quo. it can easily be looked upon more negatively. i don't know. it's a whole different thing. >> more radical in some ways. >> much more radical, i think. >> much more radical, i think. occurs in 1963 ends up being really focused on pushing the passage of the civil rights bill. focus on segregation and discrimination in the south. it's a regional problem. the answer not in the speeches, right, but in the way the press covered it and in our memory. the answer is federal legislation to outlaw discrimination. here it's a challenge to capitalism. a massive redistribution of economic power, says king. it's a national problem. it's an economic problem. whereas the march -- march on washington of '63 was sort of within -- could be interpreted within a narrow understanding of the civil rights movement, racial liberalism, liberal cons

us. this clearly could not. this is challenging all those notions of class politics, redistribution. rose. >> i was going to say it's just like this movement challenging so many aspects of the government, people could misconstrue especially if they didn't understand it, they could be easily swayed by the media giving wrong information and not the full picture. >> they did focus a lot on problems. >> it was like a big group -- not a group but like a handful of problems they were all striving for. it was a lot of challenge to the government and they saw that as a threat. >> polls showed majority opposed the movement. >> as king said easier to integrate lunch counters that

eradicate slums. it didn't cost anything to integrate lurch counters. now we're talking about something that will cost billions and billions of dollars, redistribution of economic power. we don't have time to look at torey and hamilton and black power perspective but i want to point you to, again, their notion of the ghetto as a colony. in this chapter they explicitly claim integration is not a legitimate goal. it's infeasible and suggests white culture is better than black culture. leave you with a quote from stokely carmichael who shouted black power and got all the press attention. here he is. got his creds, a real serious activist. here he is later. he said integration means the man who makes it leaves his black brothers behind in the ghetto as fast as his new sports

car will take him. no relevance to the harlem wineo or cotton picker making $3 a day. we'll do more and explore more of this aspect of black power and perspective community control at a later date. so thank you very much for your wonderful participation and i will see you on wednesday. >> you've been watching american tv lectures in history series. watch other elect turs at 8:00 p.m. and 12:00 a.m. eastern here on c-span3. >> while congress is on break this month, showing programs normally seen on weekend on c-span3 during american history tv. coming up next lectures in

history. programs that take viewers into classrooms around the country with class professors. next from the college of william & mary, comparing reconstruction, civil rights through participants and lasting changes brought about by these eras. 2:30 railroad civil war robert wolf central state university. he examines how the memory of the conflict changed after 50 and 100 year anniversaries to the present. at 3:40 p.m., the war on poverty with oregon state university professor marissa chappelle. anti-poverty and entitlement that arose from president johnson's initiative. the 19th amendment which granted women the right to vote was ratified on august 18th, 1920. a panel of historians and women's leaders will commemorate 94th anniversary today by examining how women's suffrage impacted role of women in

american potomac politics and society. hosted by american archives in washington, d.c., we'll have that live at 7:00 p.m. eastern here on c-span3. >> american history prime time features programs about dropping of atomic bomb in world war ii. grant weller teaches a class on american and japanese strategies leading up to the dropping of the atomic bomb on hiroshima and nagasaki. then president truman's decision to use the bomb. historians debate whether it was morally sound, necessary to win the war or was the start of the cold war. survivors of the bombings describe their experiences and lasting effects on those closest to them. president truman's grandson explains why it's important to consider the legacy of atomic bombs. here is a preview.

>> i think they didn't know whether this was going to work or not. they were sure about little boy bomb, two pieces of uranium, fire one into the other, boom, we don't have to test it. plus it will take too long to have a test bomb, then we won't have another one for many months later. but this plutonium bomb, this is a new animal here. we better test that first. july 16th it was tested in the new mexico desert. it worked. full speed ahead towards getting enough plutonium in the case and all the rest, have the 509th composite group ready to deliver it. plus inola gay was the first combat aircraft. in a perfect mission it went

according to plan, dropped a bomb on hiroshima exactly when it said it would and returned safely. there was much more difficulty in the second mission against nagasaki. will go into those details about fuel lines, almost ran out of gas. covered in clouds, wanted initial target onto nagasaki, so on so forth. that almost thwarted but it didn didn't. i think the element of shock. we had to shock the japanese into taking that final step. the general makes a distinction between defeat and surrender. they are not the same thing. revisionists have said they were

defeated. of course defeated. i think eventually it was the atomic bomb that convinced the emperor to intervene and say enough. it's over. >> for the point to support the professor. the decision to use as made clear in the paper was the decision to surrender. we from our vantage point, why didn't they give them more time after hiroshima, see if they would make a decision.

it was done by general groves to use the weapons. both cities were military, industrial targets. they were not simply filled with civilians and targeted because of that. hiroshima was the headquarters of the japanese argument responsible for the defense of the southern part of japan. it was a supply and lodge ifbs space for the military, port, wide ranging industrial activity. a complicated dynamic of how japan fought the war, made targeting something already devolved into an area where dare

we say civilian targets were on the list. it's under fdr the firebombing occurred, of course. we look back and see what was almost barbaric targeting of population populations which had been warned to evacuate, these cities. but this is where the tragic dimension, in my view enters in. >> let me say, i think what you have to understand in looking at the design, use of the atomic bombs, you have to understand the most important thing was the purpose. the purpose was articulate add number of times the idea it would take some tremendous shock to get leadership of japan to actually capitulate.

the targeting was a separate issue. the question whether you target a military unit or a city. the question was which was going to more impress leadership in tokyo. also atomic bomb as then existed, we cannot forget are much, much, much small er. we're not under the things we lived under the cloud of for years. the general saw the use of bombs against cities as essentially a bluff. it was a bluff to prove we had not one bomb but an arsenal of bombs. what this would leave japanese decisionmakers to realize, if the americans have such weapons in quantity, then they will not

come and invade japan. if they do not invade japan, japan's military leaders had no strategy short of national suicide. the use of the one bomb followed three days later by the other bomb was fortuitous in some respects but nonetheless achieved the the bluff. it created a relentless rhythm of nuclear attack and implied we had a very large arsenal of bombs. one of the things i touched upon you have to keep in mind is because japan had its own nuclear program and what in my view is very interesting, as soon as they heard the words atomic bomb used, big swath of japan's leadership knew what an atomic bomb was. this wasn't a bolt from the blue. they knew how incredibly difficult it was to make a bomb and how from an engineering point to make the material.

that's why the first response, reports of the bomb, the imperial army said we're not going to concede it's a bomb until we have an investigation. imperial navy more ominously says, even if it is an atomic bomb, they can't have that many of them. they can't be that powerful, maybe dissuaded from using them. the second bomb at nagasaki knocked the props out of the idea that u.s. didn't have an arsenal of atomic weapons. that's why as tragic as all that is, those two bombs in conjunction achieved the bluff. also if we understand what the japanese material talking about, no demonstration would ever have worked because the japanese comeback would have been this is very interesting. let's see you do three in a row. >> just one point on the timing of it. general groves told general marshall about the third bomb.

the timetable is speeded up, it can be ready as early as august 13th. august 9th, it was going to take that span of time, 9th to the 17th. to get it all ready to use. the third bomb was scheduled for august 17th. they might have gained a day or two. that was the timetable. many more after that. groves had them lined up september, october, november. he would have upwards of 20 by december. already the assembly line was open and plutonium was coming from the reactors in huge amounts at that point and you could calculate all these things. we needed this much. it's going to take this long to

fabricate it. he was ready for many more than two. he thought two would initially probably be enough. there. he continued to make them. >> with live coverage of the u.s. house on c-span and senate on c-span 2, here on c-span3 we speed limit that coverage by showing you the most relevant congressional hearings and public affairs events. then on weekends c-span3 is the home to american history tv with programs that tell our nation's stories including six unique series, civil war's 150th anniversary, visiting battle fields and key events, american artifacts touring are you seems and historic sites to discover what artifacts mean about past. history book shelf, best known history writers. the presidency looking at policies and legacies of our nation's commander in chief. lectures in history with top college professors delving into

america's past. our new series real america featuring educational films from the 1930s to the '70s. c-span3 created by the cable tv industry and funded by local cable or satellite provider. watch us in hd, like us on facebook, and follow us on twitter. >> next, college of william & mary professor ely comparing reconstruction and civil rights eras, history, emancipation to the present. it's just over an hour. >> well, here we are at the end of the semester, and it strikes me as a good opportunity maybe to compare reconstruction period we started talking off in this course with what some have called second reconstruction, which is the time of the civil

rights movement of the 50s and 60s. let me tell you first what i mean by the first reconstruction and second reconstruction. by the first, i mean not only post civil war reconstruction, i'm including the civil war itself and all that took place during the war up through radical reconstruction. the second reconstruction will be simply enough -- civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s. i'm not going to carry my remarks any more than that, i think. in talking about two reconstructions, i'm going to have to use broad generalizations of a type i'm not entirely comfortable with. i'll take occasionally about the white south or the north. that covers up all kinds of complexities that unfortunately i don't have time to get into today. i'm going to start off by giving you a brief summary narrative of

the first reconstruction and then of the second reconstruction. each of these is about six sentences long. i'm going to read slowly because i want you to follow and listen for similarities and differences. the first reconstruction. for generations enslaved in free blacks met oppression with resistance, with creative adeptation. sometimes mixed with resignation or even despair. eventually the north, for a variety of reasons which you know and which we may recapitulate shortly, the north for a variety of reasons challenged social and racial order of the south. that's the civil war. the white south indeed fought back in a total war that lasted four years.

southern blacks joined the fight on the side of the union and helped ensure that the war became a struggle that would definitively end slavery. the confederacy was decisively defeated in the war and radical reconstruction. whites in the south eventually regained the right to do pretty much anything they wanted when it came to race relations in the south. that had been accomplished by the 19th century. that's the first reconstruction. a brief narrative description of the second reconstruction. for generations southern blacks met oppression with resistance, creative adaptation, sometimes mixed with a measure of resignation and even despair.

sound familiar? eventually, southern blacks challenged the southern racial order. again, the white south fought back. this time by means far short of total war. some northern whites and blacks, and even a few white southerners joined the fight, but mostly a fight of african-americans. again, conservative white south lost the contest. they lost less decisively this time. there wasn't wholesale destruction and utter defeat as in 1865. the white south lost less decisively this time but more definitively and lastingly. we're going to talk about that. in both cases you've got a backdrop of black people struggling for decades against oppression. then you've got a challenge to

the racial order in the south. the first time it comes from the north initially with southern blacks joining in. the second time it's southern blacks themselves that changed the order. in both cases the conservative white south loses. in the first instance the conservative white south rebounds and erases many of the fruits of the first reconstruction. the second time around, more of the gains are affirmative i'm going to argue as we go on. now, in more detail, what can we say is true in both cases? in both reconstructions? collision of southern blacks and northerners proved decisive in attacking, listen to this, what many regarded as a southern problem. southern problems in the 1960s

is slavery. the southern problems is segregation and racial oppression. i say in each instance there's a coalition that formed. the coalition that includes union army, republican party and free and enslaved blacks. the later coalition includes southern blacks and certain elements of the north. namely, those few who came down south to participate in the movement. people who donated money to the movement should not be underestimated. legislators who eventually pass civil rights acts. as we saw the other week, most of the legislators who voted for those acts were from the north and a president who cully was kind of a southerner.

that's lyndon johnson. we'll talk more about him later. that's the coalition second time around. in both reconstructions, there was a tremendous emphasis on the part of black people on education, attaining education and attaining voting rights. very interesting parallel second reconstruction the emphasis on equality of education and ultimately desegregation of education. the first was when the issue was achieving any education at all. blacks haven't been deprived of it. in both instances, blacks wanted the right to vote. in both reconstructions the black church played a crucial role. you can argue, and some people do argue, about the exact extent of church leadership in the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s.

the cliche has it, it was a church centered movement. but don't forget when we looked at the montgomery bus boycott, it wasn't the mississippi sisters who started it. it was rosa parks, a.d. nixon, joann gibbsons robinson. the ministers came in quickly on their heals and participation was very much welcomed. their participation crucial, i'm taking nothing away from the clerical leadership when i say it wasn't the church who started the civil rights movement. let's remember who started sit-ins. college students in north carolina and dozens of other cities. the freedom rides were conducted by whom? by core, congress of racial equality who started them.

then veterans carried through to completion. i'm not trying to deprocate. they played a role but not give a monopoly. in both reconstructions, enthusiasm of white northerners started to wane, decline when the price of black advancement rose. in the 1870s we talked about the way in which just the need to police the white south became a price greater than main white northerners were willing to pay. that's one of the reasons the first reconstruction ended. in more recent times, you find

when inner city riots of the '60s take place, the school busing issue arises in the 1970s, when whites start to realize that there's a national problem acquiescence of whites in the north starts to decline. i want to draw a distinction between the two reconstructions. this time the federal withdrawal has been far less complete than it was in the 1870s. today the south is different in ways some of which we'll talk about in a few moments, many of which we don't have time to get in into. i would say one. ways it's different is blacks can vote now. we'll talk about why that is. in both reconstructions, racist violence played a crucial role. i don't need to tell you in the 1870s, violence by ku klux klan

and other white terrorists was crucial in rolling back the gains of the first reconstruction. we saw in the films that in the civil rights movement, especially by the 1960s, again, you get extreme, severe white racist violence against plaques and their white allies. let's point out that the violence was less extensive in the '60s. as horrible as it was, it's not all out war. in fact, it was counter-productive to those who wanted to keep things racially to the way it had always been. the very violence against civil rights demonstrators that furthers their cause. there a reason, as you know, why southern christian leadership conference after stalemate in albany, georgia, decided to go to birmingham. they went there, because they were pretty sure as the reverend told them they would get a

confrontation there that would dram ties to the world what was at stake. that's what happened. fewer whites in the '60s taking up arms. in the 1860s it was millions in the confederate army, fewer 1960s by far, to less effect, and, in fact, the effect us the opposite of what they wanted. in both reconstructions northern blacks played and active role but southern blacks played the decisive role. why is that? give me one reason why southern blacks are crucial both times? they are invested in the outcome. even more simple? [ inaudible ] so the blacks in the south knew the way things worked on the ground. they knew what they were up

against. >> yes, the south is where black people lived. in the 1860s almost all african-americans lived in the south. probably 90% of the population of the south was black. of course it's going to be the southern blacks who play a decisive role. that's where the struggle is carried out and where they live, many of them. okay. in both reconstructions, this is more of a side light but fairly interesting, in both reconstructions you see that the diversity within the black community emerges in, if anything, a more vivid way. people outside the black community become aware of that. we talk about how in south carolina, for example, in the first reconstruction there were

differences between the urban mixed race freed before the civil war population of f1 ol war population of newly freed blacks in the plantation district. the latter wanting radical land reform and the former not being particularly interested in that. there's just one kind of diversity within the african-american community that emerged in the first reconstruction. in the second we see it all the time. we see tensions between southern christian leadership conference and sncc on the other, which becomes more acute over time. we see differences between northern black community and southern black community of the 1960s. you heard john lewis who led the among march talking about emergence of malcolm x as a

figure and john lewis who grew up in the south and christian church didn't know what to make of malcolm x. in both these instances you really see what was always out there, which is the black community in this country is a diverse one. in both reconstructions, the crucial demands were for equality and access. i talked about the fact i like the word access better than the word inclusion, because inclusion has a little bit of a ring of wanting to get into the other fella's game. access feels more neutral to me. it's about the idea if there's a society that has institutions, that has a government that's supposed to be for the people, that everybody ought to have the same access to those. in both reconstructions, and i have to be a little bit careful

here, the first reconstruction if we talk about that portion of it, which is the civil war, first part of reconstruction, you get a real measure of black political power. up through end blacks have political power that they never had before. and then again in the second reconstruction, one of the fruits of the movement is, was intended to be and was, indeed, that blacks in the south won the right to vote on the basis of equality, a measure of political power. we need to add, hasten to add in both cases the power blacks attained was in a political system still dominated by whites. at least on the national level and state level. on the local level, it's a little different. there's many localities

dominated by blacks in the first radical reconstruction and many localities now, especially in the deep south, where you have black majority, black office holding and so forth. the bad news is these places tend to be impoverished places. places where you may have political power, monetary sources to make a difference are not abundant. in both instance, first and second reconstruction blacks ended up tied almost exclusively to a single political party. first time around republican party, second time around democratic party. there are those who argue this is disadvantageous. i had a colleague, black colleague at yale who once said, as many have, black america would be better off today if there were more black republicans.

then the two parties would compete for the black vote by speaking to black interests. he said we'd be better off if there were more black republicans. the problem is most of us don't want to be republicans, including me, he said. i'm quoting him. so there you have it. after both reconstructions, severe economic inequities remained. most of the black population after the first reconstruction remained poor rural agriculture laborers. today the picture is better, but it's still a case one-third of the african-american population is mired in deep poverty. there was more of an attempt to address that in the 1960s but haven't made a lot of headway. i made an argument in the

beginning that the gains of reconstruction have proved more lasting this time. after all, if we say we're talking about the '50s and '60s. if we say 1965 was the high watermark of the civil rights movement, how many years have passed since then? about 50 years. after 50 years there's been no rolling back, for example, of the black's right to vote. in many ways blacks have more power and influence than they have ever had. the black middle class is bigger than it's ever been. if we were going to have a retreat from reconstruction like we did the first time around, it's taking an awful long time to happen in any decisive kind of way. why is that? well, it's hard to answer definitively but prejudice against blacks was less engrained at the beginning of the second reconstruction than it was at the beginning of the first. now, that's an answer but raises a question, why in why was black

prejudice, as bad as it may have been, less intense in the 1950s and '60s as it was 100 years ago. the only quick answer i can give is that all the trends and sciences, social sciences in the 20th century, certainly the mid 20th century were toward a repudiation of racism. that sounds like an axiom to you but we mentioned in the latter 19th century, people who claimed to be scientists and social scientists were saying their inherent racial differences, their superior and inferior races inherently. that was something that a respectable person could say in a room like this and not be laughed out of the place. by 1950, you would be very hard put to put an academic person who would make that argument. very hard put indeed. another thing that happened, which you mentioned already, by

the 1950s, is that a lot of blacks moved to places where they could vote. great migration to the northern cities. the fact blacks could vote up there meant in parts of the north white politician had to listen to white people. that proved helpful when it came time to vote on civil rights legislation in the 1960s. another reason that the gains have lasted this time better than lastfñ&6l time i would arg president lyndon johnson was so politically skillful in this realm. in the realm of foreign policy he didn't have a clue. but domestically he had the vision to come up with a system that would come as close as humanly possible to self-perpetuating. what he understood was the vote

was going to be key. we talked about this. if you want to change the south, if you want to change the country, you've got to ensure black people have the right to vote. the only way to do that federalizing voters registration. he did that. he also figured out if black people have the right to vote, it's going to become politically more decide to take their rights away. the right to vote is a self-perpetuating right to a certain extent. because you have the right to vote, politicians are going to be more hesitant to try to take it away from you. it doesn't mean they will never try, it just means that your right to vote is an impediment to being denied the right to vote. that sounds silly when you hear it spoken but true. i'll more about that in a minute. the second thing different in the reconstruction was the world context. first of all the fact there was a world context. second that the cold war was

going on in which the united states and soviet union were competing for influence in the world. the united nations had been created. as i mentioned before, general assembly is a body of nations in which every country is represented. with the break up of european empires after world war ii you ended up with dozens of countries represented in the u.n. to live. it became less and less tenable for a president of the united states to try to get anything accomplished on the world stage and united nations and have to explain why black people can't eat in a restaurant in the d.c. suburbs. it's just too awkward. that's a difference. the emergence of visual media. there were news media in the first reconstruction, newspapers, but i think you may agree having looked at the films

we saw in this class, there's nothing like seeing film of a building burning down or somebody being beaten up or police dogs jumping on women and children or knocked down by fire hoses. the fact that the visual media existed in the 1950s and sikds 60s augmented these other forces i'm talking about. finally let's not forget the factor of black education. black americans in 1865 knew what they wanted and needed. they were just as smart then as 1965 but they had been systematically deprived in most parts of the country of an education. by the 1950s you've got almost a century of education that's taken place. education equips people to do things, all sorts of things, including trying to change

society. you remember we talked about this great irony of segregation. whites in the south had this brilliant idea that what they needed to do was segregate blacks in every aspect of life. separate them and push them off into the corner. one of the results of separation and neglect was a measure of black autonomy. if you have a black school with a black principle and black faculty, even if the resources aren't what they should be and white people aren't so much paying tank to what's going on there because they don't really care, you have the ability in that school to teach all kinds of things that ultimately are going to become useful in the fight for equality in the way you wouldn't if white people were running everything. there's a way in which the

segregators dug their own grave. remember the montgomery bus boycott, alabama state college. joann gibson rogers on the campus. the sit-in movement was conducted by college students emanating from black colleges all across the south. so the segregators again had created if you want infrastructure black folk would use to attack segregation. now, i'm talking about lasting gains of reconstruction. let me issue a few caveats. in the first place, i have to preface this by saying i don't mean any of this in a partisan way. i'm talking about republicans and democrats and i'm going to be talking about different political figures. i'm not trying to cast aspersions on anybody. you can like who you want.

i'm just trying to talk about facts. johnson, president johnson when he commanded his justice department to draw up the voting rights act, or actually when the civil rights act of '64 is being drafted, he said we passed this. we democrats lose the white south from my lifetime and yours. didn't happen quite as quickly as he said but pretty much has happened because the deep south is pretty solidly republican. the deep south. but this part of the south, for example, virginia, not so much. virginia voted for obama twice, for example. texas, which is sort of southern and sort of not, those who say within 15 or 20 years, texas is going to be a solidly democratic state because of immigration

from mexico. i don't know whether that's right or wrong. in the short-term a predominantly republican south just as johnson said. you may think it's good or bad but it's a fact. we still have, as i mentioned, deep poverty of the population and not small percentage of the white population and other populations as well. there's an intractable problem of poverty that we haven't figured out a solution for. we have continued defacto segregation. there's ways this society is still a segregated society. name one. one realm still largely segregated. housing and neighborhoods. religious life in the country largely segregated. whether you think this is a good or bad thing is an interesting question. most african-americans go to

predominantly african-american churches. i suspect aren't particularly interested in integrating because they don't see anything on the other side as better than what they have already got. but@"3#t

schools are great o examples. schools are run on the loefl n a lev level. everybody is ere the same race, you don't get n't integration. virginia is an extreme example of that. the cities aren't part of the counties.ople you have cities that only have a few thousand people in them but they are separate. okay.me of some of them have combined co school systems with the county,m some of them don't.ex in the city of richmond has a school system that is th impoverished whereas the suburban counties have systems e more or less flush with money.eo according to supreme court, nou way to remedy that.in many ways still in a segregated society but benmany ways not. when i was your age, this nly college only started to just

allow nonwhite students to enroll, here we are in a more integrated environment. i'm arguing changes of second reconstruction are more permanent. i don't want to sound as if i'mc wildly, blindly optimistic and a don't see problems outt there.oo one more caveat, if i may.an that is we're not sure where th supreme court was going.fice i was literally walking out of r my office to come over here when my son showed me on his phone the headline that the united states supreme court -- i've not had timeead to read the opinion the entire article in the "new york times," but apparently this supreme court has upheld the o right of voters in the state off michigan to eliminate affirmative action and

admissions to state colleges and universities in the state of michigan. i may be misreading this. it was a 6-2 opinion, which i don't understand how that even s happened. i mention this as a considerable risk of botching up the details. what i do know is that the supreme court under chief justice roberts has ruled of against certain facets of affirmative action. they have ruled unconstitutiona the central part of the voting rights act of 1965. that's remediable. congress can remedy that.now th i'm not sure if they are going to or not. this creates a problem for me. at this point in this course, which i've been teaching for almost 20 years now, i was usedt

to say whichhe i said earlier, gains of earlier reconstruction special in the political realm self-per petiation. the right to vote per petiates the right to vote. what i didn't take into righ account -- the proof of that, voting act came into renewal four or five times since 1965 and passes by huge margins.crat, republicans, democrats, d northern, southern, most rner, everybody voted m to renew the voting rights act, again and again, for exactly the reason i. explain. what i didn'tt take into accoun was that the supreme court one e fine day would decide that that act is largely unconstitutionalw i don't know where we're going on that. i do not anticipate that we're going to have a roll back in black rights and blackwell fair that will be anything like what

happened in the th1870s, '80s as '90s. this is inconceivable to me.e'ri i don't know where we're going with the supreme court. this i don't mean this remark. yes, i do. yes, i do.yes, do yes, i do.i. yes, i do, because i believe in holding onto the gains -- i think they are gains and i think we need to hold onto them, and i regret some of the tendencies that i see happening. okay. silver linings. nothing like -- i just said ing nothing like the rollback of tht late 19th century is in the cards i think.ury is now, here is the part where i hs may sound partisan, and i don'tm mean to be.e. reagan and the bushes can win elections, but so can obama. in other words, it's an open n playing field, and sometimes oni sideme wins and sometimes the

other. it's not one side rolling over the other.ot whites today will vote for blac candidates, and obama is only a oneob proof of that. more and more across the united states you see candidates of esu color being elected by predominantly white wh constituencies and i have to think this is a step in the right direction. race doesn't automatically trump other issues on a regular basis the way it used to in american life. for many americans there are a number of issue that is are more important in their hierarchy of values than anything having to f do with issues of white or black. again i say there are important parallels between the two import reconstructions. there are important differences and perhaps the most important of all is that the second reconstruction has largely clos stuck. i will just close the formal s part of this bya saying that ite

not true that history repeats itself, but it is true that we e can understand not only where we came from but where we are now better by studying history, looking for parallels and looking for differences, and that is what i tried to do here so i'm going to stop now and i' going to ask whether there are comments or questions, and i'll remind you that you're asked to raise your hand and give grace a minute to pop over to where you are, and i'll call on you. this is your opportunity for instant fame. tanner.>> i'm >> i'm wanting to ask you aboutu a decision that just broke this morning but it does seem that the court ruled that citizens in a state could by their own volition remove racial preferences from admissions to public university which seems t be a precedent other states could do that as well, not just

michigan. do you think that that will happen in certain sections of the country h or do you think tt that will generally be a clinging on to affirmative action policies?e actio >> no, i think it will probably happen elsewhere. the state of california already went through a thing like this s where affirmative action was basically eliminated, i understand, from university admissio admissions. i don't want to get into chapter and verse, but i think basicaly a lot of people dislike affirmative action. if you putke it to an up or dowt vote, yeah, i think other constituencies will vote it down. i think there was someone in the back row before -- no? oka okay. let's go to jake and then jeremy. >> well, we've often talked wee about at least in the latter te parts of our semester just

obviously the differences in democrat and republican, where r the transitions were made. obviously the black community i kind of consolidating themselves to c mainly being aligned with e democratic party.crat so i'll askic you two things, o answer what you can, but is it -- do you consider it in the best interests of the black in t communities to diversify their c political interests in terms of the parties they favor and how do you think that actually can come about? >> the question was would the black community be better off spreading their vote around -- having their vote up for grabs e by more than one party and do ie think that's going to happen? >> how do you think -- >> how could it happen. well, the first thing that would have to happen is the republicae party is going to have to fignd out what kind of a party it's ht going to be because until we ay know that there's no way to answer the other part of that question. right now the republican party

consists of actually more than two factions but let's over simplify and say there's a a faction that people call the tea party but that's probably too narrow a term that is very purist conservative and almost radically conservative, and thei there's a part of the republican party that's sort of more centrist and more interested id the traditional form of politics which is compromising and getting the best deal that you can get.can ge and as far as i can tell, thesee two factions have gotten to the point where they basically hate each other.. unlike anything i have really vr seen since the democratic partyt in the '60s. and i don't know how that's going to play out. and how it plays out is going to have a lot to do with what options blacks might have politically, whether they t might -- some of them might havt a potential home in the republican party.

the other thing i'd say is wheni people latch onto a political party, they do it in part because of the programs of that party, the philosophy of that of party if you want to say it, bua they do so also for cultural ltl reasons. this is an old idea. historians have shown in the e s 19th century how people voted based on factors such as d religion and ethnicity and so forth. today there areto cultural facts at work. as my black colleague at yale id said, a lot of black folk look at the republican party and it just doesn't look like them. it just doesn't feel culturally right. w j.c. wyatt, the only black onl republican congressman from oklahoma, he c served for threer four terms, i heard him on the radio the other day, and he said -- let me see if i can get this right. he said, there are a lot of

republican positions that a lot ofre blacks could sign onto, an he said economy and government n and this, and he named this, that, and the other but he said, listen to this. he said, white people for thanksgiving like to eat pumpkin pie. blacumk people tend to eat sweet potato pie. and he said, my problem is, he said, i'm a republican, but my party keeps wanting to feed me pumpkin pie. now, i'm not entirely sure what he meant by that, but i think hk he's talking in part about sort of ambiance factors and cultural factors and maybe sort of fact hyperassertiveness on the part of white leadership of the party. i don't know. it's a comfort level i think pa he's talking about that someone.

has to have one for blacks to feel more culturally comfort fop republicans before they're going to vote republican. the same question is out there for the t latino community as f as i can see. ten years ago there was a real possibility or some republicans thought so that the republicansh could gett a good chunk of the latino vote, but there's a big a part of the republican party that's really, really keen on restricting immigration from latin america, and not only keen on doing that, but they make their keenness known in language and body language and whatever e else that the latino community finds very off-putting and muchw to theho dismay of those republicans who would like to see immigration reform, the rty republican party appears to have

lost most of the latino vote for the next generation just by they vibes they give off if i can use a technical term.cal te so i am not holding my breath until there's an influx of blacks into the republican party, even though there are some republicans who would like to bring that about. and sincerely, sincerely care about the image -- about the issues that blacks are interested in. one of them who did was congressman jack kemp who actually ran for vice presidentc he's no longer alive now. al byiv the time he had left politics, he was an increasingly isolated voice. i don't really see that black folk are going to perceive themselves as having a whole lot of choice between the parties anytime soon.rties an >> just two short questions.ques the following up on the michigan state legislature passing the an ban on affirmative action.

is there any particular reason e aside from just the state legislature's decision to do that why they did that?di and the second question, as you noted, most black americans ost today do define themselves and vote with the democratic party. this follows up with a statemena i had have a previous history po professor who noted in the 2010r midterms though when you in discount the incumbent black ic americans that are re-elected to congress, all the new members who were black were -- ran as we republicans and allen west in an florida was a prime example. but is it a fair statement to t =americans are voting predominantly democrat, more today are running foran tln congressin and the senate -- th only black member in the senate is a republican. a >> actually, the first black lak member of the senate in the 20ty century was alsof/ó a republica. so i really don't know what to make of that.know the senate is w a whole differea

ball game from the ÷house. the house except in sparsely populated states, members of the house of representatives are represented by localities you ll might say.mi by thegh way, one thing that's happened there is one form of you might say affirmative action that's out there is the drawing of congressional districts in aa way to concentrate the black k vote in a way that produces more black congress people and that e has worked. we have 40-some black people inu congress. many republicans love that because if you concentrate most of the black vote inncenk rela few districts, it creates more conservative republican districts every place else. so you have this odd combinatiod of many black folk and many b conservative republicans who want to draw congressional districts in a way that di concentrates the black folk. your first question -- the one

thing i'm going to say, it's not clear to me, and tanner, you may know this, i had the impression that the elimination of t affirmative action in the state of michigan was done by mative referendum. >> that's correct, yeah.ac >> by referendum. so it's a vote of the people, ta not merely the state no legislature. and that's going to happen at'sg elsewhere, i promise,oi unless totally misread this opinion. sam? >> yes. you mentioned how one of the major deciding factors with johnson wanting to push through the voting rights act, the civir rights act, was america's ameri position on the world's stage e with regard to race relations especially with the u.n.u.n. what were presidents before johnson's basically position or platform when leaders from predominantly black african pred nations or nations with any populations with majority colored populations, you know,

visited the country and how -- e did they address it at all or did they just sort of ignore the he will fact in the room? >> they tried to ignore the elephant in the room.>> i think the issue of world opinion really came into play during the kennedy ressio administration. by the time johnson came in -- johnson didn't need to be moved as far as john f. kennedy did. e it's not that john f. kennedy had anything against black folk. it's just that he had no sort of visceral engagement with black i issues. the so for him the way the united states looked on the world stagn loomed larger because he cared -- he was president afterr the berlin crisis happened and the cuban missile crisis -- no, u-2 was eisenhower. i meant the cuban missile crisis. kennedyha was very preoccupied y

with foreign policy for the cu three years he was in office. so for him this was a big factor, world opinion.rld johnson didn't need so much to t be pushed by world opinion because johnson for a variety of reasons really wanted to be thee president of who did for black americans what he saw franklin s roosevelt as having done for one poor americans. johnson had his own reasons to push civil rights, not merely to make the united states look he i better onte the world stage. other sam. >> i have a question because you talked a little bit about how ed democrats don't necessarily havw to compete for the black vote, but do you think that obama is perceived as championing black c interests by african-americans today and kind of a hero in the way that civil rights leaders were or is that not really the case? >> well, i think obama is basically loved by black folk,

but your question raises an interesting topic because you talk about is the president a representative of black ntative interests. that raises the question ofck ws black interests even are. i mean, when we talk about black interests, and i do this, too, we assume that all black folk want the same thing and have thh same orientation. i'm not sure that i can give you a list of what ten black interests that would be definitive, but if you take thee affordable care health care act obamacare, that's going to o benefit a lot of people, in my opinion -- let's say it's 's designed to benefit a lot of people who don't have a lot of money, and black folk disproportionately don't have a lot of money. so is this a black interest? well, no not in a sort of tax

way, but it benefits black folke and i think what a lot of black folk want is things that are not really racially defined. i mean, black people want what e lot of white people want, whichd is a good school for their kids to go to, public transit. some would want that. i'm just trying to think of issues that on their face have nothing to do with race. what and to me that's what obama is -- obama is trying through t obamacare, for example, to make the society more fair. now, you can argue whether app that's got the right apropose or not. you can vote forvo obama or votn for mccain.gth i'm not talking abouatt that. i'm saying that obama is trying to make the society more fair. i is thatet a black interest per ,

no, not per se, but it's a thini that black -- most black people want. i think -- black america is quite happy to have the obamas in the white house. it wasn't long ago that to see michelle and the two kids in tho white house was just a mind nd blowing. you go back two generations, er theyat wouldn't even have been there as guests for god's sake.t so, yeah, ih think obama is stil quite popular among black estioi americans. >> my question is going to shift the focus a little. th i understand that terrorism played a pretty prominent role in hindering black rights following the emancipation as well as during the second civil rights movement. what role has terrorism played

in stymieing black progress since 1970.black >> you mean terrorism directed against black folks? >> i suppose, yes.i >> yeah. i don't think it's really a factor. i was thinking about that this morning though as i prepared to come to campus.ay, that some would say, well, whatt about trayvon martin, for example?know you know, stuff still happens, but as terrible as that was, and i don't know whether you mean this kind of thing or not, but on ma trayvon martin, that's not terrorism. the guy who killed him, i don't know what his racial attitudes v are and i'm not even going to speculate, but to me as awful and unjustified as it was, it' not the same as a klansman goine out and killing somebody because any want a vote. they are two terrible things bu

they're differently motivated. so i don't really see terrorismn of the kind that we saw in the 6 1870s and 1960s as a factor today. not sure i'm being responsive but that's what you're going to get.t yeah, david.t >> do you see sort of a parallel between the lies at the end of the 19th century and some of thh lies today through coded terms. when southerners say they want d to restrict black voting they went for poll taxes and today there are policies like stop and frisk or mandatory minimums or law that is disproportionately affect people of color and particularly black men that seem to operate through a nonracial context but in the end kind of operate exclusively on those groups. you think there's kind of a parallel there? >> let m ae say in the late 19th he century the language wasn't as a coded as we might think.

the actual laws couldn't refer to race because they would have been in contravention of the 15th amendment, which said you e can't deny the vote on the basif of race, color, or previous condition. so you couldn'tco pass a law inr or a constitution in mississippo that said negroes can't vote. so you couldn't do that. so you came up with a ostensiblt nonracial scheme that could be used to the same effect. the but if you look at the way thosd laws were discussed back then, s if you look at the debates in the legislature such as they were, if you look at newspaper l coverage ofe them, people were talking quite openly. they said, gentlemen, our end time goal here is to remove the negro from politics. they made no bones about it. now, today -- the thing about a coded language is it's coded. so you don't know whether somebo somebody is talking in code or

whether they're justju talking that way. k there are all kinds -- there wan an article in "the new york times" two weeks ago about efforts by -- i'm not speaking partisanly now, but efforts by g republicans in certain states to restrict the right to alter access to the ballot, and the e types of measures they were abo talking aboutwe were things lik curbing or eliminating early voting. there'vosti been a trend to all people to votepe not only on d, election day but you could comee to the renl stgistrar ahead of and vote. now there are efforts in severao states to cut back on that. now, i personally oppose cutting back on it.ersona ill personally think people shod have more access to the ballot and not less but i'm the first to admit, it is not the same whw thing as what was doneas earlier

in our e history, and there are those who would make the at argument that if we have three opportunities for you to vote early, that's enough. h youa don't have to have seven.e and a person like that may be totally sincere. it may notit be a code word. it is the case that these to efforts to restrict registratio and to require that you presentp i.d. at the voting place and the like are almost always sponsored by republicans, and i think it'e at least barely possible that he the more of this you do, the fewer people are going to vote who don't want to want for you.e i think people want to curb thee voting of people who want to i vote for them. i think that's what's happeningf and, yeah, it's probably coded.

>> i just have a question about de facto segregation and revisalization projects.projects it seems like that keeps on being the direction cities are going into, especially just like coming from richmond where you have a black mayor and there's a bunch of revitalization projects that don't really seem to help s the existing i guess you could say members of certain communities, and what do you s,d think -- why do you think that e keeps on happening and why is iu perpetuated? is it just the way it'st being marketed as like revitalization or do you think it has to do with a sort of like lack of i i guess communication between white and black communities?et

>> i'm not going to get into details of the richmond example but i haveha it in mind because you and are both from there and we're familiar with it. i was talking before about the difficulty of defining what black interests are, and what io really mean to say is not all plaque people think alike. big revelation. are and there are black folk who s seriously believe that it's going to be better economicallyo for the whole community and for the black community if you do a certain kind of revitalization of some as they call it of a neighborhood downtown. build a baseball stadium and subsidize the washington redskins to come and have their training camp in in this case richmond. a persongood of good will and g intelligence can genuinely believe that those things are going to benefit the community

economically to the point that all will benefit.be all will benefit. of where as the other point i feelg is, hey, you're going to tear down my house and you're not going to give me another place to live and that's a debate within the black community now. that's before you even get white people into it. i'm not quite sure i'm answering your question but it's just -- o in thew '60s people talked abou black power. well, when you have power, you have to decide how to use it and once you have it, there's going to be a debatealdm7wñ within thl community that holds power what you're going to do with it, andb what that black neighborhood  this t black neighborhood one wants over here may not be what the mayor wants over here.. that's the trouble with defining black interests. it was simple in the early '60s black interests were get your bl foot off my neck. give me access, give me my god o

given constitutionalna right to vote. that was a no-brainer. it's complicated now.ñ sam? >> dwhat do you think would be the civil rights would have wod turned out differently if white in the south during the '60s and '70s did not resort to such brutal violence and resisted ci civil rights in a much more passive manner? >> i used to give an exam question that was exactly that in this course and i'md not goie to make you all do an essay at the end of the xheser, but it was actually that. what if law enforcement and thee white public in the south had been more savvy in the '60s and not gone beating on people, would the movement have come out different? and the answer that i have in f mind of that is this, that inñr

the end segregation and racial oppression depended on the the threat of and the occasional us. of violence, and just because you go to albany, georgia, and chief lori prichert doesn't go beating on people, we saw that in the film, doesn't mean you don't have a movement anymore because what you do is you go to a place where the white power structure isn't as deliberative as o all of that, where they're going to go beating on people at and that's exactly what the movement did. theyed picked birmingham becausm birminghamin had a history of o. violence against plaque people.s dozens of homes had been -- buildings have been hurnt up over the years. bull conner was in charge of public safety there.tle it's a little bit complicated he what the political sways was but he was the long time head of

public safety there and he was told if you come to birmingham,u you're going to get a con trantation. look at the freedom rides. they started where? washington d.c.ington the first big city they got to was guess what?body g richmond. nobody got beat up. wan nothing much happened. they went to charlottesville ann down to north carolina.they eventually they got to anniston, alabama, and you saw what happened there. yo so your counter factual is a very provocative and interesting one but it is really counter ne, factual because in the end, in , the end the segregationists were going to pick up the club in tho end. p nadia? >> i just wanted to bring the conversation around to education. when i was in elementary school and middle school, all i learnea

aboutme african-americans was td we were slaves and then boom, a, one day, rosa parks didn't want to stand up and give her seat up. jus and i was just wondering, do you think that our education system has really given us the d help education that would help peoplr to realize where a lot of the issues in the black community om? come from? for example, the president said -- president obama said to condemn black anger without understanding its origin is to c further widen the chasm betweenk the races. so do you think that giving american students a proper h education would help to bring the american people closer coure together? >> of course i'm i a great catin advocate of education. i think we ought to have good education, but i think there's i tendency in this country to

believe that a proper education, however you define that, is th going to cure a lot of problems. there's a tendency to expect thw schools to fix what's wrong wit. the country, and i think that's far overblown. i do in the think we do a good job of education in this country by and large. i think we do a still worse job in the history of teaching. i will say that you all and f yu two-thirds of you are from the state of virginia, as am i, butt i could make the statement even if that weren't the state, what you get in school is better than what i got. because what i got was what had been out there since 1880 with just a few of the rough ems sanded off. they may not teach you beyond rosa park and martin luther king and t malcolm x, but at least y

got that. now, the president said when he was running for office that -- g you're quoting from his speech e of 2008 i think that we saw in class.hat he said that -- read me that quote again. >> to condemn blang anger is without understanding its origie will further widen the chasm.rsd >> to condemn black anger the without understanding its origie is to further widen the chasm between races.nytime i completely agree with that.pee i don't see it happening anytime soon. most people don't want toey d h about aanger. they don't want to study about anger and they don't want to study about stuff that's painful. one reason i'm in here doing e this is because i think we havet to do that and there are people who like to come and listen to t me talk here. but you try to bring that out

into the general publics for th, school, i think the country has come a long way but our aptitude for hearing unpalatable truths is still very much attenuated. dixon? >> going down lyman avenue in ri richmond, you no doubt notice the several statues dedicated t civil war generals like jackson and lee. >> i did notice that.growin growing up there. >> do you think there will be a time where these structures or d concepts dedicated to confederate themes will ever disappear? >> i think the statutes will stay up a tatwhile. we're talking about robert e. k lee and stonewall jackson and j.e.b. stuart and jefferson davis and those guys. jacks there was an interesting n controversy about -- back in thi '90s sometimes. james river used to flood all lo the time and they bill a floodwall to keep the low lying

parts of the city from being cy inundated and the city or somebody put up a display of pictures of richmond history. of and one of the pack tours with a po por portrait of robert e. lee. one black leader complained , yu about that vociferously.t you should have heard a lot of o white people howl about that.are they said, what, you're going to take down that picture of rober? e. lee? this is terrible. it's racial chauvinism and i chi wrote a piece.i sa i said wait a minute.care a i said i don't care about the picture of lee on the floodwal one way or the next, but you've got a predominantly black city council in this city since 1977 or whatever, 20 years now, and t in all that time not only haven't they taken down the

statues of confederate hear heroes but they rebuild -- they tore down the old robert e. leer bridge and named it again the robert e. lee.you wa i said how much conciliation do you want from the black er community? i don't think the confederate r legacy is in danger here. two now, there were two small bridges across the valley that were named after conconfederate. little ones. they call the first street in popular parlance the first wh street bridge and the fleet but street bridge but they were the stonewall jackson and j.e.b. stewart ridge. they did reknew those after after civil rights leaders. but believe me there's plenty

hels named after stonewall jackson and robert e. lee in that city. people campaign, people say i'd just as soon not have that. i think general lee will be there when they carry my coffin past there on the way to the th. cemetery. i think he'll still be there because i don't think that's who have power now are vindictive. i think they're very tolerant. nice people. and by the way, the city council is not -- it's a predominantly n black ancity, 50/50 with a predm predominantly white city councit and that's anothere argument fo what i said before which is that people are voting less and less among racial lines, including es black people. black people vote for a white person they think is good very, very readily. [ inaudible question ] >> i don't know the detail but i

was in the boy scouts in we richmond and we werere in the robert e. lee council.ey don they don't't tall it that anymo, right? >> no, they took it off.t >> they took it off, okay. well, it's interesting the way we're still debating these sort of cultural issues after 120 years. we're still talking about civil commemorating the civil bar. we just had a 150th anniversary, but still the past is not dead,t it's not even past. >> so i guess something you hit on was talking about the black folks today and i guess this is probably obvious question, but would you say that blackness ris during m the civil rights movemt was much more collective. i guess iti was and i guess people now try to be associate y

blackness as something that's more broken down into intersecting cultures black -- >> i don't mean to make a pun but the issues were black and white then. there was a black community that had a common set of issues, i f mean a common set of issues.u co you could be a college president in the south or you could be a u janitor and you faced some of pr the same problems because you were black. >> even blacks from the north? >> well, it was different in net york but it was another set of problems. it's all. relative. i'm just saying that the issues were -- they seemed more straightforward then. maybe they weren't, but they ty seemed so. i think most of you all have some place you need to go? need to get out of here. all right. thanks. and i'll see you on thursday. the 19th amendment was

ratified on august 18th, 1920. a panel of historians and women leaders will commemorate the 94th anniversary today by examining how women's suffrage has impacted the role of women in american politics and society. hosted by the national archives in washington, d.c., we'll have that live at 7:00 p.m. eastern more from our lectures in history series with central california state university professor robert wolff. he held a class on the civil war and how the memory of it has changed over the last century hf and a half. this is just over an hour. is dy >> okay.this, so in getting ready for this, i wanted to do like a little background work on the so-callei semicentennial of the civil war which, of course, was 1911 to i

1915.his i found this quote. i'll tell where you it comes from in a little bit but it does seem to me to kind of early encapsulate the feeling of the early 20 wthar century. the days of the civil war now belong to the historian, the t. now i think you would add the the dramatist. now i think you would add the re-enactor there probably. pe but, of course, this is a perios at which the civil war is still very much a part of living memory, right? there are living veterans of the war. there are people who were not involved in combat who are still alive.bat and in 1912 the state of 19 pennsylvania issued an invitation to honorably discharge veterans of the civild war whether they fought for thea unior fought for the confederacc to come too gettysburg+@.miñth reunion of sorts, and you have probably already seen pictures c of this or read about it in david blight's work. but i want to kind of spend a i little time talking about that.

for the confederacy, the t invasion of gettysburg marked d something of the high water mark. their featpeak of aspirations. they invaded the north. the defeat at gettysburg was the beginning of the end because it proved on the field of battle there was no way to take the wa to the north.so her so here we have some pictures.e. this is actually a picture of new york veterans having a meal at gettysburg.o if you were to look at the the public narrative, the narratived that you would find in :=mg0xtin commemorative ets pamphlets, in public pronouncements, the sentiments that were expressed during this period were very much part of what david blight called the rek conciliationist memory of the world. toco quote again that pennsylvaa evening çtelegraph, there can n no unworthy sectionalism, no li bitter memories in the prospects

with the reunited country with the spirit of patriotism pervading the length and breadth of it the american republic of e today is not the same as it was. so while we talk tonight, i wano you to think a lot about the language that's being used, and we can come back to some of it, but içim want you to think in particular about there can be no unworthy sectionalism and what that might tell us.y p as you probably all know, in 1913 union and confederate veterans re-enacted pickett's charge at the battle o.f gettysburg. this is a photograph of them he shaking hands4i across the walle how many of you have been to noe gettysburg, so you know the wall. you can see this place.see i don't think that as historians we should underestimate the importance of this gesture. given the extraordinary pags of

the conflict that we've studied, so let me ask you a question. so what were the feelings of union and confederate soldiers for one another during the war? what do we know about those? tara? >> they were not fans of each other. like they didn't like each other at all. >> jamie? >> i think each side respected the sacrifice of the other though, acknowledged it, and sort of found a commonality >> t amongst experience. >>er later or at the time? there >> at the time i think there is expression but certainly later obviously, too. >> .okay. john? >> to an extent i think it depends where the soldiers are coming from, too, graphically from the border states or from the north where there is more anti-slavery abolitionist [ sentiment. >> okay. all right.>> all so let's kind of keep going a little bit. look the way i look at some of those narratives, i agree that there are -- there's signs of kind of a shared understanding but it o

seems to me in so far there are tensions that there were at their peak. we have seen in james mcpherson's work a clear desire to get out there and kill as many of the enemy as possible.em >> one of the things i'm finding doing my paper is general lee actually wasidt quiteç dismisf union soldiers and i'm not sure that -- i know that sectionalism is the issue, but it does seem t to me that the south seemed to have more of a marshall spirit, and i think that they sort of h thought of themselves as superior fighters to the north. >> i agree. i do think so. and thus it must have also been very difficult to suddenly find yourself on the losing foot. yeah. >> was that feeling confined to the eastern theater or the western theater?eas and lee fought in the east with

the army of the potomac.n. he might have a different deed. opinion. >> he might indeed. it's a very good point. i want to put up this other image because if i go back for just a moment and look at the er gettysburg, as a student o of t civil war, the image that comes to mind almost immediately is m this one.to min who has seen thisd image befor. this is a thomas thannast car t from 1872 mocking horace greeley who was running for president. greeley said let us clasp hand over the bloody chasm of civil v war memory and thomas nast recreated this by sort of depicting greeley sort of ng extending out his hand over the

dead of andersonville prison.r , and i think for me at least the notion that we have moved from this to this is significant, right? how -- like how in your opinion do we get from a northern memor that is at least in part in 1872 still strongly condemning the confederate military apparatus,t from there to the handshake? yo what do you think? from john? >> it's from the whole drive of reconciliation. it's bringing back be the union together in an attempt to create a more robust, complete togetheo nation. >> okay. tara? >> i really think it's time. y 350 years has passed by the timt they take this photo, and some of those hard feelings might rd start to vanish over time.st >> okay.he jamie? >> it's also a nation who has

had another war behind it, albeit a small one, and that wat sort of the moment for a lot of the veterans to find a commonality amongst imperial y. simple. >> so when confederate veterans they s decided that they should support the spanish american war, that a became a moment. >> sure. s >> of sort of .unity. th john?in >> i think there's a bit of a political nature to it and then there's also, you know, even ghe though we're seeing set transhere, there's less veterans at this point which cools the tension because there's less o people involved in the event. part of it is the confederacy wants to find through the spanish-american war that that honorable image of themselves. when we moved away from the war and when we were fighting the war and when we come back to the nation. is >> so whose memory is not he visible in the handshake? austin? >> the african-americans, the

slaves. >> the african-americans, ans. particularly those ex-slaves. we if we go back -- actually if we go back to that pennsylvania editorial, i'm going to read you a couple other passages and i just want you to listen to them carefu caref carefully. so we have that editorial that said there could be in unworthy sectionalism. it also says the following in reference to kind of the valor e of soldiers, right? both vanquished and visitors gave sublime display of the di heroism of the american race.rae and then later sort of looking back across the entire period of the civil war, that period has enriched american history beyond computation, and the lessons taught by its results are of inestimable value to the race both in the present and the future.

what word leaps out at you in those passages? does any word? what do you think the writer means by american race?hite, >> we're talking white race.rac. >> we're talking white folks.pa. >> it's the commonality. absolutely. >> commonality.civil we're not talking about civil war memory. up i thought i would put up a different sort of image. here we have the ku klux klan, right? this is the early ku klux klan of the post-civil war period but we also have the ku klux klan of the 1920s. this is a photograph circa 1922 when we talk about civil war oud memory, should we talk about the

klan? i'm going to be suggesting that's a yes, but perhaps maybee i should frame it what would be the consequences of thinking whe about the klan while thinking about civil war memory? matt? >> when you talkbou about the ko you got to -- i'm thinking uctin reconstruction, 1876, 1877 where you got the federal government actually going out thereere an putting i forget the law that ac they actually put in place. >> it's the ku klux klan act. >> there you go. but basically going out to arrest and stop these types of violent actions against african-americans. >> yeah. t successfully. >> right.essf, >> for the most part. so the ku klux klan is very much a part of the post-war re reconstruction history, right? but why might we think about n a them in the context of the 50th? anniversary? john? >> i was going to jump -- kind s of leads to this as well that

the ku klux klan kind of shows g everything that didn't go quitew the way that it could have after the civil war shows the failingi of reconstruction, the failing to kind of move past slavery into equality because you still have these people who are wielding fear and power in a nan large portion of the nation. >> okay. it's jamie. >> let's not forget they're born of the knights of mary fagan. it is the creation of that lie that even persists in one form i or another to this day.ther t >> yes, exactly. and i think we want to look, ano so traditionally when we talk about the rise of the klan beginning in the middle of the d second decade of the 20th century, we talk about thomas dixon's the klansman which gives inspiration to d.w. griffith's "the birth of a nation."

but the question for us it seems to me should be why does the ike klan seem like the logical rence reference point? because the klan is more buibund. whetherow it's for the book or e movie or the growth of the klan culture that by the 1920s embraces millions of people, hw what is it -- how is it a salient image?ima >> because it reflects public memory and what ebbs and flows. it disappears only to be rebornt i think was it 1925, there's 4 e million members andmb certainly that is the height of the lost cause through the '30s. and even to the '50s and '60s d it's in one form or another until it's destroyed by civil rights. >> great, thank you,y jamie. so this gets us off to kind of k think a little bit about the role of race.

so i'm going to talk a little bit the way i think -- what i think race means in that periodn of time. i think we have to be very we h careful when we see the term american race. i think we need to remember tha it is the height of kind of race thinking in the early 20th century or at least it's part of it and by american race the rac, people who use those terms generally thought sort of what i kind of white folks should be, t but it wasn't simply white versus black. it was far more complex in the e late 19th century. so in some ways, the rise of the klan is a reflection also of nativist sentiments, anti-immigrant sentiments.so so if we kind of remember that, we remember that as groups sorto of looked to try to think theirg way through the 20th century, r, right, they looked back at this the civilt group from war as f the model for how to gk

forward. when we thinkt about the semi e centennial, we have to remembere it is exactly the same period of time -- i should say 1911 to 1915, my apologies, it should su say that, but we need to remember that 1913 is the year e when woodrow wilson segregated the federal government, right? it started with agencies like the postal service and moved frm from there.e. we have "birth of the nation," we mentioned that. by 19 224 we have the immigratin restriction act which pegs the e number of people who can migrate to the united states at a percentage of the people in thes country in 1890. it shifts the focus from eastern southern european migrants to -- back to western and northern ep european eamigrants. i think we have to see all of e these things as being connected in some way. they're also connected to historical scholarship. one of the things i want to tal about is the connection betweenn

the civil war memory and the kind of scholarship that exist about civil war and lot reconstruction. we talk a lot about aisto histo. memory. those of you who are inou i pubr history which is ay, good chunks you, you'd probably talk about it more than anybody else. th so you'rean probably familiar wh this david blight quote. blight wrote in a book on the civil war, history, what trained historians do is a reasoned tiof reconstruction of the past rooted in research.al and critical and skeptical of human motive and action. memory, however, is often treated as a sacred set of ed potentially absolute meanings and stories possessed as the ed heritage or identity of a presei community. memory is often owned, historyy interpreted. memory is passed down through hh generations, history as you weln know, is revised.s. but i would then say that in many ways history and memory are

rarely so close as they are at the beginning of this period.qñ blight's comments reflect a much later state of scholarship than you would find at the turn of the century.t th the turn of the century is the h era of thee dunning school, nad for william around bald dunning of columbia university. it looked specifically at reconstruction, it saw reconstruction as a terrifying r and terrible mistake places thed vote in thes hands of african-americans, dunning and hisan followersd argued was sof the big mistake of so reconstruction. so scholarship of thisarsh era l resonating together. so that's my 50-year piece. any questions? because i'd love them. jamie?>> scholarship to support that at t that time?o at >> for the most part having reat a bunch of those old pieces pi generally looked at political pam plphlet pamphlets, documents, speeches c

of fairly famous people but if you looked back -- if you look at any prominent politician in s the 19th century their papers and letters were published by o somebody. all you need is a fairly good library. federal government documents in some cases. >> when they came across writings of federrederick dougl would they just -- >> few saw douglass as a central player. semicentennial celebrations g or really were the reconciliation between the soldiers. i have heard and i have read some scholarship that says it was really more of a political a move and that it wasn't really f like this friendly gathering and that there was a lot of refusal for reconciliation on b.e.t. sides both sides that were actually in the war.and >> it's possible we look back a, and see it being stronger than it really was. there are still political

tensions between the north and the south but they have woodrowl wilson as president and he is a southern president from stanton, virginia. and so his world is -- that world is already very different than what has come before. >> and he speaks at gettysburg. >> he does. he does. austin? >> just a quick question, when the klan waswas revived around semisen taenal, that's when like the confederate flag was first used widely, if i remember correctly. is there a reason that the ther battle flag was used over the pn federal flag of the government.e >> i'm the wrong person to answer that question.kay. i'll have to get back to you on that one.ions any other ?questions? yeah, matt. the >> just the notion that the celebration, of course, is the semicentennial but i know that a lot of veteran groups were a meeting on a regular basis,

always having reunions and al certainly in the southwa that ww a bigas deal for small towns they would get their local brigades or volunteer cae units that they came up. was that a way that the country was able to perpendicular pet wait the memory of the civil war or do you think that that's hows the memory was sort of skewed sm to speak? >> i think memory is never purev so i don't think it ever can be. certainly in the north, which ie where i know more, the grand armyç of the at trepublic, cha of the gar served as ways for i remembering and also as true platforms for political action. i suspect that's true for the wl confederate veterans as well.g t >> what's interesting is a lot of these confederate high-profile generals were ified vilified for any criticism they had of how the war went but at e these particular reunions they y were cheered.

so it's almost like you had almo almost atst a national level a sort of disconnect from the local level, and i'm just wondering if the klan was -- more -- that memory was more local and then graduated up to f national level because of "birth of a nation" or did it just kind of come out of nowhere? >> so what strikes me as being really interesting is the focal point of the klan is in indianah and the midwest, which is t actually not the place where you ha century is to me fascinating because presumably, you have grandchildren of union veterans. right? as significant players in the klan. >> just because it's sort of

like a white supremacist type of gee, wasn't it great back then? >> i think that's part of it. i would love to hear what other people think. we have to be careful with the term white supremacist, which is correct for us, but we're projecting it backwards. that's why i want to g h sort ofaving set of meanings th could grasp. >> you mention immigration, butu at the same time, you have thisi industrial revolution where people are living in poverty an you have gotin people that are just miserablepe.op and again, harkening back to the days of egrarian bliss, so to speak. >> these are agrarian protestant, christian, often evangelicals. the big issue that holds them together aside from the americae race is prohibition is a one itse large issues. they sort of proudly support prohibition. the

>> it almost plays into the whol whole frederick jackson turner idea of the great american race conquering all of america, and , we have gone away from that because now we have all this uso filth and problems in the city. >> yeah.flect it does reflect all the prejudice that is -- yes.pr short version. yeah. john, did you have something?al all right. we so if we jump forward to the civil war centennial, so this ns is, i think there's a lot more scholarship to work with. wo i think you can see quickly thai the reconciliationist memory ofn the war is alive and well. this is a medallion that was produced by the united states civil war centennial commissionn there was, in fact, a national centennial commission, something we do not have now for the 150th.litate and its job was to kind of and facilitate and organize and prod provide some kind of coherent structure to the commemoration.o every state was to have its own commission.

to plan activities. now, in 1961, the history of the politics are very different than 50 years before. right? so here is a statement from that centennial commission, and i found this one. kind of captivating. what was lost by the war was lost by all of us. what was finally gained was gained by all of us. how do you read that statement? how do you read that? yes?>> i >> i guess you could look at it as although a lot was lost, both loss and the gain for one side was both sides was a gain for

both in the end. ag so it was kind of an everythingd got something and everyone lost something.lost >> okay. emily? >> and it sounds to me like there was no distinction between the sides. you know, it didn't matter.n? it we all came through it together. and came out of it together as one without distinction.withou >> okay.on. john? >> so me, what it kind of sound like is coming back to the reconciliation thing before. what was lost was the union and that what everyone gained when , the war was over was once again a reunified union. so what is gained is the nation, essentially. >> so yes?>> what >> what i thought about it was everyone, both sides lost l people, that people died in thio war, and so, you have hundreds of thousands of people who died so yes, everyone lost someone, everyone knew someone who died,u but the freedom and

reunification of the union was gained by everyone at the end. >> who's the us? john? >> white people.>> >> there's no mention of slavery or anything.d >> could you reconcile that re statement with the experience o the people you read about in wi southwest georgia in susan donovan's "becoming free in the cotton south"? john? >> no. >> no. why not? why would it be difficult to th? reconcile those two? matt? >> because if you are a slave, you didn't lose your slaves.our >> right. okay. you gained. right? you gained.mean and, of course, i mean, we talked about this. t we talked a little bit about bt cultural reference points, but it's also true in the 1960s, you really did have different re terminologies for the war. so it may have been the united

states civil war commemoration commission, but there were mmisi states that refused to use the term civil war. right? so terms like the war of the southern insurrection, the war between the states, the war of northern aggression, those weret termed that were much more at play than they were or have been in my lifetime. the war between the states was taught in maryland as a kid which was, i think, meant to be more neutral. right.e now, as it happened, the national civil war commemoratio commission had its own controversies. happeni what is happening in 1961 aside from commemorating the civil war?asi jen?t? >> civil rights movement? >> civil rights movement.re so we have brown v. the board of education in 1964. and

we have sit-ins in greensboro in 1960, right?nniver so all of these things are part of the backdrop, and not long before the anniversary of gettysburg, medgar evers is murdered in his driveway.so right? so that is the backdrop to thist so when the civil war centenniaw commission held one of its meetings in charleston, south f carolina, its challenge was this.ent new jersey sent delegates who weren't white. and the south carolina centennial commission arranged e for the guests to stay in the he francis marion hotel, which was for whites only.ans and it set off a firestorm becas because in some ways that otherr memory of the civil war, the emancipationist memory which is not floated to the surface as readily in 1913 floated very quickly in 1961 and beyond oated because of the context. now, in the end, that war war between the states civil war commission was solved by holdinn the charleston meeting on a f

federal naval base in charlestos so that the meeting itself was on desegregated ground even though most people stayed in thn hotel in charleston. anyone a stamp collector? i certainly was as a kid.er i had these stamps, and i never gave them any thought. so if you can see them, what do you see? there's one stamp for each year of the war.u so you have -- where do we have it? we have sumpter for 1861. shiloh for 1862, gettysburg for '63, the wilderness for '64, and then appomattox. what do you see in these stamps, tara?stamp >> i see that women and african-americans are kept out of them. >> yes, i think that's fair. th. austin? a

>> they focus on the military t aspect of the war and not like the political or social implications or aspect.or >> if we think of some of the e books we looked at, it's not -- it's not, we've looked at some stuff about the military conflict, but this is all about the military conflict.erience and tara, you are completely w right.ar there are no women here.we se so it's about men's experience n in the war, presumably. even though we see silhouettes and we could imagine one of thin these is african-american, i nk think the assumption is that they're not. what do you think of the appomattox quote? if you can see the stamp here, appomattox with malice toward none. that's lincoln. right?th that's lincoln's second inaugural. okay.ok with malice toward none. of which seems to me as clear as possibly could be an effort to e

kind of print reconciliationist memory right on the stamp.mmissn so, there were state civil war commissions and they each produced lots and lots and lots. of stuff. the maryland civil war centennial commission which youi know is near and dear to my heart, my home state, produced a wonderful brochure i will show o all of you at some point.ting this is a fascinating brochure. it's some 60 pages long, and itt details all of the places you can go to remember the civil war. has little narratives, biographies, vignettes and if you read it, what is striking is there is exactly one african american mentioned. does anybody want to guess? it is indeed frederick douglassm right?

it's sort of hard to imagine thy story without frederickerican douglass it does specifically mention douglass role with the african-american troops. however, the rest of the booklet, the vast majority of y the booklet -- let's put it this way. it is astounding how many civiln war memorials there are in the state of maryland.land. i grew up near robert e. lee park, and i knew there were i plenty of civil war memorials, l but this is one civil war bu memorial after another.anothe including one to confederate o nurses, by the way.confeder there's even an entry for john brown's raid. brow now, that might strike you as s odd, but you need to remember that john brown planned his raid in maryland and stayed at a farm owned by a family named kennedy. before entering harper's ferry. but what's striking about the entry on the raid is it doesn'th tell you why john brown raided d harper's ferry.