, Sharon Sayles Belton.

Before we get that conversation started, I want to give some context to Habitat's focus on racial equity. We believe that unequal access to homeownership is deeply intertwined with systemic racial inequalities. That's why conversations like the one we're hosting today are so critically important, so that we can all better understand how we got here and what we can do about it. It's our goal to close Minnesota's racial gap in homeownership, and we can't do that without you. Your interest, involvement, and support are the fuel that powers our work.

2020 has been a challenging year for all of us. Our spirits have been tested time and again, first with the coronavirus pandemic, then with the killing of George Floyd and the renewed call for racial justice. This year's many ups and downs have made one thing abundantly clear, a safe, stable home has never been more important. Think about your own home and the sanctuary it's been for you and your family. What about families who don't have a stable place to call home?

We were already facing an affordable housing crisis long before COVID-19. For years, housing costs have risen while wages remained flat, leaving one in every four Minnesotans paying more than they could afford for housing. COVID just made things worse, job losses, sick family members, kids at home, food insecurity, and more. And while anyone can be affected by the virus, the COVID-19 storm has been especially devastating for communities of color.

For generations, those communities have been denied equal access to quality health care, education, and opportunities to build wealth. The truth is, so many of the racial disparities we face today are rooted in racist housing policies and practices, like racial covenants and redlining. At Twin Cities Habitat, we've resolved to be as intentional about closing Minnesota's shameful racial homeownership gap as our community was in creating it.

Your gifts to At Home Fund support our two top priorities right now, protecting current homeowners from losing their homes due to COVID-related economic hardships and expanding homeownership opportunities so that more of your neighbors can experience the peace and safety of owning a home.

Now, I'm so excited to introduce Sharon Sayles Belton, who will moderate today's conversation. Sharon served on the Minneapolis City Council for 10 years, four as Council President, before becoming the first woman and the first African-American to be elected mayor of Minneapolis. Sharon is currently vice president of Strategic Partnerships and alliances at Thomson Reuters. She's an alumna of Macalester College and a member of Twin Cities Habitat's board of directors. Take it away, Sharon.

SHARON SAYLES BELTON: Good afternoon, everyone. I'm here today with the incredible Dr. Josie Johnson and Josie Duffy Rice. I've known Josie for, oh, many years. In fact, I first met her when I was a student in college, and she was an advisor to me when I was on the city council and later when I served as mayor. Throughout all of my time with Josie, she's always talked and shared with me wonderful things about her granddaughter, Josie. And I am truly delighted that you're going to be able to hear from these two amazing women today.

Let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Josie Johnson. Josie Johnson has been an educator, an activist, and a public servant for more than seven decades. Born and raised in Texas, Johnson became one of our most prominent civil rights activists in Minnesota. Dr. Johnson helped create the African-American Studies Department at the University of Minnesota, and served as one of its first faculty members and continued to teach at the University throughout her career.

In 1971, she was the first African-American to be appointed to the University of Minnesota's Board of Regents. She earned her bachelor's degree from Fisk University and a master's and doctorate from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Dr. Johnson lives in Minneapolis and continues to serve her community, advocating for equal rights and social justice.

Now, let me introduce you Josie Duffy Rice. Josie Duffy rice is a journalist and a lawyer whose work is primarily focused on prosecutors, prisons, and other criminal justice issues. Currently, she is the President of The Appeal, a news publication focused on criminal justice system, and she co-hosts the podcast Justice In America. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, in Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Slate, among others.

Josie Duffy Rice is a graduate of Harvard Law School and received her bachelor's degree from Columbia University. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband, son, and their newly arrived daughter, Josie VI. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Dr. Josie Johnson and her granddaughter, Josie Duffy Rice.

I wanted to start with a personal question that's relevant to Habitat, and one that we can all connect to. Here's the question. What has home or homeownership meant to you personally? And we're going to start with you Josie Duffy Rice.

JOSIE DUFFY RICE: Thank you so much. And I want to thank you all for having me. It's such an honor to be here with you all and especially with my grandmother, who is my favorite person. So I'm so happy to be here. Homeownership to me is-- what we know about homeownership is that it's the main way that general wealth-- generational wealth shifts from one generation to the next. And that's been not-- Black Americans typically haven't had that opportunity historically, or at least not the level of opportunity that white Americans have at owning a home.

And as a parent and as someone who has their own family, it's so important to feel like you're providing security to your family. And really, the only way I've been able to do even a semblance of that has been through homeownership. For me, I think it also is important to recognize that I live in a Black neighborhood and a majority Black city in the South, and I live in a neighborhood that has a history of homeownership for Black people and is one of the first neighborhoods in Atlanta where Black people really could own their own home and was--

And the only reason we had the opportunity to do that in my neighborhood is because it was seen as not valuable land, not land that white people wanted to live on.

SHARON SAYLES BELTON: Wonderful. Thank you. Dr. Josie, tell us what your thoughts are around home and homeownership.

JOSIE JOHNSON: I'm so happy you asked the question. And again, thank you for inviting me and being a part of this and having a chance to interact with my very own Josie Helen Duffy. Sharon, homeownership at my age has a different history than I think we think of right now. I grew up in an environment of homeownership, but it was not identified as something that was so unique and special or separated us as a people, one group from another.

Our home became the center location where people in our community gathered, where a number of our-- my mother was a great cook and she always cooked more food than we needed, and therefore it was a place where my neighborhood friends and others could come. So home for me, in my early days, represented security, friendship, invitation. And it was-- we felt lucky that we had an environment in which people could come and feel safe.

SHARON SAYLES BELTON: That's wonderful to hear you talk about it. In that sense, home being a place where family comes together, community comes together, but also home being an opportunity for individual families to be able to have economic freedom. It's really wonderful. Thank you both for your contributions. I wanted to talk to you first, Dr. Josie, about fair housing because Josie Duffy Rice, your granddaughter, just was talking with us about people's hopes and dreams for the future, for the next generation.

Dr. Josie, you were instrumental in pushing the Fair Housing bill right here in Minnesota back in 1961. It was the first bill of its kind to be passed anywhere in the nation. And I want to underscore that, anywhere in the nation. Why housing? What got you involved in this activism and led you to partner with Governor Elmer Andersen in that time?

JOSIE JOHNSON: When we moved here in Minnesota, we learned, my family and I learned, that Minnesota also had some serious issues dealing with discrimination and housing, in employment, not so much in education back in those days. And so for us, we were living in the area that was designated for us on the South side of Minneapolis.

So there were two main residential areas there, South side and North side, and our friends and the people we knew and people who looked like us lived in either of those two communities. Housing became an issue as a idea of working, for legislating for later on in the late '50, by '59, when we began to test to see what was the difference in housing here and other places that we could talk about?

And so I and others became the group that went from place to place to rent housing and get that reaction, to try and borrow money and get that reaction. And then a couple of our friends who were in charge of the Minneapolis and Saint Paul Urban Leagues invited me to visit with them after they had talked once again to the legislature and to others.

And there had been a lot of work in this area before we moved here in the area of fair housing, only nothing had happened. Conversations, church groups, other organizations. So our community that had experienced this invited me to help in the effort of developing and fighting for the legislation that would lead to fair housing.

And we organized-- I was doing a lot of volunteer work for the Urban League at that time, and we knew what the other issues were. And so I was blessed in having three friends that I could invite to come with me as we worked towards planning for the legislative session of 1961.

And we spent many hours talking to our legislators, and we knew a lot about the legislative action that had been attempted earlier and now we were once again attempting. So it was a matter of us working very hard every day, going to these people, many of whom had never seen a Black person nor a Jewish person.

And so finally, what happened was at a point where we could test where we were going with this, what the vote might look like, I was scared to death that we were going to lose again. And so I went to Elmer Anderson, our newly elected governor at that time. I had met him earlier, knew of his equal justice, equal opportunity philosophy and his attitude about justice and the issues facing Minnesota.

So I went down to the governor's office and I said to him that we were going to lose this legislation. And he then urged me to wait in his office. So I sat in the office with him, and he wrote a note. And I hope you'll get a chance to see it someday. It's in my book, but it's a note that the governor wrote personally, sat down immediately, and prepared for each member of the Judiciary Committee.

I then took that back-- Don Fraser at that time was very, very-- he was chair of the Judicial Committee, the Dems at that time. We were calling ourselves something else then, but he took that note and delivered it to all of the members of the committee. So when the vote actually took place, we won, but by one vote, one vote. We could have lost once again, the effort that many Minnesotans had been working for for years.

So we got it passed in the House, in the Senate, in the Judiciary Committee, and then in the Senate, and it became law. So it's-- I'm so proud of the fact that we were a part of that history to carry on.

SHARON SAYLES BELTON: And I'm so proud of the fact that you went to go see the governor and had the courage to tell him that he should take action.

JOSIE JOHNSON: Sometimes I ask myself, because I hadn't thought of, where did you feel you could go, little colored girl, and talk to the governor about something as important as this? But I guess that's a part of Josie Helen's great ancestors. Our my father and mother, they just-- it never occurred to them that wasn't the right thing to do.

SHARON SAYLES BELTON: I love that about you. And that's your story for Minnesota. You just do what it takes. You just get out there and get things done. I wanted to talk to you just a little bit, Josie Duffy Rice, about your work, and I want to talk about the intersection between housing and criminal justice. Now, in your writings also, you talk about promoting policies and investments that prevent crime on the front end rather than punishing it on the back end.

Now, this is a conversation that we've, again, had for many, many years in our country. And some people would argue that not enough progress has been made. Tell us a little bit more about your work in this area and what role you see housing playing in this reform conversation.

JOSIE DUFFY RICE: What we see in Black communities and poor communities and communities of color, and also rural communities, places where there has been major disinvestment by the government in people's social welfare, we see that those are the places where there is more incarceration. There is a direct link between the average income of an area and the chances that the incarceration rate is high. Right there--

We know that the places where we're using criminal justice to ensure people's safety are places that the government has abandoned historically. And there are other ways of ensuring safety, that are better for everybody. And I include the police when I say everybody. Now we're asking the police to serve a number of roles that they should not be serving.

They're not doctors. They shouldn't be handling drug addiction. They're not mental health professionals. They shouldn't be handling people suffering from mental health crises. And to your point about housing, a lot of what we see in terms of what's criminalized is that we criminalize poverty. We criminalize people for not having a home. It's OK if you're drunk at home every single day, but if you're drunk and you're homeless, that's a crime.

We criminalize people for sleeping on the street. We criminalize people for panhandling. We criminalize people for a number of things that when you actually interrogate them, what it comes back to is that people are suffering from not having enough money. And once you're criminalized, that starts another cycle. It's harder to get a job. It's harder to get an apartment. It's harder to take care love your children.

And so then the opportunities left to you are often only the ones that are not legal. And the way that housing relates to this is that housing relates back to every single issue of social opportunity in this country. It all comes back to housing. It all comes back to housing. When people don't have access to affordable housing, when they can't afford to put a roof over their family's head or buy a home, or live in neighborhoods with good parks and good after school programs and good schools, they enter a cycle of punishment instead of a cycle of public safety.

And so I don't think you can extract housing from the conversation around criminal justice, just like you can't extract education from the conversation about criminal justice or health care. All of these are issues that drive people to get caught up in a system that believes that, for some people, punishment is the answer, and for other people, investment is the answer.

SHARON SAYLES BELTON: This reference that you made to the cycle of punishment and if you really want to intervene in the cycle of punishment, you really have to approach the problem and issue differently. One of the things that I'm so proud about Habitat is that Habitat has taken issues that, like you referenced, education and health, and help people to understand that if you can provide someone with a stable home, and home can be just a place that we all gather and look out for each other, home can be the foundation from which people can, again, build wealth and prepare for a brighter future, but that home is really important.

People need safety and security. And when we provide, through programs like Habitat, an opportunity for people to be in a stable home, we've actually seen educational achievement improve. We've actually seen the health and welfare of individuals in a household improve. And I believe through the work that you're doing and the awareness that you're trying to create, we can maybe actually do something also about this cycle of punishment that we find ourselves trapped in.

STEVEN JOHN: Former Minneapolis Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton moderated this discussion with Josie Johnson and her granddaughter, Josie Duffy Rice, and their conversation continues in just a moment. Here during our winter member drive, a quick reminder that you make the difference for MPR News and programs that you rely on, like MPR News Presents during the noon hour when you hear long-form discussions, debates, and a lot of other interesting program that is of value to you.

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SPEAKER 1: Programming is supported by the Minnesota Independent School Diversity Career Fair on March 6 from nine o'clock AM to noon at Breck School, open to individuals from a variety of backgrounds who are seeking a career in education. Learn more at breckschool.org.

SPEAKER 2: Support for this program comes from Minnesota's Nongame Wildlife Program and the Live EagleCam. Swans, loons, turtles, and butterflies all benefit from your support. Find out how you can personally help at mndnr.gov/nongame.

STEVEN JOHN: This is MPR News Presents. Now back to Josie Johnson and her granddaughter, Josie Duffy Rice, speaking at a Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity event with former Minneapolis Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton.

SHARON SAYLES BELTON: Dr. Josie, I want to ask you a question. I'm going to actually ask you a question about Josie's work, and I want to ask you about it in this way. Now, people in the community right now are comparing the uprisings that we're experiencing across the country in the wake of the killing of George Floyd with the Civil Rights movement in the '60s.

But I want you to talk to us a little bit about the lessons that we are learning from the activism and the perspective of your granddaughter's generation of activists.

JOSIE JOHNSON: What I have observed is that our young people depend on the history that their elders bring to them, but they also are very realistic about what they've observed that has worked and what they've observed that has not worked. What I worry about, I think the George Floyd experience gave all of us an opportunity to see something we knew happened, we've never seen it, and we had an opportunity to show it.

For me to actually see this police officer kill George Floyd, see it-- we know it happens, our history knows it, but to see it and then to have the murderer give the impression that it was OK and accepted and a part of it.

When I listen to my granddaughter who talks about criminal justice and the opportunity to make that a very broad understanding, you're talking about some of the basic ingredients in a society that gives people a sense of security, protection, confidence.

And our young people today are putting all of that into the package. They're not just going back and looking at the laws and saying, Yes, we've got a fair housing, we've got equal ad, we've got this, we've got that. What I want to know, our young people are saying to us, I want to see the results of that. You talk about it, you've worked on it. What has been yield from all of that?

And so they challenge us, but they also work with us and they listen to us. We, I believe, have learned to listen to them and that together, what I think our young people and what us oldsters learn is that the deeply insidious teaching early on of justifying slavery, treating our ancestors the way they did, their need to justify that and our young people saying, oh no, we're not going to hear that story again.

We're going to move the way my granddaughter just outlined and described, associating what is going on in the society, what needs to be done, and then organizing a way to make it happen. So I'm happy to still be alive long enough to see where our generations, our generations, see each other and that we can all learn from each other because these young people aren't going to take what I took or what you took, Sharon.

They're not going to wait around. They want-- but they are-- they are planning. They're not just acting. They're thinking, they're planning, they're organizing. And I think that they're teaching us, their elders, how to go about that in a way that may produce-- because we're disappearing.

SHARON SAYLES BELTON: Well, we were talking earlier about building blocks for justice and opportunity. And so, Josie, I kind of want to flip the script, if I could, just for a moment and say, OK, your grandmother is talking about the torch, passing the torch on, and the power in passing the torch on, all the lessons learned in passing the torch forward. I want you to talk a little bit about what inspires you about your grandmother's generation of leaders and how you can build on that foundation that they set for your generation and generations going forward.

JOSIE DUFFY RICE: Absolutely. So when my grandma was born in 1930, she was born in Texas and there was a poll tax. She went around as a teenager to petition against the poll tax. She went to segregated schools. She lived a very, very different life than I live and that then hopefully my children will live.

And she fought for my generation and my parents' generation, her daughter's generation, and my kids' generation, her great-grandchildren's generation, to have more opportunity. I often think about what a woman named Mariame Kaba, who is someone I admire a lot in my field, she says, hope is a discipline. And I always think about my grandmother when she says that because I think that it's very easy to get cynical and it's very easy to convince yourself that none of this works, and that you're tired and you're tired of fighting and you give up.

And the point is that that's not really an option. That's what I've been taught by my grandmother. It's what my parents taught me. It's what I am inspired by her every day because she's still fighting 90 years later. And it's just not really an option to decide that nothing is going to change. And so for my generation, I mean, I think the frustration and the anger and the hurt that we experience in this moment has a lot to do with the fact that people, like my grandmother said, are always saying, well, things are better now.

And they are better than what they were like in 1930 in many ways, of course, but Black people in this country are still experiencing the effects of systemic and interpersonal racism at every time they turn around. And the experience of being Black in America, whether you're in Georgia or Minnesota, is still carries a weight, and again to go back to punishment, a punishment that has existed through the entirety of American history.

And so what I take from my grandmother specifically is the inspiration that you keep fighting, that this is-- that the reason-- life is short, the arc of history is long, and we only have a short time to make an impact here. And it is our job to do something that makes the lives of the people who come behind us easier and better.

And so that's what I try to keep in mind and that's what I take when I hear something like, hope is a discipline, because it's easy to get overwhelmed with the bad. But the potential for good is so great that it's our responsibility to push for it.

SHARON SAYLES BELTON: That's wonderful. Thank you so much for that. We have a number of people who are listening today's program because they're excited about the opportunity to create more affordable housing for people who are underserved in our community. And I just want to just take a moment again to thank them all for participating in the virtual Women of Habitat's Hope Builders luncheon. We are so delighted that you're with us today.

I want to go back to the question of fair housing, and I want to talk a little bit about your visions for fair housing. And Dr. Josie, I want to start with you, and I just want to recall that five years, five years after you helped Minnesota Fair Housing bill get passed, Dr. King Chicago campaign led to that city's expansion of public housing and home mortgage availability.

Now, at that time, Dr. King described his success as the first step, I want to underscore, first step in 1,000 mile journey. Now, arguably, I'm going to say that I think you helped establish that first step. But again, one of the next major steps was Walter Mondale's Fair Housing Act, which passed in 1968, nearly 60 years after you helped lay the groundwork for fair housing in Minnesota and in America.

We are still on that 1,000 mile journey. Still on that journey. I want to ask you, Dr. Josie, where do we go next to build on the vision of fair housing? What do we do next?

JOSIE JOHNSON: So there is a real need for us, in order to continue this struggle, we have got to prove to my Josie Helen and her age group and the group behind her that it is worth it. Something comes from it. But what I think we have got to do, and that includes me, this elder, is stop assuming that someday it's all going to be understood and that we will get on the same page.

What I want us to remember, my friends, how deeply etched white supremacy is in this society and how they were able to convince the world that we as a people who built this country were not qualified in any way. Our people had to come along in spite of that and do the things they knew, not only legally, spiritually, and other ways that needed to be done.

And we have to just-- I'm going to stop saying, keep on keeping on. That's my father's favorite expression. It is that. But it also has to now, in my judgment, for people of my granddaughters, and I've got several, people who are younger but committed to the struggle that Josie identified.

What we've got to prove is that something works. I think our generation has continued to try to hold on that this too shall pass. But our young people are saying, I don't think we still have the energy, patience, time for that. We've passed every law that you can write about justice, fairness, education, opportunity.

And this is 2020. This is Minnesota, Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton, that is at the bottom of the academic ladder, and that our people in Minnesota are in great demand for housing, quality education, opportunity.

And we can stop right here, look at our history, figure out what worked, what didn't, what ought to, what must, and how to do it. Because we have to stop just talking the talk. It is so important for us to show our young people, my granddaughter and great-granddaughters also, that this kind of commitment and belief works.

But my friends, remember, in order to enslave our ancestors and to continue passing laws that were denial, that still goes on. And it's deep in the fabric of all those who design policies, who design opportunities that underline insufficient understanding and follow through of the laws, the enforcement of the laws, the evaluation evasion of the laws.

Until we can put all that together, we will continue. My granddaughter's daughter, our new baby of just a week or so, will be fighting the same battle that her mother, her grandmother, and her great-grandmother have fought.

SHARON SAYLES BELTON: I want to ask you a question, Josie, about your work and your grandmother's comments about vision for fair housing going forward. There's a lot of people in our audience today who are actively involved in the conversation about criminal justice reform. Tell me a little bit about, or tell us, a little bit about how your grandmother's vision intersects with your work on criminal justice, public safety, and housing.

JOSIE DUFFY RICE: What I took from what she just said is that when you live in a country where white supremacy is so interwoven with everything in terms of policy in particular, it's easy to think-- the way I always describe it with the criminal justice system is it's not just a limb we can cut off. It's not a diseased limb on a tree that we can cut off and then the tree is healthy.

The tree is diseased. And so if we were able to fix mass incarceration, we would be able to solve the housing crisis. If we were able to solve the education crisis, we'd be able to solve the housing crisis. The reason we can't solve A is at its root, the same reason we can't solve B. And so I think all of this is deeply interconnected. The idea that anybody can focus on just one of these things and fix the racism in one area is not how racism works.

It infects everything. And it's not how white supremacy works and it's not how classism works in this country either. And so I deeply believe that what we're looking at-- people say, well, passing this law is hard. Passing the law is the easy part. Changing people is the hard part. And that's not to say passing the law is easy. It's not. It's just easier than really asking people to reckon with the history of this country.

What I always think about is that we don't teach history very well, and this is something my grandmother has been saying for 30 years. I mean, probably longer, but I've only been here 30 years, so that's all I can-- when people don't know what has happened in this country since its inception, it's easy to believe that these are just systems that exist now, but they don't have to exist tomorrow.

But we're fighting a generational fight because this is the fight that has always existed in this country. And I hope that the fight my daughter, who's the sixth Josie, I'm the fifth, my grandmother is the third, I'm hoping that my daughter, who's the sixth Josie, has a slightly easier fight to fight, but I don't have any illusions that she won't be fighting at all because this is a long fight, and it's existed since in the history of America.

So I don't think you can extract fair housing, the question of fair housing from the question of criminal justice because I think that they are getting back to the same root, which is the fact that in this country Black people are not equal citizens.

SHARON SAYLES BELTON: These are challenging times. And, Dr. Josie, you've been involved in this fight for over seven decades and you've been playing a key role in trying to help bend that moral universe towards justice. And I want to ask both of you to just tell us quickly, we don't have a lot of time left, but I want you to just tell us what keeps you motivated and what can all of us do as Habitat supporters to help bend that arc a little more quickly?

JOSIE DUFFY RICE: What keeps me motivated really is my grandmother. I understand that I'm lucky because she's my grandma, but I'm willing to share that motivation with anybody who would like her to be their surrogate grandma. She's an excellent surrogate grandma as well as an official one. And it-- but that's true. I mean, I get this question sometimes because the work I do is deeply depressing.

And I think the way that I stay motivated, in part, is remembering how lucky I am to have the people like my grandmother and my family who have always imparted these lessons on me, and how lucky I am to be able to be in a position to try to make people's lives even a little bit better. I know that a lot of that is luck, that this is not a merit-based society. And so there are people who have the same skills and the same aptitude that I have that will not get that opportunity and that I'm lucky to have it.

I think on the other hand, the thing that keeps me motivated beyond the fact that we do see some important incremental changes, we do see people fighting for change, we did see an incredible protest happening this summer, for the most part, just really, really inspiring protests. The other side is that I have two kids. Like my grandmother said, my daughter is just a few weeks old.

And they are just coming into a new world. They don't know anything about anything. They don't have any idea what fair housing is. But I want to be able to equip them with the tools to carry this on. And so I'm one cog in this wheel in the best way possible because the fight is much bigger than I am. So I feel motivated by my family and by seeing the change that's happening day-to-day on the street.

A lot of bad stuff is happening, but a lot of very good stuff is also happening. And a lot of people are answering the call. And so I find that to be deeply, deeply inspiring.

JOSIE JOHNSON: Josie's comments are deeply inspiring to me, as you can imagine. Not because she is my granddaughter, but because I believe she represents a generation that is forcing us to be the leaders of a struggle that we think we are. That is one that believes that we probably have more power than we realize.

We think also you of pass on to the next generation an evaluation of the struggles of the past. The fact that our ancestors, and I never want us to forget that, when those people kidnapped and brought our ancestors to this country, they had to justify that action.

I don't think you can abuse people forever and not lose your own sense, your own sense of who you are. So you make up stories to prove that what you did was right and just. And I believe the fact that our ancestors said to themselves and to us collectively, you come from a great history and a great people, and we know it, we will continue it.

And they are the ones who created, produced, and did so many things that we're all very proud of. So I think what we have to do is teach, talk, preach to our children, remind them who they are because the system is not designed to do that. It functions best when it can keep us enslaved in their description of who we are.

And that's why it just makes me so proud to know that our children are all engaged in some way in this common struggle of decency and hope and love for each other. My children love who they are. They love their ancestors. They are proud of being a part of that, and they've shown that in so many different ways. I'm very blessed.

SHARON SAYLES BELTON: I can't thank you enough, Josie and Dr. Josie, for sharing this time with us today. We've all been inspired, not only by your own personal work, but by the vision and the messages that you shared with us about the possibilities, about opportunity and always about hope.

I want to just, in deference to my Mama Josie, I want to give her the last word. And so I want you to tell us what are your final thoughts-- what are your final thoughts about our conversation today?

JOSIE JOHNSON: First of all, let me thank you sincerely for the concept of what we tried to do this afternoon. Thank you. What I think we need to do is to continue in the struggle that our ancestors presented to us, and tell our children who they are.

We don't tell them often, clearly, enough about their ancestral roots, from whence they have come, and where they must continue to go. Because those people that they brought over here in that ship, many of whom died on the route, laying them down there in the bottom of that ship feet to feet, not caring about them, and then teaching a world that they were inferior, for our people are still be here still fighting, still believing in the history of their ancestry.

Community, we need to figure out how do we keep that story going? How do we tell our children? Because in this day, to have Minnesota Black children at the bottom of the economic ladder, bottom of the academic ladder, the less hope that they seem, we've got a job, community.

And we have to remember what our ancestors taught and what they died for because we have the capacity to keep on keeping on. And that's what we must do. So thank you for giving us this opportunity, Sharon.

SHARON SAYLES BELTON: Thank you both. It's just been a pleasure to be able to speak with you today. And to all of the people who joined us for today's virtual luncheon, thank you. Thank you for caring about this work. Thank you for partnering with Habitat. And as Josie just said, let's keep on keeping on. Thank you.

JOSIE JOHNSON: Thank you.

STEVEN JOHN: Former Minneapolis Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton moderated this virtual event for Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity with Josie Johnson and her granddaughter, Josie Duffy Rice.