>> jasper is the result of greta van susteren who insisted that peter and i get another dog after him a pass one night on red white -- red eye grade gutfeld said the pop words he was mad because they were taking pictures of the dog. they said dana you are known as a monster who flies into a rage when someone takes a picture of your dog. i said i want everybody to take a picture of my dog. he is america's dog and there he is. thank you. [applause] >> thank you. >> thank you rick grenell and dana perino. the book is "and the good news is...." and all of you who have the book go out to the lobby and we will sign and those of you who don't bear for sale in our museum story. thank you for coming to the richard nixon presidential library. god bless you and god bless america.

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now on booktv with the help of our local cable partner cox communications we take a literary tour of omaha nebraska where we spoke with matt holland author of ahead of their time, a history of the omaha club which advocated for social justice and racial integration in the early 1950s. >> the omaha the poorest club was this phenomenal story of an unlikely group of people in an unlikely place at an improbable time in history that faced and

challenged racial discrimination and segregation in omaha nebraska and it took place in the late 40s and early 50's predating the other civil rights act to these if not by decades of leased by years and it was a group that defy the stereotype when you think about the civil rights group. it was men and women young people and old people, black and white but by two black men so it's this wonderful story that has all these amazing connections and like you said an unlikely place. that quote the birmingham of the north was a quote i found bite the author of black like me and john howard griffin use that quote to describe omaha in the description he gave was in the 60s. omaha had a reputation in the african-american community in omaha and the united states is a city when you came in if you are

black you needed to keep your head down and be aware that you weren't going to be served in restaurants and would be able to stay in hotels and there was like they were in many cities in the country this informal industry of staying in homes in the black community eating in restaurants in the black community even if you are an african-american of as part of a band playing in the white hotel or part of it play that was being put on in a mostly white attended theater. that's not a quote that omaha shares probably but it was known and that description of her mia hamm in the north was an apt description. the club started in 1947 by two gentlemen. one was a catholic priest who was a jesuit at creighton university which is a mile and half sell for where we are now. his name was john mark ii and the other founder was a gentleman named danny holland which is a gentleman who is my

other. he was a 20-year-old cretan student and they met and talked about what they called at the time social justice and decided to start a group to talk about it. my dad said he remembers thinking he had joined a prayer rope. they were going to sit around and read the bible and talk about the moral and implications and father mark ii had different ideas and over the next seven years he was the car in the center of the group is same moved into boycotts and picketing and challenging and doing things like that. when the club began their operation the idea and affect in fact the term civil rights, they use the term civil justice because it wasn't part of the national lexicon of the time. the idea of civil rights was so far removed from the idea of the greater community of omaha or the united states that they were

operating in a vacuum. i always like to say they were operating without a net. there were not the support groups and there were not the prior experiences of other groups to challenge racial discrimination and segregation so in some cases they were making up their strategies the techniques that they used because i'm an educator and i do this presentation often for mobile school and high school students and they say it's not like you can shoot someone had e-mail and ask how did that tesco for you last week in? they were sitting down and saying we are going to try to challenge this business and we are going to hand out leaflets but we are not go going to do it yet because we are not sure if it's legal. there were such things as we are going to wait on this protest because we have to wait until we can find out if we can legally and that protesters -- flyers in these protests. it was led by whitney young who

ended up being the national leader of the urban leaguer in the early 60s. there was a strong branch of the naacp and in came this omaha deporres club operating outside the bounds of the regular established rules of how you got things done in the city. it created a tension in the black community but and in fact one of the very first levels of tension created by the deporres club was because they were racially mixed. they were black men white women and black women white men in that created a stir because people in north omaha saw that as a problem. they didn't need to have attention drawn to north omaha because the team club was seen as a dating center which was one of the terms that was used. you have black men and white women meeting and they are single and that's a problem.

that was one of the first problems they came up against in the black community but really once people understood what they deporres club was trying to do that garnered support over the years from the urban league from the naacp and ended up working closely with both of those groups from ministers of local churches. as they saw the deporres group was about changing institutional racism and omaha and once he understood that in fact father marcoux gave a speech and he stood up quickly and said the goal of the omaha deporres group is to kick jim crow out of the city. they weren't there for anything else and when people understood that they tended to get on board who are least not resist the efforts of enforcement. the first boycott they had was it was a block down the street. it's now at daycare but it was a

laundry. was a white owned business that will refuse to hire blacks to do anything other than wash the laundry even though since it was located in the black community almost all the customers were black and they wouldn't hire any black employees in the office or to drive the delivery vans. this would have been about 1950 after couple of

you don't hire any african-americans and coca-cola said yeah we never have. why should we? and the deporres club started boycotting coca-cola eventually

after deporres club got a petition and got 45 businesses to say they wouldn't carry coke anymore coca-cola hired a couple of african-americans to work in the plant. there was an ice cream plant called reed's ice cream and when they deporres club approach them about hiring black workers their response was we will go out of this is before we hire black workers and the deporres club said that's interesting so they organize a boycott and again this one took about a year year. after a huge loss of business reed's ice cream finally hired african-american workers. the one that was the ongoing they probably the one that would have caused the most frustration and the most exhaustion especially for my dad was the omaha council bluffs company given the charter by the city to do the streetcar and bus services. unlike in some places it wasn't about -- it was about the

company hiring black people to drive the buses and the streetcars. the deporres and my dad went to visit the company to ask them why you hiring african-americans to work for your company to drive the buses and the streetcars and the leadership gave several answers but the one that my dad remembered most vividly was the vice president telling them you know if you have a black driver and you come to the end of the line and there's a white woman on the end of the light you know he will rape her. that was one of their justifications in 1948. my dad would have been 22 at the time and i can just see him walking into that meeting thinking oh my goodness did he just say that? we went back to father marcoux and he said we went to this meeting and this is what they told us. he said i know and anyway go back to and he just pushed them out the door. the company said they wouldn't hire black drivers.

49 50 51 52, 53, 54 they deporres club held rallies and picketed and in 1954 the bus company hired for black drivers because the city threatened to take away their charter they didn't change their hiring policies. those are the four main efforts but at the same time they were helping a black world war ii veteran who had been a tuskegee airmen have been shut down and held in a p.o.w. camp. he bought a house one set of the bounds of the segregated neighborhood. his house was told by neighbors and through pain on it pain on that and a white neighborhood threatened to run the family out and whitney young ahead of the urban league said can you help this family moved in? the deporres help them move then. as they were doing those long-term boycott efforts

against businesses there were dozens and dozens of things going on and all of that was matt with incredible resistance as hard as the deporres club pushed against it they resistance was just as forceful or that same time. one interesting things was as they did detect cavities in a did these efforts they were operating in a cone of silence in the black community knew it is of the black newspapers but if you were white and omaha this never happened. for all intensive purposes -- for all intents and purposes it was a nonevent. the greater mainstream media never carried it. if you want lack and didn't read the north omaha star you didn't read the omaha guide you didn't know what happened. and people asked me what was the

community's response click the community's response was nonexistent because there was nothing to respond to invest main newspaper wouldn't carry it it. in 1954 there was a television program that. episode the talk about the deporres club and that would have been the first time if you are white in omaha, you would have never heard of them so that sounds a pushing and not getting any response the deporres club expanded in the year of 1954. ..

>> one year effort to hire black teachers unsuccessful but they folded it would have been summer of 1960. but the reason they have ended after that 7-year push is they had just run out of this seat -- the resources, the leadership that it took to keep that effort substantiallied all of those years. this wasn't a six month operation or a two-week protest they were active