four or six buildings left from the exposition in chicago. so we're looking forward to the moment that we can actually begin this project and preserve this for our visitorship and the country itself. if you'd like to learn more about captain pabst and his amazing mansion, please to go to our website, www.pabstmansion.com. and which is full of all sorts of information on the captain, his brewing company, his art collection and the mansion itself. that was part two of a two part look at the pabst mansion. visit our website cspan.org/history to view other american history tv programs. the john fvm 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 havegaterd in boston on president's day under the auspices of the national archives and the presidential library system to examine the presidency and our nation's struggle to expand civil rights for all its citizens. i great that i cannot join you in person. i have fond memories of officially dedicating the kennedy library when it opened in 1979 and returning to speak there. i understand that ray swaurz is

participating in this dedication. 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, as a georgiian, i saw firsthand how the moral leadership of the kennedy administration helped to undo the wrongs that grew out of our nation's history, unquote. and i suggested that the struggle to promote equal rights and opportunities for all is ongoing and it must be shaped by the following principals. we're all americans. we're all children of the same god. racial violence and racial hatred can have no place among us. and that the moral impurity of those who led the march for civil rights during our lifetimes still remains with us today. having grown up on a farm with only black play mates and neighbors i recognized the

blight of racial discrimination and made human rights the foundation of our foreign policy when i was president. since then and i work at the carter center the broadest definition of human rights has been the umbrella under which all our projects have been conducted. including peace, freedom, democracy, and the provision of shelt, food, education, health care, self-respect, and hope for a better future. unfortunately since 9/11, we have seen an abridgement of social and political freedoms in our country and multiple vielss of universal declaration of human rights in our efforts to combat terrorism. i applaud the archivist of the united states and all those involved in putting together today's conference. i'm honored to be asked to share these words with you and encourage the young people in the audience to pick up the mantel of others 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. [ applause ] >> 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 has changed in our country since the passing of the civil rights act of 1964, our work on civil rights is far from finished. i saw this unfinished work firsthand first as a southern governor and then as president. through my administration's 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 hoirveg string of ours destroyed historically black church nos the south and the work we did 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 more important than ever that we have conversations like this that we work to build a country of shared values, shared 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. [ applause ] >> before we open this last panel i want to thank four colleagues for all their work and support of the conference. first my colleague tom mcnaugt executive director of the kennedy library foundation. nancy mccoy. carol ferguson and our forum producer.

[ applause ] i want to recognize a young civil rights attorney who ventured down into the south during the kennedy administration as part of a justice department working for john -- judge gorin martin is here with us. and lastly moderators prerogative, we took charlene's book away from her. so based on the last comment from president clinton, he said there are new challenges in our world today for civil rights and social progress. that's really what this last panel is about. i wanted to begin with ray. president carter invoked god by saying we're all children of the same god.

when president kennedy introduced his legislation he said we faced a moral crisis as ole as the scrip dhurs and as clear as the constitution. and clearly martin luther king led the movement really steeped in religion. you've written a book the holy vote, the politics of faith in america and write about the advent of the cultural wars and how religion has become a polarizing feature of our national politics and less successful in helping us to create the blessed community. is it no longer a wise or successful strategy to invoke religious and moral values to promote the cause of civil rights? >> you have to understand 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 affiliated with one of the abrahamic religions and almost everybody in the country was

culturally eg educated in it, y pulled in almost everyone listening to you when you pulled in 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 afailuation 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 the 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 would know what it was. if a president used a line from the first five books of the the

president we would all know. when you invoke it in that way you may divide as much as you unite, which makes it a very tricky gesture. also we have a running sore in this country when it comes to make one people out 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 and yet regarded with unending suspicion, isolation as we saw in the cases of mosque bombings and various kinds of vandalism, the lack of building permits and pickets outside various muslim places of worship around the country. we're not quite sure where to go next and 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 now to regard religion and the place that religion has in making us one people is also still contested to reign in 2012 and only getting more complicated with every year. >> similarly you talked about the role of the media in the civil rights as struggle in the 60's and how getting those pictures. also today the media seems to be a more complicated picture. is the media on the side of promoting the cause of civil rights today. can it still be used as effectively as it was used in the 60's? >> i think the media are as confused as ray just talked about the american people over religion. we were talking just before we started about the multipolicefy

of media forums today. you've got the internet, you've got your cell phone, you've got thins i probably don't even know about. but 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. the other thing that's very troubling to me, i lived 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 commission, the president johnson's commission cited the media as part of the culpable -- cited culpability of the media in the riots because there were no black people or people who looked like the people who were rioting who could have told them about the simmering rage that was going on in those communities. >> it's a ticking time bomb. you have the whole question that michelle alexander deals with called the new jim crow. all these black men in prison i started to say a word i can't

say in this forum. for reasons that aren't legitimate, let's put it that way. you did sos earlier and you recovered quickly. couldn't think of a word that would quite accurately describe how i feel about that. there is so much going on just beneath the surface and nobody's really drilling down into it and reporting on it. what worries me about this proliferation of media is that the proliferation of media exists but tstz not drilling down into some of the very real social problems that we have in a society. i know this is going to be controversial, but i'm going to say it anyway, we are not in a post racial society. i'm sorry if there are those who think we are. if you look at the data on just 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. 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 in this panel. one of the hallmarks of the johnson administration was the passage to have voting rights act. that act was somewhat sack ro sint in or political culture. even that is a divisive issue. are we seeing a backlash toward voting rights? >> i think that this fragmentation of the media gives

a path and the mechanism or muscles to all kinds of nuts. people who are angry. people who want to put the wrong people whoever they may be back in their place. and they get places to speak which for us a tensablely decent. i've heard stuff on some of these "evening news" diz pencers that aren't news diz pencers at all. people who got nasty fruit to

throw into good communities. it doesn't get better. it gets worse. it proliferates. there are some people who just went off the air recently. i don't think we've figured out how to have free speech and freedom of the press and also deansy, civility and truth. >> right. >> it makes it very hard. [ applause ] >> this is again a difficult question for such a large suite. talk about women's rights for aleta. the failure to pass the equal rights amendment. we're trying to kind of do civil rights then and now. the struggle for women's rights

and contemporary. >> this is my school partner. >> well, i like any place that i can sit with roger. i'm not so concerned about passing the equal rights amendment as i am about promoting and risking life and limb to say that women's rights are human rights. human rights are women's rights, civil rights are human rights, human rights are civil rights. and i think that -- [ applause ] that is the major issue of our time. i think the sort of the unintended consequence, if you will, to echo charlene's point look at affirmative action. who did affirmative action help. it helped white women more than it helped people of color. and so i think that women have a huge rode to hoe. i think in many ways despite the progress that we've made, there's still major stereotypes. i mean i am thrilled that obama

is my president. okay. but i gave my heart and soul to hillary clinton. and i have known her since 1970. and i went to 15 states, 14 states. i knocked on 15,000 doors. and i can tell you the animosity that was still there for a woman running for president. and i got that much more than i got racial epithets 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 them incomparable energies to building a world that is defined by the values that we share. and 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 chunt that is inclusive

and say that women's rights also help men, they also help children. they help people of every religion and that they are in fact, fundamental standards of human decency. until we understand the problems of housing, of access to food. of access to education. the struggle if you look for first hire -- last hired, first fired. look at the teachers that are being let go. they're disproportionately women and people of color. it's a systemic thing here. 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 ander nee green and the incomparable courage that roger has displayed throughout his career than they are to what

happened to women in the 40st, the 50s, the 60st and 70st. now with the new battle over contraception so i'm pretty worried. >> i'll switch to a wholly different topic that president carter brought up, ray. that's the question of the civil rights of terrorist suspects after 9/11. telling me that you reported on the story about that, and could you share that? >> i was covering the arrest and detention of jose padilla and got very interested in it over time. and for those of you who don't remember, he was arrested in o'hare airport and accused of plotting a so-called dirty bomb attack in the heart of a major american city. that is an explosive would be tied to a portion of radioactive material which would then be scattered, rendering a place

poisoned and useless, so it would have to be evacuated. jose padilla was born in brooklyn, raised in 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 arraigned. 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, 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. >> absolutely, yeah. >> 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 away in a prison without anybody giving a damn

whether he was even there or whether he was 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 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. but 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 at activist. i'm not a 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 runnymead in what, 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. but what would it take in this country for it to happen to you or someone you know or someone who lives in your neighborhood? again, not because he's a good guy. the courts have found he's a bad guy. but what our legal protections, what our civil rights exist for is not to protect the rights of good people. it's to protect 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 take us back to robert kennedy's famous trip top south aftrica so we can have the scren 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: ripple of hope." then i have a few questions for the panelists based on this short clip. 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 -- the twain mixed. and there we all were gathered in 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, this person almost from out of space really, when something like that happens to people who are boarded up and oppressed, it sends through an electric shock 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 which can sweep down the mightest walls of oppression and resistance. >> at the end of that speech, i remember as if he stopped and looked around as 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. i wonder, 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. but 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 even reverence for the past has diminished somewhat just as -- and 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. well, they call 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