america is watching on c-span. powered by cable. greetings from the national week archives facility in washington, days washington today gives you the d.c., which sits on the nation ees ancestral lands. capital it's a pleasure to welcome you the weekly uses audio from our immense archive to look at how issues of the day developed over years. and our occasional series "talking lists" features conversations with historians about their lives and work. many of our television programs are also available as podcasts. find them all on the c-span now mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts. greetings from the national archives facility in washington, d.c., which sits on the

ancestral lands. it's a pleasure to welcome you to today's conversation with kevin boyle about his new book, "the shattering." i will tell you about programs coming up soon on our youtube travel. on january 26th at 1:00 p.m., david king will tell us about his new book "watching darkness fall," and it's a perspective of four different ambassadors from london, berlin, rome, paris and moscow. on tuesday february 1st, at 1:00, we will talk to sarah polak. she talks about eisenhower. kevin boyle begins his look at the 1960s with the story of ed cahill who in 1961 organized his neighbors to deck their houses

with the flags for the fourth of july. his neighbors said he had seen years before in the book published by the national archives. the book produced more than 200 images was called "the american image." boyle's book, "the shattering" focuses on the periods transformative conflicts. "the new york times" calls "the shattering" a rich layered accounting of the 1960s. it's not simply the unfolding of the events but a story of individuals behind the events. in "the shattering," boyle introduces us to the people that propelled the changes, and "the washington post" said boyle has a gift of empathetic storytelling. his previous book "arc of justice," and he is the co-author of "muddy books and ragged aprons." suzanne e. smith is a professor of american history, and teaches

cultural history, history of death in america, and american popular music and african american religious history, and she's the author of "dancing in the street." now let's hear from kevin boyle and suzanne e. smith. thank you for joining us today. >> let me begin today simply by letting you know that professor smith was not able to join us. at the last minute there were complications that made it impossible for her to join us, and i am very sorry she's not here with her, and as i would

like to be sharing this afternoon with her, but i am honored to share this afternoon with you, and i appreciate the national archives giving me the opportunity to talk with you today. i want to thank susan clifton for putting together today's program. i want to start today by doing one of those things that i think you are not supposed to do when talking about your book. i want to start with somebody else's book, and what i want to do is start with a book by a woman who has been in the news a bit lately because of her passing. i want to start with joan's

second book of essays, "the white album", and i want to read the start of it. it's a famous start. this is the start, the very first start of the white album which is a collection of essays she wrote in the early 1960s and '70s. she said we tell ourselves story in order to live. we live it entirely by the impossession of a narrative line on desperate images by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting fan gora, which is our experience, or at least we do for a while. such a beautiful and elegant way of describing what historians actually do. what we do as historians is we take all the fragments, the complicated pieces of the past and we try and shape them into a coherent story. then over time we start to wonder whether the story that we shaped is really the best way of

telling the events of the past, and so we start to think the way didian did, whether we need a new story, and that's what "the shattering" is. it's my attempt to take the fantasmagoria of the 1960s, this story of events and reshape them into a new story of the 1960s. and a lot of that story centers on powerful figures of the 1960s. the book deals to a considerable extent with the presidents of the 1960s, john kennedy and richard nixon and dwight eisenhower. it deals with those people that tried to become president, barry goldwater, bobby kennedy, george wallace. it runs through so much of the 1960s. it talks about the supreme court justices and talks about a general or two. and it talks about the towering activist in the 1960s, martin luther king, jr. and malcolm x.

i also really believe that ordinary people are central to history, too. ordinary people, who we don't know, help us understand the names we never heard of help us if there's one thing that animates my sense of the past, my sense of myself as an historian, they also really believe that ordinary people are central to history too. ordinary people who we don't know help us understand, ordinary people whose names we've never heard of help us understand the past in a new

way, and ordinary people in american past changed this nation. alongside all those famous people who run through "the shattering," what i also try to do is tell the stories of ordinary people. what i want to do today, i just want to tell you more stories. and this is the first one. this is the fourth of july, 1961, on the 6100 block of west eddie street in the northwest corner of chicago. the day before, cahill and his neighbor draped the block in 38 flags, and that's a lot of flags given that there are only 36 houses on the entire block. and ed, being ed, written to the

"chicago tribune" to announce what they had done, and the trib decided they would send a photographer out to take a picture of the block, and so the neighbors gathered on the lawn next to ed cahill's house, and again, that's ed right there and that's clarence right there. two of ed's kids -- he had three children, and two of his kids got in the picture, too. that's his son, terry standing at attention up at the top of the steps. that's his daughter, katie, way in the back, right back there. you can barely see her, that's ed's wife, stella cahill, smile into the '60s. stella had good reason to be smiling.

stella was born a couple days after christmas in 1916 deep in the polish ghetto of chicago where she -- where her parents livedo what her father, who was a tailor, managed to bring home from his trade. she had an older brother chester, and the four of them lived in a tenement deep inside the ghetto. just about two years after her birth, her father died, killed by the spanish flu that was raging through the poorest neighborhoods of american cities, and her mother with two children to raise faced the prospect of tumbling into poverty, and she married another polish immigrant, this time a man did not even have a trade

that her now deceased husband had, and he made his living on the power of his back, a power that he tended to dissipate, it turned out, by drinking he could not control. all through the 1920s, stella, her brother and her mother and now stepfather lived on the edge of poverty. there's no clearer sign of that than the fact that they moved every single year. every single year all the way through the '20s they lived in this part of town, and then they moved to that part of town and then that part of town, the way poor people do. and then in 1929, the economy collapsed around them. by the spring of 1930, stella's

stepfather was unemployed. the family was getting by on whatever money her mother could bring home from her job boxing candies in the candy factory. wasn't enough. within the year or so stella's older brother left school to take a factory job that he was lucky to get. that brought in just enough money that they could keep stella in school through the two years of a commercial course she was taking in one of chicago's public schools. the minute that course was over they pulled her out and sent her off to work, too. she was 15. stella met ed cahill on a blind date in 1938. the cahill family were hardly

wealthy, but in the working class world of chicago, they were a step above, and ed's father was immigrant parents, and his father worked as a foreman for a construction company that did roadwork for the city of chicago. what that meant in the 1920s is the work was steady, in a way it had never been for stella's family. with that steady work he earned enough, ed's father earned enough that in the late 20s he was able to buy a house on the 6100 block of west eddie street, the block you are looking at now, but in those days it was a half finished brand-new development going up way on the outskirts of town. it was a completely white neighborhood. much of the new developments

that were going up in chicago in the 1920s were wrapped in restrictive covenants, the little closets developments put on their deeds that said this property could never be sold to a negro and often times to a jewish american. but i have no evidence, whatsoever, that when ed's family bought that house on eddie's street they thought at all about race. chances are they took it natural, as a natural thing that neighborhoods were going to be segregated. that's how deeply that racial discrimination was written into the fabric of american society. what they saw was that they were buying a 900 square foot house of living space. it was an unfinished attic up

above that they could finish off where the boys could have a place to sleep. what they saw was that they were buying a house with a little backyard and a little front yard, set in a half finished neighborhood six blocks away from a brand-new catholic parish that they could join, and it was such a new parish that it didn't have a church yet but it had a parochial school where he and his brother could go, as part of the deep commitment to the cahill family to catholicism. that's where ed grew up. ed and stella got married in may of 1940. 1942, they had their first child, a baby girl they named judy. in november of 1943, when judy was about a year old, ed got drafted. he was gone for 2 1/2 years.

most of that time he spent in europe. in the signal corps, trailing behind the front troops as they marched towards berlin in the end of the war. stella stayed home with the newborn. now stella knew on some level that ed was safe. she knew that, of course, from the letters he wrote home, the sweet personal letters he sent as often as he possibly could. but you have to stop for just one second and think about this young woman in chicago in 1943, in 1944, in 1945, living surrounded by war, surrounded by death, by the gold stars she would see in the window as she walked the baby along the streets. for the prayers for those boys who had gone missing, the

prayers at sunday mass for the boys that had gone missing from that parish that she was part of. and you got to believe, and i believe with all my heart, that deep in the night that fear came creeping up to her, too, that it would have been impossible for her not to imagine, the western union messenger coming to her door with that notice, and if that were to happen that she would become her mother in 1918, a too young widow with a toddler at her skirts and her life collapsing around her. it's not what happened. ed got through the war just fine. he came home in the spring of 1946 as part of the massive

demobilization of that year. within a few months, to no one's surprise, stella was pregnant again. ed decided with the new baby he couldn't afford to take advantage of the benefits the gi was providing, he would just go get a job. he did, he got a job as a clerk in the front office of the vacuum can of chicago, and it made industrial strength coffee urns. one of their major clients was the united states military. the navy liked their coffee urns. in 1948, this now young family, ed, stella and their two kids moved into his father's bungalow out on west eddie street.

they moved in partly to take care of him. his wife recently died, and everybody knew he could not take care of himself, and partly because ed -- ed had such a powerful sense of place. he wanted to go home, and so they did in 1948. that neighborhood was still half finished. half of the houses on the block had not been built yet because the development that started back in the '20s stalled during the depression and then stalled again during world war ii, and then in the 1950s the

neighborhood started to fill in, and the developers came in and put in small reasonable houses on to the empty lots. houses had been sold overwhelmingly to an italian american and polish americans who were moving out from the center city of chicago. in a process they call white flight. as that neighborhood filled in, as the population filled in, it became a more prosperous area. in the mid 1950s, developers built a new shopping mall not that far from eddie's street, and that catholic parish that was so important to ed finally got the church it had never had, a gorgeous, beautiful church

wrapped in marble. a place for families like the cahills to feel a sense of solidity that neighborhood never had. and ed started to move himself up in the company, and he was the head of sales. they had a third child until 1952, and that's kathy, down here. the cahills were not extravagant people, but they had more people than ever before, so in 1953, '54, they bought their first car. they never had a car before. but they did not see the need for ed to take the bus down to the vacuum can down in the center of the city anymore. in 1955, they bought a tv and put it in the living room, and when the kids were old enough, they sent them off to the parochial school, to the grade

school connected to their parish. and when judy got of high school age they sent her to a catholic high school. when she finished there in 1959, they sent her to depaul university, one of chicago's two catholic universities. now, there's no doubt that this was a parochial world that the cahills lived in. they lived inside this type of lower little class catholic world. there's no doubt this neighborhood out on eddie's street was wrapped around racial expulsion, and discrimination. you can see that just in the picture of the folks standing out here in 1961. and the cahills, at least, their prosperity and their ability to buy the car and tv and to send their kids off to schools, private schools, was paid for in part by the vacuum can's

connection to what dwight eisenhower would call the military industrial complex, because the military industrial complex was not all about missile systems and bombers, it was also about industrial strength coffee urns. you also have to think just for a minute about what this world looked like for stella cahill. here was a woman that grew up right on the edge of devastating poverty, who never had a stable place to live and now she and ed owned their own home out on eddie street. here was a woman who in the early days of her marriage and motherhood wasn't sure whether her husband was going to come home, and now living in this extraordinary family-stabled world. her daughter was in college,

when she would have to leave school at 15. is it any wonder why stella cahill was smiling in the 1960s? and already that world built around eddie street, already there were cracks in the exclusions that world had created. none more dramatic, none more important than the one symbolized by this young woman,

elizabeth eckford. her story would have been different, really, if her mother and father had had a phone. they were working people, and they had six kids to raise and they could not afford that sort of extravagance. so in september of 1957, on september 3rd of 1957, the eckfords didn't get the phone call telling her that elizabeth was supposed to meet with the nine other kids that were going to desegregate little rock central high the next morning, and that together the ten of

them would be escorted to the school. so on the morning of that first day on september 4th of 1957, elizabeth got up early to make 1957, elizabeth got up early to make sure that she could get herself dressed in the clothes that she had carefully picked out for her first day. she made this skirt. and she had breakfast with her family, and when breakfast was over, when one called the kids together so they couldn't all prayed together, the 27th some. and then elizabeth picked up the boundary that home had bought her, and she put on the sunglasses that she hoped might hide how scared she was and it

she took the bus to little rock central high school. the bus dropped her off two blocks from the school, but i don't know if any of you have been to little rock central high, but it is a massive building. it covers two whole city blocks. it's frontage runs to whole city blocks. and elizabeth got dropped and one of the corners, two blocks up, near one of the corners of that big, to block school. and she walked down and as she was walking down to the school, she can see down towards the center of the school on the street, in front of the school, and dance toward the center, she could see the white mob. and she can see, ringing the school, all the way to the corner, the national guardsmen that the governor of arkansas had called out the night before in order to -- not -- before in order to prevent elizabeth eckford another nine african

american friends from going to the school in defiance of a court order. she was 15! now, as she was coming up to the, line she can see that the national guardsmen were letting white kids through and that kind of mind for a 15 route, which he thought was, well, they'll let me through too. but when she got up to the corner, the government told her that she had to go down to the center of the line, all the way down to the main entrance of the school. and so she did. she walked along the street, along, in front of this long national guards line and as she walked, the mob came up the hunter, trailing along behind her, screaming at her, shouting at her. some of the kids shouting as if it were a football game -- two, four, six, eight, we don't want to integrate! and others yelling racial slurs, and somebody in that mob yelling over and over again, lynch her! lynch her! and there were newspaper

reporters there of course, because this was a major national story. they traveled along next to her with her notebooks asking her for comment, which she refused to give. and at the top photographers walking backward in front of her to get this very picture. and she refusing to say a word. and finally she got to the center of the school, the center of the line on the street in front of the school where she had been told to go. and she came up to the guardsmen who were standing there and she asked if she could get through, and they told her she wouldn't be going to school, that you needed to move on. and for a second, she had no idea what she was going to do. she couldn't go back to where she'd come from because the mob was behind her. and so she thought she had no choice but to just keep going.

and that's what she did. she kept walking all along the street, the mob trailing along behind her, the reporters gathering around her, the screams, the yells, the threats. until she finally reached the end of that two block stretch in front of little rock central high, where she saw a bus stop. and she sat down at the bus stop and she smoothed out her skirt the way a proper young lady should. and afterwards, the reporter said, well, they created a kind of court around her to protect her from the mob, and maybe that's, true i don't know. but beyond her stood in the mob, screaming and yelling, and that person, still there, threatening to hang her from a tree. along she's out there, no one can ever say. maybe about 20 minutes, half an hour. and at one point, an african

american man, middle aged african american man came up and offered her a ride home. but her parents had told her, never takes right from a stranger, and so she politely refused. and then finally, a white woman came out of the mob. and this white woman started to hearing the other whites around her to say that they would be sorry for what they had done some day. and elizabeth was horrified, because she feared that what that white woman was going to do by trying to tell off the bob what she was going to make it wears. but all elizabeth really wanted was to be let alone. it warrior of the civil rights movement, sitting on a park bench. trying not to cry.

the next day, this photo ran in all of the major newspapers in the united states, meet the front page of every major newspaper in the united states. and in that image, what's happened was that millions of white people were forced to confront, for only a moment, the confrontation, the contrast that the civil rights movement wanted them to see. not the individual, one though that's obviously terrifying, but the systemic one, the one between his social community that could produce a woman, a young woman of such grace and dignity and the social system that could take ordinary people like the people you are seeing in this picture, and twist and turn them into thugs.

into defending the indefensible. over the course of the 1960s civil rights movement with twist and turn in all sorts of complicated ways, and i tried to take away some of those in my book. but it would never have more power than when it built this extraordinary contrast that elizabeth eckford brought out. on a glistening september day in 1957. this woman estelle griswold got herself arrested. four years later, this woman, estelle griswold, got herself arrested. estelle griswold, once upon a time when she was young back in the 1920s, and she had dreamed of being a professional singer.

she even gone to paris for a couple of years to try to make a go of it. it didn't quite work out. and in 1927, she came back home to her home state of connecticut, where she fell in love and married and aspiring admin. and for the next 30 years or so, she trailed along behind his career wherever it took him. 1945, it took him to germany. where the state department had hired him to help with the occupation of defeated germany and with the reconstruction of western europe after the devastation of the war. and she went with him. ,,.

,. the settled in new haven, connecticut, came back to connecticut. and four-year-old, so she continued to work with the refugee agency. its headquarters were up in new york, and you got tired of the community. commuting. so she quit. and went looking for other work. but she had to kind of particular skill set as an administrator that wasn't an enormous demand for a woman in new haven, connecticut, in the early 1950s, so it took her about a year to get the job. finally, in 1953, she got a job that she thought would be interesting. she was hired as the executive director of the connecticut branch of planned parenthood. the nation's leading advocate for birth control. now, she said afterwards she had no idea about birth control when she took this job. didn't know what a diaphragm was. but she thought the work could

be interesting, and she had administrative skills. and the work turned out to be very, very interesting. in the late 19th century, any number of states had passed laws trying to prohibit, in one way or another, birth control. and connecticut was one of two states, massachusetts was the other one, that had particularly stringent laws. in connecticut, from 1879 forward, it was illegal for anyone to distribute, to sell, or to use any form of birth control. when planned parenthood was formed in the early 20th century, it made it a special effort in connecticut to get that law repealed, and for decades and decades, in the middle decades of the 20th century, planned parenthood kept lobbying the connecticut state legislature to repeal that 1879 law.

but they didn't really want to do it. there were political costs to doing that, and the truth is nobody enforced the law. and so it stayed on the books. and when estelle griswold took over as executive director of connecticut land purdue parody 1950s she to try to get them to withdraw the. i didn't have any luck. and so in 1958, she decided to change tactics. she arranged a four to married couples who were ready to cooperate with planned parenthood to sue the state of connecticut for prohibiting them from using birth control they wanted to use. they wanted to get the law declared unconstitutional. and in the way these things work, that case won its way up all the way to the united states supreme court. finally reached the supreme court in 1961, in the spring of

61. four of the nine justices were willing to say that that law was in fact unconstitutional. but the other five, they said that there was no real law here. it was on the books, but no one was enforcing it. and as you undoubtedly know, to have a supreme court case, you have to have a real harm. you can't just have a case that is an obstruction, you have to prove that somebody is being harm, and these married couples couldn't prove that. and so, this's case failed. and that's when she decided to get herself arrested. to be more precise, what she decided was that the way to test this law wasn't by getting married couples to say they were being prohibited from using birth control. it was to get herself arrested for distributing it.

and so in the summer of 1961, she arranged for planned parenthood's connecticut branch to open a birth control clinic in new haven, where women could come in and get, presumably could come in and get the information that she thought [inaudible] women, getting the information she needed on how to use birth control in their families. which she always assumed that this was [inaudible] . they opened their clinic in october 2nd, on october 2nd, 1961. in direct defiance of the law. and nothing happened. because nobody in a position of authority in new haven cared. now, they were distributing information about birth control. but at least one person in new haven did.

the man who worked for a car rental company, in fact, a devout catholic, with five children at home, who believed, according to the teachings of his church, that the use of birth control was a scene. and therefore should not be allowed by the state. and the law said that this was illegal, and he wanted that birth control clinic shut down and so he contacted the local authorities in new haven to demand that they go over and find out what was happening and shut down's clinic. nobody wanted to do it. spent a better part of a day being shunted aside, shunted along from one office to another in new haven by everybody saying, well, you really want to talk to this person, you want to talk to that person, you want to talk to this one. nobody wanted to deal with this guy but he was so persistent and so insistent that finally the prosecuting attorney said, all right, all right, basically

to get [inaudible] all sent a couple of policeman over. and he did. he sent over a couple of policeman to estelle griswold's clinic. and when they arrived, she came bounding out of her office, and she grabbed hold of these two people and she brought them into the office and she set the officers down and for an hour he gave them every little bit of information she possibly could about birth control, all the pamphlets, all the information. she was dredging up every bit of technical knowledge she possibly, had throwing it at them. they sat politely, taking notes. and when she was finally done, they all got up at got up and they shook hands and they walked out the door. two weeks later, she got a letter informing her that she was being charged in violation of connecticut's 1879 statute, exactly as she wanted to be.

she was convicted, as she knew she would be, in january of 1962 and find $100 for this enormous crime of distributing birth control. she then appealed that conviction all the way through the state legal system up through the connecticut supreme court. and when she lost, as she was going to do, she then went into the federal courts, and in that long, complicated way that court cases have, i don't know if you've ever been in a court case, you know what i'm talking about, her case finally reached the supreme court for oral arguments in 1964. and in the spring of 1965, at the end of their 1964 65 supreme court term, the supreme court ruled in her case, griswold the connecticut, not only that the 1879 connecticut

statute was unconstitutional, but it was unconstitutional because it violated he write that up to that point no american had had. a right to. privacy it was out of that court case, in other words, that planned parenthood cracked through that parochial world that the case hillside lydon cahills has lifted and opened up such dramatic litigation to come. and most dramatic audit, wrote v. weighed. and then there's this young woman. alison krause. the see, alison, had been a graduate of wheaton, wheaton,

maryland, john f. kennedy high school, just a year when the washington post reporter came to the school to ask about [inaudible] he went to the front office as he was required to do, and when he asked for any information they could give her, give him about allison, they didn't have much to say. they pulled out her hire file, gave him a copy of her greats, her sats scores, left him see the letter that her guidance counselor had written on her college application, it said something like, alison is a very mature woman, a woman. but really, nobody remembered anything much except how pretty she'd been. and even that wasn't necessarily a memory of her, because already [inaudible] you are seeing her heckle

graduation photo had made the papers by then. not that anyone really at john f. kennedy high in wheaton short have remembered to. she came to the school the way a lot of kids did, to a place like kennedy high, trailing along behind her father as he pursued his corporate career. who had had been hired by the westinghouse corporation in cleveland, ohio, in 1949, when he was a element. and there he and his wife started to raise their family, allison and her younger sister. 1963, her dad was transferred to the pittsburgh office, so the family trails along behind him to pittsburgh. then a few years after that, he was transferred again to the baltimore plant of the westinghouse corporation, but by then, allison was a sophomore in high school in her and our younger sister was in middle school, i think. and they were a little worried about how the schools would go,

and so they decided to settle in the washington, d.c., greater area, settle into the suburbs, and her dad would get the drive up to baltimore every morning, and allison and her little sister would get glistening new suburban schools. candidly high had only been opened a couple of years when allison in rolled. had arrived as a sop homore. and for some reason or another, ellison didn't really make much of a market in high school, probably because she had arrived as a sophomore, probably because she was 15. didn't join the sort of clubs that the cool kids joined, didn't earn the sort of greats that made her a standout in the classroom. and when she reached her senior year and decided that it was time to apply to college, she only applied to one school. but she remembered what she

remembered when she was little, on the sunday, her mom and dad and her little sister, they'd all pile into the car and they would drive out of cleveland, out into the countryside, and that we folks used to do. she loved those trips. just driving aimlessly out in the countryside. and so she decided that she would go to a college, it was out in the countryside, too. she enrolled at kent state. and in her first year at kin state, the 69 70 school year, the folks back at her high school only heard from her once. she wrote once in the sport [inaudible] i guess it was in the winter to ask that they send her transcripts to the university of buffalo, because she was thinking of transferring. we shouldn't have an idea, why shouldn't explain why she was thinking of transferring, but it turned out she had met a young man from long island.

they'd become boyfriend - girlfriend. and the young man didn't really fit in that can straight. he wore his hair to long, he didn't care about football. his roommate used a homophobic slur about him. and so he decided that he had some friends at the university of buffalo and he'd like to transfer their, and allison was going to follow him just as her mother had followed her father all those years. she and her boyfriend were together on the 4th of may, 1970, crouching in a parking lot when the bullet of from a national guardsmen ripped through the kennedy high t-shirt she was wearing that day we. the next morning, the anger was flooding through the country in what would become the most intense moment of the anti war

movement, college campuses shutting down all across the country and the protests reached to kennedy high school too. a group of kids went out of the school and they went to the flagpole in the front of the school and they demanded that the flag be lowered to half mast in allison's honor. and another group of kids came out and said, no, they like it to stay at the top. and there was a lot of tough, a lot of pushing and shrubs and shoving until the principle came out, he worked out a compromise. he said that the black and white could be lowered to half mast but they leave the one over on the side all the way at the top. and that got the kids back into the school. but at some point or another somebody came out and they took that flight at half mast and they pulled it all the way down on the burned it. in a garbage can. and it was a few hours after that the post reporters came to find out what he could about allison's's story, and after he talked to the folks in the main office, he wanted around the hallway to see if any of the kids had anything to remember, and they wanted to talk about the protests that they wanted

to talk about the war. and some of them argued that why should the like be lowered to half mast because one kid was killed when so many young men were dying in the war? but when he asked if they remembered allison, most of them said, well, maybe they saw her once or twice in the hallway. but really, nobody knew her at all. that fourth of july, it cahill puts flags back up on eddy street. it had become a tradition every year, and all the flags multiplied, he loved it, he kept, likely kept boxes of flags down in this basement and every year he take them out and drape street. and he added music and put his record player out on the window and it would blast out patriotic songs and he set up by parades for the kids and

cookouts for the neighbors. as what she probably called and old-fashioned holiday. some of that seemed appropriate for 1970s that the displays that he had embraced in 1961, it's the world that he had embraced in 61, somehow seemed eerily off the past. i'm not trying to say that the social movements of the 1960s were all triumphant. civil rights movement of the 1960s where elizabeth eckford came from, where her moment has to be understood, had its triumphs in the 1960s, dramatic triumphs, and i will argue to the day i die that they were important. triumphs. but they were also limits to what the civil rights movement could do. and among them was the segregation that embraced little rock high in 57 and that

ran around eddy street all the time, that the cahills were there. and it's true that estelle griswold and those who followed shattered, opened those restrictions of the polo creole world that was so important to the cahills. but the issues they opened clearly haven't died. we live with them still as it is so clear in what's coming from the supreme court in the next few months. and it's true that the anti war movements -- and i insist there were more than one we've met -- did have an enormous impact on the war in vietnam, even as it caused far too many lives. but the larger framework of america's place in the world wasn't fundamentally transformed. and that's the story of the 60s

i'm trying to tell. a story of the 60s this complex, that intimate, that's personal. that's terrifying and inspiring and deeply, profoundly ambiguous. 's story of the 1960s for our own troubled time. thank you so much for spending some time with me today. now i see that there is a question. no? my mistake. thank you so much for letting me join you today, thank you so much for taking the time.