with help of our comcast cable partners, over the next 60 minutes will explore the history of the city and state with local authors including a look at what's known as a black belt. >> a black belt is unique in the state of alabama. it is different from anywhere else, anybody in alabama will to you that the anybody and a black belt will tell you that. it's come a point of pride. >> what about the legal battles as they fight this is to a local employer monsanto. >> if i can prevent this from happening to one of the community, i'm going to tell you what i know and what i experienced. >> but first we speak with other earl tilford about university of alabama in the 1960s. >> the name of my book is "turning the tide: the university of alabama in the 1960s." i put this book because i was a student at the university of alabama in the 1960s and quite frankly i missed a lot of this because i was studying but

really i wanted to take the story of beyond desegregation which occurred in 1963. the idea cover that in the first chapter. i wanted to take you to the rest of the '60s because while we desegregated in 1963 did not integrate. that took a long time even going beyond 1970. it's a ne in the spirit of the university went in a new direction. once segregation was out of the way, once all the energy that had gone to trying to maintain and actually illegal and certainly immoral way of doing things, after all that energy could be sent in another direction, the university of alabama begin to turn itself away from being a regional football party school and turn itself towards becoming a major national academic institution. that's what it has become but it was a long journey in the 1960s sent us in that direction. there were a lot of changes going on at the beginning of the

'60s but really it stems from 1956. the first effort of desegregation which failed horribly. accompanied by riots. lucy was a student for three days but desegregation is desegregation we were under the same court order in 1963, so officially we've been desegregated although she was dispelled for not anything she did but the university expelled or to calm the mob that had been raging on this campus. the mob in february of 63 ended the pressures of oliver carmichael. and they were looking for a new president. they approached frank rose who was a minister in the church of christ and president of transylvania college and for mississippi. frank rose was not anxious to come your in part because the university had this bad reputation. finally, they said doctor rose,

we need you because we are facing desegregation and we neea southerner who can lead. so he accepted. he came in 1958. his first challenge was how do we do this peacefully? he went to the governor of alabama, big jim fulsome, and big jim surprise lake said i agree, it's time we desegregated the university of alabama. frank rose was wearing well-connected and one of his friends was nelson rockefeller. he called them and tell them how surprised he was and said don't be surprised, i had different down here. we serve on the tuskegee institute, a board of trustees together. he is a judge is progressive and very liberal. you need to talk to george wallace. so he called judge walls and 9058 and george wallace, judge wallace said yeah, i agree. it's time we desegregated the university of alabama. then came the election of 68 and wallace was against james

patterson, john patterson. patterson was a staunch segregationist. he became governor, and wallace swore he would never let the race issue keep them out of office again. patterson was not about to desegregated the university of alabama. so frank rose and his first four years spent that time building buildings, building infrastructure, building the alumni association. he put an alumni association in every county in the state and establish 15 new ones across the nation. he got us moving in that direction a and then george wallace became governor of the state. wallace promise segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. and, in fact, that quote is taken from the ku klux klan. the ku klux klan yesterday, the ku klux klan today, the ku klux klan forever. so that which is part of the men

who wrote it, his speech was a klansman in fact. not wallace was using the race issue to his own and. he knew the university was going to be desegregated. it was just a matter of time. frank rose made it happen peacefully. he did the first by going to the students. he went to every student leader and he didn't say please help me. he said this is how you going to help me. he got them on board. then he went to the faculty. he of the faculty in november of 1960 to say that it would be compared to keep the university of alabama open, that we would have to do this peacefully. what they were afraid of was what happened at ole miss in october 1962 when james meredith registered and 26 marshals were shot, what happened here. no one wanted that. certainly not the town fathers and that's where frank rose went next. he got the town leaders time peaceful desegregation.

then they began working for you. knowing that it was coming through the winter of 1963 into the spring, they did things like make sure there were no loose objects on campus that could be used as missiles. they would build an extension to the law school. they moved all those bricks out of your. wallace wanted a peaceful desegregation. he didn't want desegregation but he wanted it to be peaceful. so we planned to bring every member of law enforcement across the state that he could. the tuscaloosa police department could maybe muster 35 offices. the university made a dozen. he brought in hundreds of state troopers, prison guards, forest rangers to make sure that 800 people around this campus when desegregation happened on june 11, 1963. all that was planned. if you look at the student groups and look at the goals of the university of alabama in the early '60s, this was a

football party school. most students were interested in football, parties, dating, and making at least a c. in getting by. the student government association was a bastion of the greek system. it's called a machine. atop fraternities on some of the top sororities and the of the greeks but most of the top four or five fraternities were running for student government association. it was people with young men who wanted to become lawyers or businessmen. but those who wanted to become lawyers, wanted to go to the alabama school of law and they would shape the future of the university. many of them were what you would call liberal or progressive. and john blackburn, that being of man recognize that. these men would change the university of alabama. men like ralph knowles, zack

eggs and to form an alliance with them and show them how to do this within the system. they formed an alliance with a small cadre of student radicals, very small. they could have met in a similar route and a plate of chairs left over by the rich and intelligent and they want to change. and together they began to send the student body in a new direction in terms of the kinds of issues they would bring before them. for instance, having a forum for you to briefly discuss things like civil rights, coming out on the right side of civil rights issues, endorsing this dilution of an african-american student association, those kinds of things. and academic freedom was a big issue on campus and also in the state.

when george wallace and some in the montgomery legislation realize what was going on, they decided they need to take control of the university entrance of who comes here to speak. adam clayton powell came to speak in 1964. dick gregory came here to speak. the students had invited people like that to come down here, and in some of the more radical students decided they didn't want any kind of impediments to bring in speakers and admitting asia out of this by infighting eldridge cleaver, jerry rubin an idea often and tom hayden, to speak your, and president rose said no, we can't do that. had they come to speak they would have, the university would've gone under legislature for drastically. the thing about frank rose was he knew what battles worth fighting and what battles were not.

for instance, we had a program called emphasis that started in 1966. objectivity was the first keynote speaker for emphasis when he was sent to do. emphasis 67 was called revolution, and it involved revolutions and is also the 50th anniversary of the bolshevik revolution in russia. and with a magazine that accompanied his that had articles in it. one was about a black student from berkeley your her father was a number of the american communist party. she wrote about the and condemning the american position. on the other side, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the army chief of staff i think it was, general wheeler wrote an article defending american policy in vietnam. so this magazine came out and it

caused a real star in the legislature. it was being used to look at this, we have this time in his, stokely carmichael had an article and roy wilkins had an article that opposed black power articles. they raise up something called the speaker ban bill. had that happened, the legislature would have veto power when the speaker brought on any speaker and would've to academic freedom at all because the state colleges and universities lose their accreditation. frank rose refused to go along with it. the real issue was that judge frank johnson, federal judge in this area, had gotten tired of the wallace administration. arline wallis was taken for her husband and he said desegregate your schools now. and i mean in 1967, now. 1% of our public schools have been desegregated at that point. more we to put all the school

systems under the, under one man who was a staunch segregationist. she called in the presence from all the historically white alabama colleges and universities and junior colleges and ask them to sign a document endorsing the point that you and they all did except frank rose. he refused to sign. his refusal meant more than all the others acquiescence is together because he was so powerful politically. that really got the legislature after rose. he had to be very, very careful. he sent his vice president david not just about coming to stop the speaker ban bill and he managed to do. he had enough alumni to stop it. but they passed a resolution, nonbinding but unanimous, requiring that all home for all games and at the game between alabama and auburn in november in birmingham, that the confederate battle flag be

raised along with the american flag and the state flag and that in addition to playing the national anthem and the state song, they would play dixie. the sga been under don siegelman who have gone to the governor of alabama and and the auburn sg a passed the bill said no, we're not going to raise confederate battle flag and we're not goingg to play dixie afterward by the national anthem and the states on. frank rose vetoed that. he knew that i really wasn't worth fighting at that point. so for a year, all home football games, they would march out the confederate flag right after the state flag and just like and raise them and the band would play dixie. of black students would sit down and many of the students would not. some would sit down but that stopped after one year or the trident flagpoles were removed. we had her own confederate battle flag issues here in 1967 and 68. so we are way ahead of the

country. you've got to understand the role of football at the university of alabama and it goes back a long way. when coach bryant was at texas a&m in the fall of 1957, frank rose, before frank rose was on the payroll, called coach bryant and offered him a job at his alma mater. coach bryant was reluctant to accept at first because he said he wanted to finish football season. when frank rose told him to talk to bud wilkinson, bryant accepted into the. it took him two years to turn around the college football program. in the '60s, the role of the football plan was to keep the attention of the mass of alabama fans who really don't know anything about the universe of all the no is football. keep their attention focused on football. as long as we're winning national championships frank rose would turn the universe and those with people of alabama did

not care what we did. so we used that as cover. what frank was is trying to do above all was to get the university of alabama away from this party school, football school focused and get it heading in a new direction to become a viable academic institution, first in the south internationally. it took a while to do that. first thing had to do was to hire a faculty. old effort of the faculty here had degrees. that was in 1950. i 1965, two-thirds did. that made his competitive. today we have our share of some of the finest cycle in the country. we also are attracting students today that could go to harvard, yale, places like that. we lead the country in of national merit scholars that come here. we are ahead of harvard and many

of the icy come at all of the ivy league schools. we are number one and national merit scholars coming down to alabama. that was where rose wanted to get us. he had to grow the student population but he also wanted to raise the intellectual level of the student population. my books i've written on vietnam and "turning the tide" arba institutions under stress and how they handle change. during the vietnam war military services did not do that very well. they fought the last war. at the university of alabama tradition is important. history is important, but we learn from that history. we learn from history of the region that's had a very sad history. god has not blessed the south with a joyful history. we are the only part of the country that does total defeat in warfare, occupation. we have no racial strife in a very real way.

not have also submit to you that we've learned from that and we have appreciated what the past contagious. i think the university of alabama can stand as a symbol of how you can change amid turmoil in the something greater than even anticipated you could be. and it's neat to do that in a place that is beautiful, in a place that is genteel and traditional, and maintain the best of that while you are also moving in a new direction. and with that, roll tide. >> you are watching tv on watchn c-span2. this weekend were visiting tuscaloosa, alabama, to talk with local authors and with the city's literary sites with up of our local cable partner comcast. next we speak with ellen spears about health issues and legal battles local residents have fought with monsanto.

[shouting] spiff my book is "baptized in pcbs." it's the story of the egregious disastrous impact of toxic chemicals on one committee and that is anniston, alabama. in asian part of the state we are in tuscaloosa were i see it, and on the eastern side of the state is anniston. anniston is important for a number of reasons. it's really the same of two chemical dramas in the past century. one is the effort to contain and

clean up toxic contamination from pcbs, and the other, the second anniston is also home to part of the u.s. chemical weapons stockpile deadly nerve agents designed to kill people. people found out at the same time in the late 1980s, one, that the chemical weapons were stored there on the side, and number two, that the army planned to incinerated them right there. so you can imagine major movements, environmental justice movements, emerged in the 1990s to contain and cleanup the pcbs and to work for safe disposal of the chemical weapons. originally i thought i was writing a story that began in 1970. turns out i had to start the boat in 1870 when anniston was

founded as an iron manufacturing down, had all the ingredients for rich iron manufacturing. it was a model city. actually called it a model city of the south. so the big question of the book is how did the model city avenue south become what news outlets called in 2002 toxic town u.s.a.? so the chemical industry grew up in anniston after world war i. 1929 is when small local firms, swan chemical company run by swashbuckling entrepreneur, theodore swan, begin producing pcbs. people thought they would be miracle chemicals, insulating fluids, helping to prevent fires and transformers and capacitors. they knew almost immediately that workers were getting sick from working with these toxic

chemicals. in 1937 after monsanto bought the company, monsanto chemical company bought out swat in 1935 in 1937 at a daylong meeting at the harvard school of public health, dean of harvard school of public health, cecil drinker, told representatives of monsanto and general electric, electrical industry use a lot of pcbs, that the chemicals were the source of possible systemic toxic effects to the human body. so people have known since the late 1930s that these were dangerous to human beings. in 1966 they were told again come a danish researcher working in sweden said these chemicals are persistent, pervasive and toxic. 10 years later congress banned pcbs by law. first chemical to be treated in such a way. and the toxic substances control

act of 1976. anniston is, before the pcbs stored and the chemical weapons incineration, became national headlines in the late 90s and early 2000. anniston was probably best known as an iconic site and the civil rights movement. it's the place where clan sympathizers attacked, firebombed one of the freedoms writers buses on mother's day -- freedom writers buses on mother's day 1961. they were simply trying to enforce the federal ban on segregation in public accommodations, bus stations and train stations. people were brutally beaten, and so that's, happened about four miles west of the monsanto plant, four miles west of anniston.

the monsanto plant is surrounded by residences on either side nortnorth and east of the plants african-american neighborhoods. south and west of the plant, working-class whites lived. up until 1966 black workers worked only as laborers in the plant. very likely in that position, laborers working in a laundry, they came into maximum contact with these hazardous chemicals which are injurious to public health. also if you look at the topography, the african-american communities are downhill from the plant. so pcbs are not stumble in water but they travel on sediments and so the leachate from the landfills comes leachate from the plant itself. at one point in the late 1960s 250 pounds a day of contaminated waste were leaving the plant and

going into these extremes. snow creek, all the way, 44 miles of waterway, the environmental protection agency says down to lake logan martin and late late. people found out about the fish. i think one of the spurs to activism was the relocation plan. monsanto said represented to talk to people about moving out. the offers of compensation were too low for people to be able, an elderly person to take on a new mortgage across town. and so the other thing about the relocation plan that i think the company did not anticipate is that it confirmed for people the seriousness of the problem. and so that's when people took to organizing. several groups formed, task

force, community against pollution. there a number of neighborhood organizations that came together to protest, hold pickets outside the plant, attend public meetings. by this time the epa had been brought into the situation. the agency for toxic substances and disease registry was beginning to do a health assessment, and they ultimately decided to take monsanto and its corporate partners to court. it's a very interesting story how the case is formed. there were several different ones. the three largest cases attracted the most national attention. the first one, 1600 places settled in 2001 for $40 million. this is local people.

this is mainly people from the sweet valley environmental justice task force. a woman led organization because sandra roberts was a key leader in the crew. mrs. mims was part of the. other neighbors took part in forming this organization. they fired three sets of lawyers before they found people who would work with them and bring them into the major decisions. because they wanted to be a part of figure out how the cases would move forward. it's a good example of clients holding their attorneys accountable and achieving the outcome that they sought. the larger two cases, they are referred to by the named plaintiffs, abernathy and tolbert. the abernathy case, the lead attorney there was donald stewart, a bulldog local attorney, former senator briefly

in the late '70s, early '80s, built an open spot -- filled an open spot. and they had been to court and that was the main case in which there was a jury verdict issued. and the jury specified that the basis of the conviction wantonness, negligence, suppression of the truth, outrage. alabama law defines outrageous conduct be gone all decency, atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilized society. so that's what the jury ruled in that important case. they were 3500 plaintiffs in that group. at the largest group, 18,000 in the talbert case. the most famous fo attorney involved in that was johnny cochran, the california

attorney. johnny cochran came to town. 5000 people came to the meeting that was held the day he came to town. he signed up a lot of people in that case. in the final two cases were settled together for $600 million, enormous victory to think that local folks to go up against this big, multinational agrochemical company and its corporate partners and when that day. and his but there would be a lot of residents. i started guide in 2003. it was after one of the major legal settlements that he for the largest one, and people were very open to talking. i think it was because comic people express this. they said if i can prevent this from happening to want other community, i'm going to tell you what i know and what i

experienced. i did go to st. louis and interview people at the monsanto chemical company. monsanto as it is known now, and their spinoff chemical division in 1997. the monsanto company spun off the chemical division into this new company. so i talked to people of both of those locations in st. louis. it was another opportunity actually for people to come to know about this in 1970. 1971. immediate epa office in atlanta, and some of those meetings were reported once in the local paper, the anniston star, nationally recognized local paper. but the company said there's nothing to be worried about from a health standpoint. so people were reassured. one of the interesting things about these legal cases is they

brought out thousands and thousands of pages of internal company documents, chemical industry archives, environmental working group has posted many of them online. so the public can go and see them. they actually congratulate themselves for handling that public relations debacle so well in 1970 of having reassured people that there was no real health problem to be worried about. .. a

>> we were facing. another person who was very pivotal was ms. ruth mimms. she is grown up in what they called henderson hill. a neighborhood downstream from right near the plant. her mother worked at home raising 13 children. her father was a minister and farmed. his cattle drank water from the ditch that was receiving this pcb laden toxic sludge. she lost six of her 13 siblings in childhood. at the moment she testified in court in one of the trials people said to me that is one of

her attorneys. that was a pivotal moment in the case. he said it was a lot of fire in the case so she told that story in court and it had a huge impact on people. she had remembered in childhood playing and seeing a lot of dead minnows in the ditch. but without the knowledge, with that knowledge being withheld from people foresee -- for so long, it created a lot of mistrust. the whole community was riled up for quite a time.

i think one of the things that happen in the local cases is the people that get involved at activist they get called out as label unpatriotic. but it is actually people who stand-up to make their communities safer should be applauded. maybe that recognition is rolling around. one of the things that happened is monuments, two murals, have been placed in the area and students coming through learning about the history, and how the freedom riders stood up and, i think, celebrating the accomplishments of people who stood up is an important part of the future.

so you have local people who are taking the lead, standing up against the powerful forces in american society; the u.s. army in the case of the chemical weapons incinerator. they were not able to stop this but one of the opponents and people in favor of incinerator said later if they had not existed we would have had to invent them because they were so helpful in getting safer policies to be followed. so i think just really lifting up the local people in these struggles. it is a global study. pcb is in our body. everybody around the globe has them. it is not just a southern story

or american story. it is a global story. i think that is an important lesson for people to take away. >> during booktv's recent visit to alabama, we spoke with valerie pope burnes and robin mcdonald about the alabama towns they profile in their book "visions of the blackbelt". >> people are proud to be from the black belt. it is something unique. it is something they consider themselves to be very much a part of themselves. >> the title of the book is "visions of the black belt; a cultural survey of alabama" and we came at the book from separate directions but it worked out well with timing and what we could both bring. the black belt starts in north central mississippi, crosses

into alabama around pickins, sumpter and choctaw and then it continues into a crescent shape across the middle of the state, tapers out through montgomery and then it is an ancient seashore that formed 70 million years ago. there is so much chalk the water couldn't filter down. the soil has more iron in it. it is red clay. in the black belt it isn't red because we don't have the iron. it is a rich organic soil. it was great for growing cotton because prior to fertilizers,

commercial fertilizer. it fostered the economy prior to the civil war. so prior to the civil war the black belt had the largest co concentration in the state and the richest area but now it is the poorest area and least populated. it very very influential. i have lived in the black belt for 20 years and one thing that made the book important to me besides having a place where people could learn the basic history of the black belt. but the black belt is unique in the state of alabama. it is different than anywhere

else. anybody in alabama will tell you that and anybody in the black belt will tell you that. it has become a source of pride for people in the region. it is one of the poorest states in the nation and one of the poorest regions. it is developed very differently from the rest of the country. there is sort of this feeling of stepping in and out of time when you come into the black belt. we sort of think a little bit differently here and it makes sense to us not but necessarily to other people. >> as far as capturing the essence of the black belt and especially its history because it is so associated with plantations and a fair number of mansions are still standing that is obviously a way to start. i like to photograph

architecture. you can tour a fair number of the houses and they have been refurnished. in a lot of these small tones they are the main tourist attraction. a few are owned by the state and kept open to the public by the state. the most significant house was built by the guy who owned it. he didn't have an architect. they put the wing n on and then another floor and finally you have this ornate, unbelievable, beautiful building.

it is a very unusual building because it has the greek style but it is asymmetrical. and that was the predominant style during the i guess, '40s, '50s, and '60s in the black belt. thomas jefferson introduced it to the united states as the essence of democracy because it was greek. and the idea of these slave houses being representations of democracy was completely false obviously. the book intends to show the black belt as it is today. and people expect that. but we didn't limit ourselves to that. there is one great story. a house in a town called pork

land and it has a beautiful litt little carpenter gothic chapel and those were churches built with the pointed windows and steep roof and they are all episcopal. there are half of a dozen examples of them in the black belt. across the street is an old house with columns on the porch with branches attached which was intentional. the man who owned it had been a wealthy planter. his name was williamson glover. he built his huge mansion not too far from there but lost all of his money gambling on the cotton future.

he came to forkland and took wood left over and built this little house and was selling whiskey out of this basement. or some people said it was a saloon and that didn't go over well with the local methodist and they were going to kick him out and he said okay, i will get my own church. he had the little chapel moved where it was. they moved churches all of the time in those days. you would think that would be hard but lots of churches got moved. they would take them apart, put them on a wagon, and put them back together again. he had this church across the street from his house and thumped his nose at the methodist. that was my favorite story. >> the second half of the book focuses on the people in the black belt. we look at musicians, writers, and creative artist as well.

as far as choosing an artist to include in the book we actually left a good bit of that up to black book treasures started in 2005. they represent black belt artist and have a gallery in camden for people to come in and shop. they have had visitors from all 50 states if i remember and about 27 someodd countries i believe to visit their gallery. being in a small, rural alabama county in central alabama that is not especially on the way to anywhere in particular these people are coming to black belt treasures and they represent about 450 artist throughout the region. they started out with 75 and as it began to catch on they kept finding more team and realized how much is work is being done in the black belt. by bringing attention to what these artist are doing and

letting them know there are people outside of the area who appreciate and recognize what they are doing. a lot of people know the quilters who they represent the black belt of taking whatever scraps they have and not making a quilt in a traditional form but using every thread they have but using an eye that brought them much-deserved attention. it is a creativity born out of poverty that has definitely shaped the region. the artist are the best example of what makes the black belt unique but what makes it special at the same time. jim bird who is featured in the book might be my favorite because he does huge sculptures.

he will do a tin man and the feet will be claw bathtubs turned upside down. he does great things with hay. signs on the side of the road with misspelled words i love. the thing i love about what they are doing in the black belt is they are using what they have to make what they need. they have a vision in their mind's eye of something they want to create but they may not have the money to buy the tools they need so they go look around and say this makes is grael -- i can throw two can bottoms up there, a spatula gives it eye and nose, and i will take an old piece of garden hose and make the mouth out of it. just the idea of i have something, i want to do it, and i will figure out a way to make

it happen. and the artist in the book really capture that idea of the black belt the best. >> there is a guy named winky hicks who is one of my favorites. he is one of it best instrument makers in the country. me makes instruments -- he -- for some of the most well known people in nashville. he was working on a mandolin cel cello when i was there and his workshop was the messiest place i have ever been. it is like mine if you spray it with saw dust and glue. he was working on an order for somebody really well known. i cannot remember this name off the top of my head.

he has made a bunch of instruments for him. he is a great guy. he was late for the shoot because his car broke down and he had to get towed -- that is pretty common, too down here. one of the chapters in the book is about food and farming. at first i was unsure about that -- when we started on culture i was thinking of artistic culture. architecture, painting, craft, writing, music, but food is jus as much of culture and the creation of food as anything else. and the black belt has unique types of food. a lot of the cat fish, excuse me a lot of the cotton plantations have converted over to cat fish farming and the chalk that made the soil so rich, you know for the cotton farming, makes a great bottom for cat fish bonds because the

water doesn't drain through it. many, many family farms have been saved by cat fish farming. we are here in greensboro which calls itself the catfish capital of -- is it alabama or the capitol of the whole country? you cannot drive anywhere in the black belt without seeing catfish farms, and herons and birds along the edge looking for the little fish. in downtowns everywhere in the country you see empty store fronts but when you see one occupied it as a cafe. there is a pie lab here that specializes in pie but serves lunches and dinners as well. it was started as a social

experiment and it has been successful. it is run by young people who live here and they have concerts and exhibitions. and there is the a guy who was once the chef for the governor of georgia but started his own restaurant in atlanta but he was from alabama and decided to came back. he came to a town called marion to interview a well-known writer mary ward brown for a book he was doing on food memories of the eldery and fell in love with marion and bought a house there. he is an example of somebody who came back to the black belt.

there are lots of interesting farms. there was an organic farm i photographed. it is a 5,000 acre organic farm -- the largest organic farm in alabama. they are rising these cattle that date back to the spanish. the spanish explorers brought these cows who they came to explore for food and needed them for food and milk probably. when they left they left them mind and they went wild for a few hundred years and then farmed by the earlier settling . now they are endangered and this farm is -- there is only a couple thousands of these farms left and they are the original american cow going back to the desoto. that was very interesting. lots of things you would never

imagine here. it was tom peacock who told me about the farm. >> robin did a fantastic job of capturing things on film. i could take the picture and it would not look the same. i hope that visual feast will get people down here. and seeing everything that is here and people have to offer here. it is a different way of life. it is a slower way of life. >> next, we learn about the life of local author and artist lila quintero weaver as we recalls her experience growing up in the deep south during the civil rights era. >> the name of my book is "darkroom: a memoir in black and white" here it is.

it is a graphic memoir. i decided to write it because the opportunity came my way to tell my story. it is an illustrated work. i am primarily an artist and later became a writer so this was an excellent avenue for me to express some of my feelings about the way i grew up and the place i grew up in and it was just there. it presented itself and i jumped into it. i had two artistic influences from my parents. my dad did photography and had a lot of cameras and was very passionate and devoted to it. my mother was a visual artist and grew up in a home where art was elevated and her father drew

well and taught her and her sisters how to draw. so my parents turned around and put that influence into our growing up experience. so not only was my father always taking photos and developing them but my father was painting people's portraits and creating art and they always saw to it that my siblings and i had art supplies even though we were not people of means economically in any sense of the word. we always have paper to draw on, art materials to create, and this was something that was really encouraged in my family. so the story of my family's immigration has two parts. before i was born, my father who had come in contact with american missionary as a young

boy running at the bought of the andes mountains and was he was changed. he decided after learning to geed write and learned english and decided he wanted to come to the u.s. to study at a seminary. in 1948 he border a passenger freighter by himself and came to the united states and studied at new orleans baptist seminary. and my sister who is 11 years older and mother came and joined him there. my second sister was born in birmingham when they moved from

new orleans to birmingham. my family came back and i was born and my brother was born and we came back to the u.s. i landed to u.s. in march of 1961. after that, there it is, end of march and by made-may already things were happening in birmingham. this was when the freedom whiteers who were passing through the south and challenging the jim crow laws in the -- riders -- area. the birmingham bus depot is where they were met with violence and the police turned their backs on that and let whatever was going to happen happen. within a year we moved to marion

which is a small town of 3,000 that is in the black belt region of the state. that is where i, as a child, by then of six, i had learned to read, that i was able to witness the evidence of the whites-only signs and so forth in the stores that made an impression on me. but we just happened to be in this particular part of the state of alabama where that was very much in evidence. in a small town it is hard to not see what is going on. i do talk about the culture clash tat my family experienced. argentina does have a rich culture and my parents embraced a lot of it. but coming to the u.s. you realize you have in a foreign land and have different customs and they were resistant to many

things. my parents wanted to keep the spanish alive for us as kids but we were resisting. once we learned english we didn't want to go around sounding different and speaking differently than other people. that was one portion of it. also, my mother was a fabulous cook. certain traditions of argentine cuisine that is borrowed from other countries because argentina is a country of

immigrants. so she had to come up with a way to cook things when we didn't necessarily have the ingredients. especially being in a small town having souern food all around us. she wanted to, you know, make things that we were familiar with and that we knew from our native country. i remember when i was still probably about five, i think barbie dolls were coming into the market and really getting big and my sister and i wanted one so played. she got the blonde and i got the brunette and i remember brunette that is closer to me.

the exageration of the blond feminine ideal was coming about and i remember when i was pre-teen and looking through the 17 magazine and other magazines young girls looked at we would say there is nobody that looks like us. the all american girl was the all-anglo girl that looked like she hatched in england and scotland and no mediterranean or african and certainly no asian injected into that.

so my mother would make paper do dolls for us and we would make the wardrobe. and one of the paper dolls she made was based on a german actress who was a beautiful woman, very blonde and very teutonic in her type and one of our paper dolls we made this massive wardrobe. that is how we played. we didn't have tv so we read or drew. me and my sister and i. public schools in alabama were completely segregated all through my elementary school years. so even though you could maybe consider me white or not but by default we were white. so i went to the school with

white kids. right around 1966 where i first had a couple of black classmates and then a few years later when i was in the 8th grade we became completely desegregated and they closed the school where the black kids had been going and all of them came to the school where the white kids were. yet, i had not been around african-americans all of my life. you know, just barely in the streets we saw each other but we have not occupied the same

space. it is weird to have this demographic setup but we don't share the same space. what this did for me is suddenly just humanizes everyone. someone who was just abstract, someone who was a they and in the distance. people become human and you begin to relate to each other on those terms. i learned a lot about drawing human faces and this is my favorite thing to draw. it was an important, huge, and wonderful place when i was finally social and this ambiance

where i could be around african-americans and it was like my eyes were open and i lost the blindness that a lot of people do experience when they are not around various racial grou groups.

sigh -- and an african-american church was home base for the voter registration drieb. once people were registered to vote were turned away they started marching.

to get photos because he thought this was his story and that was a terrible night. this is february 18th, 1965 and when the protesters came out of the church they were met with a mob of people armed with baseball bats and axes and chains and they came and attacked the marchers and the journalist who were there.

the was an nbc correspondent who was there at that night and he got clubbed over the night and my father witnessed this. his skull was fractured. and then later a man named jimmy jackson was shot by a trooper and taken to a hospital in selma and passed away eight days later. his death is what spurred the march from selma to montgomery. my parents both, several times went back a number of times in

the 60s and 70s to visit her parents and family. my father later on went. all of us, it was out of question to go. i didn't earn are to argentina for 44 years. i finally went in 2005 with my son, who was then 21, and that was my first trip back. so i hope when people read my story that they will maybe think about what it means to be an out sider. what an immigrant brings and possibly try to walk in my shoes and think about what it would be

like to be a child and come to a new land not speaking the language and now a lot of time maybe an outsider can see a situation a bit more objectively than someone who was immersed in the culture and who grew up in it. >> during booktv's recent visit to tuscaloosa we talked to jennifer horne about "all out of faith: southern women on spirituality" about southern women of different faiths. >> i am not sure what it is that makes the south the way it is. to me it is sometimes frustrating, sometimes perplexing, but the most fascinating place i can imagine living in the united states. the name of this book is called "all out of faith: southern women on spirituality" i co-edited with my friend wendy

reed. she had the initial idea of the book. see was doing a documentary on early women preachers in alabama. you might think there were none but she actually found some and stories about them and worked on this documentary. and she started looking for c contemporary preaches and stories and couldn't find anything. she asked around and no, no, we don't know books like that and she thought maybe there should be a book like that. i think that is a good way for a book to get started. you look around and think maybe i am the one to do. wendy got me involved. we had known each other through the literary groups in al

alabama. we had to figure out how we would get the essays and began compiling them by making masters lists and listed people we might be interested in having in the book. we asked some of these people as we narrowed the list and researched journals, magazines, books, just any place we could think of to find pieces. when windy and i were putting this together -- wendy -- the thing that surprised me the most was the willingness of people when we asked them if they would write an essay. we didn't have a lot of money. we had small honorary we would

offer. but nevertheless, we asked and people said yes like crazy. so we thought maybe this is something people want to talk about. and so that was the first really good surprise. then we were nervous ourselves about putting this book out. we thought maybe people will be angry with us for saying there are different people to be religiously and spiritually. we thought he might get criticized and we could deal with that. but instead there was this tremendous openness we found as we went to bookstores and conferences and festivals and we kept coming people coming up saying i love this book. i didn't know anybody else felt this way. so unknowingly we started a conversation and helped get a community going where people

felt free to say more about what they believed or experienced spiritually that they had not felt comfortable saying before. so that was a tremendous gift to us. one of the things people ask about this book is what are the different belief systems of the writers and that is something we shied away from a little bit. if we had someone like jessica roston who wrote about being a jewish canter we were open to those discussions of traditional religious faith but what we wanted to emphasize was spiritualty in terms of individual experience and how people make sense of the world and experience what you might think of as the wonder, mystery and magic of being alive, how you connect to others and the rest of the world. so we didn't focus so mufrp on

what some people might call a simple symbol system as much as the experience the women were able to write about. we tried to talk about how pervasive religion is in especially smaller towns. that the church is the focus of what happens in towns often. high school football and church are the two big influences in small towns. so if maybe that is not a good fit for you you might feel cut out from a major part of your cultural life. so for a lot of people being part of church is part of your culture and part of what happens where you live. to take one example, african-american churches in the south in the civil rights era were such a powerful source of strength for people, for the brave people who marched and

protested, so that is a way religion shaped southerners and southern women in the south. if we talk about what tend to be more white dominated denominations i think that religion gave women freedom in a lot of ways to work within the church to have positions even though not the top positions in the church. it was a place where they could belong and have agency at the same time it was a place that often kept women out of the positions of leadership. in that sense it told them they were second-class citizens. they were not quite good enough to actually run things. when we found poly murray's essay from her autobiography she

wrote about the struggle to become an episcopalian priest as a woman and african-american women and lots of ups and downs of the trexperience through seminary and not going if she would get ordained but coming through and having a transformative moment when she was ordained and performing her first holy eucharist where hear grandmother was bapatitized. at the time she was feeling the call the episcopalian church was considering the idea of women as priest but not sure they wanted to do it yet.

i think our book gives voice to the contributors to people who feel conflicts between inner callings or promptings or understanding and what the rest of the world is telling them they cannot do. she is ready and thinks this is what she is supposed to do but the church wasn't sure it was ready. she was able to be ordained. women in our book, some of them had really strong struggles, some wrote more about sort of spiritual awakenings that came over time or how they expressed their spirituality. but some of them were kid who wrote about being a conventional religious person but slowly realizing as a feminin st she

wasn't comfortable being in that. she writes about being in a drugstore where her daughter was working as a teenager and there were a couple men down the aisle. her daughter had squatted down to stock a lower shelf and the mother happened to be in range and one of the men said yeah, that is how i like to see a woman. and it was just this moment for her when her rage exploded and she could not stand to listen to it quitely especially of her daughter being spoken that way. she realized she had to change and maybe she had already changed and she had to speak out. cassandra king, novelist, was a preacher's wife and that is her role she was supposed to play. she is supposed to help with the

news letter and be properly dressed always and attractive and be the perfect lovely wife. she realized she had a lot more she needed to say and it could not be said in the news letter. it needed to be said in novels. she reclaimed that part of herself that was sort of, i guess, a free, open child she writes about. she comes back to that sense of herself and begins to write her own stories not just stories she is supposed to be writing or telling. several of our contributors did come from this area in alabama. jeanne thompson is a poet and lives in montgomery, nasland is from birmingham originally, vicky covington who also is from

birmingham. he did draw on the alabama literary community we anyhow and authors from all over the southeast in addition to that. i think you could say pretty much all of them who stepped out of the conventional mainstream religious tradition they were a part of felt some pushback. it might be what you would consider minor comments or, you know, people not being as friendly or it might be major in the sense you decide you need to leave your job because you can not be the person you are and still remain in that position. but i would say overall in all of these essays there is a sense of when you decide to be who you really are there is a tremendous freedom that comes with that. so it took bravery and courage for these women to step outside of the mainstream but i think it

was so much better for them to do that than to conform to something who didn't fit who they were anymore. my sense from reading this is it was worth it. >> from a more information on booktv's recent visit to tuscaloosa and many other decimations go to cspan.com/booktv. booktv took a four of the folger shakespeare library. >> this is the most completed volume of his works and it is important his friends' assembled

it. and this is an engraving here that was part of the book. it is missing from some copies. it is very valuable. but ben johnson who knew shakespeare said this is the likeness of that man. that is important because it is one of those person-to-person familiar connections to shakespeare so we would say it has real authority of the likeness of the writer. >> 82 folios in the shakespeare collection, correct? >> correction. >> how many world wide? >> 233. >> if somebody wanted to buy one what would it cost? >> there are very few in private hands. complete first folios can go from $5-$6 million. >> you have them going around

the country? >> we do. we realized it matters when you come face-to-face with sources of shakespeare. we realized we could take it safely to all 50 states and two territories and the response is tremendous. someone proposed marriage successf successfully on the first visit to oklahoma. there is a jazz funeral for shakespeare coming in new orleans. a jazz funeral for shakespeare. there is a great indy rock band doing a concert for the folio ind ind india -- in duluth. this is a smaller version of a shakespeare play known as corto.

it means one side is printed and the book maker solds them together. it is one fold. a cordo is folded twice and you cut the edges. this is a smaller format and cheaper to produce. half of shakespeare's play appeared in this format before the first folio was printed. so that means there are multiple editi editions of this plays and there are differences. >> you mean in the language? >> in the language and the stage action. we have mr. shakespeare, his chronicle of king leer and the life and death of his three daughters. this isn't describedt a first as a history but a tragedy.

if you are creating an edition of this play you have to decide what to call it because there are two conflicting versions of what this play is. if you are doing an edition of hamlet you have several cordo editions. and in one it reads to be or not to be, that is the point. it is so different than the ones we recognize and that is because there are different ways of capturing the performance and perhaps that version is from series of describes transcribing it in real-time. we really cover the introduction of print in the 1470s through

about the 1730s which is the full emergence of the atlantic world including the part of the world we are standing in now. this is a copy of "cicero" which is a school book but this belonged to king henry the viii. divorced, beheaded guy. this copy is one that henry annotated and he said in his early modern spelling this book is mine. who >> who can access this besides you or a c-span camera crew? >> you can see it online. but if you are a reader here we will put many of these documents in your hand because people need

to look at the real thing. upstairs you will find people who have handled a hundred books or 500 early modern books. looking at the paper, and the ink, and how it is annotated gives extra information. if you did a job interview face to face or over the phone you would prefer face to face. the more you work with these materials you get a sense of the feel and touch and how they are put together. i want to show you a couple more things. this is a copy called the bishop's bible. this is queen elizabeth's the first bible. >> this is her bible? >> this is given to her by matthew parker and used probably in her chapel.

you can see it has the beautiful red velvet cover. this is an expensive book with the tudor roses here. it has her identifying marks here, elizabeth regina saying she is the queen. you can see on this side, if the cameras can come in, this has been tectured on the fo for edg of the book. this is the equivalent of a cathedral in the sense this is tremendous learning. the mount of craft you have to get to to where you can create a book like this is tremendous. it is given to elizabeth and it

is monument. it is not made out of stone but it is a complicated object. you have to learn how to set type, learn how to handle classic languages, and all of tat learning goes into the creating this. >> when you see that beautiful, print i want to say, the colors are so vivid years later. >> this is an atlas here latin title here meaning the theater of the worlds or the globe. you have these figures here representing africa here another figure here. you have grisly stuff here and something like the goddess woman

on the top. what is done here is they made a beautiful printing using a copper print that has been etched. and someone has hand colored the page itself. and this edition is wonderful because the hand coloring extends to every plate in the edition. so i would show you this one. this is europe and am is known well and some isn't. but you can see the cathedracat and the national borders are england, ireland, and scotland and whales in the west. >> pretty accurate map. >> this is pretty accurate.

you have the colonies in james town here and that is shakespeare's world planting itself in north america. >> was shakespeare aware of the new world? >> he was. when he wrote the tempus he read a pamphlet about a shipwreck. he never visited. he probably didn't have great information about it. but when he uses a phrase like