implicated with civil rights activism. johnson said the rat browns dh. rat brown, we haven't talked about him be the martin luther king s and all of them are products of community action. that's where he get tthey get t. we finance all of them. notice here linking black power folks with martin luther king to community action. so johnson is to fan. he wants to get rid of community action. in 1967 there are all kinds of restrictions placed on it that it allow local governments to take more control of it. another thing that's linked to community action is the so called riots that occurred beginning in harlem in 1964,

1965, 1967, 1968. outbreaks of violence throughout the country. you read the introtucdurks tctie turner report. this was after the detroit riot was a particularly big one. five days. 41 dead after the detroit riot. there were 163 riots during the summer of 1967. johnson put together this panel to investigate and come up with an explanation so we're moving now to interpreting urban uprisings. so what is the colonel commission. this commission by the way is chaired by the governor of illinois and has members from both parties on it and has a labor official and member of the naacp. it's a real blue ribbon panel. what did they have to say.

>> i thought it was interesting. white tuinstitutions created it white society condones it talking about the violence that occurred. >> they are talking about the ghetto. >> yeah. but that's where the riots occurred. so they are saying that white institutions created it. they maintain it. they keep that status quo. i thought it's interesting that they basically define institutional racism in this report so it's pretty blatant that it's there. i don't really know why nothing was fully done about it. >> yeah. johnson actually shoved this report. he was not happy with this report. scott. >> this was a short quote that kind of stood out to me. he said this is our basic conclusion. our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal. >> yeah. now this is 1967, right? the report comes out in 1968

we've had a civil rights act past, federal housing act past and yet we are here moving into two separate and unequal soci y societi societies. institutional racism, the whole process of metropolitan development. i mean it's interesting to hear this federal commission actually, you know? we learned about the concept of institutional racism by reading black power and here is a federal panel. yes. >> okay. the kerner commission therefore, here is some pictures of the rite o riots just to give you a sense. this is from the detroit riot of 1967. institutional racism relative deprivation and frustrated expectations. african-americans growing up in an affluent society in the civil rights age who don't see things

changi changing. they go to bad schools and live in poor neighborhoods so it's an ut bre outbreak of frustration is how the kerner panel explains it. how would carmichael interpret it. >> they are talking about how this has been implemented -- there's no actual changes that have really come from this movement. societal change. it can't be the acts that are passed. there needs to be some actual action. this article focused more on different. >> i'm thinking about their use of the colonial metaphor to

describe the ghetto. so certainly they would target institutional racism but for them, this is a political -- it's not just people are frustrated and angry, this is a political rebellion, right? you can hear this in different language people use to describe the uprising. is a riot, criminality or is it a rebellion, a political act. this is how they would see it. a colonial population attacking the sources of exploitation. in the riots, typically the property that was damaged is property owned by nonblacks so they are targeting that notion of exploitation in their community. >> also there's a good chance that the media highlighted on more of the worst parts of it in pretty much every other story and it affects how other people see -- that don't live there. they are not there first hand. mostly what they get is on the

news like the radio and a lot of white people control the media and the other side of the media is just like the black power movement but then the other white people see just this one vision of riots and just shedding the worst light on the black people who really just want change. >> that's a really astute comment. here is the most common explanation, right? it's a culture of poverty. these are young men growing up without father figures who end up being delinquents and criminals. you can see that that couple of quotations i have for you. the wall street journal in 1964. family live break down in negro

slums sows seeds of race violence. husbandless homes spawn hoodlums sowsiologists say. the culture of poverty that results from male unemployment and family break up generates a system of ruthless exploititive relationships within the ghetto so yes, the more common explanation as rose suggests is that it's criminality. the answer is not massive programs to rebuild the ghetto or open opportunity. the answer is law and order. in fact the crime bill in 1968 gave a wind fall to local police to maintain order in the ghetto. all right. so imagining alternatives. alternatives to the federal government's focus on human

capital development. we talked about one alternative already which was keying and the urban league and the freedom budget, right? massive investment. we will talk about two others. one is the emerge of a well fair rights movement. the other is king's last vision before he was assassinated which is the poor people's campaign. then a third one is the black power perspective from tury and hamilton. we will see if we can get through all of this. so remember the segmented well fair state. let me wipe this off. we've alluded to this here a little bit but in the social security act of 1965 that set up the structure of the american well fair state, we have on the one side social insurance that

would be old age, what we call social security now. old age insurance and unemployment insurance. remember a lot of groups are left out of this most denominatedenominat predominately agricultural workers, domestic workers. on the other side we have public assistance which are the programs that come to be known as well fair and they target certain groups not expected to be in the labor force and the most controversial and largest is aide to dependent children. you can see here from the social security board very early on a very positive view on this program so that dependent children can grow up in their own families. the federal and governments provide cash allowances more children will have chances to live normal wholesome lives in their own homes. the discrepancy is white

widows. as white widows get folded in here we add survivors here and women who are widows who had been married to a covered insured male through this system can get funded this way leaving adc to unmarried mothers and minorities and the poor who don't have access to this. so over the post war period the population of adca, fdc shifts. the image of it becomes much less positive, right? so let's look at a couple of documents that you read. you read two that involve adc in particular. one is the urban league of new orleans which is responding to what they see as a crisis in louisiana in 1960. the other is the advocate for well fair. this is elizabeth wickenden who's proposing a certain response to these programs. so what did you read?

what's happening in louisiana in 1960? joseph. >> they are going to pass a bill or a few bills that would say that if a child was going to receive money it had to be in a suitable home so all homes without -- with single parents or parents not working they would be left out of the bill. the document was arguing that it was backed by racial standards or racial -- i guess standards. >> yeah. so the suitable home provision really said that if the household has an illegitimate child, a child born out of wed lock then it's considered an unsuitable home and not eligible for aid. 23,000 children are knocked off.

>> what really stands ou at and think is important is that they say the urban league said there was public inaction. no one was doing anything about this. it seems pretty blatantly messed up just from any perspective. i mean there's definitely white people who have illegitimate children, i'm sure. >> the rates were actually growing faster for whites but many white families, you'd give it up for adoption, it's a whole other system. yeah. >> right so the press barely played any attention to it so the urban league was trying to get the press to shed some light on this. they actually ended up getting attention from international -- >> british women. >> other people around the world but it's kind of surprising it shows institutional racism at the time where the big massive -- the press, the government, other people were kind of ignoring this starving children.

reconstruction and civil rights eras. it's just over an hour. here we are at the end of the semester and it strikes me as a good opportunity maybe to compare the reconstruction period that we started off talking about in this course with what some have called the 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 the second reconstruction. by the first, i mean in not only post-civil war reconstruction, i'm including also the civil war itself and all that took place during the war up through the end of radical reconstruction. the second reconstruction will be simply enough, the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s. i won't carry my remarks any farther than that, i think. now, in talking about the two reconstructions, i'm going to have to use some broad generalizations of a type i'm not entirely comfortable with, for example i'll talk occasionally about the white south or the north or something like that and that covers up all kinds of complexities that, unfortunately, i don't have time to get into today. now, 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. and i'm going to read slowly because i want you to follow and listen for similarities and differences. the first reconstruction. for generations enslaved and free blacks met oppression with resistance, with creative adaptation, 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 the social and racial order of the south. that's the civil war. the white south, indeed, fought back in a total war that lasted for four years. southern blacks joined the fight on the side of the union and

they helped ensure that the war became a struggle that would definitively end slavery. the confederacy was decisively ended in the war and radical reconstruction but whites in the south, as you know, eventually regained the right to do pretty much anything they wanted when it came to race relations in the south. and that had been accomplished by the end of 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, now this is where it becomes a little different.

eventually, southern blacks challenged the southern racial order. again, the white south fought back. but this time by means far short of total war. some northern whites and blacks and even a few white southerners joined this fight but it was mainly a fight of southern african-americans. again, the 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 more lastingly and we're going to talk about that. so, in both cases you've got a backdrop of black people struggling for decades against oppression and then you got a challenge to the racial order in the south.

the first time it come 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 shout rebounds and erases many of the fruits of the first reconstruction. the second time around more of the gains have proved permanent i'll argue as we go on. all right. now in more detail what can we say is true in both cases, in both reconstructions? first of all, as i've said two or three times now in both instances a coalition of southern blacks and northerners proved decisive. in attacking and listen to this, in attacking what many regarded as a southern problem. the southern problem in the 1860s is slavery. and the southern problem in the 1950s and '60s is segregation

and racial oppression. i say in each instance there's a coalition that formed. the earlier coalition is that the coalition that includes the union army, the republican party and free and enslaved blacks. the later coalition includes southern blacks and certain elements of the north, namely those few who actually came down south to participate in the

very interesting parallel. the second reconstruction was emphasis of equality of education and desegregation of education. first reconstruction, of course, was a time when tissue was achieving any education at all. blacks having been deprived of it. in both instances blacks wanted the right to vote on the same basis as whites. in both reconstructions the black church played a crucial role. now, you can argue and some people do argue about the exact extent of church leadership in the civil rights movement in the '50s and '60s.

the cliche has it it was a church centered movement. but don't forget when we saw the montgomery bus boycott it wasn't pastors, it was rosa parks and then the ministers came in very quickly on their heels and their participation was very much welcomed, their participation proved crucial. this movement gives the world the leadership of martin luther king and i'm taking nothing away from thelerr clerical leadershi. let's remember who started the sit ins. who did? students. college students in north carolina and eventually in dozens of other cities. the freedom rides were conducted by whom? by congress of racial equality which started them and then students, veterans of the sit in

movement who carried the freedom rides to completion. no church involvement there. again, i'm not trying to depricate the church, i'm asserting it played a central role but i don't want to attribute them a monopoly of leadership, the church. in both reconstructions, the enthusiasm of white northerners started to wane, to 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 that was greater than many white northerners were willing to pay and that's one of the reasons the first reconstruction ended. in more recent times, you find that when the inner-city riots

of the '60s take place, the school bussing issue rises in the '70s, when whites realize there's a national problem here and a national fribs fade enthusiasm for whites or at least the whites in the north starts to decline. this time the federal withdrawal has been far less complete than it was in the 1870s. and today the south is different in ways some of which we'll talk about in a few moments and many of which we don't have time to get in, to but i would say one of the most important ways in which the south is different is that 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 that in the 1870s, violence by the ku klux klan and other white

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

world what was at stake and that's what happened. so fewer whites in the '60s who were taking up arms. 1860s it was millions in the confederate army. fewer in the 1960s by far to less effect. in both reconstructions northern blacks played an active role but southern blacks played the decisive role why is that? give me one good reason why southern blacks are crucial both times? [ inaudible ] they are invested in the outcome but even more simple. [ inaudible ] okay. so the blacks in the south knew the way things worked on the ground. they knew what they were up against. [ inaudible ] yes, because the south is where

black people lived. in the 1860s, almost all african-americans lived in the south. probably 95% of the population of blacks lived in the south and even in the 1960s a majority of blacks still lived in the south. slight majority. but, of course, it's going to be the southern blacks who play a decisive role because that's where the struggle is being carried out and that's where they live. many of them. okay. in both reconstructions -- and this is more of a sideline but a fairly interesting -- in both reconstructions you see that the diversity within the black community emerges in, if anything, a more vivid way and 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 free before the civil war population of african-americans and those newly freed blacks in the plantation districts. the latter wanting radical land reform and the former not being particularly interested in that. so 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 the tensions between the southern christian leadership conference on the one hand and snick on the other, which becomes more acute over time. we see differences between the northern black community and the southern black community in the 1960s. you heard john lewis who led the selma to montgomery march talking about the emergence of malcolm x as a national figure and how black folk like john lewis who had grown up in the

south in the christian church really didn't know what to make of malcolm x. sign both of these instances you really see what was always out there, which is that the black community in this country is a diverse one. in both reconstructions the crucial demands were for equality and access and i talked about the fact that i liked the word access better than the word inclusion because to me inclusion has a little bit of a ring of wanting to get into the other fellow's game, whereas access somehow feels more neutral to me. it's about the i it's about the idea that if inst 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.t's er hav in both reconstructions, and i have to be a little bit careful here, the first -- the first

reconstruction, if we talk about that portion of trit, which is e civil war por, the the first pa reconstruction, you get a real c measure of black political power. up through the end o of radical reconstruction, blacks have tio political power that they never had before.r then again in the second of reconstruction, one of the fruits of the movement is, was intended to be, and intended to be that blacks in the south wonh the right to vote. on a basis of equality. a measure of political power. now, we need to add, hasten to add that in both cases the power that blacks obtained was in a political system that was stills dominated by whites. at least on the national level and state level. by on the local level, it's a little different. there are many localities which were dominated by blacks in thee first radical reconstruction.

and there are manytr localitiesy the united states now. in especially in the deep south su where you have black majority, black office holding and so forth.the the bad news is these places tend to be impoverished places. places where you may have political power, monetary resources to make a difference are not abundant.second in both instances, the first an second reconstruction blacks ended up tied almost exclusivelt to a single political party.was first time around it was the se republican party. the second type around, it's the democratic party. there are those who argue this is disadvantageous.d thohis i had a colleague, black colleague at yale who once saido as many have, black america would be better off today if there were more black bett republicans. because then the two parties pae would compete for the black vote by speaking to black interests.r

he said we'd be better off if there were more black republicans.th the problem is most of us don'ts want to be republicans, republic including me, he said. i'm quoting him.sa so there you have it. after both reconstructions, severe economic inequities remained. most of the black population after the first reconstruction f 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.th i made an argument in the beginning that the gains of a reconstruction have proved moree lasting this time.

after all, if we say we're t talking about the '50s and '60ss if we say 1965 was the high watermark of the civil rights movement, how many years have passed since then?t about 50 years. after 50 years there's been no rolling back, for example, of the black's right to vote.wer in many ways blacks have more power and influence than they have ever had.ce the black middle class is bigger than it's ever been. if we were going to have a been. retreat from reconstruction like we did the first time around, rn it's taking an awful long time d to happen in any decisive kind of way.g a why is that? well, it's hard to answer ve definitively but prejudice against blacks was less engrained at the beginning of the second reconstruction than it was at the beginning of the first. the now, that's an answer but raises another question. why? why was white prejudice as bad

as it may have been less intense in the 1950s and 1960s than it was 100 years ago?er 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 yom but we mentioned in the latter 19th century, people who claimed to be scientists and social scientists were saying their tuo inherent racial differences, their superior and inferior races inherently.superi that was something that a respectable person could say ini a room like this and not be resc laughed out of the place.ard 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, ha which you mentioned already, by the 1950s, is that a lot of b blacks moved to places where ata they could vote. moved

great migration to the northern cities. the fact blacks could vote up there meant in parts of the or to e, white politicians had listen to white people. that proved helpful when it came time to vote on civil rights legislation in the 1960s.n the another reason that the gains have lasted this time better la than last time i would argue, president lyndon johnson was so politically skillful in this realm.n in the realm of foreign policy d he didn't have a clue. unfortunately. in many respects. but domestically he had the vision to come up with a systemt that would come as close as a humanly possible to self-perpetuating. what he understood was the vote was going to be key. we talked about this.oun that if you want to change the

south, if you want to change the country, you've got to ensure that black people have the right to vote. top to the only way to do that is by federalizing voter registration, and he did that.de he also figured out if black o people have the right to vote, e it's going to become politically more decide to take their righto away.y. the right to vote is a te self-perpetuating right to a certain extent.ght to because you have the right to o vote, politicians are going to y 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 o to being denied the right to vote. if you see that. that sounds silly when you hear it spoken, but it's true. i'll more about that in a minute.toas d another thing that was different in the second reconstruction isr the world context. first of all, the fact that there really was a world context.s 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.th as i mentioned before, general assembly is a body of nations i which every country is y is represented. with the break up of european empires after world war ii you y ended up with dozens of w countries represented in the ih u.n. that aree places where people of color live. so it became less and less tenable for a president of the r united states to try to get y anything accomplished on the hed world stage or in the 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.sb there were news media in the first reconstruction, first newspapers. but i think you may afree haviny looked at the films that we saww in this classe that there's

nothing like seeing film of a bg building burning down or somebody being beaten up or police dogs jumping on women and children or people being knockef down by fire houses. the fact that the visual media i existed in the 1950s and '60s 50 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. we they were just as smart then as 1965 but they had been 19 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.society you remember we talked about llm this great irony of segregation. whites in the south had this bri

brilliant idea that what they an needed to do was segregate blacks in every aspect of lifeot 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 principal and black a faculty, even if the resources aren't what they should be, and white people aren't so much ying paying attention to what's goinw on there becauseha they don't really care, you have the abilithay in that school to teat all kinds of things that s ultimately are going to become i useful in the fight for equality in a way that you wouldn't if lr white people weree running everything. so there's a way in which the segregators dug their own graveg remember the montgomery bus he boycott, alabama state college.f

joanne gibson robinson was a professor there. she called for the boycott on cp the alabama state 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 eg infrastructure black folk would use to attack segregation. now, i'm talking about lasting gains of the 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.w topref i'm going to be talking about e republicans and democrats and i'm going to be talking about different political figures.i' 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 drhts act, or actually when the civil rights act of '64 is beine drafted, he said we passed this. we democrats lose the white south from my lifetime and yours. forime didn't happen quite as quickly as he said but pretty much has happened because the deep south is now pretty solidly republican. s the deep south. but this part of the south, for example, virginia, not so much. virginia voted for obama twice, for example. sort texas, which is sort of southern and sort of not, those who say within 15 or 20 years, texas iso going to be a solidly democratia state because of immigration from mexico.e

i don't know whether that's right or wrong. in the short-term a predominantly republican south just as johnson said.th you may think it's good or bad but it's a fact. hat's we still have, as i mentioned, p deep poverty of 1/3 of the blaco population and a not small percentage of the white population and other populations as well.tiions there's an intractable problem of poverty that we haven't figured out a solution for.cto we have continued defacto atio segregation. there's ways this society is still a segregated society. stil name one. one realm still largely segregated. housing and neighborhoods. c >>ou dixon? >> churches? is >> religious life in the country is 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.g

i suspect aren't particularly interested in integrating inte because they don't see anythings on the other side as better than what they've already got, but, yes, religious life isgo quite segregated. did you have somethings ?qu that was the same one. neighborhoods? caroline? >> schools. >> schools, legally, are desegregated. there are many parts of the country where there's a lot of integration.se my own children went to schoolse that were thoroughly integrated, but, but, there are many entire school systems such as the one that my wife grew up in where, p that are de facto, almost completely segregated because n minority folk live there in that jurisdiction.ec that brings me to the realm of s localties.p local governments. lot the way this country is set up is a lot of the day-to-day es running of life takes place on nhe local level. schools are a great example. schools are run on the level.

so if you live in a jurisdictioj where everybody isur basically s same race, you're not going to get integration.sa virginia is an extreme example of that. of because the so-called cities aren't even part of the counties. you got cities in this state that only have a few thousand w people in them, but they are separatean.d okay. them but they are separate school systems with the county,. some of them don't.y, in the city of richmond has a school system that is impoverished whereas the suburban counties have systems more or less flush with money. according to supreme court, no way to remedy that.s no in many ways we're still in a seg fwated society, but in many ways not. when i was your age, this colleg college had only just started to allow nonwhite students to st

enroll, and here we are in a more integrated environment. so, again, i'm arguing that the changes of the second ge, chan reconstruction have been more permanent. i don't want to sound as if i'mi wildly, blindly optimistic and don't see problems out there.hat one more caveat, if i may. a su that is we're not sure where the supreme court was going. i was literally walking out of my office to come over here whõi my son showed me on his phone the headline that the united -- states supreme court -- i've not had time to read the opinion or the entire article in the "new t york times," but apparently thim supreme court has upheld the right of voters in the state of michigan to eliminate affirmative action and

admissions to state colleges and universities in the state of michigan.d i may be misreading this. it was a 6-2 opinion, which i don't understand how that even happened.so i mention this as a considerable risk of botching up the detailso what i do know is that the supreme court under chief the justice roberts has ruled against certain facets of affirmative action.act they have ruled unconstitutional the central part of the voting rights act of 196565.. that's remediable. congress can remedy that. but i'm not sure whether they're going to or not. this creates a problem for me.ea because at this point in this course, which i've been teaching for almost 20 years now, i year always used to say what i said y to you earlier. which is the gains of the second

reconstruction, many of them, mo especially in the political espi theç

happened in the 1870s, '80s and '90s.and this is inconceivable to me. i don't know where we're going with the supreme court. i don't mean this as a partisan remark -- yes, i do. yes, i do. r because i believe in holding on to the gains we've -- i think they are gains and i think we need to hold on to them, and i some of the tendencies that i see happeningi. okay. silver linings.thing nothing like -- i just said, nothing lightning the rollback of the late 19th century is in the cards, i think.inhe here's the part where i may sound partisan and i don't mean to be. reagan and the bushes can win elections but so can obama. in other words, it's an open playing field and sometimes one side wins and sometimes the t

other, it's not one side rolling over the other. whites today will vote for black candidates. and obama is only one proof of that. more and more across the united states you see candidates of color being elected by s of predominantly white constituencies and i have to think that this is a step in the right direction.tlump 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 issues that are more n important in their hierarchy of ovals than anything of issues of white and black. so, again, i say, there are important parallels between the two reconstruction, important differences and the eo most important of all is that the second reconstruction has largely stuck.mo i'll just close the formal parts of this by saying that it's nott true that history repeats

itself. but it is true that we can hist understand not only where we came from but where we are now better by studying history, lo a cesking for parallels and looking for differences and w that's what i've tried to do here.so so i'm going to stop now and i'm going to ask whether there are ' comments or questions and i'll m remind you that you're asked to raise your hand and give grace e minute to pop over to where youc are and i'll call on you.al this is your opportunity for instant fame. [ laughter ] tanner. >> i'm looking to ask you aboute a decision that just broke thisn morning but it does seem the hat court ruled that a state, citizens in a state could by their own volition remove -- do you think that that will happenh

in certain sections of the country?ts or do you think that they will generally be a clinging on to ig affirmative action policies? aco >> no, i think it will probably happen elsewhere, too. the state of california already went through a thing like this where affirmative action was basically eliminated is elim understand from the university of missions. there's -- i don't want to get i into chapter and verse, but i le think basically a lot of people dislike affirmative action.ke tn if you put it to an up or down vote, i think other constituencies will vote it down. i think there was some one on w the back row before. no? let's go to jake and then jeremy. to jake. >> well, we've often talked at about, at least in the latter parts of our semester, obviously

the differences between democrae and republican and where the transitions are made. obviously, the black community is kind of consolidating themselves to mainly being aligned with the democratic party. so i'll ask you two things. answer what you can. but is it -- do you consider it in the best interest of the black communities to diversify t their political interest in co terms of themm parties they fav, and how do you think that actually can come about? >> the question was would the black community be better off b spreading their vote -- having their vote up for grabs by more than one party and do i think that will happen? >> how -- w >> how could it happen?uld well, the first thing that would have to happen the republican party is going to have to find t out what kind of a party it's going to be, because until we w know that,e there's no way to nswer the other question. right now the republican party consists of actually more than

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

the other thing i would say is when people latch on to a political party they do it in pi part because of the programs ofi that party, the philosophy of o that party, if you want to say itr. but they do so also for cultural reasons. this is an old idea. historians have shown in 19th century how people voted based on factors such as religious, religion, and ethnicity and so forth. today there are cultural factorr at work as my black colleague ak yale said, a lot of black folky look at the republican party and it just doesn't look like them.d it just doesn't feel -- doesn'te feel culturally right. j.c. watts who was the only j. black republican congressman c.m from oklahoma, he served for three or four terms, i heard him on the radio the other day and he said, let me see if i can get this right. this he said, there are a lot of republican physicians that a lon

of blacks could sign on to -- and he said economy and government and this and he named this, that and the other.med but he said, listen to this. he said white people for thanksgiving like to eat pumpkin pie. pum black peoplepk tend to eat swee potato pie. and he said -- he, j.c. watt said, my problem is, i'm a kees republican, but my party keeps wanting to feed me pumpkin pie.t now i'm not entirely sure what he meant by that, but i think he's talking in part about sort of ambience factors and cultural factors and maybe sort of ctors hyperassertiveness on the part of white leadership of the party. it's a comfort level i think he's talking about. something has to happen for pai blacks to feel more comfortable

i'm going to say culturally comfortable with republicans before they are going to vote ns republicans. the same question is out there o for the latino community as far as i can see. ten years ago there was a real possibility or some republicans thought so that republicans ssco could get a good chunk of the latino vote but there's a big part of the republican party ly that's really, really key in restricting immigration from latin america. and not only keen on doing that but they make their keenness known in language and body m language and whatever else that the latino community finds verye off putting and much to the dismay of those republicans who would like to see immigration reform, the republican party appears to have lost most of th

latino vote for the next generation, just by the vibes they give off, if i can use a technical term. so, i am not holding my breath until there's an influx of blacks into the republican party even though there are some ath republicans who'd like to bringe that about -- and sincerely, sincerely care about the image,y an the issues that blacks are interested in.ut t one of them who did was vic congressman jack kempe who he's actually ran for vice president. he's no longer alive now. by the time he had left politics he was increasingly isolated voice.he was i don't really see that folk are going to perceive themselvea as having a lot of choice between the parties any time soon f. >> yes. just two short questions. the following up on the michigan state legislature passing the law to ban affirmative action, is there any particular reason

aside from just the state legislature's decision to do wy that, why they did that? you and the second question, as you noted, most blackd americans amr today do define themselves and vote with the democratic party. this follows up with a statement that i had from a previous history professor who noted in the 2010 midterms, though, whens you discount the incumbent black americans that are both re-elected to congress, all the new members who are black ran ae republicans and allen west in florida was just a prime exampll that i remember, but is it a ime fair statement to say while to black americans are voting blac predominantly democrat, more today are running for congress e and themo senate, the only blac member in the senate is black -- or the only black republican. the only black member in the senate is a republican. >> actually the first black fis member of the senate in the 20th century was also a republican. so i really don't -- i don't know what to make of that.alcan. the senate is a whole different ball game from the house .

the house, you know, represents populated states, members of thr house of representatives are e elected by the localities, you might say. by the 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 n districts in a way to concentrate the black vote in an way thatqhzt-tr÷ produces more t congre has worked.draw we have 40-some blacks in ican congress now. partly because of the way districts are drawn. many republicans love that because it concentrates most of the black vote in relatively fes districts, it creates more conservative-republican districts every place else.istrc you got this odd combination ofe many black folk and many you got conservative republicans who want to draw congressional districts in way that c concentrates the black vote.ono, your first question, the one

thing i'm going say it's not cl clear to me and tanner you may know this or somebody else may.o i had the impression the se elimination of affirmative action in the state of michigan was done by referendum.n the st >> that's correct, yeah. >> it's a vote of the people, not merely the state legislature.of t that's going to happen elsewhere, i promise, unless i totally misread this opinion.prs sam. i >> yes. you mentioned one of the major . deciding factors with johnson willing to push through, like, the voting rights act and civil rights act was the -- america's position on the world stage with regards to race relations. especially with the u.n. so what were presidents before o johnson's you know, like, ba basically position or platform when leaders from predominantly black african nations, or nations with any populations, majority colored populations, un you know, visited the untcountr

and did they address it at all or try to ignore the elephant in the room? >> they ignored the elephant in the world. the the issue of world opinion really came into play during the kennedy administration. by the time johnson came in -- johnson didn't need to be moved as far as john f. kennedy did. it's not that john f. kennedy had anything against black folk. he had novi visceral engagement with black issues. so for him the way the united states looked on the world stage loomed larger because he he w cared -- he was president, after all, when the berlin crisis the crisis happened and the cuban missile crisis -- no, u2 was eisenhower. i meant the cuban missile l crisis happened. kennedy was very preoccupied with foreign policy for the three years he was in office ana

so for him this was a big factor, world opinion. johnson didn't need so much to be pushed by world opinionso m n because johnson for a variety of reasons really wanted to be the president who did for black ç americans what he saw franklin roosevelt as having done for poor americans. p johnson had his own reasons to d push civil rights, not merely to make the united states look better on the world stage. other sam. de >> i have a question, you talkeo a little bit about how democrats don't necessarily have to compete for the black vote but do you think that obama is perceived as championing blackf interests by african-americans today and kind of a hero in the way that civil rights leaders were or is that not really the c case? >> i think obama is basically ob loved by black folk but your bu

question raises an interesting topic because you talk about -- is the president representativeh of black interests? that raises the question of wha. black interests even are. when we talk about black interests, and i do this, too, we assume that all black folk want the same thing and have the same orientation. give i'm not sure that i can give you a list of what ten black interests that would be hatinitive. if you take the affordable health care act, obamacare, that's going to benefit a lot of people, in my opinion, or let'sd say it'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. is that a black interest? no, not in a taxenomic way, but

it benefits black folk. i think what a lot of black folk want is things that are not really racially defined. i mean, black people want what d lot of white people want which is a good school for their kids to go to. public transit. transit. some would want that.trai'm just i'm just trying to think of the issues that on their face have throug to do with race. and to me that's what obama has, tried through obamacare, for example, to make the society more fair.y mo now, you can argue whether he'sr got the right approach or not, you can vote for obama or you can vote for mccain, i'm not talking about that . th i'm saying that obama is trying, by his rights, to make the society more fair. ma is that a black interest per se? no, not per se, but it's a thing

that most black people want.o i think, to me, black america seems as a group quite happy to have the obamas in the white house.g i think it's -- it wasn't long t ago that to see michelle and thh two kids in the white house and it would have been just a mind blowing -- you vote, you go bacu two generations, they wouldn't even have been in there as guests, for god's sake. yeah, i think obama is still quite popular among black americans. qus yeah. cole? >> my question is going to shift the focus a little.tand i understand that terrorism played a pretty prominent role in hindering black rights ole following the emancipation as well as during the second civil rights movement. what role has terrorism played in stymieing black progress since, say, 1970?

>> you mean terrorism directed against black folks? >> i suppose, yes. >> yeah.yeah, i don't think it's really a factor.t' i was i thinking about that thi morning, though, as i prepared to come to campus.ld s some would say, well, what about trayvon martin, for example? stu you know, stuff still happens, but to me, that's -- as terriblt as that was, and i don't know tr whether you mean this kind of id thing or not, but trayvon martin, that's not terrorism. gy the guy who killed him, i don't know what his racial attitudes are, and, you know, i'm not even going to speculate, but to me, as awful and unjustified as it was, it's not the same as a klansman going out and killing y somebody because they want to voteto. they're two terrible things but they're differently motivated.y

so i don't really see terrorism of the kind that we saw in the 1870s and 1960s as a factor today. i'm not sure i'm being responsive, but that's what you're going to get. yeah, david.david. >> do you see sort of a parallee between the lies at the end of the the 19th century and some of the laws today that operate throughh coded terms, in terms of when southern states wanted to some s restrict black voting, they when for literacy tests and poll taxes. there's stop and frisk or mandatory minimums.nd fri people that affect people of ins color and particularly black met that seemed to operate through a nonracial context but in the end kind of operation exclusively o those groups? do you think there's kind of a parallel there? >> let me say that in the late 19th century, the language wasn't as code as we might think.centthink. the actual laws couldn't refer

to race because they would have been in contravention of the 15th amendment which said you can't deny that the vote on vote basis of race, color, or previous condition. of so you couldn't pass a a law, or a constitution in mississippi that said negroes ' can't vote. couldn't do that. c so you came up with an ostensibly nonracial scheme thao could be used to the same effect. but if you look at the way those laws were discussed back then, if you look at the debates in such a the legislature such as they ewp were, if you look at newspaper e coverage of them, people were talking quite openly. they said, gentlemen, our entire goal here is to remove the negro from politics. they made no bones about it. t now, today -- and the thing about coded language is it's coded. lathey'r so you don't know whether somebody is talking in code or whether they're just talking

that way. a there are all kinds of efforts. there was an article in "the new york times" two weeks ago about efforts by -- i'm not speaking partisanly now, but efforts by republicans in certain states t restrict the right -- to alter e access to the ballot, and the ee types of measures they were were talking about were things like cushing or eliminating early voting. there's been a trend to allow people to vote not only on tiond election day, but you could comt in and register ahead of time e and vote. more and more states are doing this. and now there are efforts in several states to cut back on that.es peo now, i personally oppose cutting back on it.dhave m i personally think people should have more access to the ballot l and not less, but i'm the first to admit it is not the same it' thing as what was done earlier h in our history. oppor

and there are those who would e make the argument that if we have three opportunities for you to vote early, that's enough. you don't have to have seven.en and a person like that may be totally sincere. it may not be a code word. it is the case that these efforts to restrict registration and the like, to require that you present i.d. at the voting d place and the like, are almost always sponsored by republicanss and i think it's at least barely possible that the thought therei is the more of this you do, the fewer people are going to vote who don't want to vote for you. i think people want to curb theg voting of people who won't vote for them.'s i think that's what's happening. and yeah, it's probably coded.

kaitlyn?>> i >> i just have a question about de facto segregation and ion revitalization projects.rev it seems like that keeps on eemk being the direction cities are going into, especially just like coming from richmond where we have a black mayor and h there's a bunch of revitalization projects that don't really seem to help the l existing, i guess you could sayp members of certain communities.f and what do you think -- why do you think that keeps on happening, and why is it perpetua perpetuated? is it just the way it's being marketed as, like, revitalization, or do you think it has to do with a sort of, like, lack of, i guess,ommunic communication between white and black communities?nd >> no, i don't -- i'm not goingf

to get into the details of the d richmond example, because i have in mind, because you and i are e both from there and familiar with it.ith i was talking before about the difficulty in defining what black interests are, and what i really mean to say is not all m black people think alike.reve big revelation.k who there are black folk who seriously believe that it's slyi going to be better economically for the whole community and forn the black community if you do a certain kind of revitalization f of some, as they call it, of the neighborhood downtown.own. build a baseball stadium and subsidize the washington redskins to cam and have their training camp, in this case, in richmond.a person a person of good will and good intelligence can genuinely believe that those things are going to benefit the community economically to the point that all will benefitec. all will benefit.

where as the other point i feel is, hey, you're going to tear down my house and you're not ebateto 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 -- in the '60s people talked about black power.in well, when you have power, you have to decide how to use it ane once you have it, there's going to be a debate within the community that holds power what you're going to do with it, and what this black neighborhood wants here may not be what thist one wants over here, may not be what the mayor wants over here.e that's the trouble with defining black interests. it was simple in the early '60s. black interests were get your foot off my neck.ashe

give me access, give me my god given constitutional right to vote. that was a no-brainer. it's complicated now. sam? >> back on the line of racial -- the importance of racial violence, what do you think would be the civil rights movement would have turned out h differently if whites in the 0s and 70s did not resort to such mo brutal violence and resisted civil rights in a much more passive manner? >> i used to give an exam question that was exactly that sed in this course and i'm not going to make you all do an essay at the end of the semester, but it was actually that.me the what if law enforcement and then white public in the south had been more savvy in the '60s andg not gone beating on people, n would the movement have come oup different? and the answer that i have in mind of that is this, that inå the end segregation and racial

oppression depended on the ç threat of and the occasional use of violence, and just because t you go to albany, georgia, and o chief lori prichett doesn't go beating on people, we saw that in the film, doesn't mean that you don't have a movement anymore. a what you do is you go to a place where the white power structure isn't as deliberative as all of that, where they're going to go beating on people, and that's exactly what the movement did. they picked birmingham because birmingham had a history of violence against black people. e dozens of homes had been -- buildings had been blown up ovey the years. bull conner was in charge of public safety there. it's a little bit complicated what the political situation wa but he was the longtime head of public safety there, and

shuttlesworth said, you come to, birmingham, you're going to geta a confrontation. so what i'm saying is you mightt not -- look at the freedom rides. the freedom rides started where? washington, d.c.rst bi the first big city they got to t was guess what? richmond. nobody got beat up.ch nothing much happened. they went to charlottesville and down to north carolina. eventually they got to anniston alabama, and you saw what happened there. so your counterfactual is acou very provocative and interestin one, but it is really actual counterfactual, because in the e end, in the end, the segregationists were going to pick up the club in the end. nadia?ing to >> i just wanted to bring the conversation around to education.ersa i when i was in elementary school and middle school, all i learned about african-americans was that

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

however you define that is goin to cure a lot of problems.a there's a tendency to expect the schools to fix what's wrong with the country, and i think that's far overblown. w a i do not think we do a good job of education in this country by in largela. i think we do a still worse job in the teaching of history. i will say that you all, and 2/s of you are from the state of virginia, as am i. is i could make statement even if that weren't the case, what yous 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 edges sanded off.st y you don't get that. at least you know who rosa parks was. now, they may not teach you much beyond rosa parks and martin luther king and malcolm x, thent they move on to the next unit, a but at least you got that.

now, the president said when he was running for office that -- you're quoting from his speech of 2008 i think that we saw in class.that he said that -- read me that quote again. q and i'll repeat. >> to condemn black anger without understanding its origin to further widen the chasms between races. >> to condemn black anger without understanding its origin is to further widen the chasm between races. i completely agree with that.om i don't see it happening anytime soon. most people don't want to hear about anger.out st they don't want to study about anger and they don't want to uf study about stuff that's painful. one reason i'm in here doing this is because i think we havee to do that and there are people who will actually come and listen to me talk here.you but you try to take that out into the general public or to the schools, i think the but

country's come a long way, but think our appetite for hearing i unpalatable truths is still very much attenuated, let's say. dixon? >> going down lyman avenue in a richmond, you no doubt notice h the several statues dedicated to civil war generals like jackson and lee.vil w >> i did notice that.that. growing up there. >> i say, do you think there will be a time where these structures and concepts dedicated to confederate themes will disappear or be ey acknowledged as pieces of history?ory? >> i think the statues are going to stay up for a while. we're talking about robert e. lee and stonewall jackson and n j.e.b. stuart and jefferson guy davis and those guys. there was an interesting controversy about -- back in the '90s some time. james river used to flood all the time and they bill a flood wall to keep low-lying

parts of the city from being dia inundated and the city or somebody put up a display of pictures of richmond history. on the flood wall. one of the pictures was a e, portrait of general robert e. lee. one of the pictures. there was a black leader who complained about this very vociferously and said, you havet to take that down, we're not glorifying robert e. lee. lo without getting into the meritsl of his acomplaint, you should y have heard a lot of white peoplt howl about that. what, you're going to take down that picture of robert e. lee? this is terrible this is racial chauvinism.an and i wrote a piece, i said, wait a minute, i said, i don't e care about the picture of lee or the flood wall one way or the next, bullet you've got a counci predominantly city black councie in this city since 1977 or whatever, 20 years now, and in e all that time, not only haven't they taken down the statues of

confederate heroes but they rebuild -- tore down the old mc robert e. lee bridge and named it again the robert e. lee bridge. i said how much conciliation do you want from the black community? i don't think the confederate legacy is in danger here. tere now, there were two small bridges across the valley that were named after confederates. little ones that nobody even t knows about.reet, they call the first street -- et popular parlance, the first street bridge and the fifth street bridge but they were in fact the stonewall jackson and j.e.b. stewart bridge.ghts they did rename those after t civil rights leaders. aft food for them. believe me, there's plenty more,

named after stonewall jackson and robert e. lee in that city. asve people complain, people say i'de just assume not have that. i think general lee will be there when they carry my coffin past there on the way to the cemetery.n t i think he'll still be there because i don't think those who have power now are vindictive.vi i think they're very tolerant and nice people.'r and by the way, the city council is not -- it's a predominantly o black city, 50/50 with a predominantly white city council and that's another argument for what i said before which is thar people are voting less and less among racial lines, including black people. black people vote for a white person they think is good, very, very readily.ble q [ inaudible question ]ow >> i don't know the detail but t was in the boy scouts in richmond and we were in the

robert e. lee council. and i had the patch on my uniform. i've stillha got that uniform. it says robert e. lee council. they don't call it that anymore, right? >> no, they took it off. >> they took it off. okay. well, you know, it's interesting the way we're still debating these sort of cultural issues after 120 years.afte we're still talking about commemorating the civil bar. already. we just had a 150th anniversary. we're having it.'re but still the past is not dead,c 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 pl during the civil rights movement was much more collective. i guess it was and i guess

people try to -- blackness as something that's n. more broken down into intersecting cultures -- m >> i don't mean to make a pun th but the issues were black and white then. commun there was a black community that had a common set of issues, i ha mean, a common set of issues. you could be a college president in the south or you could be a o janitor and you faced some of pe the same problems because you were black.ms >> even blacks from the north? >> well, it was different in new york but it was another set of problems. it's all relative.p) it's all relative.p) i'm just saying that the issues, htforward then. maybe they were, but they seemed so. i think most of

begins tonight. next, air force academy professor grant weller teaches a class on american and japanese strategy, leading up to the dropping of the atomic bomb on hiroshima and nagasaki. historians and authors debate whether it was morally sound or was the start of the cold war. and 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 discuss the legacy of atomic bombs. here's a preview.

>> i think -- they weren't sure whether this was going to work or not. take two pieces of uranium, we fire one into the other, they're going to blow up. we don't need to test it. plus it's going to take too much if we 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'd better test that first. on july 16th it was tested in the new mexico desert. it worked. and full speed ahead toward getting enough plutonium and titanium in the case and all the rest and have the 509th composite group ready to deliver it. and, of course, "enola gay" was

the first combat aircraft and in the perfect mission it went according to plan, to drop the bomb of hiroshima exactly when they said it would and returned safely. there was much more difficulty in the second mission against nagasaki and i'll go into all those details about fuel lines and almost ran out of gas and there was covered -- it was covered in clouds and they wanted a visual target onto nagasaki, so on and so forth. so that almost aborted, but it didn't. i think the element of shock -- we had to shock the japanese into taking that final step. general groves makes a distinction between defeat and surrender. they're not the same thing. the revisionists have constantly said that japanese was defeated. of course, they were defeated. they were probably defeated at midway, although they didn't know it. but how do you get them to surrender, surrender on your terms? eventually it was the atomic bomb that caused them to intervene and say enough, it's

over. >> let me just add a further point to support professor norris. the decision to use as professor norris made clear in his paper was the one decision. in retrospect i can understand how we from our vantage point, why didn't they give them more time after hiroshima, see if they would make a decision. but it was essentially driven by general groves, the one decision to authorize the use of the weapons, they had two, they used two, both cities were military

industrial targets. they were not simply filled with civilians and targeted because of that. hiroshima was the headquarters for the japanese army for the defense of the southern part of japan and it was a supply and logistics base for the military communications center, nagasaki, of course, very important port, wide ranging industrial activity. the dynamic of how japan fought the war and who was a civilian and who was a combatant, et cetera, made targeting something that had already evolved into an

area where dare we say civilian targets were on the lists. it's under fdr that the tokyo fire bombing occurs, of course, and the war had evolved into a level of what we can look back and see as almost barbaric targeting of populations who i should add had been warned to evacuate these cities, but this is where the tragic dimension in my view enters in. so -- >> let me say i think what you have to understand in looking at the design of the, you know, use of the atomic bombs, you have to understand the most important thing was the purpose. the purpose was articulated a

number of times the idea that it would take some tremendous shock to get the leadership of japan to actually capitulate. the targeting was really a separate issue. the question of whether you should target a military unit on kyushu versus a city. the question was whether it was going to impression leadership in tokyo. also the atomic bomb as it then existed which we cannot forget are much, much, much smaller than anything that came after or not nearly the sort of things we left under the cloud now for some 70 years. general groves and others also saw the use of the bombs on cities as essentially a bluff. it was a bluff to prove that we had not merely one bomb but that we had an arsenal of bombs, and what this ultimately would lead japanese decision makers to realize was as premier suzuki would say in december of '45, if the americans have such weapons

in quantity, then they will not come and invade japan, and 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 another bomb was fortuitous in a lot of respects, but nonetheless it achieved the bluff. it created a relentless rhythm of nuclear attack and implied that we had a very large arsenal of bombs. one of the points 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 is that as soon as they heard the words "atomic bomb" used, there were a big swath of japan's leadership knew what an atomic bomb was. this was not something from the blue. they also knew how incredibly difficult it was to make a bomb, primarily from an engineering standpoint to make it. that's why the first reports of

the bomb, the imperial army says, well, we're not going to concede it's a bomb until we have an investigation and the imperial navy even more ominously says, well, even if it is an atomic bomb, they can't have that many of them, they they'll be dissuaded from using them. that second bomb at nagasaki knocked the props under the whole idea that the u.s. did not have an arsenal of atomic weapons and that's why as tragic as all of that is, those two bombs in conjunction achieved the bluff. it also, if we understand what talking about after hiroshima, no demonstration would ever have worked because the japanese comeback would be this is very interesting, let's see you do three in a row. >> just one point on the timing of it. general groves together general marshal about that third bomb and he said the timetable is

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

than just the two, but he thought two would initially be probably enough, but he wasn't going to stop there and he continued to make them. next here on c-span 3, a discussion on women's suffrage. the 19th amendment granting women the right to vote was ratified on august 18, 1920. the national archives in washington, d.c. this evening is hosting a panel of historians and women leaders to commemorate the 9 9 th anniversary. they'll examine how women suffrage has impacted the role of women in politics and society. among the speaker, the executive director of the league of women voters, nancy tate. just getting under way live here on c-span 3.