so much work to be done. president biden is also expected to attend this, making this the first time since 2016 that a sitting president has made an appearance. our coverage begins at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. we will have highlights from past dinners ahead of the program. coverage on the c-span.org and c-span now app begins live at 6:30. the white house correspondents' association dinner, live, saturday, april 30th. season focuses on the

presidency of lyndon johnson, and you will hear about the march on selma and the war in vietnam. not everybody knew they were being recorded. >> certainly johnson's secretaries knew, because they were the ones that made sure the conversations were taped as johnson would signal to them through an open door between the mayor's office and theirs. you will also hear talk -- >> if mine are not less i want them less right quick. if i can't ever go to the bathroom, i won't go.

i promise you i won't go anywhere. i will just stay behind these black gates. c-span brings you an unfiltered view of government. scan the qr code at the right bottom to sign up for this e-mail and stay up-to-date on everything happening in washington each day. subscribe today using the qr code. >>. >> sits on the land of the people. it's a pleasure to welcome you to today's conversation about boyle's new book, the shattering. before we begin, i would like to

tell you about two programs coming up on our youtube channel, "watching darkness fall" is a book that talks about the rise before the fall in germany. and on tuesday, february 1st, at 1:00 p.m., we will hear from sarah pollack that would discuss her book, "fdr." she analyzed roosevelt as a cultural icon. historical leader who carefully and intentionally built his public interest. kevin boyle begins his book in the 1960s for the fourth of july. boyle is inspired by a

photograph of cahill. history is not the simply unfolding of the events. boyle introduces us to the people who prau poled changes. 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." his essays appear in the detroit free press. 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 and i'm not sharing this afternoon with her, and 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. the book deals to a considerable extent with the presidents of the 1960s, john kennedy and lyndon johnson and richard nixon and to my surprise, really, 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 that we associate with 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 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 right next to ed cahill's house. 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, smiling 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 lived on what her father, who was a tailor, managed to bring hem 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 young children to raise faced the prospect of tumbling into the worst forms of poverty. she tried to break the family's fall by getting married again in 1920. she married another polish immigrant. this time a man did not even have the trade that her now deceased husband had. he made his living on the power of his back, a power that 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 stella's family, considerably a step above. 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 clauses 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. in 900 square t house of living space with an unfinished attic above that they could finish off where the boys could have a place to stay. what they saw was that they were buying a house with a little backyard and a little front yard senate in a half finished neighborhood six blocks away from a brand-new catholic parish that they could join, six or denies. it was such a new fashion vacay, didn't have a church yet. but it did have a parochial great school where it and his brothers could go. as part of the commitment to the cahill family the, deep

commitment to the gaels emily to catholicism and. that's where it grew up. it and stella got married in may of 1940. 1942 they had their first child, he'd girl they named judy. in november of 1943 when judy was about a year old had got drafted. you was gone for two and a half years. most of that time, he spent in europe in the signal corps, trailing along behind the front line troops as they marched towards berlin and the end of the war. and a stellar state home with the newborn. now, stella knew at some level

that it was safe. she knew that of course from the letters he wrote home. his sweet personal letters that he sent as often as he possibly could. but you've got to stop for just one second and think about this young woman in chicago in 1943 in, 1944, in 1945, living surrounded by war, living surrounded by death, by the gold stars that issue to see in the windows as she walked the baby on the streets. for the prayers for those boys who had gone [inaudible] the race as sunday mass for the boys that had gone missing from that parish that she was [inaudible] . and you've got to believe, i believe it all my heart, that deep in the night that kim creeping up to her too, that it

would have been impossible for her not to imagine the western union messenger coming to her door without notice. and if that were to happen that she would become her mother in 1918, you two young widow, with a toddler at her skirt and her life collapsing around her. it's not what happened. and 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. and ed decided that with a new baby coming, he couldn't really afford to take all the benefits winded the g.i. bill was providing and he needed to get a job. you did.

he got a job as a clerk in the front office of the vacuum can company of chicago. thank you ken company of chicago made industrial strength coffee urns. and one of their major clients was the united states military. the u.s. navy really like their coffee urns, as did the. army in 1948 -- well there, son was born in 1947, that's terry right up there -- in 1948, this young family, ed and stella, there are two kids, moved into his father's bungalow, over down on west 80 street. and they moved in party to take care of him his wife had recently died and [inaudible] he couldn't take care of himself, and i think partly because it, ed, it has such a powerful sense of place. you wanted to go home.

and so they did in 1948. that neighbor was still have finished and half of the houses on the block haven't been built yet because the development that had started back in the 20s and stalled during the depression and then stalled again during world war ii. over the next three years, from 48 on through the 1950s, the neighborhood started to fill in as developers came back to philly and small, reasonable houses onto the empty lots. houses that have been sold overwhelmingly to italian american and polish americans we were moving out from the center city of chicago any process we 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 brand-new shopping mall not that far from it is street, one of the first shopping malls in chicago [inaudible] not that far from eddie street. and that catholic parish that was so important to ed finally got the church that it had never had, a gorgeous, beautiful church, wrapped in marble. a place for families like the k heals to feel a sense of solidity that neighborhood never had. the gaels started to do well from themselves too and started to move themselves up in the vacuum can cut pretty until in the 1950s he was the head of sales. they had a third child in 1952. that's coffee, down here. and the cahills, cars were not 's extravagant people. but they had more money than ever before, and so in 1953, 54,

they bought their first car. never had a careful before. but now, they didn't see the need for it to take the bus all the way down to the vacuum can company down in the center city anymore. and in 55 they bought a tv and put it in the little living room and. when the kids were old enough -- judy were certainly old enough -- they sent them off to the parochial school, to the great school that wears connected to their perished, to think for denied, and when julie, their oldest daughter, got to high school age, they sent her to a catholic high school. and when she finished their, 1959, they sent to two, one of chicago's two large catholic universities. now there is no doubt that this was a parochial world that the cahills lift in. they lived inside this tight kind of harper working class,

lower middle class, catholic world. there's no doubt that this neighborhood on west eddie street was wrapped around racial exclusion and discrimination. you can see that just in the picture of the folks standing out there in 1961. and the cahills at least, their prosperity, their ability to buy the cars, by the tv, to send their kids off to schools, private schools, was paid for in part by the vacuum cans connection to what dwight eisenhower would call the military industrial complex. because the military industrial complex wasn't all about missiles systems and bombers. it was also about industrial strength coffee urns. but you also have to think just

for a minute about what this world looked like for stella cahill. he was a woman who grew up right on the edge of devastating poverty, we never had a stable choice to live and now she and ed owned their own home out on eddie street. here was a woman who in her early days of her marriage and her early days of motherhood wasn't sure whether her husband was going to come home. now living in this extraordinary stable family centered world. here was this woman who in 1961 had her older daughter in college which she had had to leave school at 15. is it any wonder that stella cale was smiling into the 1960s?

and already, that world, built around eddie street, already there were cracks in the exclusions that that world had created. none more dramatic, none more important than the one symbolized by this young woman, elizabeth eckford. . elizabeth eckford's story would have been fundamentally different, really, if a mother and father had had a phone. but they were working people and they had six kids raised, and they couldn't afford that sort of extravagance.

and so on the day before school was to start in 1957, september of 1957, and september 3rd of 1950 87, the eckfords didn't get the phone call for the national association for the advancement of colored people [inaudible] the back which the experts didn't get the call telling her that. elizabeth was supposed to meet with the nine other kids who are going to de-segregated little rock central high the next morning and that together the ten of them would be escorted to the school. and so on and so on the morning of that first day on september 4th of 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, her mom called the kids together so they could all pray together, the 27th psalm. and then elizabeth picked up the binder that her mom 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 two whole city blocks. and elizabeth got dropped near one of the corners, two blocks up, near one of the corners of that big, two 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, down towards 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 and her 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 behind her, 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 take rides 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 white woman started to harangue 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 mob was she was going to make it worse. but all elizabeth really wanted was to be let alone. it warrior of the be let alone. a 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, madethe front page of every major newspaper in the united states. and in that image, what 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 a

social, a 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 trace 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. four years later,

this woman, estelle griswold, got herself arrested. estelle griswold, once upon a time when she was young back in the 1920s, she had dreamed of being a professional singer. she had 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 an aspiring ad man. 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., ,,, 51 day finally decided to come home. they 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 she got tired of the commute. 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 sat on the books. and when estelle griswold took over as executive director of connecticut's planned parenthood in the 1950s she to

tried to get them to withdraw the law and 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 wound 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 abstraction, you have to prove that somebody is being

harmed, and these married couples couldn't prove that. and so, estelle griswold'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 it in terms of women, getting the information she needed on how to use birth control in their families. which she always assumed that

this was about married women. 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. that 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 sin. 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 estelle griswold'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 so persistent and so insistent that finally the prosecuting person, you want to talk to that person, ought want to talk attorney said, all right, all right, basically to get to this one. nobody wanted to [inaudible] all sent a couple deal with this guy but he was so persistent and so insistent that finally the prosecuting attorney said, all right, all of policeman over. and he did. right, basically to get 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 him off the phone, i'll sent a couple of policemen over. and he did. he sent over a couple of policeman to estelle griswold's clinic. and when they arrived, these two people and she she came bounding out of her brought them into the office office, and she grabbed hold of and she set the officers down these two people and she and for an hour he gave them brought them into the office every little bit of information and she sat the officers down she possibly could about birth and for an hour he gave them control, all the pamphlets, all every little bit of information the information. she was dredging up every bit of technical knowledge she she possibly could about birth possibly, had throwing it at control, all the pamphlets, all the information. she was dredging up every bit of them. they sat politely, taking technical knowledge she 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. 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.

full tour online at c-span.org/history. so without further ado, i'd like to introduce our panel dr. yuris morissette marcellus, and i know i wasn't going to say that right of pra so without further ado i'd like to introduce our panel. doctor