then at 3:00 p.m. eastern, the center forest strategic and international studies outlines a new report on irregular migration including refugees, immigrants mumbling. the new cspan on mysore now has put tv products. go to cspan stork .org to check them out. she was new for book tv and all the cspan products. the university of shankar chicago. 1919. this is about 50 minutes. >> hello than everyone. welcome to to the 35th annual presented by the near south planning council. want to give a special thank you to all of our sponsors for the

generous report this year especially when trust. in our programming sponsor, robert r mccormick foundation, the alpha without foundation, the tribune, three al real estate, cspan poteet and the american writers museum for sponsoring this viewing event. today's program will be broadcast live on c-span twos tv. if there is time at the end of the presentation for a q&a, we ask that you use microphones located at the center of the room is please speak clearly into it so our viewers at home can follow along. also ask to silence your cell phones at this time. if you do choose to take photosw at this time, turn off your flash. with that said, please welcome carrie any viewing. [applause]ti hi everyone how are you. great so this is going to be

like fast. really like 45 minutes. what carrie and i decided to do was i would talk it just a little bit about the book and read a few poems to get us started. then i will hop back over here and he asked me some questions and will try to leave some time for you all to have some questions. the only questions that your not embarrassedstba to have live on c-span two. [laughter] think of your questions. my name is e viewing in this book is called 1919. it's about the race riot that took place in chicago in the year of 1919, 100 years ago this july 27th. each of the poems in the book is in conversation with a report from 1922 called the negro in chicago. it was an analysis of why the race riot took place. and how it could be prevented, how racial violence in chicago could be prevented.th i read from this report. the first poem is called train speaks. i begin with this quotation.

the presence of negroes in large numbers in our great cities is not a a medicine itself. reasonable.di this poem is called the train speaks. even now i dream of them quiet nights in the railyard when the little rat seat skinner beat me when the last of the strongmen with his gleaming silver buttons has locked the door and laid his hands against me. i see them dancing in every passing cloud, my babies, my baby, born unto me in the hills and great lands, loose threads sketching in my sharp arts when they don't watch out, blistered hands hauling parcels of burlap as hefty and shapeless as bound cotton. they moved like rabbits then, they look for a lash that isn't there, even then that never felt it is in their shoulders. the lash lives in their shoulder.th

long after the last biscuit is gone, when the sunrise brings still mountains, my children look and look through the space i have made forum the gift i have prepared, they are safe with and i can see without. they feel it before they know the words, and smile when it comes to them. it's flat, the land is flat. they smiled to think of it, this new place the uncle or cousin who will greet them, the hat they will buy, the ribbons, they know not the cold, my babies, they know not the men who are waiting in angry, they know not that the absence of science is not to print in the absence of danger. my children, my precious ones, i can never take you home.e. you have none, and so you go out into the wind. thank you. [applause] so this riot that

happened in 1919 began when a young boy name eugene williams was 17 years old, was swimming in lake michigan on the beach and there is no legal segregation but informally there was a beach where black people swim and beachwear white people swim between 37th and 30th street. he was in the water, he started water each started to drift over white people were and when he looks out onto the shore, he saw people throwing rocks. they're different reports, some peoplele think there were rocks that were thrown and actually hit him, some say heo was too afraid to come out of the water because he was afraid to be sent to death. either way, he was floating on a railroad tire and a piece of wood and ultimately he drowned. people were outraged at his death and that was the beginning of what became riot. this poem is about the moment it of his around his drowning. the home is called jump rope.

it begins with this quotation, on sunday july 27th, 1919, there was a clash of white people and agro set of bathing beach in chicago, which resulted in the pounding negro boy. jump rope. singing. sweetest i've seen same, his mama told him that white boys main main main, he didn't listen, listen, what mama said said, when through the lake, that july's day, date. it goes like, singing. sorry to trouble you, ride eugene, call me or mama scarce. just set up and look around, don't let them marry you down.

no it goes like, down down, suite sweet baby, don't make me let you go, swallow swallow dark,sw swallow swallow, grab skype, grandma grandma, sick in bed, because you babies. now it goes like, all dressed in black, all dressed in. and he never came back back back. thank you. got back i'm going to redo two more bombs and i wasn't going to read this one. one of the people who sort of inspired this poem is unexpectedly in the room. so i feel like i have to read this poem called sightseers.

which is very much influenced by the work of risqué. and very appreciative that i lived in the same time as him. this poem begins with two quotations. i will read for you. the first one is from thehe rept in chicago and they are talking about the fact that people participated in mob violence. that ultimately resulted in people dying. they often didn't realize until afterwards. they entered into kind of space. often the sightseers, and even though those included in the nucleus, did not know why they had taken part in crimes. the viciousness, that which was not apparent to them. until afterwards. the second quotation is from a cow. the sad truth is that most people is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil. this poem is called sightseers. just this once, i hope you'll forgive me for writing a somewhat digested program i just

didn't know how else to say we live in a time of sightseers. standing on the bridge of history, watching the water go by, and our bodies in the water. the water has been dirty for so long, and the sightseers still drink from it. they buy special filters and they smile. nice glasses and teacups. they put sugar in the dirty water that has our bodies in it. there are sightseers seated beneath the tower of empire, peering up at the lights and there are children in the tower and the tower has been crooked for so long. . . .

tis our children tower, and thy are dead already. thank you. [applause] thank you for being so kind and this is my first reading of the book. thanks for being here for that. i'm going to read one final column. if you read my first book you know i write in that tradition and part of what i'm always trying to do in my work is troubled about time moving in a straight line and so this is a poem about nfl and its ms hilla column that takes place in the universe where he lived a long

and boring life and none of us ever learned this because he never became famous for being the victim of a vicious murder so in this column i run into him and it's called iso- and it felt this week at the grocery store. looking over one by one lifting each turning it over slowly checking the smooth skin for marks and signs of unkind days or people enslaving them gently into the plastic reaching within arm into the cart he first balanced them over the wire before realizing the danger of bruising and lifting them back out cradling them in the crook of his elbow until something parker could take that bottom space. one of those fine numbers they used to sell on roosevelt road

it lost its feather but he had carefully sold to be coupled with a dollar bill and it stood at attention. he wore his money. upright and strong he was already to the checkout by the time i caught up with him. i called out his name and he spun like a dancer candy bar in hand looked at me for a moment before remembering my face. hello, young lady. hello, so chilly today. i should have worn my warm coat like you. soso cool for august and chicag. how are things going for you fax he put the candy on the belt. it goes. thank you all so much. [applause] thank you very much for that. the book is absolutely amazing.

can you talk a little bit about what brought you to it. obviously the schoolyard had something to do with it, but then what was the process like? >> my second book some of you may know it's a nonfiction book about the 2,013th school 2013 ss in chicago that is the largest mass public school closure in the history of the united states, and in writing that book i started, i realized in order to talk about segregation in 2013 i had to talk about a century earlier and end up pretty central to one of the chapters. i started reading this report and it was so fascinating to me for a number of reasons. number one, because it captured this period of black life in chicago atic a time when black history is very short.

even though it was a government report it had all these lines i found to be poetic or paradoxical and i wanted to be in conversation with them and have a chance to dive into them more into the other reason is because i knew very little about this period of history may be like many of you do read some are probably got in my u.s. history textbook in high school i realized often our discussions about history people know about slavery and people know about the civil rights movement and in between, black people are just doing stuff. i realized how little i knew about th the events of the morei studied it and became that the racial boundaries and social realities of 2019 or in many ways traceable to this thing that happened 100 years ago and

i wanted to understand if more e and was curious about why i didn't knoww more about it. kindnd of a recurring thread iny work is what history gets told and which ones don't and by. i have 4 degrees. i care a lot about race. in chicago i read books and write them. i care a lot and i realized every time i talk to people about the project they would say i'm embarrassed to say i don't know much about that so i wanted to create it as an accessiblele entry point about the period in history we should talk about a lot more. >> when you talk about the history on this and the impact of note being taught, not something that we hear about, your book looks at this from three points b of view before, during and after and you kind of

go back and forth with others tying it back in different ways. can you talk about the process of putting it together? >> as you said the book has these three sections. before the event itself which is about the conditions of the tgreat migration, what it was like for people coming up to chicago for many folks in the w.room this is the time i revead that i amg. telekinetic. [laughter] the period of what it was like for black people in chicago during this time perhaps folks toin the room. or great grandparents but it was like to arrive and then during it's about the sequence and so after, i am thinking about everything from nfl including the column i just read to 1968 and what happens after doctor martin luther king is

assassinated and then probably most recently 1995 is about the heat wave that happened in chicago which over 700 people died which is the period that is similarly interesting because the only reason i know about that is because i remember it happening. and many of you in the room probably remember it happening. when i thought about it all these years later i thought 700 people dying in the summer over the intersection of natural disaster and human policy seems like something we ought to talk about more. it's almost like did i dream that this happened, and then probably thehe most recent so fr those of you that are not big poetry fans.

thete data for the verdict i received an e-mail from the manager of my apartment building basically warning me about how to protect myself in the case of n massive civil unrest and they don't knoi don'tknow if you remy they commissioned buses full of pulleys and drove them around. the idea that hes was going toe a race riots and nobody says that phrase but the idea is they were going to be just in the streets if jason van dyke wasn't found guilty. so i received this bizarre e-mail that made a lot of weird assumptions about racing the boundaries and safety eugene

williams is a familiar story is a 17-year-old black boy because of the boundaries that we have an scribed and that is the boundary of ms and what does it mean to be caught up in this recurring storierecurring stori, during and after its a little bit of a rude because i don't believe in things like that. [laughter] >> you've added structure you don't believe in. >> it's helped it to be successful. >> going back to the idea of the race riots, you obviously had read a lot and looked at this and the question i want to ask edabout this in tulsa after 191, they had a riot and now they've actually started to talk about rephrasing the terminology, calling it the tulsa massacre.

what did you think about looking at it from a different perspective like that? >> that is such a good question. as a person has to talk about this all the time, is an open question for me. i think that there are certain situations it is very clear for example what happened after freddy graves murder i wouldn't call a riot. there's a wathere is a way thatm delegitimize this political cafactions. white residents that were enraged at a certain level of material success literally wanted to render the part with their spare hands.

trying to move the families into roseland into a predominantly white neighborhood there was a riot that lasted forho four or five night and 1,000 police officers had to come out and end it and it was again specifically white residents enraged by the presence of black people. what happened in 1919 as the majority of people who are murdered or killed at the hands of roving street gangs in the great hall of euphemism where groups of young men usually affiliated with white ethnic immigrant groups so they might be irish or italian groups and because of chicago, they generally had a loose affiliation or patronage relationship with some sort of powerful politician usually.

so, the it's also great for the gender-neutral so, these athletic clubs would act as kind of the street presence of the political machine and in turn they could act with impunity and know that they have police protectionre. and by the people that wrote ino chicago the post-analytical report they were considered the groups that were most responsible for the violence because they were literally roving the streets attacking random black people on the street and in street cars. one of them is about a guy that is murdered in the loop on outcomes across from where the art institute now is so of course one of thehe most famous members of the groups was a member of the gang that was a member of the time.

it's how we label different forms of violence and when they are seen as noble and wonderful and acceptable forms of violence in the military that and ask some people and so on and so forth and when n it's not. so i think that's an open question. >> when you look at the starting point it is an act of violence, and it really is in the notion of the great migration one that people had left. it is a public lynching. >> that's why not to be over

explanatory, but it's obviously playing with the image of the rope as the weapon most affiliated. but i appreciate you bringing it up because i think there's a way of talking about the great migration that is a waste votalking about violence. black people migrated to the north because they were living under conditions of state sanctioned racial terror in thee south with the resurgence of the clan and with the many ways that could be an active against seemingly random for offenses like looking menacingly at a white woman. these are the kind of phrase is people would use to things like being successful in business. ida b. wells, folks don't know she was famous for being an anti-lynching crusader but she was impacted and ran a newspaper in the southor in memphis whichs what she considered her hometown. when a group of grocery store

owners were murdered in memphis and she wrote against it in her newspaper, she was told you can never come back here we will kill you. and her printing press was destroyed in all the things she used to publish the paper and she was never able to go back on so these are the conditions s ople were living in. and they were coming here looking likes so many migrant stories and immigration stories coming to a place to fulfill the promise of something different and the promise of the american dream essentially as it tends to be the case things are a little more complicated than you would expect under the receiving end. >> as you were touching on the other is a connection between the reaction of the people of chicago to the great migration to what we are seeing today. >> absolutely. >> it is xenophobia essentially. there was so much in terms of economic tension, racial tension, black migrants were

seen as dirty and uneducated and as not fit to kind of operate in society. one is about the frequent complaint they would wear their clothes from the union stock cars so this idea they would go out and work all day and get in the car and they would be smelly or dirty. there were multipler tuberculos epidemics that happened in the black neighborhoods during the migration because people didn't have adequate sanitation or water and that was seen as the reinforcement that they were dirty and they brought disease and they were unintelligent and they had to be held back in school. all the same kind of cms public assumptions that wbutassumptionn all kinds of contacts at the times. >> the notion of how this ties to housing and what they were living in. your book goes from a school yard and that type of thing. can you talk a little bit about

what it meant for the city to grow, an and it only grew becaue of this migration really it was a part of the economic engine that drove the city forward, and yet at the same time it was pushed aside. >> black laborers were instrumental in working in the sort of domestic sphere and factories and in the union stock yardyards often at a lower pay r with lower opportunities for than their white counterparts and the black population in chicago in the 20 year period at the beginning of the 20th century grew by about 3.9 times while the rest was growing at 1.5 times that rate or 1.5 times the population within the same period. so this is how we come to understand a cit the city that w live in. the economic imprint of a cultural imprint of the black nomigrants in chicago, the peope that we consider some of our

greatest musicians, literary producers and so on and so forth, but the question becomes how do people have opportunities to reap the benefits of that capital in their lives and often the case is note so much. >> so again, writing this obviously was difficult. there is a point at which you can't write a poem in response to something you've read in the book. howho much different was this process? >> it's mostly an autobiographical work in this book is not. there are little pieces. my own grandmother came from mississippi when she was 5-years-old, and there are some references to my own family history in the column, but for the most part it's not autobiographical at all and i think that it was challenging,

number one because i made this decision. i have like a sort of compulsive personality. so, if anyha of you have follo, i've tried to make every bread in the americas test kitchen bread book since 2017. [laughter] some people come up to me and to sasay i love your books and some people say i love your bread. so for those of you in the audience, shout out to you. [laughter] a sort of get compulsive about things. once i made the decision i'm going to write this book in conversation with this report from a century ago to the report is like 850 pages long and it's a pdf publicly available. i encourage people to check it out. it's really interesting as an archival document. part of it was the arduous task of saying some of those i could write on my poem in line at cvs. this i have to sit down and pour through these massive columns and my friend asked how is the

book going and i was embarrassed to tell them i was on page 500 of this thing i dedicated to completing before i could even write most of it. so i went through the text and i was highlighting passages and thinking about things i wanted d to sort of right into or out of, so that aspect was difficult. i pushed myself to write in a lots of there are inin the formn the book. patricia smith is another great chicago poet. o you made it when you can write without feeling the need to announce that it is in the form at the beginning. like you want people to know whi thwrote a sonnet. it might not be good that i wrote it. there are a couple in here that are lame but a couple that are not, so i'm getting intermediate in my writing and form, but i wanted to push myself technically an it on a craft lel things to do i hadn't done

before. on the other hand, that was all difficult. on the other hand, it was sort of a release like not writing about yourself is kind of a relief and it was almost like a once i created the mechanism of how i wanted the book to work it was sort of decoupled for me. it is a task that i have to complete. i this is the teacher in me that is my desire to take away. i want people to go from a baseline is not very much knowledge to feeling like they have an accessory entry point for learning a little bit more on their own. that's kind of a relief as well. this isn't the definitive history. it's meant to be an invitation to the broader conversation

folks continue on their own and that is also part of why we have these amazing archival photographs in the book. what does it look like to see a picture of the national guardd walking down the streets that we traverse every day and those are photos in history that we were not familiar with before, so i hope that people get something hoout of that. >> you talked about the craft. i don't want to downplay just how beautiful, as painful as it is, how beautifully written it is a. of the effort you put into it and the gorgeous use of language to take this. so i don't think that we should push that down because i think that is part of the reason that it is accessible.

>> a famously said it's to make the revolution irresistible. i think that part of what i like to do is think about how this has to do with also being a professor int and being a poet a professor or these occupations people think of as being inaccessible or that you are like some sort of person on high in the tower. archives are something people think of as being inaccessible or difficult to enter. so if you can make something that is only beautiful using a snippet of something that has a potential for people to unlock so much more meaning on their own, that is my hope is an invitation.

i don't want to be the expert. i want to be the person that holds your hand and pulls you along. >> i'm going to make a little segue while you were writing this along with all of your academic workac and teaching, yu were also writing from the comics. >> my question is having seen you at comic con and talking about iron hard in this connector that you took over and made your own. you were doing this while writing the book. they continue tono be so and soi

think that their vision of me as a social justice warrior which by the way is not an insult people like me are going to write these comic books where superheroes through their costumes to the ground and stand up and give an impassioned speech about medicare for all or something like that single-payer healthcare. i want exciting stories about people fighting. t that's what people came for. if you paid for 99 for a comic book and want to see people write, i also want to. that is what people came for. the funny thing is they are actually more subversive, political, and hearing sort of outing myself, i think that there is a more subtle and

subversive kind of political ideology thatmo is present in in hard and the other comic i just finished working on called marvel team up which is between peter parker, spiderman, and the plot i was told you can write this about peter parker one of the most iconic characters to live, and a new but beloved character that is a 16-year-old pakistani american muslim girl from new jersey, a superhero. i was like okay clearly they have to switch bodies. [laughter] and now peter parker who i told you a few u minutes ago was lika white dudee from queens is inhabiting the body of a teenage muslim girl in new jersey. hijinks ensue and neither of them know how to use their power anymore so they suck as superheroes.

what is domestic for that to happen and what do they learn from each other, so i think similarly one of the questions i'm trying to answer isy traditionally in superhero comics there are rigid ideas about good people and bad people. and so, iron hard, she comes from the southside of chicago and she comes from social conditions where anybody who's ever lived life in the city understands the lines of good and bad are not so clear and some of the people that are supposed to be good, the people in power are not so good, and some of the people that are doing bad things are doing bad things because they'ver been pushed by some very bad circumstances. so to be a superhero that understands that is the kind of more subtle racial or political undertone and i always wanted her to be a superhero that doesn't happen to be black. the advertising agent said they are not dark skinned white

people. so similarly it's not like a dark skinned version, she is a black teen girl superhero. but it has this theme is where she finds out there's a ring of people that have been dealing with electronics around the city and she spots the first issue where she's back in chicago and there's a lot of fan service she's flying over and so she spots a thief has stolen a phone and she chases the person and they go through and have this whole chasing scene and she ultimately chases him down to the tracks and lands in superhero land. the person turns around and she

sees thatle it's a kid, nine or ten year old kid who's crying and she gets down so that she's actually at this level and looks him in the eye like why are you doing this, what's going on. i'm not going to hurt you what can i do for you. he gets scared and runs away from her but thatt is the panel of the two of them kind of inlooking eye to eye and confronting the thief and not just like bundling them up and calling the nypd. thinking how do you encounter that on the human level and asking i wonder how this person feels about themselves and how that leads them to where they are. there are a lot between network and 1919 as well but don't tell the whitphelps helda white supr. [laughter] >> the first is like a maia angelou quote, so 5% of the people are like my gosh, and the

95% are like she was flying through the air. i think we are going to take questions in a minute if you want to line up. if you are not scared you can come up and ask a question but in the meantime, i will just ask if you made a connection between what you just talked about and the end of this book that you read. what do you want for the future in that connection, what do you want people to feel? >> that is a great question. i think that as a sociologist, i am always trying to ask the question why is the world the way it is and in comics i ask the question how can we imagine the world as it could be otherwise. so i think that for me, questions are always questions of the president.

we build towards the future that we want to see. i think what i'm interested in is how we can resent her ideas of basic care and an e. and as cliché as it sounds, basic human respect for one another and what it means t to enact that in our daily beatings, so that is what i hoped for. >> we have questions. >> first of all, i adore you. there are a lot of people that look like me that adore you as well. my first name is reagan, my last name is burke. we want to go with you but we are having trouble getting in. >> are you here on behalf off al of the white people? [laughter] you need a badge or something.

>> the old white people. [laughter] >> we haven't run for office but we've helped people get elected and made our phone calls and have gone door to door. it's a little different now, but we still do it and we want to but we don't know where we are going and we don't know what to do. you may get your life and the plight. where are we going and how can we help? >> that's a great question and thank you to all of the people that sent you. [laughter] i talk often about the idea of abolition and i think something that's easy for us to forget is that the time when slavery was abolished, the entire social political, moral, economic system of the united states

since its founding was predicated upon the system of slavery, no one who was alive ever understood the reality or have everd experienced anything with that. it wasn't like some people over here and here. it was like the fabric of reality as much as the sky is blue. there are black people property and they are owned by a planter class that is fact and it feeds into the economic system in the country. yet still people had to be able to imagine something they had never seen. they have to be imaginative atenough to the basic questions like where are they going to go. these are the questions people were asking at the time and do some kind of unimaginative questions people like to ask now about a variety of social issues

and so i can never answer the question of where we are going so thatn is what makes it terrifying. what it means to try to move through the world with moral courage is to say i don't know where we are going but where we are going as an accessible is ud we can even take the down to the microcosm of people escaping from slavery or the people in this book believing mississippi and alabama and chicago, the white press published in chicago how they were going t to die in how terrible it was going to be. and it is kind of terrible sometimes. but you can't stay where you are because you are afraid. so i would invite you to stumble forward with me into the dark and periodically you can have a flashlight or a match or whatever and when you see that you have to follow but a little further and hope that you are some are better than you were five minutes ago.

then it's like hopefully somebody else takes it from where we were. [applause] [inaudible] a lot going on in my head right now but i guess as a self-made activist help you make sure you are taking care of yourself when you write aboutut difficult tops like these because i try to write about topics -- taggable

outcomes and early mortality. it's terrible to do the things about my liberal thought. i think that you have to figure out ways of building distance and taking breaks. i tried hard not to traumatize myself through their writing. i feel like when i was growing up, the image i was given is you have to be willing to put everything on the page like that all your pain out in the world and that is what people wanted to hear from you. part of what i was trying to do is write a different kind of book that isn't really about my own suffering for the most part. people were like yeah but you got called the n-word. most things i'vee never written about and probably never will. i think that you have to take breaks and recognize thoseev boundaries for your self and also have a community of people who can talk it through.

i'm a big believer in therapy. contrary to what people like to say, it is therapy and writing is writing. art is in therapy, basketball is in therapy. there is one thing and that is therapy. [laughter] i am aa big believer in god and having this kind of designated space. but it is tough. to write that i had to listen to recordings of kids crying for hours on end and just like kids crying like please don't close my school i don't want my school to go away and knowing at the end of the school is closed, people literally on tape begging people to not do something they later did and that was difficult. so i think you have to b be awae of that and know that there is the kind of glory ono kind of gn and just pushing through a you take the breaks you need to take and talk to people you need to talk to.

>> i want to ask a question about the revolution. revolution. >> what's your name? the french revolution i'm so grateful for you and your work and i love your work and loved electric arches. while i was reading that i was thinking about the social production of space and ruth wilson gilmore and about ongoing struggles and thought portraying thera thieves because they becoe a foregone conclusion. as somebody that aspires to be a radical agitator in k-12 education and a teacher in high school in english, it is a bizarre time because they get the power andan domination

celebrated. pathe space of freedom in the classroom and in between the schools that i just want tos create a wormhole with students and engage away from systems of power that are hurting them and the way that the economic system structures some of us benefit stepping on the backs of others so the question is what do you do as a radical agitator that wants to bring the revolution to the communities and schools to create spaces of freedom with kids. how do you do that under the power and domination and the neolibera era? >> that is a great question that doesn't have a simple answer but i appreciate it and part of this is the tension that you constantly have to work through. one thing is pedagogy of the

oppressed tells us that we can never bring people in an oppressive social position can never bring freedom or liberation to other people. liberation is some people who are in the social circumstances have defined for themselves. one of the things you can do is step aside and try to give people the tools and reading as an educator there are young people in front of you that the state says you get to spend hours of today so what does it mean to give them the tools they need to understand their own political power and then be willing to step aside. id i think what you said about history is important because one of the most powerful things we crn do is highlight the stories of the mundane average people in changing the world. part of what i wanted to do is go through and talk about the fact thate they even have a history and they'r there such ag as my colleagues that tha thate

book political education does a similar thing with her book this tour is-something people don't think of as even having a political reality and highlighting for people do you know that to protest segregation in the 60s, 220,000 students walked out of school. 48% of the students walked out ed school on freedom day and protested in 1963 and they were not any different than you. if you heard me talk you heard me say this before and i apologize i always say we talk about the march on washington and martin luther king voting and giving a but somebody ha yos to make sure people have things to eat. they had to make sure there was child care during the meetings and go door-to-door are you coming to the march on washington. they do the work also and in fact it is the majority of the worktheworks and how do we valoe narrative is a specialty in how we history to young people.

they need lawyers,y graphic designers, yoga instructors, people who know how to make sure the slideshow works properly. everybody needs to find their lane because if you only have a charismatic person that goes up and gives a great speech it doesn't help that change happen so how do we teach them to see and valorize the role that they can play, i think that it is a small answer to part of your question. [applause] this young person you can come and speak to me afterwards. thank you so much i'm grateful you are here. thank you for the great questions. [applause]

but they didn't trust congress as an institution. nor did they trust each other. by 1860 in many congressmen were routinely armed, not because they were eager to kill their opponents, but out of the fear their opponents might kill them. a history professor and author julie and friedman will be the guest on in depth sunday from noon to 2 p.m..

i think the lesser evil argument contributes to keeping a system in place that takes accountability out of the system and it also is an easy way to bring something like evangelicalism and use that as a way to get votes which seems like the worst possible way. >> watch booktv every weekend on c-span2. >> we continue to look at some of the programs you can watch every weekend on book tv on c-span2.

the good afternoon, everyone. welcome to the 16th annual roosevelts reading festival at the presidential library and museum. i'm the director and i'm so honored to be on stage today with these distinguished historians and supporters of the library. how many of you have been here all day?