>> dr. george was coming, we heard that michael jordan was coming with her. michael, stand up. [applause] so, thanks all of you for your support. >> if you walk through the bowel of the slave ship, there's a reception there and there will be people if you're interested on going on a tour, people there to show you through the rest of the building. thank you so much, congressman, for being here. thank you for what you do. thank all of you for your time. god bless you. >> buy some books.

block >> you're watching booktv on c-span, with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. booktv, television nor serious readers. this weekend 'on booktv, in depth with ron paul. the form congressman and presidential candidate will discuss his books and answer viewers questions on sunday from 12:00 to 3:00 p.m. eastern, on afterwords, shirl chumley talks with a former white house chief information officer, and you'll

also see books about the middle east millenial generation, the life of author harper lee, firearms, and thesive rights movement, corruption in the department of justice. all this and much more. 48 hours of nonfiction books and authors on c-span 2. booktv, television for serious readers. >> welcome to booktv special look at the places we have visited in 2014 as we continue to explore the unique history and literary culture of america. >> with the help of our cable partners, for the next how we'll take you across the country, from salem, oregon to st. louis to mobile, alabama. we begin in ogden, utah, where we toured 25th street. >> 25th street itself is actually not that unusual.

similar streets have popped up. with beaumont, text, heal's half acre, larimer street in denver, but what makes 25th street unique is the fact it arose in the middle of a motorhome mon -- mormon settlement. you had the mormon people's party struggling to maintain control, and then you had the railroad, the economic life blood of the city, which was bringing in nonmormons, which swelled the ranks of the liberal party so the railroad was also leveling the playing field. so you had that irony. and i think in that context, the guilty pleasures that were along 25th street were going to be just a little bit more taboo than they might have been in other cities. initially, after the railroad came, a number of hotels sprang

up here at the ogden depot. and initially the railroad, the mayor, the city council, did not want to serve alcohol. they said alcohol would demoralize the railroad workers. well, that didn't last too long. the city needed the money. and so within a year, after the railroad came, the city council licensed four saloons here at the railroad, and after that booze began to flow like the ogden river. at the same time, three blocks east of here, where 25th 25th street intersects with the main street in ogden, there was another hotel called the white house. the white house was initially run by an itinerant merchant named simon vanberger. he later became the gov -- governor of utah.

so, with the hotels and restaurants here at the depot, and the hotels three blocks east of here, the three blocks between them began to fill in slowly with boarding houses, rooming houses, and saloons. and bordellos, and even some opium dens. it just so happens that people who came through here, transcontinental passengers, were interested in pastimes that were quite different than those that mormon culture was accustomed to. the mayor, peery, from to 1939. during his years that 25th 25th street's wild reputation reached it highest point. harmon peery believed that licenses and thieves were the best way to regulate vicious

establishments such as gambling halls. he also believed that 25th 25th street allowed ordinary people to enjoy the same kind of recreation as members of private clubs. so you get more of that during his time than at any other time in its history. a lot of notorious people on 25th street. the most famous of all had to be rose and her husband, bill davey. rose davey, among other things, rap the rose room. the rose rooms are right behind us in the second floor of the building on the corner here. it's now called alleged, the hottest place in ogden. bill davey had his own gambling joint, called the key club, on the opposite side of the street. second floor of that building where lucky slice pizza is. rose davey leased the building

and for a year she ran it as a normal rooming house. and then mayor harmon peery came back into office at the beginning of 1948. now, there's no evidence for this but i think she thought, now that harmon peery is back in office, maybe a bordello would stand a chance. so, she decided to start importing women in there as prostitutes. the rose room's first blazed in the public consciousness on may 1, 1948. the wieber wildlife foundation was holding its annual party in the livestock coliseum, and three strippers from the rose rooms were hired as the grand final heat. they were passing round matchbooks riff the rose room's logo on them, and the strippers named are written in ink on the matchbooks. well, the crowd became so unruly they started throwing bottles on the stage and police rushed to

the coliseum some arrested not the bottle-throwers but the strippers. this was the first time the public ever heard of the rose room. and within a few days after that they raided the rose room and arrested rose davey not for prostitution but for distribution of narcotics. we're standing in front of a couple of building. this one is called the london ice cream parlor now, and this one was called the davenport saloon. it's still referred to that. bell london didn't actually build these but owned them and was famous for keeping her office here. now, the thing that is most visually interesting nowdays is this passageway which you see between them. this supposedly was built for bell london by special arrangement with the building's

owner so gentlemen could discretely go here from 25th 25th street, into the center of the block, which was ogden's tenderloin district. this passageway leads to what was called electricaley. it was in the center of the block. and it was built in 1893. bell london hired a local construction firm to build a grand parlor house for her right where this parking lot is. it was called number 10 electricaley. the alley itself came to the interior of to the block from grand avenue, and on both sides it was flanked by buildings built for patrols constitutes.

so from 1893 to 1912, electric alley was the place to go for prostitution, and i like to say she was the most fame house and most successful madam utah history. the reason if say she was the most successful madam in utah history is when salt lake in 1909, decided to create a regulated prostitution west of downtown, they recruited not a madam from salt lake but bell london from ogden to run it. but bell london was only in salt lake for three years. her career in ogden lasted a quarter century, from 1889 to 1914. and at one point, she owned more property along 25th street than any other private citizen except one of the big hotel owners. we're standing on 25th street. in front of what used to be the porters and waiters club. this is a very important building in the history offing

-- offing den and for the heritage of 25th street. they porters needed a place to stay and it was convenient to union station. so for years and years it was a place where they could not only sleep but get food and licensed alcohol, play cards. a great convince for them. the owner was bill weekly, and during the war years, during world war ii, he married a beautiful young william who had come to utah from new orleans, named anna bell shaw. anna bell weekly is the name that became inseparably if the porters and waiters. anna bell creteed a club in the

basement which featured live jazz. there's a saxophonist, an excellent saxophonist, named joe mcqueen, who is still living in ogden. he got here in 194 5. he and anna bell weekly teamed up to create the jazz club that game a sensation. -- became a sensation. it had the beneficial effect of integrating ogden. >> 25th street flourished for a century. when railroad passengers started to decline after world war ii, especially in the 1950s, as they were building the interstate highway system so people could travel more easily by cars or go by airline, which was faster than trains. then the railroad passenger service started dying out. and by the late '60s it was pretty much all gone.

25th street today in 2514, looks a lot better than it did, say, at its low point in the 1970s. the buildings, if you see pictures of them from the mid-1970s, looked just horrid. in terrible condition. many of them had been abandoned for years. but to be on, that's why they're still here. they were hiding in plain sight. they weren't desirable, and so no one wanted to be on 25th 25th street. and so no one bulldozed them to make way for fancy new buildings. the street was put on to the national register of historic places in the '70s, and then in 2000, congress created the lower 25th street historic district, which makes federal money available to people who are fixing up the buildings. so, now once again, you have a viable, vibrant street where people come for fine dining, for

street festivals, for live theater. there are mixed use condominiums, street festivals all the time in good weather. there's an awful lot to do and a lot of good ropes to come here. >> next from st. louis, hammer barnes -- harper barnes discusses the 1917 race riot that sparked the civil rights movement. >> my book about the east st. louis race riot had it start in the early '90s when i was working at the st. louis post dispatch and was writing an obituary of miles day advice, who is from -- day davis, and stories of the race riot filled his ears since he was a child, and he talked about how horrible it was to learn that white people had massacred black people in this small city in

illinois. and he thought it affected him fact it might well -- the fact of the riot in his home town might well have affected his altitude toward white people untilg] the day he died, really, and i thought, my gosh, miles davis died -- i'm sorry -- was born in 1926. minus nine years old when the race riot occurred, and for something like that have been so prevalent, so persistent, in the stories that he heard as a child, seemed to me a powerful indication that a story needed to be told. and i asked around, and black people in general, who grew up here, knew about the riots, but their parents had not really discussed it, and their grandparents. white people on the whole didn't know about it at all and yet it was by the number, the deadliest race riot in american history until the rodney king riots in

los angeles. i discovered that congressional hearings had been held six months after the riot and that people who had participated in the riot, black and white, businessmen, a variety of people in east st. louis, had been interviewed by this congressional committee, this committee of five congressmen, and they told the story of the riot, incredible narrative detail, and i thought, my god, this is a great head start. and so starting with that, i tried interviewing people. this would have been in the late -- latter years of the 20th century, and the very beginning of the 21st century. people in their 90s, and i interviewed some people, and i discovered their memories were not as good as i thought they might be, and not particularly their age but the distance from the events. people tend to embellish their

memories, and so i decided to go with the written record and much of it was published. web dubois wrote about the riot, covered it for in the naacp. marcus garvey, the great black separationist leader, had written about the riot. and it was front page of every paper in the country for a week or so. 1917 is not that long ago. the fact that whites were massacring blacks in at the streets of a middle sized american city is just horrific. in the early years of world war i, america had just entered world war i -- the factories across america geared up and there were many jobs available, and blacks from the south, at the same time the bowie veil was destroying the cotton crop and farm jobs were disappearing, and so blacks were moving in large numbers north to industrial

cities, and east st. louis was an industrial city and were there inevitable clashes between blacks and whites that took place over these jobs, and it just evolved into a riot that took place in july. july of 1917. the night of july 1st, a model t ford, black model t ford, 0 drove through a black neighborhood, people shooting out windows. an hour latary black model t ford moved through a black neighborhood with people shooting out windows. no one was killed. but the third time a black model t ford went through a black neighborhood with people shooting out the windows, blacks had assembled -- young black men assembled with gucks and shot back and two police detectives were killed, and that triggered the riot, and then all chaos broke out the next morning. it started out as riots often do

with fistfights in the streets but they quickly escalated. and one of the reasons they escalated was that there was a central mob of men who probably had been in the bars drinking all night, which you could do in east st. louis in those days. but soon there were terrible atrocities. black men hung from telephone poles in streets. one man's scalp was ripped loose. a mother and her baby were shot as they were trying to escape from a burning building. much of the downtown area was burned down. and as i believe i said -- if i didn't -- 48 people were killed, 39 of them black, and three of the white people were killed accidentally by other white people. and it was -- finally in the national guard came in and restored peace, but by that time

the city -- much of the city was just devastated. the mayor instructed -- did not want a record of this and did not want east st. louis to be known as the place of this terrible riot, and the mayor ininstructed the police to confiscate cameras and destroy film. so very few photographs actually emerged from the riot. and some of those that did -- in fact all of those that did as far as i was able to determine, were thrown away when one of the newspapers cleaned out its reference library in the '20s. so the imagery comes mainly from drawings and newspapers, which there were self of those. i suppose the thing i learned that was -- that stuck with me most strongly in writing the book was the fact that the civil rights movement did not begin in the 1950s with the decision in

the topeka school system case. that it began the day after slavery ended, and persists until this day, and that in 19- -- in the period of world war i i don't think i was aware, and i know most people i talked to were not aware -- i'm talking about educated people -- that america erupted in these race riots across the country in 1917, 1918, 1919, and 1919 was nope as the red summer of 1919. the chicago race riot was the word of many that took place that summer. what made the riot different was it was the first and probably the deadliest of two dozen riots that took place in the world war i period, and it was the first one -- it was the probably

the deadliest one and set the pattern for those that followed. whites would attack blacks. accuse them of taking their jobs in some cases white industrialists were in part guilty for flooding the market with blacks. they were advertising in southern newspapers of job -- help wanted, and when there were no jobs at all so that they would have a large pool of workers to draw from to defeat -- so the unions could not organize against them. and i -- but i think it was the first, and it set the pattern and it was followed by what i consider to be the first major civil rights demonstration. there was a march two weeks after the riot, mid-july of 1917. there was eight to ten thousand people marched down fifth avenue from harlem to the middle of the town, middle of new york to

protest the east st. louis race riot and protest racism across the america. but the east st. louis race riot was the spark for the civil rights. i want to take from the book, it ain't over, and i just think we need to be conscious, very conscious and not forget that this was a racial history and it all grew out of slavery. a deadly legacy of slavery, and we still see its results around us. >> from booktv's recent trip to salem, oregon, learn about the jewish response to removal of japanese-americans in world war ii. >> pearl harbor in december of '41 and almost immediately immediate talk about what can be done with the enemy alien population, which includes germans and japanese and italians, foreign nationals, who

are enemy illens -- aliens and that's an internment which start witches them. what happened with the japanese americans is difficult and the internments most historians talk about it as removal and incarceration so the japanese american population in general on the west coast, which two-thirds of the population were american citizens so they were not enemy aliens. they were american citizens by birth. they were around up in mass and had to leave their homes if they lived in the western defense zone. so they were removed, forced to leave, and then they were put in camps surrounded by barbed wire and not charged with anything in particular. i got interested in this issue when i read an article about african-american and jewish civil rights organization, an article by sheryl greenberg, talking about how the issue had passed unnoticed to them, and they were in new york city. right?

the headquarters were. so i got curious about what the reaction would be here. and i expected to find that the jewish community, because of the involvement in civil rights issues, would have spoken out here because unlike the jewish community in new york, for those who lived here, japanese-meshes -- americans were their neighbors. they were familiar with them, and the community had a commitment, a public commitment to speak out against prejudice. the reaction was a nonreaction and you have to understand something about the context. the first thing to understand is that as the policies started to take shape -- it took shape in february and march of 1942. by the spring, japanese-americans living in the area were rounded up and put in temporary camps near the large cities and then subsequently moved to the camps in the intermountain states.

in general, west coast, nonjapanese americans, the population in general, most politicians, most newspapers, strongly supported the removal of japanese-americans. it was a very popular policy locally. that's one piece of the context. the other piece of the context e and what got me interested was the civil rights organizations, which were based back east, didn't pay much attention it to. i found for the most part there was very, very little said about this, and so i started by looking at newspapers, the community newspapers, in each of the major cities had one -- and there was almost nothing said. when you started to read between the lines there were these awkward, almost mentions of japanese-americans. so right after the executive order, roosevelt's executive order, that kind of launched this policy, in all of the major

jewish newspapers on the west coast they were weeklies, and they had editorials talking about how the rights of all have to be protected and we should fight prejudice in all of its forms and so on and so forth, without ever saying the word japanese specifically so it was almost as if they wanted to say something but were nervous about actually doing so. so, there was -- i call it a kind of awkward silence or an uncomfortable silence around this issue, that i started to investigate more. to speak out about it was to stick your neck out, and the jewish populations were already nervous about antisemitism. so that's one piece of it. the other piece i think is interesting is these communities had two main agenda items at this moment in time. one of them was this agenda of fighting prejudice in all of its forms because they believed that only when all prejudice was eliminated would antisemitism be

eliminated. you had too fight it together. the other priority was to support the war effort to save european jewry, so this policy put the two goals in conflict. so the war department and the president himself was saying that japanese-americans had to be removed in order to further the war effort. they war threat to the war effort. so you think that inclination would be that the jewish community would support that. on the other hand, those few people who speak out against this policy say it's a policy based on racial identity. right? and so if you're against prejudice you should be speaking out against it. so i think this policy brought those two goals into direct conflict with each other and that produces this kind of silence around the issue. some of those -- depended a little bit on the community but some of those who spoke out were threatened in various ways. so, there was very strong feeling, and you have to

remember that at this time there were blackouts in the coastal cities, there was a fear on the west coast that the west coast would be attacked, and so tensions were quite high. the community relations committees were an arm of the jewish community that emphasized what was at the time called intergroup relations so work with a racial minority groups against prejudice in all its forms. so i knew the group in l.a. had emerged during world war ii. as a force in the community and there are several accounts hold it up as one of the major organizations behind civil rights activities in los angeles. so i went to their archive expecting that they would be a group that spoke up, and what i found was really quite different than that. and it goes back to their history. so, they were founded under a different name, called the jewish community committee, of los angeles, founded in 1934, at

a time when antisemitism was increasing rapidlyd-e7"% in ths angeles area in southern california in general. some so they made it their mission to document that antisemitic activity, some in the form of pro-nazi groups. there was a group called the silver shirts and various blendist pro-german groups, and so they wanted to document what was going on. one of the people who came to work for that organization, named joseph ruth, was originally from austria and he and whys wife and other austrian imgrays went out and infiltrated meetings of the nazi groups the message they wanted to get out was these groups were both

antiamerican and antisemitic. however they felt if itself wases a jewish group getting the word out that would be perceived as self-serving so they wanted to find a way to get the word out in a more neutral way, and so the solution they found was in 1939, they started an organization called the news research service, which you'll notice dund say jewish in the name. and the news research service published a weekly called the newsletter. and it went to important decisionmakers. so they sent it to the major newspapers across the country, to many members of congress to the president himself, to people in the justice department, and so on. and it began to have a reputation as a very good source of news about these kinds of

fascist groups. and they started publishing about imperial japan, and published several pieces in the late 1930s and 1939 about japanese-americans. clearly they were not passing in the same way they passed among the austrians. but they were clearly getting the information from somewhere else, and a lot of the things they circulated had them been circulated by antijapanese forces, a lot of antijapanese tension in the west. so they spread the offsided report that japanese-american textbooks used in the after school program cultivated loyalty to the emperor. then once pearl harbor happened those reports were picked up further so and to the news research service information they gathered was used in

various government reports. so, for example, the house unamerican affairs committee, the earlier version of that, it was chaired by congressman dyes, and there was a lot of contact between the dyes committee and this news research service, which is part of the l.a. jcc. and their information goes into some of the testimony that helped justify the removal of japanese americans. so, yeah, it was a rather unexpected finding. both at the time and in the years since, there was knowledge that the news research service applied part of the information but it was not nonthat wases -- that was not known that was a jewish organization. very odd to read that organization's materials because tame this is -- at the same time

this is going on they're working on antiprejudice campaigns. i think what happened is they were -- it is very useful for them to have these contacts in the government, and the dyes committee and so on, and the dyes committee they were aware had some issues with excess. not only go after fascist but after communist but it got the word out so effectively about the dangers of naziism and that was their primary concern. the vast majority of their materials was really about fascism and primarily about pro-german groups, and the japanese-american stuff was not great in volume, and was sort of incidental. secondary. it was something that they did because the dyes committee and asks ask the them for information and they got the information from elsewhere and it kind of funneled through them. however, it did end up having an

impact. so there was a report about the dangers of the japanese american commitee. it became known as the dyes yellow paper. a lot of that information comes straight out of the news research service, and so they ended up doing a lot of damage. even during the war, this coalition of pro-civil rights groups come together, and one thing they do is try work to enable japanese-americans to come back to their homes and that work starts as early as '33, '34, trying to get the government to distinguish between those people for whom there might be an individual suspicion as opposed to the community in general, and to allow them to come home. and this group is involved in that work. and there's no indication that anyone -- they don't acknowledge that -- though there are histories written of the group this was never mentioned. there was an interview done used

ago with joseph ruth, an oral history, and when they get to this part of the history of the organization, he asked them to turn the tape recorder off, and so i wasn't every able to hear what his comments were on it. but they do work very hard to support the japanese-american community afterwards, and so one has to think they realized they had done wrong in this case. these are people who spent, including joseph ruth, spent their lives working on civil rights issues, and that they participate in this is really shocking. people have a difficult time hearing it. there were certainly jewish americans who stood up, just as there were other americans who stood up and opposed the policies. they were in the minority certainly on the west coast they were in the minority.

but people don't expect to hear this story, and unfortunately it's a story of kind of getting in bed with the wrong people. so they got in bed, so to speak, with people like martin dyes and so on because he was able to further their campaign against antisemitism, but in doing so they ended up doing damage to another. i think that many people read history looking for good guys and bad guys, and here's a case where if you look at -- to go back to this organization in los angeles -- like i said these are people whoa dedicated their lives to civil rights and even they got caught up in this, in a sort of wartime hysteria and expedience si and so on. so it's not so simple as good guys and bad guys, and i think as we saw at the time of 9/11, during times of war, when people feel vulnerable, they sometimes aren't as thoughtful about things as they might be, and so

i would hope that would be the message. i'm certainly not trying to vilify the community. certainly if you look at the jewish community overall, the fact that they maintained a silence for the most part, an official silence, at first when i started doing the research i saw that as a failing because i expected them to speak out. but when you look at the secular press at that time, people are virtually screaming from the rooftops that all of the japanese-american community should be taken away. by not jumping on that band wagon, that says something. so i kind of shifted from seeing it as a failure to seeing it as -- they realized they weren't going to get on the bandwagon. so, it's not quite what i expected to find and it's often not the lesson that people expect to hear, especially when i go out to talk to community

groups. people will come to the book or come to my lick tour expecting to hear the story of good people who stood up, and there's some of that in the book. but it's a much more mixed bag. >> up next, the tour of atelier 6000, booktv toured the site with the help of our local cable partner, bend broadband. >> jewelry winter and i'm -- julie winter and i'm the executive direct user here at a-6 and we're in bend oregon. a-6 is a nonprofit organization and we are -- our mission is to advance printmaking and book arts, as vital contemporary art forms. so we do that through our making book projects with local authors, dot that through workshops with high school students and adults. bring in artists and having

workshops with artists coming in and doing different book arts or printmaking. book arts is hand-made books creating and -- books made that are not just the traditional book, so it could be books that are unbound or bound, all sorts of disstructure from accordion to flag to tunnel books to traditional bound books that lay flat when you open. so it's a book and art and altogether and all hand-made, and so it's more than just the words that are in the book. it is also the structure of the book, also the part of the art, the paper used, how the -- whether there is text or no text. so it's all of that and it's an unending world to discover and to create and it's pretty amazing. this is another book, the most recent book, and it's written by

ellen waterston, and relates to her trip on the santiago, and ron choke, the illustrator for this, and he and ellen collaborated in doing the drawings that would go with her poetry. this is particularly interesting page because elly says she got the idea to do the book after hiking the trail, when he saw a map of it and it reminded her of a woman stretching across northern spain on this pilgrimage, and then ron drew the map and also this overlay which is a woman, superimposed on this. so as we close this page, it shows the woman on the map, in his interpretation.

artist comes in with a vision and have they're writing -- their writing and then when you're working in collaboration so ron, who did the illustrations, had both the instraights of what ellen waterston is telling him in her writing and his inspiration he brings it to, influenced by what she is describing to him. and so he does the drawings and she says, i like that, and it really is that collaborative. not the author just directing necessarily how the whole book goes. so it's in that collaboration. then you have each artist along the way. the topographyer, the layout of the image and the type on the page, also the letter press artist, so it really is a collaborative process. >> this is the original drawings. one of the original drawings, so this is just a pen and ink drawing. the pen drawings are then converted to a transparency that

faithfully reproduces the penwork. and then that transparency is used to burn a photo sensitive plate, and that's what we have here. so from that point, after the plate has been created, there's a process of inking the plates, so i'm using this kind of a tile grout spreader to spread the ink over the surface. in this case, the ink is below the surface of the plate so the image will be held in the lines that are etched below the surface. below the surface of the plate. so, i make sure that the ink is spread evenly over the plate. and then i try to pull away as much of the ink as i can just using the squeegee.

and then i'm going move the plate over here. i'm going to put on gloves for the wiping process. this whole process, every step of it, hases to be done for every print you produce, and so in this case numerous prints for this book project. so, then i'll use -- like the same material they use for bridal veils, very soft and pliable cloth, and i will gently rub away the bulk of the ink on the plates.: you can see how the images become more and more

okay. so, don't want to press too hard with any of these materials. don't want to take the ink out of the low points in the plate. so once the ink is off i use pains from a telephone book and gently work over the surface, again taking more ink off the plate. and through this process, as the ink is removed, it becomes easier and easier november across the surface of the plate. so, now it's ready to print. so we'll walk over to the press. >> because the plate on the back or actually they're steel plates so there's a magnet here that will hold the plate in place so i'll place it down on at the

template here. i'm lining it up. and then on this template i have lines for where the plate goes and where the paper goes, and is so a always going to be centered in the paper. all right. >> put a sheet of news print over, just to keep any ink from getting on the blankets. then run it through.

all right. so there's our print. so, it's the same process for every print. so, that's the -- one of the labor-intensive aspects of the project, is -- it's a craft and people are working on every aspect of this process, from page design to letter press printing, illustration printing, stitching of the book. so it's all involving craftsmanship. >> i can tell you about this book, buck aroo, a book that i am the author of and handmade book at al -- with lots of

support to get it accomplished. it's cased in a juniper box which was made especially for us by the opportunity foundation, and they did a grand job. they have -- we put in what the wooden box is about and also information on this original book. it starts with -- the whole idea started with pat clark. i had written an article about ron miller, and he is a buckaroo, fourth generation buck aroo and said, let's do a book. i was excited about and it we start figuring out how to go about it. and then to put it together i ordered some cow hides from north carolina, and they had the

hallmarks of what the animal lived through. some barbed wire scars and bite marks that were held, -- healed. so we like that expect and we took the hides and laid them out on a large table and cut out the leather cover. so this binding itself is called italian long stitch. we have five signatures, and i'll explain what those are. the closure is a strap that goes around the side and goes into a little loop to keep it all together. the pages were all hand-torn, individually. it's about 100 pages, and so we took a large sheet of paper and then we actually ripped it to size. so each page has been handled quite a few times. the beginning page is horse

hair. a print we made using horse hair and a brayer, and that's the end pages for it. then i want to tell you about the signatures. a signature is a group of pages that are folded together -- see if can -- and we have five signatures that just means how we put the book together with the pages. so, one piece of paper, this gray paper, which has -- if you can see it, it's -- we call it our glue horse because it wases made by bennett miller and she drew a horse and ran that through the press. that's the first page and also the last pain, which shows stirrups. so as we put these pages together, there are five of them, and when you get to the

center, -- the book always lies flat but you get to the center and you get the -- it shows how it's stitched. and so every one of these pages has actually four pieces to it. that means that we were printing -- we have to know where this page goes because it's not sequential. so we print that. and then these two had to be printed together, and the back pain. so we would print one part and then we would put that aside and let it fry print more. so every one of these illustrations from drawings -- this is one of pat clark's illustrations -- the drawings, the photographs, are embossments and solar plates, various techniques of the printing. every page has been handled multiple times.

an art form in itself. just the book. and it's beautiful to hold to read to look at. everything about it, in that wonderful dance between the word and the images and the whole book structure. so, it puts it in a formal -- format that is hand-made that is not as -- it is an art form, so it puts it into this -- it's going to last forever and it just has a beauty of its own. so, the advantages that -- they see it printed and appreciate the different processes that go into creating their book. >> this weekend, booktv is in mobile, alabama, with the help of our local cable partner, comcast. next we sit down with author greg waselkov to discuss the fort mimses massacre and the red

stick war from 1813 too 1814. >> we're at fort mims park, a little five acre park in the southern end of alabama and it's the location of a major battle between the americans and creek indians in 1813. the fort itself was full of all kinds of folks taking shelter from impending indian attack. included indians that were allied with the americans, local settlers. and lots of slaves. about 500 people inside this fort. and in august -- on august 30, 1813, a faction of the creeks that was quite upset with the american policy toward indians, attacked the fort and there 'twas a long battle, and at the end some 250, 300 people inside the fort were killed, and largely known as the fort mims

massacre. but there was much more to the story. the creeks, like most american indians, had to find a way to deal with the expanding american settlements throughout the late 18th, 19th centuries, and the creeks actually were quite successful, as were the chair keys -- cherokees, at least some portion assimilating to american lifestyle. so wealthy creeks owned slaves, had big plantations, raised domestic livestock and were accommodating their way of thrive the american norms of agriculture and other kinds of things. but large part of the creek nation didn't see the advantage to that. they wanted to maintain their tradition lifestyle. so there was a real rift in the creeks in 1813. a civil war broke out and what happened here at fort mims was a continuation of the civil war but brought the americans into the war against the redstick

creek action which was antiamerican. there was a religious component to it. the shawnee prophet and his brother, tecumseh, war proselytizing for a new religious way of life for american indians and tecumseh came here and converted a lot of creeks to the religious prophet religion. and so there was a political angle as well. most of the creek leaders at the time were in the pay of the american government in one way or another so their families, their lineages, were profiting and lynnages out of power were suffering from poverty by their early 1800s. so a lot of reasons why individuals chose one side or the other, but in this area, most of the local creeks were pro-american and decided to stay on that side of the civil war. and a couple were very --

william witherford was the leader of the redsticking a tack. and in august 1813. the folks inside fort misdemeanors had been forted up for a north there had been a skirmish in july that involved some militia from this area, and apparently the redstick attack was in response to that skirmish. actually the creeks had been in their own nation, within their own territory and were attacked by americans. they felt they were wronged by that and decided to take revenge, particularly on the creeks in this area of the -- that sided with the americans. so in the morning the folks inside the fort had to go out to find food. there were 500 people within about an acre size fort. so a very cramped conditions, and they had to go out to forage every day for food. and so people disburse, hart vesting crops in nearby fileds, tending cattle. that went on throughout the

morning. there were various sightingsing of redstick warriors in the area. mostly by african slaves and they reported this to their owners but weren't believed, and then one was being whipped at the time of the attack for having spread fault rumors. the attack was prize. shouldn't have been this the garrison was not a formal military unit. they were all militia from local and territorial militia units, and so very badly led. the fort was very badly built. the gun loopholes which should have been five or six feet above the ground so the defenders could fire down on attackers were at three-foot level so they were on level with the attacking force, who ran up and took possession of the loopholes and began to fire into the fort. the battle went on for quite a long time. there were maybe 750 or so redsticks in the attacking force, and about several hundred actively fighting inside,

amongst the many civilians and other people inside the fort. and by sometime around the afternoon, 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon, the battle kind of stalemated. so the redsticks withdrew, decided whether to renew the attack and they did. at that point they set fire to a good portion of the southern part of the fort. that fire spread throughout the entire fort, and at that point defense was impossible so the few remaining defenders tried to escape and quite a few were killed or captured but 25 made it out of the fort. the battle immediately made all the papers in the country. considered a huge disaster of american military might, and took quite a while for the local armies to reconstitute themselves and this would be territorial volunteers were really devastated by this. but eventually they organized the southern army to invade the creek nation from the mobile area. the georgians organized a couple different attacks from the east

and then the tennessee troops under several generals, most famously andrew jackson, invaded from the north, and this actually was one of the major outcomes of the battle, was this introduction of andrew jackson into the war of 1812. his successes throughout the creek war, especially at horseshoe bend -- they made him famous throughout the country and also convinced leader palestine washington he could actually fight and win so so he was given command of the army at new orleans and defeated the british in early 1815. andrew jackson is a controversial figure for many reasons in all sorts of radical new sorts of policies and aspects of government, but certainly one outcome of his experiences during the creek war was his determination to see indian removal finally occur throughout the eastern united states. a lot of people like george washington, thomas jefferson, had tried to formulate a policy

of assimilation, where indians americans in their sense of the word, and stay where they were locate but on smaller parcels of land. the american indians had populations in the tens of thousands. owned millions of acre of land and the american government was under tremendous pressure by american settlers to take the land one way or another. so jackson actually was quite excited when he heard the news of fort mims and saw this as the perfect opportunity to take land from the creeks, and he eventually negotiated the treaty of fort jackson at the end of the war that took 21 million acres from the creek nation, both from the creeks he fought with as well as those he fought against, and 20 years later then, of course, when he became president, he was able to then push through the removal act of 1830 that did lead to wide-scale forced removal of indians from the southeast as well as the north, old northwest

territories in the ohio country. the attack itself, of course, launched the invasion of the creek nation and the confiscation of this land, 21 million acres, which immediately after the war was opened up for settlement. so, alabama and a good bit of southern georgia would not have been settled as early if it hadn't been for this war, and there was actually a thing called alabama fever, big land rush in the years following the war. so that was the most immediate impact. and of course the removal act, this sense of betrayal the americans felt at the sneak attack. the way they viewed it, sneak attack and massacre. they felt very much betrayed because in previous years, people like baby benny minimum hawk and federal agents tried to assimilate creeks and this was a response from the creek nation they did not want to become

americans. so that gave force to removal proponents to move indians out of this area permanently. a conquering spirit is a phrase that benjamin hawkens used. a federal agent for the southern indians and when he first got wind of the redstick movement, largely religious and militaristic, he said they were possessed of the cob conquering spirit by the shawnee great spirit figure, and so i thought that was appropriate for that perspective but also, of course, when the americans are attacked at fort mims, their response is to respond in kind and basically go into an all-out war with the creeks. i thought "a conquering spirit" captured the essence so what was going on all sides. i was part of a team of archaeologists contracted by the alabama historical commission to look at the, archaeology going n

here. a lot of digging at the site of fort mims, and we had thousands of artifacts and no report to speak of. so we spent bat year back in 20002003-through, analyzing the collections and in the process of that i began to read up on the history and into there were a lot of very old historical ideas that need teed be re-kenned. more evidence available now that back the 1890s when the last major work had been done on the redstick war show. archaeology led me to the history. i hope that people who read "a conquering support" that american frontier life hat a lot of different perspectives. the creek perspective has been underrepresented in history, and indian perspectives in general, although that's clearly changing now. i hope that people try to understand the redstick point of view. they weren't evil incarnate that's were portrayed in that

era. ski they had like grievances and the outcome is tragic from all perspectives. it's a very ininstructive period to study. view fort misdemeanor as similar to -- fort mims as similar to many other stories that offering fission writers will take a vessel like the titanic or row boat or space station, some kind of contained entity in which people interact and really kind of show their true selves, and i thought that really is what was happening at fort mims. we see the cruelty of the commander here, daniel beasley, who has been a sheriff in the naches area, writtenning the slaves that were telling the truth before the approach of the redstick creeks. all the different kinds of human stories that go on within the fort were most fascinating to me, and really trying to delve into the genealogy of these

individuals, showed in fact they were all quite closely related. these people were fighting on opposite sides but they all knew each other, would yell insults back and forth and it was very, very personal war played out here on kind of a small scale really. but the american civil war crunched down into a little tiny event in many ways. you see all the same kind of stories here as you would see in a bigger picture like the american civil war. >> up next, author michael vincent williams talks about his book "medgar evers: mississippi martyr." he spoke with booktv on a recent visit. >> for anything on capital street, let's let the mar chants on capital -- merchants on capital street build -- i had one merchant tall me and he said, i want you to know that i've talked to my national office today, and they want me to tell you that we don't need

nigger business. these are stories that helped to support the white citizens council. a council that is dedicated to keeping you and i second-class citizens. now, finally, ladies and gentlemen, we'll be demonstrate can here until freedom comes to negroes here in jackson, mississippi. >> 15 minutes past midnight, evers got outside of his car and in a vacant lot, a sniper fired a single shot at evers. the bullet hit him in the back. crashed through this body, through a window in the house him died within an hour at a jackson hospital. city detectives believe the fatal shot was shot from this tree. they found a rifle they think is the murder weapon and have other clues. ♪

♪ >> as a child i remember vividly my mother talking about medgar evers, and also tell us it's extremely important you know who this person what and what he did. she was always dismayed that nobody had really written about him or he hadn't really gotten the kind of respect that she thought he deserved. unlike martin luther king, jr. and malcolm x and others, that he really got that kind of recognition.

he was borne in mississippi and it's important to understand the significance of his family, his mother and father in particular. they were teaching him that it was his responsibility to care for the community and his responsibility to the larger community so he grew up with this attitude. his father talked about the importance of manhood and their responsibility as men and he grew up with that. his mother as well taught them the brotherhood of all men and particularly that their responsibility also. and he grew up with these kinds of ideas. it's important to note that his childhood he was often times faced with brutal racism in terms of individuals who he knew whoa had been lynched, and what that meant for him, and so the childhood for him was a growing experience, but out of that came this idea that you have a personal responsibility and that's what is important to remember. 1950s and 1960s in

mississippi was very repressive, and violent in terms of african-americans in their position and status in this society at large. talk can about second class citizenship, talking about individuals who denied opportunities to vote, denied opportunities for equal access to education. denied opportunities to participate fully within the society. it was oppressive to say the least. but most importantly, to understand the kind of environment, it was a very violent time. and so individuals who decided they wanted to raise the vote, in the times could be killed or beaten at a moment's notice, and this was not just connected to the right to vote. any person who exhibited any kind of attempt to demonstrate their manhood or womanhood was subjected to lynchings or beatings or brutality. that was the environment in which individuals were acting upon. that becomes important to understand not only what medgar

evers was doing and also those individuals who were also activists along with him as well, because you're acting against a society that in many instances will kill you. and that is the kind of environment that we were talking about. individuals also would lose their jobs if they were identified as individuals who was trying to change the system. they may have loans suddenly called in. so these are to the kind of things that would go on. the employees would be notified of their participation. those kinds of things. so it was an oppressive environment when evers was operating. he decide ned 1953, while he was at a regional council meeting in which they were calling for volunteers to desegregate the university of mississippi and he decided them then he would volunteer to do that and actually put forthhis application in 1954. the importance of this is evers believed that african-americans

should have an opportunity just like everybody else, not only to go to school but also to participate in all aspects of the society in which they lived. now, he put application in in january of 1954. it would go through the process but in the end he we be denied on a technicality which would say he hadn't gotten the proper support from where he lived so he was denied. ian though they said they would open it up again for consideration, nothing ever came of it. the important part of that, however, is the naacp was paying very close attention to his application at that point as well, because this is a period in which the naacp is focused upon trying to integrate institutions, from the professional to graduate level. and once he was denied, they actually offered him the naacp field secretary position to him, and the naacp became this vehicle for which he was able to

express himself. the naacp said was responsible for organizing naacp chapters, responsible for investigating all instances of brutality and wrong-doing throughout the state. the field secretary also was responsible for making reports, any kind of problems or issues, and sending that to the national office in new york for publication as well. and so the field secretary position was not just something that was localized but they went all out of state, speaking to groups of individuals, encouraging individuals to register to vote, encouraging lawsuits, filing affidavits, showing vivids -- individuals how to register and organize. and the field secretary's responsibility was that. medgar evers, one of the more significant ones happened with the 1955 -- the 14-year-old was killed and his responsibility was to investigate what happened to try to seek out witnesses,

and then try to get justice for the family. and it was many instances -- that was something that bothered him also, because we lad a 14-year-old child who was brutally murdered, and these replicated themselves as well inch 1955 we had several murders, george lee, mr. mart smith in mississippi, and again, evers is responsible for investigating those, and then trying to get justice. and so with that, you have to go in and often times in disguise to girth out what happened to speak to witnesses who may have witnessed it, get a sense of what was going on and then try to philadelphia out affidavits and -- to fill out affidavits and get the word out to the naacp headquarters iny. so they also could publicize what was going on. these were some of the more prominent things efforts was involved in it's fortunate understand when we talk about medgar evers and civil rights

activism that every day that the individuals get up and leave the house this is the mentality you have to think of today, they understood full well that they might not come back home again. and when they leave their families and kiss them in the morning, that they may be the last time they see them, yet the still do it day in and day out, and for the field secretary that is something that he is constantly that kind of fire, that kind of environment. it was much more difficult for evers after he gave his national -- his televised address in 1963 because prior to that he has to go in many instances undercould have. you have to dress as a sharecropper, or go in the needle of feeling though night to talk to people where they can't be seen by whites in the area. so it's very difficult. after he gave his televised address, then everybody knows what he looks like so it makes it more difficult to go