he has been a professor at we see lean, hamilton and the university of hamilton. he has written or coedited other books in addition to the one he'll be speaking about tonight "shadows of youth" and his topics about which he wrote is massive resistance and civil rights in virginia. currently andy is working on a book entitled "race and the rise of the boston celtics dynasty." i know we have a lot of massachusetts students at the university so that's pretty exciting. dr. paul gaston will fall andy. paul was actually both my and andy's dissertation advisor at the university of virginia where he taught for decades after receiving his doctorate in u.s. southern history from the university of north carolina at chapel hill. paul has written a number of works on various topics including the new south, the history of fair hope alabama, south africa and the civil rights movement in the united states. paul has won numerous awards.

most recently the naacp's legendary civil rights activist award. again, as you see on the table, it looks as if the books are going to be talking but they're not. they're there to represent the two tors tonight. they both recently published these new books. they will be available after their talks to sign, for purchase and to be signed by our authors and again we'll take questions and comments after we're done with the two authors. so if you will wait until they're both done. . ..

>> are not an experience they could relate to, so in many ways i thought of this story in the way i wanted to tell it in the way i wanted to explain it to make it relevant to an audience of younger people who didn't live through it and who saw it as something in the remote past and not relevant to their lives. and as juliette pointed out, today marks or this week marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the citians, february 11960. a key turning point in the civil rights movement i think the key turning point is a pivotal

moment in my book, and so i thought i would devote most of my talk to the sit-ins and explaining why i think it's a turning point and i think it does together some of the themes of my book, turning it back to its roots and then looking forward to the repercussions of the sit-ins. as you can see, my book is called "the shadows of youth," and it examines what i call the life arc of the civil rights generation. and at the core of that are the young activists who have the sit-ins and ends started sncc, the student non-violent coordinating committee, which was in existence from 1960 to about 1970, or a few years afterward. and sort of tapered off. it's the most important and i think least appreciated organization of the 1960s. sncc was formed in april 1960 by the college students that i said for behind the sit-ins. is a driving force behind the freedom rides of 1961, it

organizes the freedom summer of 1964. its tactics change the dynamics of civil rights movement making both the civil rights act of 1951954 and the voting rights at of 1965 possible. and inspired the antiwar movement, the opposition to the vietnam war. if martin luther king wrote the portrait of the movement, sncc acted out its pros putting flesh and blood to the abstractions of democracy and freedom of citizenship that made the civil rights movement possible. the life of sncc was briefed at its most effective days were over by 1967. though elements of it as i said later on into the 1970s. my book is about more than just the movement. in the '60s the subtitle, as a public rear of the of important snickers into the '70s, '80s and into the '90s. we can see here some of the leaders of sncc as youth, and

then today. more than anything, three questions drove my writing of this book. the first to work more sort of personal human questions, and i want to know what it was like to be in the grip of history as a young person. what did it feel like to be at the center of history when you were 20, 21, 22 years old, and how to make that come alive? and sometimes to me the civil rights movement and its actors were presented as bland as the puritans seem to me as a high school student, which is they were robbed of all the things that made them exciting, their youth, they're bigger. and the kind of adventure story in some way, this was an incumbent dynamic mode for someone to kind of restore some of that sense of adventure to the civil rights movement.

and also, i was curious every to talk about this in the question and answer period, what happens to you if you change the world before you're 30? what do you do with the rest of your life, and how does that shape the kind of person you going to become in the kind of person you are, how do you live, how do you live with that, and how does that shape you? i thought that the civil rights activists were, sncc, were a good example of that here. they were about 21 when the movement began. they are not even 30 in most cases when what we think of the civil rights movement comes to an end, and as this is happening they know it's the most important, most exciting, most dramatic thing they're probably going to do in their lives. and then they live in some ways in the shadow of that for the rest of their lives. and certainly, we as a nation live in the shadow of the activism of the '60s, its color and how we think about politics, how we think about

youth. it's colored almost everything we think about in this country, so i thought about that. and the third question i was interested in was kind of a larger one of greater historical importance, which is, and one thing i puzzled over as a historian is why did the civil rights movement happen when it did? why did it happen in the 1920s or the 1940s or maybe even 20 years later in the 1980s? why in the 1950s and 1960s did legal segregation in the south collapse? especially why was 1960 a key turning point? it's something i've always puzzled over as a historian, and thought about and wanted to explain a little bit, which is why, what is it about this particular moment in time that was unique or different? let me take you back to januar january 1962 set the scene for what's going to happen. the south is segregated, and this famous photograph typifies the separation of the races that existed in the south, separate

water fountains, separate restrooms, separate sitting rooms, and bus and train stations. signs like this at restaurants. but segregation as juliette poured out was under attack. the brown decision had happened in 1964. the montgomery bus boycott had happened in 1955 and 1956. there had been little rock in a virginia school desegregation crises. martin luther king had emerged, was an important national figure. yet it's also worked at how little had changed by 1960. six years after brown, school desegregation soap we mired in the courts. fewer than one in 1000 african-american students attended an integrated school in the south. and numbers actually closer to

probably one in 5000, depending on how you define the south. and how you calculate what an integrated school is. but the point is that brown had preceded slowly. in many ways martin luther king was lost in drifting. as the cover of this "time" magazine chose, he was the most famous african-american in the nation, and yet he had trouble turning the success of the boycott into a kind of enduring movement in progress seemed to stall out. in many word that the civil rights movement such as it was, had stalled about or was in danger of falling apart. i think the best way to illustrate this is to talk about one of kings biggest critics who happen to be executive director of the southern christian leadership conference that the organization that king formed after the montgomery boy's boycott. and baker, she's one of the great figures in the civil rights movement, not very well known. she had come of age in the 1920s that should been the valedictorian of her class at

shaw university. she had moved to new york to harlem in 1920s where she organized tenants and poor people. in the '40s she was a great organizer for the naacp traveling around south helping establish new naacp branches. by the 1950s, she had taken a job as the executive director of the southern christian leadership conference. and the best way to think about baker's criticism of king isn't just to take one second to think about the organization he formed and just examine the title which i think probably what most of us have never done, the southern christian leadership conference. every word in the organization's name bothers ella baker. it was other. alum baker thought the movement should be national. she didn't think the problem, although she recognizes segregation was a southern institution commissioners of the

races with a national problem and she thought should be addressed nationally. >> christian. à la baker was a devoted churchgoer but she thought the question of segregation was in that organization should should be thinking in terms of politics. leadership she dreamed of a mass movement, not a movement of literature and not a movement of deletes. and she was particularly critical of preachers, with the she thought were trained to speak to an audience, not with an audience. preacher stand on the pulpit and they deliver sermons. and she thought that the north station should come from the bottom-up, not the top down. and last was the conference, which is kind of a funny word. and the thing about the southern christian leadership conference, it was more of an organization rather than a mass organization which is you as an individual could really join if you wanted to. organizations like the alabama human rights organization where members of the southern

christian leadership conference. and if you remember of that you are a member of the sclc but you couldn't join as an individual. she wanted a mass organization of individuals. so every word of the title bothered ella baker, and was at the root of her criticism. ways in which she thought came had began to squander the opportunities of the montgomery bus boycott. and she feared that the movement was owing to stall out. 10 k. february 1, 1960, and here you can see a picture of the first city in. for guys as juliette poured out were sitting in a dorm room. they were frustrated they want to do something. they decided to sit in a restaurant until they were served. the manager was so unnerved he simply close the counter. he didn't know what to do. you know how to respond but the idea spread. we can see from this map how fast on favorite to april 1960 a large stars represent places

where sit-ins happened. after the first sit-it more student joined them. by the end of the week 1500 students in greensboro were participating in trade do. in the sit ins jumped in nashville, into atlanta, by the end of the summer, they had spread to more than 70 cities and 50,000 people have purchase a paid. it's the largest mass explosion of civil disobedience in american history. we can see here, here's a picture of a national students sitting in an here's a picture of the students in atlanta sitting in. in nashville they were already preparing for sit-ins when the greensboro, when the first greensboro sit-in happen. james lawson had been training college students in nashville for this exact thing, and they've been going over nonviolent tactics when the

greensboro sit-in happen spontaneous and they jumped in the fray. in atlanta, they had been thinking about this, but college student named julian bond was sitting in a milk shop, a hamburger joint one day when another student named lonnie king, no relation to martin luther king, walked in and showed paper about the greensboro sit-ins and he said have you seen this, we should do something about it. and julie of censure. he joked later that he should have said we? you mean you. but he got involved in the sit ins, and they spread. and in almost every city they were led by college students more than anybody else. and one of the things about the sit-ins it's worth noting, is that they were an urban phenomenon. they took place in cities, not in rural areas. and let me just talk about for ways in which or five ways in which the sit-ins change the civil rights movement. one of the things about the sit-ins that was different than

protest before is they were egalitarian. everybody participated equally and everybody was in equal danger. if which is contrast every minute with the mod coming bus boycott which was kind of hierarchical protests in which the preachers organized it and it was highly recommended. it took a lot of organization to pull off a bus boycott that you had to arrange an alternative form of transportation that are even if you think about the brown school desegregation cases, it took lawyers to argument. it is a highly kind of organized affair in which not everybody participate equally in the same way, and yet the city and were a way in which everybody participated equally in the protest. they were democratic. and i think this is important which is the distance between near and polymer collapse. in the boycott has a clear irt. and that sit-ins there's no

clear hierarchy. everybody as i said is sitting in. everybody is an equal danger. everybody is participating equally. the sit-ins were easily replicable. and i think this is also an important point, which is even those the students in national have been trying for a long time, and a lot of that training had simply been lost in trying to convince them that it was possible. once a first try to happen in students saw the response they would easy to reproduce in a way that something like montgomery bus boycott or a suit against school desegregation which was difficult to reproduce. all you need to do to stage a sit-in was a few friends and the ability to master some simple ideas about nonviolence and about nonviolent resistance techniques. so it made the sit-ins compared to other forms of protest easily replicable. and that's why they were, as i said in this market, viral.

they spread so fast and so quickly. they were a media. the sit-ins didn't take a lot of time to organize. and the last, and i think this is the most important thing about the sit-ins in which they differed from other forms of protest before them, which is the goal of the sit-ins once they got going was to challenge segregation by breaking the law rather than to avoid it as in the case of the boycott, or to use existing law to challenge it as was the case with the brown decision, which is to say one of the things about the montgomery bus boycott that king worked hard was to avoid arrest was civil rights leaders believe the way to convince white americans, congress, to bring about change was to show that they were good americans, that they obey the law, they worked within the system. and the sit-ins were the exact opposite of that. which the goal of the sit-ins was to save we're no longer going to obey any more law.

which is their southern policeman to arrest them, and to overwhelm the system hopefully with their challenge. and this marks a real break with the kind of protest that happened before. because the idea was to go to jail. the idea was to get arrested. and to show that only white southerners, but the nation, how inpatient african-americans worked with the slow pace of change. and so this leads us, or leads me to a question which is, the question i start with is, why 1960, and why young people? why is it at this particular moment the protests against segregation change in their led by young people. one of the things i'm struck with is a quote, a few years before the sit ins, you franklin

frazier, wrote a book about the african-american middle-class. and as you can see from this quote he wrote about here we're speaking about young middle-class college at getting african-americans who are less concerned with a history or the understanding of the world about them than they are with their appearance, ethnic social affair, money and conspicuous consumption are more important than knowledge. here is frazier saying, just a few years before the sit ins start that not on does he share ella baker's concerns about the movement might be stalling out but that the reason this is going to happen is because young people don't care. the problem is young people are as he says more interested, especially the people who might be the leaders of the movement, middle-class college attending african-americans who should be at the forefront of this, all they care about is day 10 dances and getting a good job. and the reason why the movement isn't going to happen is it's going to be their fault. it's not our fault. and i've always been fascinated by this quote which is what it

fresh amiss, how did he get so wrong? is a person who has spent his whole life studying the african-american community. he's one of the most eminent african-american scholars, and yet within a few years of his book coming out things change completely and he is wrong. and i've always been true to about this which is it's not just frazier. what did everybody, what did everybody mess? and one of the things i think that fraser didn't see was how frustrated young people were and how the combustible mix of rising world progress and a new youth oriented pop culture can produce activism as well as apathy, engagement as well as in difference. and i want to just tell the couple stories about young people. to give you a sensible their frustration and how the culture had changed in 1950s to make the sit-ins possibility. imagine for a second that you are 13 or 14 years old in 1954,

which will make you 19 or 20, or 15 years old in 1954, your 21 when the brown decision came down. you think you'll be attending an integrated high school before graduation. john lewis, who attends school in rural alabama. he started the newspaper everyday looking for news about what his school is going to integrate. and yet here he is in college in nashville six years later and there's been no integration to speak up in his home state. at the other end of the spectrum of class and geography, the frustration was just as great. diane nash grew up in chicago, decided she wanted to enter a beauty pageant. so she called a few beauty schools to learn about classes. they said come on down. when she showed up and they saw that she was african-american, they said we don't think african-americans and they turned her away at the door. so i think in those two stories,

you see a generation with a rising sense of expectation and a rising level of frustration about how slow changes happen. there are a couple reasons for this, and let me talk about this. in a want to talk about pop culture for a second. and i will bring it back to before i finished. one of the things happen, the middle-class that grown substantially. in relative terms they were still much smaller than the white middle-class, but in absolute numbers it had grown greatly in the room any african-americans attending college. in fact, african-americans were more embedded in american consumer culture than they had been at any time before. "forbes" magazine wrote a story about the growing african-american consumer, pointed out that african-americans were a separate nation their purchasing power in the 1950s would be equal to canada. and although the population would have been larger, as a group, they had more disposable income in absolute terms than

ever before. although relative to whites, they were still far behind that in particular young african-americans were more likely to work under white counterparts, and more likely to have some small amount of spending money. one of the things which happen is that the generation started to be with racing class is an identity. for youth, and for young people today use the mtv as a perfect example. with the message of mtv is it doesn't matter where you live or what color you are. generation trumps all. mtv's appeal is that youth matters more than anything else. and you see this begin to emerge in the 1950s. in one place this happens, i will tell two stories about the very quickly, is american bandstand, which is a show that premieres in philadelphia in the 1950s and then goes national. and it's like a condensed version of mtv and its day.

and the host is that clark, who is still around. he is sort of the equivalent of the right secrest of his day. actually write seacrest is the dick clarke of our day. and the thing about american bandstand was was interesting was that it featured an integrated dance floor which is the word black african-americans and white dancing together for african-american couples dancing on the floor with white couples. and for afghan american teens this was a stunning site. and that they raced onto watch american bandstand as quickly as their white counterparts. and i think music illustrates this as well, and here's a poem that julian bond wrote, and you can see him riffing on langston hughes in his opening line, but talking about little richard and fats domino talking about the musicians of their era.

and talking about the ways in which ray charles is drowning in his own tears, the sorrows of segregation, but also that i don't mind standing a little longer, he concludes, and the ways in which pop culture, music, is both drawing him in to the broader american culture and also highlighting his sense of exclusion. and you see the ways in which marketers are trumping generational identity over racing class in some ways. and you can see here help us, after buying all his records as much as whites are. you can see chuck berry, little anthony and the imperial, but also somebody like james dean or marlon brando, a figure of alienation appeal to both black and white teens, and they're being marketed in many ways as a generation rather than as a

member of a particular race or class. and this is a shift that happens in the 1950s that hadn't happened before. and you can see, i love this ad from seven up because i think this typifies in many ways how marketers who are trying to produce a revolution, but you are participating in one or marketing their products to african-american teens in ways that highlight their kind of youthful identity over race, which is this a very middle-class leave it to beaver image of african-american teens sharing seven up floats, started appearing in the 1950s. and you would have seen as quite like this before. and one of the things that i think is interesting about this, which is youth is an identity was being marketed everywhere in ways that suggested as i said, that it trumps race or class, but in their everyday lives african-american teens knew this

was not true, they shopped in, they couldn't share the same dressing room with whites. they were the same yet different. they were considered, as with any kind of academic ease, first class consumer and second class citizens. and i think this gap is really important to understanding why the sit ins happen when they do and where they do, and so let me double back to woolworth's, and it is worth thinking about woolworth's to illustrate this point. and let's pause to think where else they could have gone rather than woolworth's to have a demonstration. they could have gone to a school, right? if we think about all the alternatives, woolworth's becomes kind of an interesting choice. given all the rights tonight at an american, given the slow pace of school, segregation, you could have gone to the registrar's office and tried to vote or register to vote that you could have gone to the mayors office and made a political statement, and the

range of possibilities for african-americans are great, yet the four students who started chose to woolworth's. in the first thing they did before sitting down was to buy something. they made a purchase. they bought some school supplies to emphasize the idea that if their money was good, then their patronage, their ability to be able to sit at the lunch counter should be the same. and they wanted to link their consumerism to their citizenship, right, to say that if i can stand here, i should have the same equal rights. and i think that's the kind of interesting statement that and it's one of the things that is interesting to me about the sit ins, which is in some way how conservative the goals were even as the attackers were revolutionary. which is to say that teens who sat in wanted inclusion in american society. they weren't saying that american society was fundamentally flawed in the beginning. they were saying we want to be a

part of the. want to be able to participate in this new, exciting, emerging youth culture like everybody else. want to be able to sit at the lunch counter and have a shake and a burger like everybody else. we are paying in some ways only marketed that this matters more, and yet we are excluded. and in some ways the sit ins, the goal at first of inclusion is a kind of modest goal and not a revolution ago. the tactics are revolutionary, but the goal is revolutionary. and one of the things that i think we see here, and it shapes what happens later, and let me just talk for a couple of minutes about what happens later before i finish up, which is the kind of hope and optimism of the sit ins, which is the students who sat in what he believed in america's ability to self correct, that to expose would bring men and women of goodwill

to change it. in many ways, that they had learned their civics lessons to well, that they thought if they simply showed that the system was wrong, but that would bring about change. and there's a certain optimism in the sit ins that i find interesting. and i think it helps is also understand, this is one of the things about the sit ins, and here we will see the movement begin to shift, but we want to understand why 1960, which is the sit ins were centered on the middle-class and on urban areas. and one of the things that we often don't think about is our assumption sometimes i think is that the movement would start in areas in the rural south were african-americans for the most oppressed. in areas where african-americans suffered the harms of segregation and economic exploitation the most. and yet, the funny thing about the sit ins and the thing that makes them interesting is,

people who in some ways are least exposed to the harshest aspects of segregation that are rebelling against it personal they live in urban areas but these are college students were going to have middle-class lives, segregation in the cities, well, well terrible doesn't carry with it in the same dangers in many ways that it does in the rural south. and yet, these are the first students to rebel. if you think back to the fraser quote, you know, he thinks these are the most apathetic of african-americans. and yet they are the very ones who started. and i think it's worth thinking about how when we think about why social change happens, where the process, to see how in many ways the people who are relatively the most comfortable under the system in some ways are the want to our most agitated by it, and most willing to risk it.

and also have the resources in many ways to challenge it. so the sit ins it started off in a way as modest, but ella baker, let me come back to drama, thought they could be more. she invited the students from the sit ins down to a conference and shot university over easter weekend in april 1960. to discuss sit ins and to see where to go next. both martin luther king and the naacp want to go of the students into an organization that would be junior league of the the the sclc or the naacp. ella baker gives a great speech in which he says that sit-ins are more than about a hamburger, and the students should form their own organization. and so they follow her advice in the form the student non-violent coordinating committee in april 1960, just as an aside king and the naacp are furious at baker for subverting their plans. but the student still saw themselves as active as. and they call the temperature

nonviolent coordinating committee. they only see that this is going to last a little while. and, in fact, if this is one of the things i find most surprising about this is that many would back to school in classes and dates and dances the meeting. here we are in the middle of the civil rights movement and we think of course, you know, there going to charge right into it, and yet they still saw themselves as students and not activist that it would take a couple more years for things to change. and part of the reason it took a couple of years for things to change was their optimism which proved naïve, which is they assume, as i said, if they expose injustice change would happen. and it turned out to be that men and women of goodwill didn't change their minds that easily. they didn't put tech them or do anything to help them. and it's why i say they learned their civic lessons to welcome because they assume that american democracy was self-correcting, that the

federal government would protect right and that turned out not to be too big a couple things to change this. the freedom rides changes when the federal government didn't step in to protect people who were beaten and jailed change them. and made them more radical. and then one more person change, change them. was bob moses. about moses had come, let me just talk about bob moses for one second. bob moses had come to atlanta in 1961. it seem the sit ins on tv. he lived in new york. he was so moved by what he saw he decided he wanted to work for the southern christian leadership conference. he met with king and king sent them off to stuff envelopes and to prepare mailings. ella baker met him at but here's a guy who had gone to hamilton college as an undergrad and harvard as a grad student at heat being wasted.

so seat she sent him down to deep south to recruit people for a fall sncc conference. and he met a guy named am so more in mississippi. aims we more have been an organizer for civil rights in mississippi for a number of years. and he said to him what good is eating in a restaurant if you don't have any money? he said the savings are nice but for people in the deep south, rural african-americans the savings are irrelevant. these are middle-class protest that they don't do anything for us. and moses realize that the tactics of the sit ins could apply to voter registration in the deep south. that is to say that in the deep south where whites tried hard to keep african-americans from voting, if you the same sort of aggressive tactics of the sit ins but applied to voter registration you could bring about change. and in merging voter registration with direct action, moses change sncc and sncc

became the shock troops of the movement. and moses did a couple of things, put black political power back in the center of the civil rights movement that made local moments important that made the deep south important and major confrontation with segregation strategy of direct action. but sncc a burned out quickly, and let me talk about the reasons why sncc burned out quickly. and then let me talk about why i think this tour is useful to young people today. for things writing this book about why sncc burned out quickly. the first is that full-time activism burned out quickly and it's the province of the young. and i think were always surprised by that. and we should be. which is these people in their 20s, if you devote your youth

to full-time activism. that burger out. is a full-time 24/7 commitment. and we should be surprised not by the people that burn out but by the people who are able to sustain that kind of activist commitment their whole lives. and i don't often think we realize that. secondly, one of the reasons why sncc burned out his they naïvely believed that justice which from expediency. which is to say they were right and so change would happen. and it turns out to be that in the politics of america, expediency, that is to say, what is easy and quick often trumps justice. the third is, the third thing i learned is we often wonder why the civil rights movement seem to fracture at the end of the 1960s. and to think this is a predictable thing which is want of legal segregation came to an end, it's predictable to people have different views and the movement would fracture. so we are often surprised by the. i went over to and say of course that was going to happen, is the common goal of ending legal

segregation binds people together. and once again to an and we shouldn't be surprised that divergent political views would emerge. and get the way we talk about this civil rights movement is so surprised that that would happen. and i would say that that's not true. and let me just say why is this so important young people, why should you care, you're 20 years old today? how is the story 50 years ago whether you're black or white, important to you? unable to for reasons why i think this tour is important to you. in closing. the first is fraser's quote, which is we tend to think of prosperity and affluence and apathy. that's just not true. and sometimes they can be true but it's not always do. and we make that criticism about young people today. and we should be careful about that. we tend to demonize youth culture that in the '50s it was rock 'n roll. today it is the new games. we tend to assume that what young people do that's different is going to cause our society to

collapse. many whites thought that rock 'n roll would lead to interracial dating and that would be the end of american society. in the same way that people talk about video games being the end of american society today. and the third and interrelate part of this is we tend to take young people, we don't tend to take them serious as political actors. what the student she was is that young people are serious political actors, and we dismiss them as ignorant or self absorbent, and narcissists into because of the way that they address. they dress differently than as. they pierce there is that they like to get tattoos to they do all sorts of things that we think are different. so we tend to dismiss them. but we should take the youth thursday as political actors began to try again -- trantwo's shows that. and we shouldn't be surprised

when that happens. less than a sncc i in ways in which history happens and unlike the places and unlikely time is that before it became a bumpersticker sncc looked at the idea of think globally, act locally. which this i global problem of racism and injustice, and the response was to act locally which was to sit in at a restaurant. so the response was small and personal. can we eat at this restaurant? and i think that that idea and the idea that history can have in unlikely places and unlikely times to an unlikely generation is one worth remembering, and that's what i think the story is important to younger people. now i'm going to turn the podium over to paul. [applause] >> i don't have any more pictures, but i like this one.

well, you heard juliette say, i've known her a long time, i've been in election associated, and socially associated with or. you heard her say that this is going to be an evening about the city and. and i was interested to hear because i do know what i'm supposed to talk about until i got here. but as one who was in a second, i would like to take just a little bit about how good this book is, and how you should all buy a copy. sorry, is this close enough? is exceedingly difficult to describe the scope and nature of this book. one reviewer recently described it as a very personal memoir, which is also a social history.

and i try to write the book that was like that that was a pretty good reviewer to pick it up. when i was in college, i was trying to figure out what to do in my life. it was the early '50s. i knew big changes were coming to the south. my fiancé, we weren't engaged until about the last senior year. felt the same way about things i did. we both came from the deep south that she is from south carolina, me from alabama. we knew big changes were coming from the south. voting rights were expanded. the civil rights movement hadn't started yet. and the cases were going through the lower courts. and we decided, and i confess that when i use the pronoun it's a reflection of the age. that is, i decided, the man

decided, and the woman said yeah, that's a good idea. that one way to end the movement that was coming was to teach southern history at a southern university, to change the views that people had about -- and to enlighten them about the views that their fellow southerners had. i was lucky enough to get a job at the university of virginia, and it was my first job. i never left. and i could do that. i could teach a version of southern history to southern students, mostly men, and so after the 1970s, when women came to the university. and i could teach history that was different that many differences believe that they believed that slavery was

benign, segregation was good for everybody, and poor people were that way because they were lazy. all of these things were reformed. my grandfather was from iowa, and he was really upset by the excesses of the gilded age, the spreading gap between rich and poor, what the captains captains of industry did that made a mockery of the american dream. and so he decided that it was moving too slow to bring about change. he learned that as an officer in the populist party in 1892 when his colleague, general weaver, ran as the candidate for president, and lost. so my grandfather designed a

model community, which he which is, he established it on mobile bay on the banks of mobile bay in 1894. now, i do not have time and i sort of won't take time to describe the premises upon which that community was built. except it was to have the economic and the political and the social structure that would create a society in which the gap between rich and poor would be narrowed, where opportunity would exist, but cooperation with virgin a long society. that community was brilliantly successful for 30 years, or so, when i grew up in a community, i felt that there was something really unique about it, and

uniquely good. by the time i was off in college, the communities of values had turned upside down. once a committee where people came to solve social problems, it became a community where they came to escape social problems. so i have written about it and i've lost a lot of friends in that town, one of them i'm told would be ready to assess met -- assassinate me if we met. so i toned down some of the discussion. so that's what i wrote this. i wanted to show, well, maybe i just want to say thank you, grandfather, and thank you to my father, who were devoted to this. but also how it changed my life. working with wonderful student at the university, who did join a variety of movements for social change.

but since we are focused tonight on the sit ins, i'd like to tell you, just tell you a story about a city and. and how andy said on the one hand, and this i found disappointing as a university professor, on the one hand, rational evidence-based argument does not change the minds of people whose privilege is deeply ingrained. they won't change. as a consequence of explaining to them that what they believe in is false imaging. and another thing was that they would change, maybe, under the force of something like the sit ins.

example, we had an organization in charlotte, so we had the naacp. i was on the executive committee, and went another organization called council on human relations. they were the only civil rights groups in the town of charlottesville. and each year we would go out to the restaurant owners and to the theater operators and say hey, wouldn't you all like to change our policies and integrate? well, if the other fella would do it, we would. and they didn't mean that at all. they weren't going to change. so one year in may of 1963, and i'm sorry, andy, it's not always young people. i was 35 years older than, and most of my colleagues who joined in, they were that old too. the head of the naacp had recently arrived in town, passed by one of the black churches. floyd was only 32. and we had a picnic at the end of the are talking about what we

had accomplished and what we had accomplished. and floyd got up on a stool and he said, look, you all remember what happened in birmingham. and the brilliant demonstration were just over the bark off the tree, the bark on the trees have been removed, powerful hoses, the children had gone to jail, connor had written around town in his big band. and yes, we did remember. and floyd said, well, history seems to have passed our town by. we are going to have a city in. and all of you folks who care to help us, come down to my church on ask night and we will instruct you on what to do. we looked around, i and my wife and i and set about how many of

us will come. and i said, we're going to go. so we went and a few others went. we got there and floyd told us what we're going to do, which restaurant we were going to go to. and he had a booklet, maybe came out of snick originally, i don't know, and it told you what to do. told women what to do to protect themselves, and it told me and what to do so as to not to appear aggressive, because we were nonviolent. and this is what you do if someone was going to attack you. and i leaned over to my wife, and i said this is charlottesville. this is in columbia, south carolina, or greenville south carolina over greensboro north carolina. or lord knows, it isn't birmingham, alabama. this is a very civilized into everybody told us when we got to the university of virginia how civilized it was. anyway, we got to this particular theater -- particular

restaurant named buddies. just a nice place to be. and several of us went in. mostly black, but substantial, it's probably 60-40. and we got in and we took tables. and the tables had little boys on them that said don't let our waitress is russia. and they didn't. we sat there for three hours. but they didn't pour coffee on our heads, as they have done in the stories that andy has told. than the next day we came back and there was a bouncer at the door, and we formed a line along the sidewalk leading up to the entrance. we were blocking anything. we weren't breaking any laws. but we were standing as though we wanted to enter. and then the third day i came -- i have been there a while, and floyd, who was the head of the line, i mentioned a moment ago,

said he was hungry. and i said, well, floyd, why don't you come in here. i hear this is a very nice place to be. he said yeah, why don't my? he said what i would like used to do is go home and telephone and get one of the black leaders to come here and take my place. i said, okay. so i went home. i telephoned. i couldn't find anybody. so i came back and said floyd, i'm sorry, i couldn't find anybody. and he said well, i'm really hungry. you take my place at the head of the line. at about that time know why today at the head of the line. i said all right. i didn't say with much enthusiasm but i said all right. and shortly after he left, this is memorial day, holiday, a car came up and for fellows looking as though this wouldn't be the first place they would come for beer that day. walked up to us and made some remarks which could indicate that they really didn't know

what of why we were there. i breathed a sigh of relief as they went on in the restaurant again and after a while they came out. and this time they made their disapproval, obvious both in word and in the. i can't say about the deed and not the word. and they started pushing and shoving, and i said somewhat odd to do something. well, i'm the head of the line. i should do something. so i watch across the street where there's one of these in closed telephone booths, and i decided i would call the police. i had never called the police before. i'd never heard of 911. i don't even know if there was such a thing way back in 1963. so i pulled the phone book out, took -- to call the police. where's the police?

and before i had the chance to find the number, this rather large man, i found out later he was a former prize fighter and he weighed 330 pounds, he picked me up by the shoulder and he pulled me out of the phone booth like that, and she looked at me and he said, you a going to call know damn police. and i look at him and i thought, you know, you're absolutely right. [laughter] >> well, they push me back -- oh, his confederate who was much smaller hit me once across the jaw, and then with the other hand a little harder. but since i didn't hit back, not because i believe in nonviolence, but it was is 330-pound man, what was i -- i believe in nonviolence at that time. it was an expedient is believed to hold the circumstances. they pushed us back. and in some of my -- i want us to drop the whole damn thing.

i'm not a courageous person and i did to -- let's let it go away, but my friends wouldn't do that. they had already called the police. we think the please had the in the whole time, but i don't know that for sure. and the police came and they said, well, who do you think that was? and i described them and they said yes, it would be so and so. and i described other one and they said that would be so and so. so i went down to the playstapolice station and had to swear out a warrant for their arrest for assault and battery. and i said, you don't suppose those cells would come out to my house, do you? and other my family, and they said oh, no, they wouldn't do that. but they might go back to the line and bother the people there, which is exactly what they were doing at that moment. and floyd and william johnson, no relation to him, were both beaten badly. floyd was hospitalized and is backed by the jim all of his life. he died a couple of years ago, very sadly.

he became a good friend. as did william. and, parenthesis, i later learned, this is really hard for me to believe, a newspaper reporter named allen runs, allen told a long time ago that i was the first person ever beaten in a civil rights demonstration in virginia. so, that was hard to believe. but i queried a number of historians, number of civil rights activists, and he was too young to ask about that 1963 your candidate appeared to be true. and floyd and william would be just after me. now, to wind this up, we had a big trial. they come on the advice of counsel i assume, accused of the three of us of assault and

battery. and then their lawyer said, we will drop our charges if you will drop yours. the difference was they were guilty and we weren't. so of course we didn't drop our charges. there ensued a two day trial, and the big courthouse in charlottesville. if you ever been to courts or and you see the big old courthouse, that's what it was. we had a booth there because all of the people to fit into small courthouse. now, during the stand out, or the sit in at buddy's, all of the community attention focused on this event. people with nazi armbands were there to shout at us. a student, we later found out who it was, came out to my house

and slashed all of my tires. we were having a black couple to dinner one night, had a wide open glass, windows, and telephone rang and i answered. are you integrating the knitters tonight, mr. gaston? after a while we discovered the telephone. so these are the kinds of things that happen to just ordinary people in march and may of 1963. three years after the citians had begun. the trial resulted in conviction of our two assailants. they were fined $10 given 30 day suspended sentences. the sit in had hardly begun before floyd and other leaders begin getting telephone calls.

outcome here. we integrated. .com bother us, we've changed. and, in fact, virtually all of the formerly segregated restaurants in charlottesville, nearly all of the segregated motel's and hotels, two of the three theaters, one of which we embarked on two years earlier, changed overnight. you've heard the expression many times you can't change things overnight. well, you can. if the time is right. and the time was right. partly for all of the work that people that andy had been talk about had done. and partly for what was finally appearing to the people in charlottesville, that they couldn't go on a new longer. and some of them didn't want any

sit ins. so segregation ended overnight. and the city council which had been very conservative at our suggestions appointed a commission to study race relations, the very tried this technique for postponing doing anything, but eventually they did do something. this was a small turning point. ella baker had said, you know, this is about more than a hamburger. and it's more than about having a place for a place to go to the bathroom. but it was all those things. and the city change as a consequence of that sit in. the time was right, the people involved in it were right. . . and

one of my conclusions which i describe in terms of my 40 years teaching at the university of virginia, the years i spent in south africa where i got to know many of the leaders there and the years i spent at the south's foremost civil rights information and advocacy agency, the southern regional council

all persuaded me that change comes from below. when privilege is deeply ingrained. and there's so many many other interesting things in this book but i talked enough. [applause] >> okay. all right. and so will the questioners and the commenters also come up to the podium. oh, you got it. okay. oh, good. all right. questions, questions, comments? who's going to get us started?

>> one of the things that you mentioned was how this affected the lives of the civil rights activists afterwards. and i'd like to ask paul to answer that on a personal level and to answer it referring to some of the people in your book. >> personally? well, it hurt here but not for very long. negatively and positively. how it affected me negatively, in the winter of 1963, '64, i had gone to hopkins to be a visiting professor. and i got an invitation to come to mississippi in the summer of 1964. some of you may know of that as

the great mississippi summer. the summer of '64 when freedom strugglers came from all over the country to promote voter registration, freedom schools, and a variety of other things. i was asked to come down and be director of the freedom schools. one of the things you read about in this book is my experience in a progressive child-centered school that i had attended and written about. and somebody must have known about that. and also known i'd been in a sit-in so they asked me to come down and be the director of the freedom schools. the freedom schools would take black citizens, young and old, and let them learn about things

that were barred from the schools in mississippi. i was flattered. i said no. and i said no because my wife was pregnant. i was broke. and i promised to teach summer school. all true. but the truth is i was frightend. after all, i grew up -- i knew about alabama and i knew about mississippi. and it had made a difference to be beaten up. so that made me aware of the fact that violence can have its effect. and when you think about people like the ones andy has talked about, john lewis and bob moses and what they went through day after day after day, you have more respect for them. that's the negative thing i learned. the positive thing i learned was that -- well, people didn't have many heroes and i became a great

hero. and it was all an accident of history. supposed i had been able to get somebody to take floyd's place, then somebody else would have gotten beaten up and i would have gone to court and supported him or her and so on. but people still to this day will say, oh, you're the man. and that gave me an entree to do things i might not otherwise have been able to do. it also made it possible for me to work constructively with the increasing number of students who wanted to bring about change in the university who by .hr196 '69 had created a movement strong enough to bring about momentous changes. this is what they got in their protest of '68, '69. active recruitment of black students.

active recruitment of black professors. and the installation of a black studies program. shameful. shameful that it took all this time but at least i got to help with that. and i developed many, many close friends, black and white, doing this. so those are the two things. both one positive, one negative. >> when i think about the students who are in sncc one of the things i think about the arc of their lives is that we often dream about youthful glory but we often dream about its benefits and not its burdens and we sometimes don't see that achieving great success at a youthful age can be a burden to a benefit. it can be really hard to recreate that kind of success. to capture lightning in a bottle in some ways. to be at the right place at the right time. and one of the burdens, i think,

that sncc alumni carried was the expectation you had helped bring about change in the 1960s why can't you help us solve ratio problems in the 1970s, in the 1980s and the 1990s with the same success? and the problems had changed and the tactics needed to change and i think our expectations often are that people can reproduce youthful success over and over again. and i think that's not always true. and so in some ways youthful glory is both a burden as well as a benefit. and one of the things that i was struck by in some ways in thinking about sncc is the way they held on their youthful idealisms even as they struggled to tried to do the successes. john lewis was a congressman and i think the person who stayed closest to sncc's ideals

throughout his life was bob moses who organized in the '80s the algebra project to teach students in rural mississippi and in the inner city in baltimore and new york and boston algebra math skills that they weren't learning that he called math literacy of the civil rights of the 21st century. and so the lives of the civil rights generation is as varied as the people themselves. but i think a cautionary tale, our expectations that people who help bring about change in the '60s can help us solve our racial problems today are naive in the sense that the story has shifted in some ways and that the things that were successful then may not be successful today and the assumption that if you were forefront then you could be

at the forefront now is a flawed one. and one we should avoid. >> you made a reference throughout their talk through the civil rights movement and it's easy to see the civil rights movement from now back. but since birmingham and little rock and the "time" magazine cover in '57 that you said the movement was kind of at a stall, i'm curious if there was a sense of them being in a movement as they did it to the extent that it seems like a movement now from looking back. >> that's great question. and i think it took them a couple of years -- if we talk about sncc to see that they were

part of a movement in a way we think about it now which is why i said they named it temporary student nonviolent 'cause they didn't see it. and one of the things i'm struck by is how it took a couple of years for them to go from sittins to go from full-time activists which is a transformation which i didn't talk to that here which happened it them both violence and jail. and it's not really until -- until 1961 that they really start to think of them as activists. and if we think then how short the life span sncc by '65 that energy kind of burned itself out a little bit. and so it's one of the reasons i say that full-time activism is so all-consuming. and our expectations sometimes as i said is -- i'm struck not so much by the people who burned out by the people who could

sustain that kind of activist momentum for their whole lives. somebody like bob moses. and i think if we invert that, it give us more empathy in many ways for the burdens that civil rights activists faced. and the difficulties they had, you know, later in their lives. i think of being part of the movement as the domestic equivalent of the vietnam war and i think a lot of civil rights activists suffer from a post-traumatic stress disorder. so to answer your question, no, it took them a while to see that they were really part of a movement. but one thing that happened right away which i was struck by was the extent to which they had a sense of camaraderie with each other. and a sense of group identity partially generational almost from the beginning. even as they went back to being

students, they still realized that they were connected together in some ways and that sense of cohesion helped produce a tighter sncc as the movement, you know, went on. and that that kind of happened very, very quickly. even coming out of the conference in 1960 and even as they went back, they still felt themselves connected in a way that hadn't happened before. so there's an embryonic sense that they are part of a movement. >> i would just add to that -- excuse me, i was too old to be in sncc. there was a sense of movement, at least as i saw it. and i saw it particularly in 1963, '64 when a group of young white people inspired by sncc

formed an organization called the southern student organizing committee. they called themselves ssoc. and they had a culture, a vision, an ambition and thought of themselves as bound in a movement inspired by sncc and they would be the white version of sncc. whites were having more difficulty in sncc by the time. -- by that time. so they would organize on white campuses. and they had a south white organization. and i knew all of them at that time. yeah, i think they had that feeling. there was, of course, on the other side i'm sure andy mentions in his book that amongst the several civil rights organizations, the corps, sclac and naacp there were lots of them in all this time.

there's lots of jealousies and they all came together and it was really critical. >> this presentation has focused primarily on the active resistance such as the sit-ins which came in a large part after the inactive or passive resistance such as the bicycles. -- boycotts. was it chance timing as made the sit-ins as effective as they were? >> repeat your question. i didn't hear what you said, i'm sure. the last part. >> do you think it was the combined efforts of both the active and inactive resistance or simply the chance timing when the sit-ins came that made the sit-ins so effective? >> i'm sure. i'm deaf in one ear. let me turn this ear and say it again. >> do you think it was the combined efforts of both types of resistance that made them effective or when the sit-ins

came that made them as effective as they were? >> yes. [laughter] >> well, i think -- >> who's combined? >> the active resistance such as the boycotts as well as the active resistance of the sit-ins? >> oh, i got you. well, i think -- well, the boycott could be active. i mean, a boycott did make a difference in some places and not in other places. and the sit-ins more often -- the direct action would more often make a difference than the boycotts. but the boycotts made differences, too. andy writes about that. andy has written a great book.

it's a wonderful page-turner. he'll answer that question for you. >> well, i think paul mentioned something about ingrained privilege and how hard it is to changed that. you heard paul went to the university of virginia to teach as you once told me to hold up the mirror of american whites and show how distorted it was and how resistant they were to looking at that. and one of the -- one of the reasons why i wrote this book was i thought sncc's contribution had been undervalued and my friend jokingly said your purpose was to write martin luther king out of the civil rights movement and you can't quite do that. and there's a small grain of truth to that in the sense i think that ingrained privileged could only be challenged by the bottom up by breaking the law that you actually have to confront this problem with an

active challenge and that part of the problem of both the legal challenge and the montgomery bus boycott which do serve very useful things. i don't mean to dismiss them. i only want to contrast them with the sit-ins but i would say part of the problem is they tried to work within the bounds of the law and that they tried to change an injust system within the bounds of that injustice and the greatness of the sit-ins was that they stepped outside of that injustice and were no longer going to participate in any way in that system. that that was a radical break with what had gone on before. and one of the myths about king that i would like to correct -- and in talking about this book is in part his gandhiism was somewhat shallow in the 1950s. it's sncc that has a much more gandhiian approach and king tops catch up with it and he does in the 1960s but we ring the king

of the 1960s back to the king of the montgomery bus boycott when, in fact, he was much more timid and cautious in many ways in 1957 than he would become in 1962 and 1963 and he's pushed by sncc which is a robust nonviolent direct action than king had. and none of this is to dismiss king's contributions in any way but so mythologized king that we have lost the pace and the timing of the movement in part to write this book was to restore sncc to that and, you know, i say jokingly that this book was written as an angry response to tailor branch's america in the king years whose title drives me insane because

it diminishes almost every other person who participated. and sncc's goal was not to reproduce organizations, a thousand snccs but to produce a thousand local movements. in some ways king's goal was to produce a large movement. so talking about sncc is a way to show to the extent change happened aggressively and from the bottom up and that in many ways as paul said, that that was really the only way you could get white southerners to really show -- to really see how terrible the system was. and not just white southerners but all white americans. >> as another aspect of sncc to answer the question that hadn't been asked. king's life after 1965 was very different from his life before 1965.

and it has been air brushed from history largely by the right wing. people from george will to rush limbaugh. in his last years he argued that the civil rights act of 1964, the voting rights act of '65 -- those things are the end of the civil rights movement. those were building blocks. those were the first steps to clear away the debris of segregation. they were -- they should make it possible now to move on to other things. what other things? he talked about the wide gap between rich and poor. he said we cannot solve our problems unless we remake what he called the architecture of american society. people like bill buckley called

this king's kindergarten of socialism. well, it wasn't that. but it was -- it was a deep attack on the materialism, which was associated with american capitalism. it was a deep attack on the militaritism which he characterized our country and led to death after death after death of people that should never have been in harm's way. julian once wrote a piece which i quoted in here somewhere but i can't remember on what page in which he said king's "i have a dream" speech had been so misinterpreted because king said my dream is deeply rooted in the american dream. well, after 18 -- after 1965, he made it pretty clear that the american dream had so many flaws

that we weren't really going to solve all of our problems until we confronted much more radical points of view and actions. and that as julian said an antiseptic hero that we honor every january on his birthday. i wrote a piece, an op-ed piece for fredericksburg paper later and the mcclatchy people got ahold of it and it went everywhere. and every response i got where do you get such a crazy idea? that is an idea people are not going to accept. young people, old people. that's un-american. but i think that's part of his real legacy. >> i would just add one thing to that. and think about the history of sncc i think the same thing happened which is when we often

talk about and think about the movement, it turned radical or black power emerged as some betrayals of the movement. we often talk about that as an internal change as if african-americans became more radical for some internal reason. and i would say that african-americans became more radical as a result of external problems. which is to say that they believed men and women good will will change. they believed president johnson valued justice over political expediency and when those things proved not to be true they adopted more and more aggressive ways to get the attention of the nation. and so in many ways what happens -- when we think of the civil rights movement becoming, quote, more radical or black

power emerging that's the result of external and the fbi didn't protect them. that's the result of external force not some internal change. in many ways black power is the response of the inability of whites to live up to the hope and optimism of sncc activists and these activists don't lose that hope and optimism. i'm disappointed julian said and it sums up partially as well we didn't betrayed liberalism. liberalism betrayed us. it didn't live up to what its ideals about justice and equality would be. and they adopted more kind of radical techniques. and we should be aware of that. and instead we think of it as coming internally. i think we have time for probably one more question.

>> you said that nothing happens overnight. but that it depends on the timing. how did they know this was the right timing? like were the inputs to this time and this era? >> well, it was a closed society in 1963. the schools had been desegregated. but they remained largely segregated. it really was a closed society. and i think there had been no sit-ins before. there were no black colleges. and i think the explosion of this incident in may of 1963 was something that they had -- they really were shocked by.

and the opposition to it to people with nazi arm bands out there and them getting their pictures in the paper, the fear of some sort of moderate store owners who previously had said, oh, we'll intergrate if everybody else will, they certainly -- they suddenly saw the possibility of that happening to them. they didn't like that. and you could argue that one of the differences was that charlottesville by 1963 was not as fiercely in defense of segregation as it had been. and the time was right to show them that and topple the thing with this direct action. and that's the best answer i can give. >> and i would also add to that, i think the students didn't know it was the right time they were -- it happened as i said to

an unlikely movement to unlikely people. and i think sometimes social movements start spontaneously at places and in times we don't expect. and that the crucial part of that as i said was that the students lived out what we think of as a bumper sticker slogan really meant something to them, which they thought globally and they thought about a wide array of social problems and they acted locally. they tried to change something small that bothered them and that that -- that magnified into a larger kind of movement and that they were, i think, all the students who were involved in the sit-ins were caught off guard at first by the extent to which it took off before twitter, before facebook, you know, it exploded across the south when communication was harder. so i think that you don't often know you simply have to act on your principle and then share your beliefs.

that becomes a social movement but people are surprised when that happens. >> i thank you all so much for coming tonight and for your attention. and your wonderful questions. we're going to have some crazy weather coming up so i'm glad that you all got to come out tonight. and if you would help me thank andy and paul for their wonderful talks. [applause] >> andrew lewis is the coeditor with julian bond of gonna sit at the welcome table a documentary of the civil rights movement. he's taught at hamilton college, wesleyan university and the university of richmond. for more information visit redroom.com/author/andrew-b- lewis. >> mr. speaker, on this historic day the house of representatives