it raises so many important moral and ethical questions about behavior and about what's important and what we value as a society. if this behavioral isn't illegal, maybe it should be. that's probably what senator levin is getting at. when he issued his report last week and referred to the matter to the justice department. :

>> when it acts like a casino, one way or the other, which is what was happening during this crisis, and it's probably still happening, that is not good. that's the debate we need to have, but that's not the debate we have had. >> host: no, it's quite unresolved and taxpayers are still missed bailing out firms in the midst of doing that, not for the good of the country in any way. well, thank you very much for your wonderful book and it makes me even more interested this than i started out. >> guest: my pleasure. thank you for having me. >> host: best of luck to you too. >> guest: thank you.

>> that was "after wards" booktv's authors inte -- interviewed with others familiar with their material. >> the cookbook author and television permty began service in 1942 as a file clerk and later stationed in india and china. the author recalls the couple's travels as well as the interrogation of paul child. this is about 40 minutes.

[applause] >> thank you. thank you for venturing out on this rainy spring evening. i think i'm going to start us off by quoting to the effect that been i begin talking, i have something to say. the first thing that absolutely everyone asks me is how julia child at six foot two, that incredibly distinctive voice slipped behind enemy lines. the answer is simple. she didn't. we'll get to that later. the other thing is despite what you read this morning, bon apetite was not a secret code. the most common question i get is what on earth brought me to this topic? how did i come to write about julia child, and more to the point, how did i know the

popular french chef of cookbook and television fame worked for the intelligence agency? well, i read it in the "new york post," and i saw a headline secret recipe of spy reporting that julia was an employee of oss, office of strategic services, which was set up by president roosevelt in the early days of the war, the forerunner of today's cia. anyway, i was in washington at the time. this would have been the fall of 2008, and i was on my book tour for the "irregulars," a group of early spies before the oss. the national archives released previously classified documents. this was a huge, huge hall of papers, records, and it detailed the 24,000 people that had worked for the oss during world war ii. .

those records identified the vast military operatives who served their country during the time when it was threatened by nazis and fascists. some of the people were notable and unusual and most unlikely secret agent. there was supreme court justice, the actor sterling hayden, moe berg, and perhaps the most unusual and notable was the chef julia child. the news that julia worked for the oss made headlines across the country. everywhere i went, people stopped and asked me was she really a spy? what did she do? where did she go? i didn't know the answer to their questions, and so i began doing research, and one thing or another led to the beginning of this book. now, like so many wartime secrets, julia child's career was not a secret at all.

the basic facts of her career was looked up as easily as ingredients to a recipe. late in her life, she opened up about her past, broke the vow of slains and talked about the oss and mentioned a few paragraphs about it in her memoir, "my life in france," and there was a movie that mentioned a brief bit about it, and it was in all the obituaries when she died in 2004. as soon as this huge treasure of archives was released, there was great excitement about the new material to be unearthed. the cia held on to these classified documents for many decades and had been very reluctant to release them, and it took william casey, former director of the cia who convinced them to release them. these records were the very last batch of papers to be released

and julia child's 130-page oss file, a classified document, gave the details of her career in the intelligence agency and made for some fascinating reading. the first thing clear to me thumbing through the documents was contrary to all the newspaper headlines, julia was never actually a spy, but she hoped to become one joining the agency in december of 1942. like so many young people in the wake of pearl harbor, she moved to washington determined to try to serve her country. she was single, 30, and unemployed with several failed attempts of a career behind her. he was looking for a second chance in life, a chance to remake her life, a chance to do something special. she was the daughter of a well-to-do rancher, graduated from smith, but spent post-college year as a a social butterfly and mid golf, tennis,

attended parties, and had a good time. she was keeping house for her widowed father and living a very sheltered life. she was by her own account, a pretty plain person with no skills. she didn't speak any languages, and she had never been further out of the country than a day trip. she had always felt she was bigger than life. she always thought she was destined for big things, but by 0, they failed -- 30, they failed to earlyized. she wassal, athletic, sure to be a natural for the army. when she was rejected, the form letters came, tooal, they stated. [laughter] she was bitterly disappointed. she used family connections and got a job at the war department. it was a low-level secretary job. she was a typist, and she loathed it and determined to work like a demon to get promoted. she did, was trainings ferred to

the -- transferred to wild bill donovan, the newly appointed head of the oss. as one reviewer noted, the cloak and dagger business was bread and butter to julia. she found is exciting and glamorous and loved her colleagues. she found herself assigned to the emergency sea rescue section. she was working with a harvard zoologist, developed a shark propellant to be rubbed on pilots downed at sea to protect them. they conducted bizarre experiments, and julia's speedometer was to go -- responsibility was to go to the fish market for the fresh catch. she loved her work and felt she had found her niche, the place where she belonged.

the oss was a pretty strange group of people. there were a lot of colorful personalities and had the lenient atmosphere of a college and odd balls and ease centrics. she her donovan's idea of the female employee was a cross of a smith graduate, a powers model, and a gibbs girl. she had all the right qualifications and had a private income after her mother's death. the rumor in washington at the time was that donovan only hired people from the io -- io ivy leagues. critics scoffed that the oss stood for oh, so social, and oh, so secret. the oss did not recruit until all the other services had their

pick, and so don was forced to scramble to find real atlanta. faced with building a huge add administrative bureaucracy overnight, he had to get creative. he knew the skills he was looking for. he needed someone with the brains to make decisions on the fly, the smarts to throw out the rule book, someone with self-confidence and and under developed sense of fear. of course, these same qualifications can be used to describe any number of dubious characters, and his lacked standards met dangerous people were employed as spies. still, he hired lawyers from his own wall street firm as well as attorneys from other firms and businessmen he knew recruiting a wide variety of academics from psychologists and linguists to mathematicians and others who

chased birds across asia. he recruited an assortment of creative types, artists, painters, writers, and inventers. he kept it all within the family. if an oss had a girlfriend or a sister who went to college with a decent typing speed, she was promised a better job. if she had foreign languages or lived abroad, she was whisked off to a secret spy school and started training. while working for the o srk s in washington, she was fast friends with a number of young women training to be spies, and she was green with envy. one was a young woman named jane foster. she was from a wealth, conservative west coast family, an add adventurous california girl, but there, the similarity ended. jane was widely traveled,

briefly married to a dutch diplomat and spoke fluent malay. she was everything julia felt she was not, witty and outrageous, bold and daring enough to be true material. while jane was -- while julia was filing, jane was taking a crash course in espionage and learning everything from forgery, cryptography, to the morale propaganda to demoralize the enemy. another colleague that became a great friend was betty mcdonald. she grew up in honolulu and had been a young reporter, the first on the scene after the pearl harbor attack. she was recruited because of her knowledge of japanese and wartime experience. she and jane would disappear for

weeks at a time on orientation courses and small arms courses learning to master a submachine gun and a cult .45. after 17 years of high school and college french, julia discovered she couldn't speak a word. when the word went out don von was looking for warm bodies, any bodies to run a new network of intelligence bases in india, beer ma, and china, she volunteered. she didn't care where she went as long as she got to go. there was a man shortage and the newly oss was under staffed. it's important i think to remember when you think of the oss, you think about the military and guerrilla operations. they get all the glory. you think of images of agents parachuting behind enemy lines, but of the 13,000 employees,

4500 were women, the vast majority spent their time writing reports, collecting and analyzing information, and planning missions. the fact that many of the oss is very unorthodox activities could be conducted from behind the desk meant women were equally as effective. while the majority of women did remain in washington helping to support the oss's far-flung missions, a very small percentage went overseas and even fewer went into active operations. the small percent taj that went overseas, like jane, julia, and betty, they carried out assignments with the same self-reliance and seat of the pant ingenuity inspired in everyone who worked for him. now, julia got her wish in early 1944, joined operatives that were sent to india.

on the month long boat trip, her travel orders were changed and was rerouted because lord louis, the dashing new supreme commander decided it it would be much nicer and cooler place for wartime headquarters. candy, a mountain top resort, was not a hardship coast. nestled high in the hills, a thousand miles from the fighting and picture postcard pretty with a buddhist temple and a scenic lake where you could go rowing with your boyfriend. the female personnel was put up in a giant british clone ya hotel, called the queens hotel. it was run down, but it looked grand. the office headquarters detachment 404 of the oss was housed in an old tea plantation o little bit out of town made of

bamboo huts, but the palm trees and neat pass between the homes and a green tennis court made it seem like an island retreat than an wartime headquarters. she was put in charge of the oss registry, known as the camp's nerve center con taping all the most top secret documents. the military plans and operations, classified cables from the joint chiefs of staff in washington, the code books, as well as locations of all of the oss missions around the world and the real identities and various code names of their oss agents in the field. it was an important job. it carried grave responsibilities, and it came with the highest security clearance. julia joked she developed a top-secret twitch from handling such sensitive material. while she was never an operational agent going behind

lines, she became a very able and effective intelligence officer. by her last few months in china where she served in a remote military outpost, she was working through very, very difficult and dangerous conditions. she carried on through a devastating flood that swamped their base, a raging cholera epidemic and cross fire from the chinese revolution that was overrunning their camp. by the end, she was a seasoned veteran of the oss doling out slices of opium which she said reminded her of boston brown bread but which oss staffers referred to as the operational payroll. now, julia said later looking bard that the war made me. it was her personal and political coming of age. it infused her with a new confidence and curiousty about

life, and it's where she met her mentor and soul meat, paul child. julia met paul, who designed warrooms for the allied generals on the porch, and she was immediately submitten. he was 41, a decade older, and a head shorter. he was world weary, withdrawn, and somewhat difficult. his colleagues regarded him as a loner, moody, and set in his ways, not an easy man, julia confided to her diary. he started out by skipping college, and worked as a sailor, studied art in paris and spoke french, a self-taught photographer, black belt, house builder, and jack of all trades. he considered himself a connoisseur of the finer things in life, art, foot, fashion, poetry, women. he romanced all the prettiest

oss officers, and after his initial advances were robust, became the very best of friends. with jane foster who he described as a wild necessariy girl, always in trouble, always gay, and irresponsible. he admired and doored her. jane was infamous overnight for her scheme to release propaganda materials wrapped in condoms. her plan was to have a submarine to releet the rubbers off the coast and they would float ashore bearing friendly messages of allied support. [laughter] donovan was skeptical, but gave her the green light. [laughter] during the year, jane and paul were inseparateble, and julia pined for a man who took little notice of her. she wrote she knew he was not attracted to her and liked the

worldly type. she was not wrong in guessing he did not reciprocate the feelings. he wrote long letters to his twin brother, carls, raving about jane. he would note that julia was a nice girl with good legs. he dismissed her as a grown up little girl knowing at 31 she was inexperienced and overly emotional and a virgin busy trying to be brave about being an old maid. not one to give up and sulk, she soldiered on. in early 1945, she and paul were transferred to china while jane stayed behind training native agents and running subversive radio broadcasts. seizing her chance, she got his attention, explored with him, ventured to back alley chinese dives. she tried to proof her medal by

eating baby frog legs and sweet and sour sauce. this resulted in days and days after dysenntary. any way, by the end of the war, she was head over heals in love, and paul, well, he was still on the fence. he feared they were from very different backgrounds and dreaded meeting her right wing father and she would be a sociallite at the end of the war and suggested they return to their peacetime lives and see how they liked each other in civilian clothes. they went their separate ways. she embarked on a mission to win him over. she subscribed to the "washington post" and "new york times" much to her father's horror to read what paul read.

she took up the novels of henry miller that was x-rated, but paul doored, and took cooking lessons to make him a home made meal. well, after six months of a long distance relationship, he succumbed and allowed his head to overrule his heart, and they were married in september 1946. in 1948, two years later, the childs moved to paris. paul went to work for usis, united states information service, a branch of the state department, and julia continued her cooking lessons at the school. they reconnected with their old friend jane in paris, who was a painter, and she was married to an odd russian man, but as paul wrote that day, she was just as lazy, hazy, impracticable and lovable as she had always been. the happiness of their reunion

was short lived, however, as they were embroiled in the red spy scare. in just a few years after the war, the euphoria of victory was replaced by new fears about the spread of communism and the cold war. after the fall of china to the reds in 1949 when they led the come communists and set up the people's republic, the administration was convinced that communism posed a real threat to america's security. by the end of 1950, spy fever gripped the country. some confessed and others were arrested on espionage charges. by 1953, three years after unrelenting media coverage, the rosenbergs got the chair to confirm to people in government, there were spies in every nook and corner of washington.

as the journalist once observed, joseph mccarthy was a political speculator who found his oil gusher in communism. he kicked off his anticommunist crew said in 1950 with a speech in wheeling, west virginia, claiming to have had in his hand a list of 205 known communists currently employed in the state department. julia and paul were on their way to their new post when the book burning and finger pointing began. work from everyone to their close friends, the journalist, teddy white, who covered china for "time" were banned from the shelfs in the libraries in europe. paul took the books off himself seeing they were destroyed. rumors about where the smear tactics would lead, spread like wild fire. they watched in dismay as one after another officer they served with in china, some very

close friends, were accused of disloyalty and forced out while others quit in disgust. somehow, the victory in china was seen as part of a master plot enabled by a bunch of communists in the state department known as the china hands. at the same time, hoover, the ambitious head of the fbi was out to destroy donovan's representation who he viewed as a threat to his espionage empire. donovan to protect the staff burned the oss records of his former personnel knowing that many of them, like jane and paul, had been left as center. julia and paul's letter in this period captured their atmosphere of fear that permeated their small circle. julia considered mccarthy to be a desperate power monger and

believed his campaign of intimidation was destroying a country that she loved. i am worried about mccrater yism she wrote. what can i do as an individual? it is frightening. i am ready to bear my breasts, small they may be, stick my neck out, i will sacrifice cat, cookbook, husband, and finally self-. inevitably, they became caught in the buzz saw of mccarthy's red spy hunt. april 7, 1955, paul received an urgent telegram summoning him to washington. their old friend, the reckless jane foster, was being investigated as a russian spy by the fbi. when she was arrested in paris, the authorities had ransacked her parent and found paul's name this her address book. paul and julia found themselves

in the middle of a terrifying nightmare, full scare espionage investigation, interrogations, and a drawn out internal state department loyalty inquiry. friends, family, neighbors, and former employers were questioned about paul's past. his communist proqifties, lose lifestyle, and homosexualities. if you want to have verbal fun, try to prove to two fbi guys you're not a lesbian. how do you prove it? they decided they would not be intimidated and chose to stand by their friends and principles no matter the cost. in the months to come, they would have to endure the shame of being accused as well as the taint of suspicion that paul rightly predicted would always place a black mark by his name and curtail his career

advancements. ultimately, they would also have to come to a very painful decision about whether jane was really a soviet spy or the victim of an overzealous fbi. without giving away the story, i'd like to say the point of the book was to examine the issues this group had to face this that controversial historical era and explore the ways that personality becomes destiny and how the two adventurous california girls who came to be wartime friends and intelligence colleagues came to meet such different fatings. one was a beloved american icon, and the other a lonely exile in france. thank you. [applause] do we have any questions?

no questions? great, well, that's -- yes? >> [inaudible] >> microphone. >> how long did it take you to write the book? >> it took probably about three years. i had done the previous book about the oss, so i had a great deal of material which helped speed up the process, and i was very read into the period and the characters, but the last book was from the british side, and this was from the american side, and it's based on their die rays -- diaries and letters, but there was such a great correspondence between the two, i had a vast and colorful archive to work with. >> did the families help you? were the families any help to you? >> yes, all the families were

very cooperative. in fact, some of the families, even of minor characters in the book who were oss colleagues of theirs who were on the boat to india, worked in china, people gave me their letters and diaries, so the very vivid descriptions in the book, you get a lot of dialogue and a lot of scenes making you feel as though you are there, and the reason is they are drawn from so many diaries because i had so many characters, i limited the number of characters i name, but all of the incidents were true and happened and julia stands out for obvious reasons because of the height and personality, and jane because she was outrageous and up fa mouse during her -- infamous in her time there, so everybody had a story to tell that they remembered. >> that was kind of my question as well. where did you get the letters from? they were found? >> they were from families.

after that, and jane foster's family offered me personal letters and diaries. there's the huge archive that paul and julia left to harvard. other families provided me with letters and diaries, and i did an enormous amount of research in the military's libraries and repositories where i found all the telegrams and intelligence reports that they filed, many of julia's memos, jane foster's reports, all the superior's reports about them, and i could tell you where they were and what they did much of the time they were abroad, and then they all stayed such close friends and exchanged letters throughout the 50s, so even after the war, i was able to keep up with them, and they were very frank in the letters. they are moving about the fear of losing jobs and what's happening to their friends. you can really get a feeling for the time.

>> [inaudible] >> use the microphone, please. >> during the time of the inquestion cigs in washington, were people sympathetic? were the american people sympathetic too julia? any record of how they responded to her being taken in front? >> it was paul taken in for the full loyal diaries up qir ri -- inquiry. they didn't know what was happening, and he got a telegram summoning him back. it was vague. they thought in the beginning perhaps he was going to be offered a promotion. when he got there, nobody talked to him or meet his eyes or say what he was doing there, and it was finally clear he was in some sort of serious trouble, and he was pulled in for this very long fbi interrogation and he cabled julia in germany saying it's

kaska-esque. i don't know what's going to become of me. that went on for a month. they were able to unite again in paris, but it was several months before he was cleared, and, in fact, they continually up vest gaited -- investigated him for the next year. it didn't become public in that sense that there were not headlines about it. in fact, the sad thing is hundreds and hundreds of people were under investigation in the 50s. the hollywood 10 already happened. charlie chaplin was in investigation for months and fled to europe. there were high-profile people under investigation every day, so paul child did not make the news. julia was not famous yet. their friends knew, and everybody in the state department knew, and it was humiliating and terrifying. paul rightly predicted that his career would probably not

recover from it. >> was paul brought before the committee itself or just by the committee investigators? >> he was subjected to a full loyalty inquiry that was the fbi investigating him, the united states information service investigated him, his past, going back 10 years and all of that, but he was not dragged before a senate subcommittee. in the end, even though they thought he was about as liberal as you could get without being a communist, and they thought he was a homosexual, and they accused him of other acts, julia was a wealthy right wing family, and her father was a supporter

of nixon and pulled every string in washington, and he was finally cleared. >> what role did paul play in her celebrity? >> that's an interesting question and a complicated question to answer. if you -- if you look at the ark of their relationship, she was really a very insecure, as you put it, unexperienced girl when he met her. she turned herself inside out to become someone he would like and admire and someday love. he became her mentor, educated her, shaped her interests, and through that, she took up cooking and fell in love with french food. she emerged a completely different person, much more

confidence, outspoken, really charismatic individual, and she really credited him so much with that that when she became a celebrity virtually overnight with her cookbook, she worked on it while he supported her for about 10 years it took the first cookbook, and it came out, and it was an overnight success. she stepped from being a nobody into the limelight and becoming a celebrity, and it was interesting. she would always use the plural, we, we did this, we did that referring to herself and paul because i think of the gratitude she felt she owed him. >> how did you get interested in this historical genera? >> good question. you know, i'm from a war family. my grandfather was the president of harvard when world war ii, in

the early days of world war ii appointed by president roosevelt to be one the men that led the organization of the manhattan project of the bomb. i grew up in the far east and in cambridge surrounded by wartime scientists, politicians, and the men that led the war effort, and so i think i got hooked on war stories at an early age, an war movies at an early age, and it just stuck. >> what other books have you written? >> i wrote a book called "tuxedo park," about a group of physicists who gathered together in a secret laboratory in new york exparenting with -- experimenting with radar to lead all the radar systems eventually that helped win the war in europe. i wrote a book about the

development of the bomb called "109 east palace" and i wrote book about british spied on the oss, and it's called "the irregulars." you can sort of see a theme. [laughter] the lady in pink, yeah. >> what happened to jane? >> well, i can't tell you that. you have to read the book. [laughter] i'm glad you're curious. you have to find out. >> thank you. >> any other questions? yes, sir. >> yeah, after these investigations were over, did they have bitter feelings for the u.s.? >> i think that's one of the things that's they were nice about in the book. you see different reactions. betty mcdonald went through

the process as well. she was married to colonel hepner, their boss, and she helped burn the papers of the oss personnel before the fbi could go and get them. she, as well as julia and paul, never became bitter about the u.s.. they were very bitter about that period and they really hated mccarthy, but they stayed very optimistic in the ability of people to learn and change and they, after all, they all returned to the united states and lived a very happily in the united states from 1960 on, so they with respect bitter about that -- weren't bitter about that, but they did have sad and complicated feelings about the 1950s even though that's when so much good happened to julia in her career. she would always have very mixed feelings about that period of time. >> time for a couple more

questions. >> [inaudible] >> oh, sorry. how helpful was the government in getting you information? or unhelpful. [laughter] >> well, you don't want to say unhelpful. that's kind of an active term. they make it hard for you. i had to order all the oss documents and then for every character in the book, the fbi files. now, jane foster's fbi file is more than 65,000 pages. if you can imagine. as you get further into the book, you meet a number of other characters whose fbi files are longer, so you get these papers and sort of pacts of 200 at a time. every time you need to request them, you double check, wait, and it takes three months.

it's a long process to go through the request, the freedom of information act. it takes the parks of a -- patience of a saint, and you don't get everything. when you do get the files, they are redacted, sections are blacked out, and then you can go through a set of appeals to argue they should give you those papers. it's a never ending process. i have a feeling i'll be receiving fbi files on paul own jane, you know, for years to come. [laughter] i hope i don't find anything shocking in there. [laughter] yes? >> since they were such letter writers, did julia or paul write a letter to mccarthy? >> no, not that i know of. it's always possible, but i wouldn't think so because they pretty much hated him on site from the beginning and it only got worse. they wrote letters about him

though. there's just reames and reames of sort of angry screams against him in the letters and diaries. it's actually just fascinating to read how it darkens, you know, from the 1940s through the hollywood 10 when they watched all of that persecution of the artists and directors in hollywood, and he moved to the state department. you see his fear and anxiety deepen, and it's really compelling reading. thank you, all, so much for coming today. [applause] >> we'd like to hear from you. tweet us your feedback at twitter.com/booktv. >> tomeko brown megan, the

author of courage to dissent. >> this has not been discussed often in the civil rights movement although it was the home to several national civil rights organizations, and the place i wanted to explore because i thought that it would be a success story. it's usually considered of interest only because it was the home of sort of martin luther king j.r., but i wanted to explore atlanta because i knew it was a home to a sizable african-american middle class, many black colleges, and i thought that in part because the white city fathers always considered it a place of racial moderation, that it would be a good place with much to explore, dynamics, and the civil rights movement. >> what did you find? was it a success story?

>> well, in some ways it was a success story including for many members of the black civil class coming of age after the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s, but the story that i tell in my book is a little bit more complicated. it also shows that for many african-americans in atlanta, a city that one would think would be a perfect place to tell a story about civil right's success, it wasn't all successful for everyone. there was a lot of failure including for a group of african-american women who were welfare right atavists. i tell their story in the third part of the book who challenged not only whites, but the black leadership in the 1970s saying that they had been left out of the successes of the civil right movements. >> when you use the word dissent

in the title of the book, who is dissenting? >> right. i talk about three waves of dissentser in my book at three different moments. the first wave is pragmatists, people who are members of the african-american middle class who were interested in challenging jim you, but without giving up the social and economic capital that the black middle class had been able to achieve under jim crow, so this meant, for instance, that they were interested in economic, preserving their economic status. they were interested in educational equality, but not so interested in school desegregation because that would have meant that black teachers might lose their jobs. >> was there a fear by the black middle class in atlanta that they would lose what they had? >> absolutely, there was, and to

some extent that fear was well-founded. the last third of my book, which explores these discenters whom i talk about as welfare rights activists, the poor themselves, i discuss how the black middle class pushed back against segregation because of employment discrimination, or at least the fear of employment discrimination of black teachers and principals. >> what was the relationship between thurgood marshall and martin luther king, jr.? >> well, it was complicated. i talk about this in the middle third of my book with dissenters who remitted them. it turns out that thurgood mar shall was not enno , namerred

with protesterred. he told them in 1960 they should not engage in street protests and said they were going to get people killed, that they were invading the property of whites, and was very negative towards sit-ins, and he believed that martin luther king, jr. inspired the students to go into the streets to protest, of course, for a good reason because of king's leadership of the montgomery bus boycott in 1965. >> the civil rights movement is looked at as monolithic and in agreement. were you surprised at the levels of disagreement within the civil rights movement that you found? >> you know, i was. i think that's the most

surprising thing i found in my research is how much we don't know about the movements, although many, many books have been written about the civil rights era, that there was so much conflict, and, again, i talk about these three historical moments of conflict. so much conflict over whether to desegregate schools, how much emphasis to put on voting rights, whether to desegregate housing, whether to engage in street protests or to negotiate with whites. these are points of contest that historians have not written about in part because we want to tell stories that are simple, stories that are consistent with progress, american progress, and for so many years, both stories have turned over brown vs. board of education, the civil rights legislation of the 1906s, --

1960s, and the long civil rights movement asked us to go back and talk about the 1930s and 1940s and push forward to the 1970s, and so not so stop at those conventional points in the story. >> if you had to pick a date that the civil rights movement story, what would that date be? >> well, you know, historians, these days, are really very spectacle of picking a starting point for the civil rights movement. i can tell you that my book begins in the 1940s in the post-war era after the war, world world war ii, provided a jumping off point for civil rights activism including because there seemed to be such a conflict between pursuing democracy abroad and the states

in which african-american found themselves, found jim crow not consistent with democracy. i talk about the 1940s as a jumping off point for the movement. >> published by oxford. tell us about the cover of the book. >> right. i love these photographs on the book. the first photograph is of ap apwaldon, the first african-american lawyer, a man known little of today, but what i show him doing here is counting the white primary, the convention excluding african-americanings from voting in the democratic primary in georgia and throughout the south. he's actually here trying to vote. >> what year was that? >> 1944. >> okay.

>> you can see he's squaring off against the registrar and people are looking at this really dramatic moment and the history of atlanta. the lower photograph takes us to the 1970s where i show a woman by the name of ethel may matthews, the leader of the local group of the national welfare rights organization. she was a strong dissenter in the african-american community. she's at a welfare rights protest there, and what she's saying there is that the civil rights movement has not worked equally well for all blacks. she's demanding an adequate income. she's demanding integrated schools, affordable housing, so the cover is meant to depict the nuances of the book. >> professor, is ethel may

matthews still alive? >> she is not. she died in 2005. >> did you have the chance to chat with relatives? >> i did not, but i had interviews with her which was just a joy. >> you did? >> yeah. >> you've been working on this book for several years then? >> absolutely. this book represents a decade of work. i started on it as a dissertation, and worked on it for many years, and the result is this 5-00 page -- >> dissertation. >> that's right. >> in talking with ethel may matthews in doing your research, what was she like 30-40 years later? >> uh-huh. well, she was a remarkably strong woman. she was very passionate. she was very clear in her sense

that politicians of all ideological stripes, of all races had not been attentive enough to the poor, and that's what she said to me in no uncertain terms, and that was quite surprising to me. she really opened up to me i think more than anyone else whom i interviewed, and i conducted about 30 interviews for this book, that the civil rights movement was much more complicated than even the stories that i had learned in graduate school and certainly in law school. >> if somebody said to you, professor, that the civil rights movement was a middle class movement, what would be your response? >> well, i would say that it's an apt description in many ways

in terms of its impact. i don't think that leaders of the civil rights movement like thurgood marshall, certainly not dr. king, and others set autofor it to be that way. they intended for civil rights legislation, for instance, for civil rights litigation to have a wider impact, but for a number of reasons, the civil rights movement did end up being most beneficial to members of the middle class. those were the people who were in the best position to take advantage of the opening up of the workplace to african-american of the opening up of schools to african-americans, but for those like ethel may matthews who was

the child of alabama sharecroppers who just was not very well educated, she was very smart, but not very well educated, it was a harder, harder thing to do to try to go in and interview for jobs and be successful even after the employment discrimination legislation was enacted, for instance. i talk about those things in the book, why it was so difficult to have a successful movement that brought in benefits for a greater number of people. >> we're talking with professor tomiko brown nagin at festival of the book in march 2011. what is your day job? >> i'm a law professor and history professor at the university of virginia, a job that i enjoy very much. >> what do you teach?

>> i teach constitutional law, constitutional history, and i teach a course on education law and policy. >> how long have you been doing that? >> at the university of virginia? for five years. before teaching at uva, i taught at washington university in st. louis for two years. >> what's your education? you were editor of yale law review, i believe? >> yeah, that's right. the yale law journal. i was an editor of that journal, so i attended yale law school. i also got a ph.d. in history from duke university and prior to that i got an undergraduate degree in history. >> where did you grow up, and what did your parents do? >> right. i grew up in a small town in south carolina, greenwood it's called. my parents, well, like ethel may

matthews parents, my father was once a sharecropper. he later on worked in a factory, both of my parents attended segregated schools in south carolina. my mom later, actually when i was in law school, went to college and became a teacher which is something she does now. >> we have been taking with tomiko brown nagin, courage to dissent, atlanta, and the long history of the civil rights movement. >> so, matt, here's my question. this book is written in a breezy popular style and has sort of a breezy optimism to it. you write at one point, "the

innovative capitalist culture will allow us to make a hue -- houdini-style escape from the impacts." what makes you sure of that? >> my mother told me to avoid wishful thinking, and i try to be provocative to see if folks are awake. i take climate change seriously, and now that my two minutes is up -- [laughter] i love good jokes. folks, i take climate change very seriously, and my optimism is really -- the core of my optimism, and i don't want you to think i'm a naive optimist is when we anticipate a challenge, that our minds, in a world of perhaps 9 billion people, if enough of us are scared and aware of the challenge that