look behind the scenes at the history of literary life of the southern city. on booktv on c-span2 september 15th, 1953, a bomb rocked the sixteenth street baptist church killing 4 young girls. that story through the eyes of a survivor even under the hazardous working conditions people fought the work at the cotton mill in jacksonville, rick bragg on the day after the bill closed and on american history tv on c-span3 stanford university history professor on how martin luther king jr.'s letter from a birmingham jail set the tone for the civil-rights movement. also a tour of the premises opened in 1881. the black for ernest for over 100 years and tune in at 6:00 as curator karen hunts continue to discussion on birmingham did during the great depression this weekend on c-span2 and 3.

we would like to hear from you. tweet as your feedback at twitter.com/booktv. up next booktv interviews rich bragg in birmingham, alabama. looking at the literary landscape of eight southeastern cities. he reports on the millworkers of the appellation should -- foothills of northern alabama. >> those people on the cover our workers from the dark age of the cotton mill in my home town. those are folks who survived the 20s 30s and 40s into the 50s in the breakup of summertime when the air was thick with flying cotton that filled their lungs with cotton fiber. they would hang out windows trying to get a breath of air.

kids would ride by in cars and wagons and it would scare them to death. these were people that lost their fingers, hands and arms to the machines and were grateful that they had to work. they came down out of the mountains walking barefoot, came down with all their children in a line. and they hired men and women and babies because the children were valuable. their hands were small and they could reach into the gears and unclog them and and foul lines. >> host: what are we talking about? >> guest: 8, 9, 10. >> host: tell me more about jacksonville, alabama. >> guest: it is the beautiful

town. i said once it is almost like someone painted it and hung it on the air. it nestles in the foothills of the appalachians surrounded by beautiful mountains. not far from the coos the river. it is one of the most beautiful places on earth. but the civil war wrecked the region. a lot of people call it the rich man's war. it wrecked the region. starved region. then came reconstruction. almost like the civil war faded into reconstruction and reconstruction faded into the great depression. not much changed.

the mill came in the early years of the 20th century. and was salvation. these people were sharecroppers were subsistence farmers. they dug well. they cut timber. and all of a sudden there is inside work, steady, and it saved them and many of them, the sons and daughters and grandson's and granddaughters see it as salvation. >> host: how much did they get paid? >> guest: next to nothing. it varied over the years from nichols and times an hour, pocket change to a few dollars a

week. even after roosevelt demanded decent wage for them the mill owner just refused to pay it. and b5 the federal government successfully and broke the union. mill owners kind of paid what they knew they had to pay. considering these poor mountain people and where they came from was not very much. as the 50s faded into the 60s and 60s into the 70s it became a decent paying job. the machines were never safe but got safer. by the 70s and 80s if you work for a cotton mill you were

making as good money as any blue-collar worker except maybe some coal miners, steelworkers. >> host: people were losing their fingers and hands and getting paid next to nothing. why were they still loyal to working in that mill? >> because there was nothing else there. there were pipe shops and steel mills in the bigger cities. to understand why you would work in a place that kept the part of you at quitting time you had to understand that these are folks who don't want to go anywhere else. they don't want to move. a lot of their kinfolks went to deflate and hung the bumpers on cadillacs. it was important to these people

to live in the mountains of their fathers. it was important to them that they live in a place where bug deer jump across the road in front of their yards. they live in a place where their grandmothers foot jelly in the window sill. was important to them that when they died nobody sent their body home on a train. >> host: when did the mill closed? >> guest: it closed after 100 years. i think it was 2001. >> host: what did that do to alabama? >> guest: it would be a romantic story to say that the economy bottomed out and all that. that is not true. the mill became a lesser force in the economy but still a force.

jacksonville state university college became the economic force in town. it wasn't there was a whole lot of new industry. there wasn't. you worked with your hand for a living in this country, you don't have any champions. so the milk faded out of existence and a lot of those workers leader to my brother was one of them, went to work for jobs that paid less. my brother works for the city. they went to work for jobs that don't pay as much but are not as dangerous and don't wreck their health. a lot of the onset they work for nothing so they could have insurance.

the town went on about its collective life. that the cotton mill workers often wound up in jobs that just did not pay as well so their standard of living fell. some got -- went to work for honda. went to work for some new plants around the state where they had to travel. the town went on about its life but it was as though the blue collar part of a place that i call it in the book, the beating blue collar heart of the place kind of wind still. it is such an odd thing to get your hands around because when my brother lost his job, i know that it killed him because for

these people work is the thing. people talk about southerners in cliches. we live for stock car racing and hunting and fishing and football and we handle snakes and shoe a lot of tobacco. what my people are about is work. they talk about work. they talk about how many feet of wood flooring they laid that day. they talk about how much pulpwood they cut. they talk about how many bricks they laid. what they are really about is work. if you take the work away, if you take the machines away and

they did, they took the machines to south america, to asia. if you take the work away you take something out of all of them. so while you hate the fact that it killed so many people, so many people died young and gasping from brown lung but you hate all that, you also hate to see that full taken out of their hands. there ain't no perfect world and there is no perfect solution. i just know that it is missed. it is badly missed. >> host: what prompted you to write this book? >> guest: i promised these folks that i wouldn't write it. a lot of the folks i bumped into in my home town are had written

a newspaper story about it a long time ago when it shut down. and the lot of these folks in my home town, these older folks had helped me on previous books and i promised them that if i ever could i would write them their own book. one old fellow in particular named homer barnwell when to work in the bill. his mom and dad worked themselves to death in the mill. they went to work in the mill after world war ii and after walking across europe he looked around him at all the carnage and the noise and the people trying to brief and he walked out. but he was always part of the mill village. he lived there now and his mom and dad who gave their lives for the place, such a part of it,

all those worries were worth telling. i said i would tell the story. i would see him at high school graduation and deeply ashamed not to have done the book already. so i had a chance to do it and did it for a pretty good reasons. and i am glad it is done and on the shelf and i am very proud of it. >> host: how was this book different from the other books you have written? >> guest: it was similar in that it wasn't necessarily about family. i did not dwell on my brother's story. i told it in a handful of essays of other people. they are almost family. they are friends and people that i know on the street. it is different, moments of even though there was killing and

dying and poverty and struggle and sacrifice there are also moments i hope people laughed out loud. moments i hope they smiled. this book was a little grimmer, a little grammar, a little sadder. and i am glad it didn't. i hope it hit people in the stomach. it didn't give you much of a chance to breathe. >> host: 9 next question. for people who don't live in a jacksonville or the state of alabama when they pick up this book what do you want them to take away from it? >> guest: that the country is changing. people love to say we have a service economy now. what we serve? people work -- i heard this that. is not an