make black women infertile so they wouldn't have -- give birth to more antiapartheid activists. that one never came off. they were also working on a poison that they could inject into mandela when he was released that would ultimately give him a heart attack that couldn't be ultimately traced back to that potion. they would take anti-apartheid activists into airplanes and inject a paralyzing agent into their bodies so that when they dropped them into the sea, even if they were strong and could swim they wouldn't be able to because they were paralyzed. now, this guy is still practicing medicine in south african and got through the truth and reconciliation commission. mandela hired him after the end of apartheid. but now the health professionals

are trying to strip him of his license because he didn't act in a manner consistent with the hippocratic oath. his argument is that he was a soldier following orders. we've heard that before. so i wrote this piece for "the new yorker" the week that they tried him. the final verdict is supposed to come down or continuing on the 27th of march. and at the end i quoted -- i talked about how the pain continues to come back, even though people are trying to shed this pain from apartheid. i said, but some people have a different view of it. there was a guy who called into the radio station, and he said, i don't know the why everybody's being so hard on what he did during apartheid when american doctors are injecting prisoners on death row with lethal injections.

and they are part of torturing prisoners at places like guantanamo bay whom they are trying to get testimony about terrorism things. so, you know, the things -- what we should realize is that as much as many of our things in america have been beacons to others in the world, our actions are paid -- they are paying attention to our actions and people, even those that are not formally educated, are very sophisticated. and they know more about what's going on in america that we -- than we know about what's going on in their country. >> absolutely. >> aline, i wanted to use that is clip to tell the rest of the story, which is margaret smashl came to the united states, named first to massachusetts supreme judicial court and supreme

justice and wrote the landmark decision that allowed same-sex couples to marry saying that that right was guaranteed in the messages of the state constitution. tell us about the struggle for gay rights and how that is seen. is there a barrel with the earlier stories? >> yeah. i do. i mean, i -- i would like to flip it for whatever -- i was pretty down in the first part. what i was talking about. i mean, i live in virginia. and my legislature is -- there is no other word for it. they are neanderthals. i mean neanderthal. and my partner and i have been together for 21 years. and we have decided to get married. it was a big decision not because we are not committed. we are more monogamous and more financially intertwined than any couple i know. but we were going to go to south africa because mandela got it in the constitution. and we thought what an

extraordinary way to honor a man and a country that was really grappling with major issues. and then we decided to do it in the united states instead. and if i may be personal for a minute, i was an intern for jimmy carter. i wrote a grant that got $250,000 for grady hospital to set up the first rape crisis center in the south. that grady would -- outside of miami. grady would not hire any black counselors. so as an only arrogant 21-year-old could do, i gave the money back. you know. and -- i know. how stupid? right? but we set up the -- multiarea rape crisis counsel council by god, sandra flowers and i ran it. you know? and most of the people that we saw were african-american. when i wrote a grant for the

carter administration and when he was governor to start up maternal health care, they set up the program, but they let me go because they thought that i might be a lesbian. okay. now 20 years later, bill clinton is in the white house and my partner and i get invited to every christmas party as a couple. i cannot tell you what that means. and now a united states senator -- sorry, this is really -- a united states senator is going to stand up and marry us and i ran the atlanta gay seminar. i helped set up aid atlanta. i have lost thousands of friends. i have three address books that i cannot throw away. i have seen people lose everything, everything. i have seen kids die in the streets because hospitals would not take them and to be able to

stand in washington, d.c., the capital of the my country, who i still believe in, warts and all, and will deck anybody that wants to stop it, to be married in washington, d.c. in the war memorial for world war i which was built by multiracial school children in washington, the only memorial in washington that has black and white names carved around it, men and women carved around it and to have a united states senator stand up and celebrate my human rights and my relationship with my partner of 21 years senior revolutionary. and i revel in that. if i may say one thing, when president obama says that he stands on the shoulders of

giants, i guarantee you that the people that will be with me are all the men i know who died and who did not need to die because our presidents would not respond to it. and now we have pepfar, we have a budget, we have a conference on aida, and we are doing something about it, and progress can come, but my god, is it painful. >> so this is a conference on civil rights and the presidency. we have the first african-american president. what's the narrative here and -- you know, certainly one of the stories is the high expectations of the latino community, for instance, on immigration reform or the d.r.e.a.m. act and the

sense that the president isn't meeting those expectations. what's the obama narrative on civil rights? >> the argument is never over and the work is never done. with each succeeding generation comes new arguments about who is fully human and who is fully a citizen, and who has the privilege of being a full member of this great extended family. when the founders drafted the constitution, believe me, they never had any idea of a leader marrying her partner in the world war i memorial in d.c. and they never had any idea of roger and charlene sitting up here, and they never had any idea about me either, fright frankly. quite frankly. >> we haven't decided on you yet. >> exactly. jury is totally still out and i get that. but -- but -- we always take on more because america is constantly widening the idea of

what civil and human rights means, and never narrowing it. which is a great genius for people to have. if you are going to have a sort of habit that you keep coming back to, century after century, there are worse habits to have. like biting your nails. but -- so we always widen the argument when people were trying to get on public -- public accommodations and mounting trailways and greyhound and heading south, they didn't think they were doing it for people who wanted to go to the movies and were in a wheelchair and there was no way to get the wheelchair into the movie but they were. they didn't think that they were doing it for people who could get kicked out of their apartments because they were gay. but they were. and so we are dealing with this constantly widening notion. now today, there are people who are not citizens of this country doing a lot of the work that gets done every day in this country. and the challenge for us now, and there are people on all

sides of the issue, is whether they are fully invested with a set of claims because they are human beings that they can make on us, not because they are citizens. two different statuses. so if they get picked up by a landscaper in the morning, they're standing on a corner near a home depot and a pickup truck comes by and puts five of them in the back and they go work all day, and then at the end, the employer tells them to go get lost and doesn't pay them, to whom do they explain? is this a human rights violation? is this a civil rights violation? is it something that they can turn to the local authorities and say i, too, have a claim on your attention? even though i didn't ask your permission to be here, even though i'm not a citizen, even though i'm not, in your view, a legitimate member of this community, do i have a claim on your attention? and we haven't quite worked that

out yet. whether that person does have some claim to the same humanity that i as a citizen and you as a citizen do. that's part of a long argument that goes all the way back to the original arguments since 1789. it is not divorced from it. it is not a separate thing from it. it runs like a thread through our entire history. so whether they are working with produce that is sprayed with poisons that cause permanent nerve damage, cognitive defects, tremors, permanently in your hands after you have worked picking vegetables for five, ten, 15 years, or terrible chromosomal damage that you then pass onto the children that you never even really thought about having some day, whether it means that you are a member of one of the 4.5 million people who live in mixed status families in this country with some of the members of the nuclear family of citizens and some of them are not, some of

them live in constant fear of deportation and some of them don't, this is a challenge to us today, and there is a legitimate argument. the people who want to send them home are not all bad people. and they're not all racist appearance they're not all wrong. every country in the world has the right to control its borders and know who lives inside its country. there is a legitimacy to that argument. but if you both use them, use them like human harvesting machines and steal their wages and don't send them home, that just seems to be a little bit too much. >> roger? >> ray, since i had the least negative things to say all day, i will say a positive thing or tell you a positive little story.

at my -- first, i would say when you get to the place in life where i am, which is to say within 30 days, i will step through the thing and by god, i'll be 80 years old. now, i say to myself, by god, this is a different country than i was born into. it is so much a better -- there -- god knows that there's terrible stuff still here. the banks, the ponzis, and lots of crooks. but look at you and you and you. here we are.

it won't have been 100 years ago, i'll tell you that. and we did that. we americans changed the country in extraordinary ways. we tell the whole story. we tell the old stories, you know. general washington, good old abe, fdr, but everything now all this stuff is too big for us. and i don't think it is too big for us. i think probably much of the responsibility of changing things should go after digging into people like me, like ernie, god knows like you.

how did folks make this country a better country? and what is it that we now need to continue? we can't just sit around in our fancy cars and fancy houses and say god, we are a swell country. when there's so much more to do. and doing it is the best stuff. i mean, i will say to you that to have done the journalism, my dear pal here, to have done a little bit of tv and the shows that he is on, to be motivated by a picture of ernie and his

co-activists, they all -- they all give great energy, but there's something, something that we need to do, and that is that we need more people building and fewer people reaching in to what can i get today, bigger car than yesterday and so forth. we teach each other that america is worth taking care of. our schools, our hospitals, our police departments, all of these things need work. and people can find that out. one of the things that makes me almost cry for joy is that i have a daughter who is about to turn 30.

she could be working at the white house right now. most people -- because she was a terrific campaigner, and most people who get a job in the white house when they're that age that i that's enough. they'll stay at the white house the rest of their lives. this young woman gave up the job and went back to school, to yale law school because she has seen the issues of americans coming -- people coming to america and not being treated fairly, decently, honorably. she then took a little stint

with the service employees union, found a whole bunch of stuff that she thought needed to be changed and fixed and so she's at yale law school and she's going to be, the first thing she's going to be is an immigration lawyer. i just want to say, we have to take care of this country. it is not going to be a terrific country forever unless we take it -- take care of it on a -- regular basis. this is -- you know, i could say i was a journalist and i was a lawyer. i was this and that. but basically i was a citizen. i was just a citizen who really thought the place was great.

particularly when jackie won the world series that year. >> i had a last question for each panelist. and you already answered the question that i wanted to ask you. let me just quote briefly from roger wilkins' lovely book in which he writes, the greatest legacy of our founding fathers is the opportunity of this nation allows each of us to engage and struggles for decency it evil, he writes, is a basic element of nature. the seeds are in all of us. good has to be manufactured and pushed energetically into public affairs. it is willed into the world by human effort. roger wilkins. [ applause ] i have a final question for all three of you. aleta, what would eleanor roosevelt say to us today as we were leaving this conference? >> she would say the last sentence she ever wrote -- staying aloof is not a solution.

it is a cowardly evasion and that we cannot leave our problems to the government. we are the government. >> from aleta's book, aleta has a lovely grow the her book from eleanor roosevelt. you are going to live in dangerous world but it will be an interesting and adventurous one. i wish you the currently to face yourselves and your presently disses and when you know what you really want to be and what you really want to fight for, not in a war but in order to gain a peace, then i wish you imagination and understanding. god bless you, may you win. eleanor roosevelt. [ applause ] there's a lovely moment in your memoir where you're there, a young student at the university of georgia. the phone rings. and it is james meredith. and james meredith is in the process of trying to integrate the university of mississippi. and at first you don't believe that it's him. but finally you do.

and basically he asks for advice from what he calls a fellow traveler. i thought, what advice would you give to the fellow travelers especially the young people today who are defending their own rights or the rights of others? >> again, to go back in history, my grandfather, who was presiding elder in the african methodist episcopal church, used to tell his son, my father, and his other son, my uncle, gets an education, boy, boys. that's going to be the key to your liberation. and i think that is what propels so man black people. but i think if we bring it forward to today, as a journalist, i tend to ask questions much more than i give statements. so my question would be who is educating our young people this