every day of the possibly can and we have have a lot of tips for the moment when you get stuck, the moments when you feel insecure, tips about finding an agent and we walk the authors through the publishing process from beginning to end. we hope it gives people a more realistic sense of how the whole thing works. >> i noticed the forward by a maya angelou. how did you work that out? >> i will admit she and i have been friends for 25 year so i called her up and asked her. >> what are some of the other books you have written? >> i've written a novel, my shoes keep walking back to you and i've written quite a few essays and anthologies. i also co-wrote a rock 'n roll joke book and i am the founder of the literary broadband, the rock bottom remainders so i've written a book with my bandmates as well. >> i wrote a book called how to play the harmonica and other

life lessons and it is a humor book and i also wrote a column with kathi and buck paige called the author enablers and kind of a dear abby for aspiring writers and i am also a member of the rock bottom remainders by double messages because my brother is dave barry, the lead guitarist, sort of and kathi of course. >> thank you both very much for your time. ..

and indeed we didn't meet the had met her father many times connie was already in college and so we didn't meet but i knew of her because the time had always come when someone would say i saw you o

is a book about our family and how they were educational evangelists and very much in social justice. >> the family is so proud.

this is a wonderful to contribute not just to your parents who were beyond extraordinary but to the whole family and i think the whole family is extremely proud of this book so thanks for doing it. magoffin that is so moving about it is that going through your early life, you are showing that you lived in a sort of a last chapter of that jim crow era and it is important for you to share that with the world why was it important to start there? >> as you might imagine you always think what am i going to say after eight years? and i was going to write and still writing the secretary of state memoirs of the last eight years and here is what we did in foreign policy but i am also asked the question i decided i wanted to answer how did you get

to be who you are? i said in order to know that you have to know john and angelena and my parents were in many ways ordinary people. my mom was a high school teacher the first students of what we may who she taught at fairfield industrial high school and even though she knew nothing about sports she said she told him you're going to be a ballplayer so if you need to leave class a literally, you go right ahead and do that. [laughter] so she taught school. she was a musician, loved to bring art to her students in this very poor high school she taught in birmingham, the head of bras and they had produced so she was an elegant lady but schoolteacher.

my dad was also an ordinary person a presbyterian minister, high school guidance counselor later on in the university administrator she was an athlete and big sports fan and my parents had a deal which may relate to you because i know the same. my parents had a deal had i been born a boy i was going to be named john and my father had already bought the football for john who was going to be a linebacker. but he got a girl. my mother and her condoleezza. but my parents were in that way i doubt they need more than $60,000 between them in their entire life, but there was no educational opportunity that i didn't have and the extraordinary part comes to the circumstances that you

mentioned. i grew up in birmingham alabama. i was born in 1954. i was 55, so you don't have to start counting. 56 next month. [laughter] and my parents in birmingham alabama segregated, i didn't have a white classmate until we moved to denver when i was 12. you couldn't go to a restaurant or stay in a hotel or go to a movie theater, and yet my parents and the people in our community in birmingham and the committee i grew up in. this little middle class community had been convinced we might not be able to have a hamburger at the counter but could be president of the united states if you wanted to become so that's the extraordinary part because they believed very strongly that if you couldn't control your circumstances which you certainly couldn't in segregated birmingham, you could

certainly controlled your response. >> that is the extraordinary part because being ordinary, african-american and you had to have an extraordinary capacity to rise above jim-crow depression and the lesson for that today i feel like there is still time there's a way to rise above it without getting better and that is what they taught us is to increase the committee with grace and so john and my parents our great grandparents we share a great grandparents and they were 12 and 13 and so we are just four generations of slavery which is an extraordinary and get who's gotten left behind because i know you want to share a passion for a kid is still out the

bottom of the well and you can get that heavy lifting them. >> i do think it has lessons today. first of all, if you don't consider yourself a victim and if you aren't given the bitterness and if you really do believe that as my parents and your parents taught you might have to be twice as good and they said that by the way as it was a given then you can overcome whatever is in front of you but we were very fortunate. we had parents who were there. we had teachers who were there for us. we grew up in communities where our parents were educated and knew how to deliver on that message and yet i worry about today the kids who are trapped in that poverty and race, and for them there is no way out if

they cannot be educated and when i can get yours it couldn't tell whether or not you have an education, and i can look at your dakota and tell, then we are doing something very, very wrong. weaver fortunate that our her grandparents were able to get to our parents the possibility of education. in fact, my grandfather who would have been your grand uncle is a particularly interesting case. his name was john wesley rice, senior, and he was a sharecropper's son but they worked other land in utah, that is -- he decided he wanted to get book learning in college so he asked people coming for what colored man could get educated and they told him about a

college in tuscaloosa. so he saved us and went to college. his first year went great and after the first year they said how are you going to pay for your second year and he's about as cotton and he said well you were out of luck. hauer those boys coming to college? he said you see they want to be presbyterian ministers, so they have work called a scholarship and my grandfather said you know, that's exactly what i wanted to become a too. that's exactly what i had in mind. [laughter] and my family had been presbyterian and college-educated ever since. [laughter] they were very industrious people but also ingenious to finding ways to education. >> and the republican party -- the party of lincoln i can't quite say that it stayed that

way -- >> we are pretty much a republican. >> except for me. >> except for rebuke. [laughter] >> [inaudible] >> in fact my father was a republican for a totally instrumental reason. at the beginning, connie mentioned the south and birmingham was the most segregated big city in america, and when my -- it was 1952 my parents were actually not yet, they were courting so they were registered to vote and this is the kind of thing you would have seen have you been old enough. but in those days you had what is called a poll sector if you pass the question you could register. and so my mother who was very fair skin, long hair, a man said to her what a job do you have?

she said on the ennis school teacher and he said then you probably know who the first president of the united states was and she said yes, george washington. he said fine, you go register. then he looked at my father, dark skin, six-foot two, built like a football player and he said to my father so how many beans are in that dark and there were hundreds of beans in the jar and so my father couldn't answer. he said you feel the pull test and so my father was very unhappy. went back to frank hunter, an old man in the church and he said don't worry i will show you how to get registered. he said there is a court down there and she is a republican trying to build the republican party. he said she will register anybody who will say they are republican. [laughter] >> now you didn't register by party, but i suspect this woman was telling you go registered republican. my father kept his word and

registered republican committee proud republican but he came to it because it was a way -- >> my grandfather when he put the cold water for president sign my grandmother [inaudible] [laughter] but it is a tradition. one of the most moving parts of the book that came through loud and clear is you felt the fear. you weren't watching it on television, and so it was the first terrorism, african americans experienced terrorism before we even knew what international terrorism was about and the state-sponsored terrorism of the white supremacist klan, and so you had direct contact with that and on a think about the case now of the different kind of terrorism

and i wanted you to kind of harken back to that. >> terrorists have something in common with it is the plan for the way the gangs turret's a community or the terrorism that we experience on september 11th has continued to fight. they want not just to fight. they want to terrorize to the point that they can humiliate and control and they want to send a message don't cross us. and indeed that is what was going on in birmingham in 1962 and 1963. now birmingham had been segregated and there were incidents from time to time but one thing i wanted to do in the book is to show that a family in birmingham you still get up

every day and go to school and church and have piano lessons and ballet lessons and it's not as a segregation is every waking moment of every day. people need normal lives but in 1962 and 1963 that is shattered and birmingham became known as bombingham because bombs were going off all the time. i remember one night driving back from my grandparents' house a loud explosion as we were driving up to the house and in those days, 1962, you knew a bomb had gone off in birmingham. and my father turned the car around started driving and my father said where are you going and he's a i'm going to the police and he said the police it off, what you mean you're going to the police? because there was no such thing as protection for black families from authorities in birmingham. eugene konar was the jim crow

segregation and was trying to enforce it by whatever means necessary now when the district commission in september of 1963 after a very violent summer of water hoses and so forth dr. king had realized they were not getting the response they wanted and so something called the children's march and may of 1963 were these children had been set right into the pension bonds of timber, 1963, september 16th, 1963 we had just gotten to church at my father's church and there was, again, a lot of buzz, and everybody assumed it is in our community that it was 2 miles away and pretty soon the phone calls started and they said they are going to bomb a 16th street

baptist church. a little while later the said for little girls had been killed in the basement getting ready for sunday school and will little while later they said the names and suddenly we realized little denise mcnair why it known from kindergarten there's a picture in the book of my father to think denise mcnair her kindergarten graduation certificate and these little girls had been killed by these terrorists. i remember thinking at the time people must travel to detroit to kill four little girls and being quite frightened and my dad and sat on the porch that whole evening in the september heat with a shotgun on his lap and they organized a neighborhood watch and what patrol with their guns and would go ahead of the community and once in awhile to

scare off might writers the never actually shot anybody but the would have. >> i remember my dad coming in in london. that bombing made headlines in london and said what kind of country kills little girls so that was a turning point. the way that you tie it up with the determination to keep the community together and the bridge with our allies and the white community because you talk about the whites we had to have so many allies in the abolition and the civil rights revolution and so one of the things that struck me about the book is how you tie together those alliances, those alliances work cross racial and we marched together to get birmingham to the 20th century and so today we

seem to be screaming along some fault lines and i wanted to get your thoughts right now because we have to get this country together. >> i think particularly when it comes to issues of race, we have to be very careful in the united states and how we throw around titles like you are a racist. the united states is a to read deep set of wiltz around race. if we have a birth defect call slavery and it is a wound so deep that i think the worst thing you can say about somebody really is you are racist. the volumes coffin brac jolie hi about race these days and we would do well to turn down the volume, stepped back, give each other the benefit of the doubt

and try to work again on the kind of common problems that are affecting us all. i don't care what color you are. they are affecting us all. the interesting thing about segregation in birmingham is of course affected most dramatically, most directly black people but it also affected white people in birmingham and negatively. it took birmingham a long time, something to overcome a lot of those guards having been known as bombingham and the most racist city in the united states. it finally has overcome the impetus of things directly into rhetoric in birmingham because a part of birmingham, the fact is the racism had a very negative effect on the white community, too, and there were few weeks trying to break out of it. i tell the story of the doctors,

my mother had a very bad bronchial infection and my father had a mentor who was a director of guidance counseling for the schools in alabama and birmingham and my father said there's a terrible one section, can you recommended doctor? he recommended dr. carmichael. we went in and the waiting room for blacks was a horrible kind of paint peeling of the pharmacy stepped straight up with hard benches to sit on and so after dr. carmichael's all my mother about 5:00 that afternoon and that saturday he said now reverend wright, he said the next time you bring angelina you bring her after 5:00 so we can at the white population was gone and we were able to set up in the waiting room where there

were magazines and leather chairs and all these things. pretty soon overtime dr. carmichael kind of integrated his own waiting room because i think for him it was humiliating to have to treat someone like my father that way because of race so racism and segregation hurt not just the black community it heard also the white community. and today, when we know that joblessness and homelessness and the gang violence on which you're working with chief dak and others and the violence becomes with that we know that poor schools that are not preparing kids so that the united states of america is both becoming more inward looking and fearful and less likely to lead there are scorches that put not just kids caught in poverty it's

hurt us also be one thing we can learn from that period is bridging of the divide is not really a matter of charity, it's not a matter of reaching out and trying to help somebody. it is essential to who we are as the people and essentials for our national security. >> and the essential to get some prosperity back for kids coming in behind us. you talk about having to be twice as good. you and i both know that [inaudible] got to compensate for color, race, language barriers, that is the human enterprise and we take it for granted. is their part of a problem here that we just haven't done our homework but we haven't done the hard work we just kind of gloss over and pretend like we don't have to kind of unpacked

suitcase there's a lot of work to be done we have to stop swinging the label and doing a drive by labeling and the date but to give the other joint history and different roles. one of the questions i have is your dad and my dad used to ride around and for the families that couldn't get it together, couldn't get the wood chucked the would go around to get her to the families that were not quite holding it together and when we left and moved up and out, moving on up, that kind of fell apart. how do we make up for that? >> every that system has some things about eight and the black community was very much had integrity in the segregated birmingham, so the middle class in birmingham lived not too far

from the working-class and underclass. my dad had a church group called youth fellowship group and he was a presbyterian, so he would have dances on like the baptists, so his church, his fellowship was really popular. [laughter] but behind the church there was a government project and the kids and that were a part of the fellowship. he would bring them in and many of them said he would go door-to-door and like my grandfather did he would go from door to door and say your child is smart and she ought to go to college and i have a fellowship for her at tuskegee. i've got a scholarship at spellman, not even ask a parent do you love your child to go to college, just insisting. now my father is very middle class church, this wasn't always popular, and one of the things i tell in the story my father had a picnic for his kids

unfortunately some of them were not teaching the children how to shoot craps and so a number of his older kids said we told you they were not ready but for our father, there were no class barriers when it came to making sure kids were educated and families were taken care of but when the middle class moved out as we did, the people who were left in that poverty and race are the most damaged in our community, and how we get that back now i think is one child at a time. now i had parents and teachers i don't care if it is a teacher, a parent, if it is a community leader, minister come every child has got to somehow have some adult and educating. some attended the other and the institute.

>> i can't let you off the stage without talking about stokely carmichael. >> that is actually connie. i'm just kidding. [laughter] >> one time she wanted -- >> stokely carmichael, a name out of the late 60's and early 70's stokely carmichael was a firebrand leader of the student nonviolent violet cord mechem a, sncc come he was one of the original black power people and my dad who was a conservative republican presbyterian minister invited stokely carmichael to speak at spelman college in 1966 and 1967 much to the dismay of the power elite and tuscaloosa that thought was going to start a right but my dad was attractive in a funny way to the radical and the black politics and i try to understand why it is because he was a conservative

man, he was the united states of america but i always felt he had mitered applied, he admired the dignity with which the radicals confronted racism rather than taking it with the kind of quietness he was not for instance willing to march in 1962 and 1963i remember being in the hallway and hearing my parents talking in the living room and my father said they want us to go out there and be non-violent but if somebody comes after me with a billy club and going to try to kill him and then my daughter is going to be an orphan soy think that he was somehow attracted to people like stokely but the talk is around senator obama, i don't know all the people what our real because the work with a few of them.

>> thank you. it's a wonderful, wonderful book. >> thank you. good. [applause] -- be to spin it should be on to beat if you could just remember to read for the microphone when you are chosen to ask a question we would appreciate it. thank you. >> please raise your hand if you have a question. >> - pastor charles patrick and i was born in birmingham alabama what you said sharing the experience of what happened in the south is absolutely true. like that experienced the same thing and one of the reasons we

had to come to california is because he was almost run out of town. the naacp's if he possibly would have been killed. what was you. thank you for use that interest me for a long period of time i harbored a lot of the anger that my dad was beaten and all that back in birmingham alabama. i'm familiar with the areas you talk about. my mom went to tuskegee so intimately with the of the places to talk about. congratulations. i'm excited about your book. my wife and i bought one and are going to read it. >> thank you very much. >> one question. the question is -- [laughter] my question is who was your hero when you grew up? who was your hero? >> that's a good question. you know, i think for all the fuss there were several. my family have been republicans.

we loved the kennedys. we love president john f. kennedy and we adored bobby kennedy and i remember very well going to hear after the university of alabama integrated, going to hear bobby kennedy in one of their speeches and being completely taken with him and totally devastated when he was assassinated here in los angeles so the kennedys were huge, and another person i talked about in the book who was the local leader in birmingham who really brought about race consciousness in birmingham, founded the early, had to leave and go to cincinnati and he has never really got him his due compared to the great national leaders for all that he did and

he was also a great hero. >> the leedy right over here. >> hello, my name is edwards. i grew up -- a lot of my friends say it's not the real south but i grew up in -- i pretty much grew up in the all white community most of my life i move to northern florida and actually once i moved out here you talk about letting go and not harboring resentment. what would be some of the things you could encourage the younger kids today to hold onto and remember to help him transfer their anchor to let it go and move past it and not use it as a

crutch and excuse. >> mauney parents and in some ways going up in segregated birmingham was a bit of an advantage because you were in a totally segregated school, segregated principles black, teachers are black, then when the teacher says to you that's just not good enough there wasn't any racial overtone people could be fairly tough in terms of insisting on the achievement and on excellence without racial overtone somehow of being racist. one of the most interesting things that happened when i was at stanford was i suddenly realized that there is a subtle -- president bush called it bigotry of expectation that creeps in when people see black

students, and all of a sudden they have had a tough time and so maybe i shouldn't say anything about that and i tell you related in the book i noticed i went to my first phi beta kappa ceremonious provost in 1994, and at stanford in this group for the 300 phi beta kappa there was one black student. i thought this is really odd. sorted looking at it and thinking about it and we formed a group called partners and academic excellence and we asked black graduate students to meet with black freshmen and to read the papers in our introduction humanities course and these black graduate students would say to the black freshmen how did you get an a on the speaker? soft bigotry. looks dictations commesso by the

time the students are getting that clause is in the jr., senior year they were not prepared for tough judgment. and sometimes racism shows itself in a very unexpected ways , and it shows itself in just not holding that person not quite equal to yourself but wanted the best for them and wanting to help them and basically patronizing them. i think one of the deepest problems we have in the school's right now is we are not expecting enough of a free charnel and kids read it and they underperform. some of my answers to kids who are feeling bitterness or anger or whatever. it's their problem, not your problem, and if you let it become your problem then you are going to think of yourself as a

victim and the next thing you were going to do is be agreed, and by the way, the twin brother of agreement is entitlement, so now i don't have to work for it and you are on a really bad road to nowhere and there are plenty of people, plenty of people who will play to that sense of agreement and that sense of victimhood and entitlement and you still will have a job. so i think our kids have got to find a way to be tough with people who underestimates them. those are the most racist people in the world. >> my name is lang ander tick-tocks what you're given a ticket educational opportunity with your parents and have a very busy child where you would like but 4:30 and you would want to go ice skating. was there ever a time when you

just didn't want to get up in the morning? and if so, what was the motivation, that kind of extraordinary motivation to get out of bed and do all of that and to become your internal motivation? >> welcome your the one who wanted to take skating lessons so what do you mean you don't want to get up? with [laughter] unfortunately i was really bad at it. i'm 5-foot eight and i have five foot ten legs. when i picked up a tennis racket several years ago i said to my father why did you not put a tennis racket in my hand instead of skates on my feet. he set your the one who wanted to skate and i didn't want to get up to tiki. so i was very motivated in part because of something that i did learn from that it was hard for me and i did i learned more from overcome thing something hard for me than something that was

easy. i was a natural pianist. it wasn't that hard for me. but i will tell you parental innovation on the piano side when i was about 10-years-old, i've been playing since i was three cubits i could read music before i could read and when i was 10-years-old i wanted to quit and i said to my mother of one to quit the piano. and she said you are not old enough or good enough to make that decision. [laughter] and, you know coming years later when i was playing with yoyo ma i was glad she didn't let me quit. [laughter] part of it was all part of asian tv to see six self motivation and you're the one who wanted to do this. and some of that we didn't want to disappoint our parents. we knew how much they were putting into it and so i just didn't want to disappoint them either. >> think you for joining us, both of you. i actually grew up in

washington, d.c. area, born and raised there also a graduate of notre dame, undergraduate at jolie. congratulations. go i risch. >> you've got a lower court to do one egoi risch. [laughter] >> my question actually is getting political, but i am very interested in what you think obama is doing really well. there's a long list of what you think he's doing really well but even more importantly but you think he should be giving a lot better. >> welcome you know, i said when i left government and i feel pretty strongly about it when you are in office it is a whole lot harder than when you were sitting out here and it's really hard when people are chirping at you from the outside and you think well why didn't you do that when you were here because it's obviously a lot easier out there and so with as president bush said i felt frankly i owe

the president and secretary clinton and others my silence if i disagree with something that they are doing all i will tell them and in fact i know them well enough that if there is something i'd like to see, i will simply call them and say you know, bob gates and secretary clinton and others. i think that we are very, very tough on our president. i am going to make two separate statements here. juan bautista the president and general and on about our politics. i think we are tough on our presidents. the days that they are inaugurated the of the smartest human beings we have ever seen having your leader how did we every elected and i watched it happen over and over and over again. it is the loneliest job in the world. it doesn't get tougher than being president of the united states. i do think that the people that we egullet to that office are

elected because they stood for office for the right reasons and they are trying to do the right thing and sometimes i disagree and sometimes i agree. but i will tell you something i think is going on in our politics quite apart from the administration and that is when you are seeing in the grass-roots movements and look, i am not one who agrees everything is being set for instance in the tea party. i am more pro immigration and free trade but i will tell you this what people are singing in the grassroots movement is the conversation in washington and out here in the country is not the same conversation, and they are sitting across the board to washington dc. and i frankly think that is a healthy development because what concerns me about the united states at this point is we have lost our confidence and optimism as a people. americans are the most

optimistic people on the fees of the earth. trust me. i have been across the face of the earth. we do the most optimistic people on it. but only when they are confident and when we have deficits roaring and we can't get joblessness down and we can't get comprehensive immigration reform so that we are battling each other and the educational system isn't delivering we are not very confident and i think that's people are saying whoever is president. >> [inaudible] and liz over here in the south. and i was just wondering if when you were a kid did you grow up and no you were going to have a lot of people [inaudible]

[laughter] -- just have the state of mind when you were a kid that you are going to do better and make something out of your life and that you're going to us by your young black women like me to want to do more and that state of mind? >> what is your name again? >> bethary. >> i had no idea that i was going to end of the secretary of state, no idea. in fact, how will our you? >> 16. >> 16. when i was 16i was going to be a great concert pianist and i studied piano from the age of three and i could read music and concert pianist and then i went to something called the aspen music festival school and there were prodigies who could play from sight what it had taken me all year to learn and i thought i am about to