left from the colombian exhibition in chicago. we're looking forward to the moment to actually begin this project and preserve this for our visitorship and for the country itself. if you'd like to know more about cap faitain pabst and his amazi mansion, go to our website www.pabstmansion.com, which is full of all sorts of information on the captain, his brewing company, his art collection and the mansion itself. >> this was part two of a two-part look at the pabst mansion. visit or website, c-span.org/history to view other american history tv programs. the john f. kennedy presidential library convened a day long conference on the presidency and civil rights. during the concluding panel, the achievements of the last 60 years were considered as well as contemporary civil rights issues. this hour-long program begins with taped greetings from former

presidents jimmy carter and bill clinton. >> so before we begin the last panel, we have remarks from two presidents. president jimmy carter and president bill clinton. >> i'm pleased to know that so many of you have gathered in boston on presidents day under the aus pieces of the presidential library system to examine a history of the presidency and our nation's struggle to expand civil rights for all citizens. i regret i could not join us in person, as i have fond memories of officially dedicating the kennedy library whether it opened in 1979 and returning to speak there last year. i understand that ray suarez, who moderated the forum with me last spring, is participating in this conference as well as two civil rights heroes, our fellow native jornlgzian and ernie green who served in my

administration. i salute them and all the distinguished panelists and thank them for participating in this historic event. as i stated at the kennedy library and dedication ceremony, quote, as a southerner and georgian i saw first hand how the kennedy administration helped to undo the wrongs that grew out of our nation's history. unquote. i suggest the struggle to promote equal rights and tunlts for all is ongoing. it must be shaped by the following principles. we're all americans examine children of the same god. racial violence and racial hatred can have no place among us. that the moral imperative that those that led the march for civil rights during our lifetimes remains with us today. having grown up on a farm with only black playmates and neighbors, i recognized the blight of racial discrimination and made human rights the

foundation of my presidency. since then, the broadest definition of human rights has been under which all our projects have been conducted including peace, freedom, democracy, and the provision of shelter, food, education, health care, self-respect, and hope for a better future. unfortunately, since 9/11 we're seeing an abridgement of social and political freedoms in our country and multiple violations of universal declaration of human rights in our efforts to combat terrorism. once again, i applaud david ferrara and those that put together today's conference. i'm honored to share words with you and encourage young people in the audience today to pick up the mantle of ernie green and and roger wilkins and to serve as our nation's next generation of leaders in this ongoing struggle to build a more just

and equitable nation and a more peaceful world. thank you. >> good afternoon. i'm sorry i can't be there with you today, but i'm glad to be able to welcome you to this terribly important conversation. though much as changed in our country since the passing of the sift rights act in 1964, our work on civil rights is far from finished. i saw this unfinished work first hand first as a southern governor and then as president. through my national initiative on race, i worked to bring our country closer together across the racial divides to prepare for a 21st century in which we're all bound together. i'll never forget the horrific string of arson that destroyed historically black churches in the south and the work we did to put an end to them, to heal and move forward together. today there are new challenges to civil rights and social progress both within and beyond

our borders. it's important important than ever we have conversations like that we work to build a country of shared values and opportunities and shared responsibilities because we continue to believe that as important as our differences are, our common humanity matters more. so thanks again for being here. i hope you have a very productive conference. >> before we open this last panel, i want to thank four colleagues for all our work and support of the conference. first my colleague the executive director of the kennedy library, nancy mccoy, carol ferguson who provided technical sppt and amy mcdonald our forum producer extraordinare. i also wanted to -- i also

wanted to recognize a young civil rights attorney who ventured down into the south during the kennedy administration as part of the justice department working for john door, judge gordon martin is here with us. lastly, we took charlene's book away from her. so based on the last comment from president clinton, there are challenges for us today. that's what this last panel is about. i want to begin with ray suarez. president carter just invoked god by saying we're all children the same god. when president kennedy introduced his legislation, he said we faced a moral crisis as a country and people that was as old as the scriptures and clear as constitution.

clearly martin luther king led the movement really steeped in religion. you've written a book of the holy vote, the politics of faith in america and right about the advent of the cultural wars and how religion is a polarizing feature of the current national politics and less successful to create the blessed community. is it no longer wise to promote civil rights? >> if you invoke religion, it doesn't get you the same portion of the audience that it once did. at a time in our past when almost everyone in the country was in some way either lightly affiliated or strongly aaffiliated with one of the abrahamic religions and although everyone in the country was culturally educated in it, you pulled in almost everyone

listening to you when you invoked a common religious heritage for this country. but the united states is so much more religiously diverse than it was earlier in our history. the largest single faith group or the largest -- the fastest-growing faith group in the united states and one of the largest is no religious affiliation at all. it's roughly 16% to 18% of the population and growing faster than any religious group. we are no longer, as part of a common culture, educated and steeped in the language of religion in the way that we once were where if a president used a line from a psalm, we knew what it was. if praise used a line from one of the first five books of the old testament, we might know who it was. so when you invoke it in that way, you may divide as much as you unite, which makes it a

very, very tricky gesture. all, we have kind of a running soar in this country when it comes to making one people outs of this 311 million of us, and that is what we're going to do and how we're going to regard islam, the new kid on the block, the faith of millions of our fellow americans and yet regarded with unending suspicion, isolation, and as we saw in the cases of mosque bombings and various kinds of vandalism and the lack of building permits and picketts outside various muslim places of worship around the country, we're not quite sure where to go next. like with so many struggles in our history, where civil rights really involved opening -- making our arms wider, we don't know if we're yet ready to open

them wide enough to include the millions of muslims who are now our fellow americans. so religion, how to regard religion and the place that religion has in making us one people is all still contested to rain in 2012 and only gets more complicated with every year. >> charlene, similarly you talked about the role of the media in the civil rights struggle in the '60s and how getting the media on and getting those pictures. also today the media seems to be a more complicated picture. is the media on the side of promoting civil rights today? can it still be used as effectively as it was in the '60s? >> i think the media are as confused as ray talked about the american people over religion. you know, we were talking just before we started about the multiplicity of media forums today. you have the internet.

you have your cell phone. you have things i probably don't even know about. some of the these young people could help me out here a little bit. there's so many different ways of communicating that it's hard to get any centrality of ideas put across, other than maybe on the news hour, right? my former home, i have to say that. the other thing that's very troubling to me, i live in south africa half of the year and here the other half. i have noticed in the past few years a diminishing pool of african-american people in prominent positions on television. i don't know why it's happening, but there are very few who had the kind of positions they had post-1968 when the country

commission, president johnson's commission cited the media as part of the culpable -- cited culpability of the media in the rey riots because there were no black people that looked like the black people rioting that could have told them about the simmering rage going in in these communities. there's simmering rage in this country today based on some of the same inequities we thought we ended with the civil rights act and that kind of legislation. it's a ticking time bomb. i mean, you've got the whole question that michelle alexander dealing with in her book the new jim crow. all these black men in prison, and often for -- i started to go to say a word for reasons that aren't ledge mags. let's put it that way.

you did s.o.s. earlier and you recovered very quickly. i couldn't think of a word that would quite accurately describe how i feel about that. there is so much that is going on just beneath the surface, and nobody is really drilling down into it and reporting on it. what worries me about this proceed proliferation of media is the proliferation of media exists, but it's not drilling down into some of the very real social problems we have in a society. i know this is controversial, but i'll take it anyway. we're not in a post-racial society. i'm sorry if there are those that think we are. if you look at the data on about every indication of progress in this country, you'll find black people pretty much at the bottom. i heard the other day that black unemployment is going down a bit, but it's still twice as high as white.

so there's -- where are the people who are looking into these things and doing very good analysis of what's going on? i'm very disappointed in the media today with some notable exceptions. >> so, again, there's so many things to talk about on this panel. roger, one thing we didn't talk that much about your service in the johnson administration, but certainly one of the hallmarks of that administration was the passage of the voting rights act. that act also was really somewhat sack row sinked in our political culture for years, and that's even a divisive issue of current political debate. are we seeing a backlash towards voting rights? >> i think that this fragmentation of the media gives a path and a mechanism or

muscles to all kinds of nuts, people who -- who are angry. people who want to put the wrong people, whoever they may be, back in their place. and they get places that speak, which are ostensibly decent. i mean, i've heard stuff on some of these news dispensers that aren't news dispensers at all. they're people that have nasty fruit to throw into good

communities. and it doesn't get better. it gets worse. i mean, it proliferates. i mean, there's some people that just don't oftwere on the air r but i don't think we've figured out how to have free speech and freedom of the press and also decency, civility and truth. >> right. >> it makes it very hard. >> this is a difficult question. talk about women's rights for alita black. the failure to pass the equal rights amendment, wire trying to do civil rights then and now. what's the struggle for women's rights and contemporary? >> this is my school.

>> any stage that i can share with roger. i'm not so concerned about passing the equal rights amendment as i am about promoting and risks life and limb to see that women's rights are human rights, human rights are civil rights and civil rights are human rights and human rights are civil rights. and i think that that is it is major issue of our time. i think the -- sort of the unintended consequence, if you will, to echo charlene's point, i mean, look at affirm active action. who did affirm active action help? it helped white women more than it helped people of color. so i think that women have a huge road to hoe, and i think that in many ways, despite the progress that we've made, there's still major stereotypes. i mean, i'm thrilled that obama is my president. i gave my heart and stooul to

hillary clinton. i have known her since 1970, and i went to 15 states -- 14 states. i knocked on 15,000 doors. i can tell you the animosity that was still there for a woman running for president. i got that much more than i got racial epitaphs about obama. there's an undercurrent here that we still need to address, which is why i am so enormously proud of both of them for figuring out a way to devote their incomparable energies to building a world defined by the values that we share. so i think that for women what we've got to do is to figure out how to stand up for ourselves, talk for ourselves, build a community that is inclusive and say that women's rights also help men, they help children,

they help people of every religion, and that there are, in fact, fundamental standards of human decency. until we understand that problems of housing, of access to food, of access to education, the struggle p if you look for last hired first fired. look at the teachers that are being let go. their disproportionately women and people of color. it's a systemic thing here, but i think we have made significant progress. and i'm proud of that, but my great frustration to the young people in this audience is they are much more unlikely to know the stories of charlene and the stories of ernie green and the incomparable courage that roger has displayed throughout his career than they are to what happened to women in the '40s, the '50s, the '60s and '70s.

now with the new battle over contraception, i fear that we are going to go back into this whole thing so it would have to

evacuated. jose padilla was born in brooklyn, raised this chicago, lived in florida, was arrested in illinois, and held without charge for two and a half years. most of that time in solitary confinement, in various kinds of restraints that also deprived him of his senses. so he couldn't hear things. he couldn't see things. he couldn't speak to anybody. without being arraignearraigned. now, he was later found tried and found guilty on charges totally separate from the ones for which he was arrested and held so now he's been convicted to life in prison, and there he is in prison. a bad guy likely found to be guilty of plotting against the united states, but it should

arouse your attention, it should arouse your concern, p if you are an american and your fellow citizen can be picked up in the united states and held without being charged with anything for two and a half years. when i worked up a book proposal on the padilla case and shopped it around to publishers, nobody wanted to print it because it was a downer, as one publisher said. now, yes, that's one of the reasons why it would be a good book, frankly. it's a downer. it's a downer that it can happen. it's a downer that it did happen. it's a downer that jose padilla, because he was a puerto rican gang banger and not the head of the local lions club or rotary can be stuck waway in a prison without anybody giving ail damn whether he was there or ever tried. it should be something of tremendous concern to us all.

i have to say again, i'm not sticking up for the guy. if he's guilty of anything, then fine, let us our legal system work and find him guilty and put him away for as long as the charges he's charged with merit his detention. americans should not be arrested in america by american law enforcement and then held without charge. that's bill of rights stuff. that's magna carta stuff. i'm not an activist or crusader. i'm just a guy who watches to see if people play by the rules. if those are the rules and the barrons made king john sign it was the rules in 1215. so that's been the rules for a long time. two and a half years without charge is an amazing thing, but it could happen to jose padilla because of who he was. what would it take in this

country for it to happen to you or someone you know or someone that lives in your neighborhood? again, not because he's a good guy. the courts have found he's a bad guy. what other legal protections -- what our civil rights exist for is not to protect the rights of good people. it's to protects the rights of people we suspect might be bad people. the jose padilla case should be something that we don't forget very soon. >> i want to switch gears just quickly and get back to the panel. i know this is about contemporary struggles, but i want to go back to robert kennedy's famous trip to south africa. we can have the screen come down. he was invited by a group of students while he was a senator, and after he accepted the invitation, the head of the organization was actually arrested and was not allowed to greet robert kennedy. so a young woman named margaret marshall was a student in south africa at the time and we'll now

hear her in this film clip in a film by larry shore called "rfk: hip ripple of hope." so robert kennedy in south africa in 1965. >> there were places for whites. there were places for what the government referred to as non-whites, and never the two mixed. there we all were gathered in jo johannesburg awaiting his arrival. >> they arrived at the airport that said non-whites only and whites only. he chose to go to the non-white area. that's where they put his podium. >> i don't think anybody anticipated that hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of people made their way to that airport,

which was a long way outside johannesburg. there was no public transportation. the black south africans, very few of them had access to automobiles. >> when kennedy came, it was almost out of space really. when something like that happens to a people that are opressed, it sends through an electric shot through the communities of the coming of freedom. >> the airport was swarming with white, black, brown, indian, every hue of skin. i don't think i had ever seen anything like that in my life. so that very first night we began to get an inkling of what this visit was going to entail. >> the speech robert kennedy gave on that occasion was certainly the most important speech of his life, and i think it captured the essence of what

he stood for and came to be known for when he ran for president, particularly that one paragraph about the ripple of hope, which has been quoted over and over and over again. >> each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that sweep down the mightiest walls of oppresion and resistance. >> at athe end of the speech he stopped and look around as it if to say, was that enough. >> thank you. >> charlene, you live in south

africa now and have seen the transformation of that country and you were part of the transformation of this country. how does the u.s. look from an international perspective? do people in africa look to the u.s. as a beacon of civil rights, or are we losing that? >> i think historically south africans took great inspiration from our own struggle here in america. i think increasingly you have a whole new generation of south africans. we call them they're the born frees. they were born after mandela's release, and so their allegiance or reverence for the past has diminished somewhat. they look very critically increasingly at america just as america is being looked at increasingly more critically around the world, which is why it's really important to -- for

those who have the opportunity to help america continue to stand as a beacon for civil and human rights and justice. it's so coincidental that you would ask me this because just as ray was talking about the gentleman he reported on, i recently wrote a piece for "the new yorker," the blog about a guy in south africa by the name of dr. death. they called him dr. death. he was the -- he's a cardiologist who during apartheid created poisons aimed at killing antiapartheid activists. cigarettes and chocolates laced with anthrax spores. they were working on a drug to make black women infertile so they wouldn't hav