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it all starts with great internet. >> wow? >> wow, along with these television companies, supports c-span 2 as a public service. ♪ ♪ ♪ >> if you are enjoying american history tv, then sign up for our newsletter, using the qr code on the screen. to receive the weekly schedule of upcoming programs, like lectures in history, the presidency, and more. sign up for the american history tv newsletter today, and be sure to watch american history tv every saturday, or anytime online at c-span.org slash history. ancestral lands of the nokache tank peoples. >> greetings from the national archives in washington, d.c., which sits on the ancestral lands of the nacotchtank peoples. i am david ferreira, archivist of the united states, and it's a pleasure to welcome you to today's conversation with kevin boyle and suzanne smith, about boyle's new book, the shattering. before we begin, i'd like to talk about two programs coming

up soon on our youtube channel. on wednesday, january 26th at 1 pm, david mccain will tell us about his new book, watching darkness fall, which recounts the rise of the third reich in germany, and the road to war from the perspective of four american ambassadors in the western european capitals. rome, berlin, paris, and moscow. and on tuesday, february 1st at 1 pm, we will hear from sara pollack, who would discuss her book fdr in american memory. roosevelt in the making of an icon. she analyzes roosevelt as a cultural icon in american memory, historical leader who carefully and intentionally built his public image. gavin boyle begins has look at the 1960s with historian, when 1961 organist's neighbors to decorate their houses with american flags for the fourth of july. boyle was inspired by a photograph from -- and his neighbors that need seniors before in the book

published by the national archives. the book which re-produced more than 200 images from our photographic holdings what's called the american image. 's book about america the 1960s, the shattering, texas educate me on the american image, and focuses on periods transformative conflicts. the new york times called the shattering a rich, layered account of the 1960s. history is not simply the unfolding of events, but it is a story of individuals behind the events. in anna shattering, boyle introduces us to the people who propel the changes. the washington post reviewed that boyle has a gift for synthesizing and translating the often dry arguments and analyses a former scholarship into artful and pathetic, empathetic storytelling. kevin boyle there's that williams matt mason professor in american history northwestern university. his previous book, arc of justice, what the national book award for nonfiction, and was a finalist for the pulitzer

prize. he is also the author of the uaw and the heyday of american liberalism. and coauthor of muddy boots and ragged aprons. his essays and reviews have appeared in washington post, new york times, baltimore some, chicago tribune, and detroit free press. suzanne e. smith is a professor of american history at george mason university, and teaches african american history, 20th century cultural history, history of death in america, american popular music, and african american and religious history. she's the author of dancing in the street, motown in the cultural politics of detroit. now, let's hear from kevin loyal and suzanne eats mitt. thank you for joining us today. >> let me begin today simply by letting you know that professor smith wasn't able to join us. the last-minute, there were complications that made it

impossible for her to join us. and i am very sorry that she is not going to be sharing this afternoon with us. but i'm honored to be sharing it with you. i just want to say how much i appreciate the national archives giving me the opportunity to talk with you today, and particularly, 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're not supposed to do when you talk about your book. i want to >> i want to start today by doing one of those things that i think you are not supposed to do when you talk about your book. i want to start with somebody else's book. and in particular, what i want to do, is i want to start with a book by a woman who's been in the news a bit lately because of her passing. i want to start with john didion's second book of essays, the flight album. and particularly, what i want

to do, just for a second. i want to be just the start of it. it's a famous start. this is the start, the very first essay of the white helmet, which is a collection of essay that didion wrote in the late 1960s and early 1970s. this is what she said at the start. we tell ourselves stories in order to live. we live entirely by the imposition of a narrative line on disparate images, by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience. or at least, we do for a while. >> such a beautiful, elegant way of describing what historians actually do. what we do, as historians, is we take all the fragments, a complicated pieces of the past, and we try to shape them into a coherent story. and then, overtime, we start to wonder whether the story that we shape is really the best way

of telling the events of the past. and so, we start to think the way didion did, whether we need a new story. and that's what the shattering is. it's my attempt to take the phantasmagoria of the 1960s, this extraordinary sprawl of events. and to reshape them into a new story of the 19th, the 1960s. and a lot of that story centers on powerful figures of the 1960s. the book deals, to considerable extent, with the president of the 1960s, the john kennedy, lyndon johnson, with richard nixon. and to my surprise, really, with dwight eisenhower who hovered over the 60s to an extent, that i hadn't realized when i first started working out this book. it deals with those people who tried to become president,

barry goldwater, bobby kennedy, hubert humphrey, george govern, george wallace, who ran through so much of the 1960s. it talks about supreme court justices. it talks about a general or to. it talks about the towering activists we associate with the 60s, dr. martin luther king jr., malcolm x. but if there's one thing that animates my sense of the past, my sense of my sufficient stories, is they also really believe that ordinary people are essential to history,. ordinary people we don't know help us understand, whose names you've never heard of, help us understand the passed in a new way. ordinary people, the american past change this nation. so, alongside all of those famous people who went 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, our stories, or story. war stories. and this is the first one. this is the 4th of july 1961, on the 6100 block of west eddie street in the northwest corner of chicago. a day before -- ad and his neighbor, terrence mitchell, draped their block with 38 flags, that's a lot of flags given that there was only 36 houses on the entire block. and ed, being had had with into the chicago tribune, one of the major papers in chicago, to announce what they had done and

the trip decided that they would send the photographer out to take a picture of this block. and so, the neighbors all gathered on the lawn right next to ed cahill's house, and ed and clarence, of course, got pride of place, as they should have, again, that is it right there. and that's clarence right there. and two of its kids, he had three children, two of his gates got in the picture, too. that's his son, terry, standing up on the top of the steps. and that's his daughter katie. way in the back, right back there, you can barely see her, it is ed's wife, stella cahill. smiling into the 60s. stella had good reason to be smiling. stella was born a couple of

days after christmas in 1916, deep in the polish ghetto of chicago, where her parents lived. her father 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 then 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 families fall by getting married again, in 1920. she married another polish immigrant, this time, a man who

didn't even have a trait that her now deceased husband had had. made his living as an unskilled labor, which meant he made his living on the power of his back. a power that he tended to dissipate, it turned out, by drinking he couldn't control. and so, all through the 1920s, stella, her brother, and her mother are now stepfather, lived on the edge of poverty. and there is no clear sign of that from the fact that they moved every single year, every single year, all the way from the 20s, in this part of town, and then they move to that part of town. and then, they move to that part of town. the way poor people do. and then, in 1929, the economy collapsed around them. by the brink of 1930, stella's stepfather was unemployed. and the family was getting by on whatever money her mother

could bring home, from her job boxing candies in the candy factory. left it wasn't enough. within a 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 court she was taking, in one of chicago's public schools. and the minute that course was over, they pulled her out and sent her off to work, too. she was 15. stella met cahill on a blind date in 1938. the cahill family were hardly well to do. but in the working class world of chicago, they were a step

above stella's family, considerable step above. ed's father, who had been born and downstate illinois of irish immigrant parents, his father worked as a foreman for a construction company that did road work for the city of chicago. what that meant, especially in the 1920s, that work was steady. in a way that it had never been for stella's family. and with that steady work, he earned enough ed's father earned enough, that in the late twenties, he was able to buy a house. on the 6100 block of west eddie street the bloc you are looking at right now. in those days it was a half finished, brand-new development going out 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 who are

wrapped in restrictive covenants, those little clauses that were put on developers, put on their deeds, to say this property can never be sold to a negro, and oftentimes, to a jewish american. but i have no evidence whatsoever that when ed's family brought back that house on a street, they talk about race. chances are they took it in 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, with an unfinished attic 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 and a half finished neighborhood, six blocks away from a brand new catholic parish that they could join, st. verdant. it was such a new parish, and, fact they didn't even have a church yet. but it did have a pro catholic grade school, where ed and his brothers could go. that's part of the commitment to the cahill, the deep commitment to the cahill family to catholicism. and that's where 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, while judy was about a year old, ed got drafted.

he was gone for two and a half years. most of that time, he spent in europe, in the signal corps, toiling around behind the troops as they march towards berlin and the end of the war. and stellar state home with a newborn. now still knew on some level, that i was safe. she knew that, of course, from the letters he wrote home. those personal letters that he sent as often as he possibly could. what you gotta stop for just one sec. and think about this young woman, who in chicago, in 1943, 1944, 1945, living, surrounded by war, living surrounded by death, by the gold stars that

she'd seen the windows as she walked the baby along the streets. for the prayers, for those boys who had gone missing, the prayers at sunday mass, the boys have gone missing from that parish that she was a part of. and you gotta believe, 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 without notice. and if that were to happen, that she would become, her mother, in 1918, a two young widow, with a toddler at her skirt, and her life collapsing around her. it's not what happened.

ed got through the war, finally 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 that she eyeball was providing. he said, let's go get a job. and he did, he got a job as a clerk in the front office of the union company of chicago. the vacuum can company of chicago made industrial strength coffee urns. and one of their major clients was the night states military, the u.s. navy really like their coffee urns, as did the elderly. right up here in >> in 1948, there's some born

in 47, that is terry right up here. in 1948, this now young family, ed and stella, and their two kids, moved into his father's bungalow over down on west eddie street. and they moved in partly to take care of his wife, and everybody knew he couldn't take care of himself. and i think probably because ed had such a powerful sense of place. he wanted to go home. and so, they did, in 1948. that neighbor was still have finished half of the houses on the block haven't even been built yet because the development that had started back in the 20s it stalled during the depression. and then it stalled again during world war ii. over the next few years the 48, on to the 19 50s, the neighborhood started to fill in as the developers came back to put in -- small, reasonable houses onto the empty lots.

houses that had then sold overwhelmingly to italian american and polish americans who were moving out from the center city of chicago. and a process we call like flight. -- in a process we call light flight. as that neighborhood filled in, as the population filled in, it came a more prosperous area. in the mid 1950s, developers build a brand-new shopping mall, not that far from eddie street, one of the first shopping malls in chicago, not that far from 83. eddie straight. and that catholic patch that was important to -- finally got the truth of that never had. gorgeous, beautiful, church wrapped in marble. a place for families like the cahill's to feel a sense of solidity that the neighborhood had never happened.

and the cahill started to do well for themselves too. slowly started to move himself up into the vacuum can company, until the end of 1950s, he was the head of sales. they had a third child, 1952, that is kathy, down here. and the -- they were not extravagant people, but they had more money than ever before. and so, in 1953, 54, they brought their first car. never had a car before. but now, they didn't say the need for ed to take the bus all the way down to the vacuum can company down in the center city anymore. and in the 55, he bought a tv, put it in the living room. and one that gets were old enough, judy was certainly old enough, they sent them all to the great school that was connected to their parish, to send ferdinand and then when judy, their oldest daughter got of high school age, they sent

her to the catholic high school. and what she finished their, 1959, they sent her to depaul university, one of chicago's two large catholic universities. cahills now, there is no doubt that this was a parochial world that the cahills lived in. they lived inside this tight upper working class, lower middle class catholic world. there is no doubt that this neighborhood out on west eddie street was wrapped around racial exclusion. 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, their ability to buy the car, to buy the tv, to send their kids off to

school, 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 missile systems and bombers, it was also about industrial strength. you'll have to think, just for a minute, about what this world looked like for stella cahill. here was a woman who 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 her early days of her marriage, and her early days of motherhood, wasn't sure whether her husband

was gonna come home. now living in this extraordinarily stable family -centered world. here was this woman who in 1961, had her older daughter in college. when she had had to leave school at 15. is there any wonder that stella cahill was smiling into the 1960s? and already, that world built around 80 street, already, there were cracks in the exclusions let that world kind of created. none more dramatic, not more important than the one symbolized by this young woman, elizabeth eckford.

elizabeth eckford's story wouldn't have been fundamentally different, really, if her mother and father had had a phone. but they were working people and they had six kids to raise, and they could not afford that sort of extravagance. and so, on the day before, school was scheduled to start in 1957, september of 1957, on september 3rd of 1957, the eckford's didn't get the phone call from the national association to the advancement of colored people, the nation's leading civil rights organization. the eckfords didn't get the call telling her that elizabeth was supposed to meet with nine other kids who are going to desegregate little rock central high the next morning.

and that, together, the ten of them would be escorted to the school. and so, on the warning of that first day on september 4th of 1957, elizabeth got up early. she made sure that she could get herself dressed in the clothes she had carefully picked out for her first day. she made the skirt. that she had breakfast with her family. when breakfast was over, her mom called the kids together, so that they could all pray together the 27 solemn. 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 she took the bus to little rock central high school.

the boss dropped her off two blocks from the school. i don't know if any of you have ever 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 off near one of the corners, two blocks, near one of the corners of that big two block school. and she walked down, and as she was walking down towards the school, she can see down towards the center of the school on the street in front of the school count towards the center, she could see the white mob. and she could see ringing the school, all the way to the coroner, the national guardsmen that the governor of arkansas had called out the night before, in order -- to nights before, in order to prevent elizabeth eckford and nine other african american kids from going into the school, in defiance of a federal court order. she was 15, and when she was

coming up the wine, she can see that the national guardsmen were likely to get gets through. and that, in the mind of the 15 year old, what she thought was, will they let me through, too. when she got up to the corner, the guardsmen pulled 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 then 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, because this was a major national story. they drove along her, asking

her for comment that you refused to give. and the photographers walking backward in front of her to get this very picture. and she was refusing to say a word. and finally, she got to the center of the school, the center of the line along 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 acts if she could get through. and they told her she wouldn't be going to school, and she needed to move on. and for a second she had no idea what she was gonna do, she could not go back to where she came 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. this 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 boss 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 reporters said, well, they created a kind of cordon around her to protect her from the mob, and maybe that's true, i don't know. but beyond them stood the mob, screaming and yelling, and that person, still there, threatening to hack her from a tree. how long she sat there? no one could ever say, maybe about 20 minutes half an hour. and at one point, and african american man, middle aged african american men came up and offered her a ride home.

her parents have told her never to take rights from changer, so she refused. and then finally, a white woman came out of the mob, and this is a white woman started to harangue the other whites around her, saying that they were gonna be sorry for what they had done on this day. and elizabeth was horrified because she feared that what that mob, they were gonna make it worse. when all elizabeth really wanted this to be let alone. a warrior of the civil rights movement sitting on a park bench, trying not to cry. the next day, this photo run in all of the major newspapers and

they noted states, made the front page of every major newspaper in the united states. and in that image, what happened was that millions of white people who were forced to confront, probably for a moment, the confrontation, the contrast that the civil rights movement wanted them to see, not the individual one, although that's obviously terrifying. but the systemic one, the one between a 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. defense of the indefensible. over the course of the 1960s,

the civil rights movement would twist and turn and also have complicated ways, and i try 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. got herself arrested. four years later, this woman, estelle it whistled, got herself arrested. estelle griswold, once upon a time, when she was young back in the 19 twenties, she dreamed of being a professional singer. she even got to paris for a couple of years to try to make a go of it.

it didn't quite work out and in the 1927, she came back home to her home state of connecticut, where she fell in love and married, and aspiring at man. and for the next 30 years or so, she trailed along his career path, wherever it took. 1945, it took him to germany, where the state department had hired him to help with the occupation of defeated germany and with a reconstruction of western europe after the devastation of the war. and she went with him. and from 1945 to 1951, she worked, herself, with a refugee agency and agency trying to help the massive refugee crisis that engulfed europe, in a terribly brutal days after the war. in 1951, they finally decided to come home. they settled in new haven,

connecticut, came back to connecticut. and for a year or so, she continued to work with refugee agencies, with its headquarters 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 a particular skill set, as an administrator, that wasn't an enormous demand for a woman in new haven, connecticut, in the early 1950s. so to her about a year to get a 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, i had no idea about birth control, when she took this job. she didn't know what a diaphragm was. she thought that it can be interesting, and she hadn't used these set of skills. 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. one 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 enforce the law. and so, it is set on the books. and when estelle griswold took over as executive director of connecticut's planned parenthood, she tried to lobby the legislature to get them to withdraw the law. haven't had any luck. so, in 1958, she decided to change tactics. she arranged for two married couples who are willing 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 to declare it unconstitutional. and in the way the things worked, that case wound its way up all the way to the noted state supreme court. finally, it reached the supreme court in 1961, in the spring of 61. four of the nine justices who are 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 real harm. you can just have a case that is and obstruction. you have to prove that somebody is being harmed, and these married couples could not prove that. and so, estelle griswold's case phil failed. and that's when she decided to get herself arrested. to be more precise, when she decided was, 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 the information that she thought about -- getting the information they needed. how to use birth control and their families? and she always assumed this was about american women. they opened their clinic on 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. a man who worked for the car rental company, in fact, a devout catholic, with five

children at home, who believed, according to the teachings of his church, that they use of birth control was a sin, and therefore, should not be allowed by that state. and the loss that this was illegal, and he wanted that birth control clinic shutdown. 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 the estelle griswold's clinic. nobody wanted to do it. spent her better part of the day being shunted along from one office to another in new haven, everybody saying, well, you're not gonna talk to person. you want to talk to 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 him off the phone, he sent a couple of policeman over. and they 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 people, and she brought them into the office. she sat the officers down, and for an hour, she gave them every little bit of information she possibly could about birth control all the pamphlets, all the information she was wedging up every bit of technical knowledge she possibly had throwing it at them, and they sat politely taking notes. and when she was finally done, they all 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 1879 statute, exactly as she wanted it to be. she was convicted, as she knew she would be, in january of 1962, and find one hard dollars

for this enormous crime of distributing birth control. she then appealed that conviction, all the way through the state legal system, up through that supreme court. and when she lost, as she was going to do, she then went to the federal court. and then, and that long complicated way that court cases have, and if you've ever been in a court case, you know what i'm talking about. her case finally reached the supreme court, her oral arguments, in 1964. and in the spring of 1965, at the end of 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 a right that up to

that point, no american 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 cahills had lived in, and opened up such dramatic litigation to come, the most dramatic of it roe v. wade. and then there's this young woman. alison kraus. alison had been a graduate of in maryland, john f. kennedy high school just a year when the washington post reporter

came to the school to ask about [interpreter] -- 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, really, they don't have much to say. they pulled out her file, gave him a copy of her grades, of her s.a.t. scores, let him see the letter that her guidance counselor had written on her college application. it said something like alison is very mature, a very mature young woman. but really, nobody remembered anything much except how pretty she'd been. are high and even that wasn't necessarily a memory of her because already, the high school graduation photo, the photo you're seeing, had made the papers by that. well that anyone really, john f. kennedy high, should have

remembered alison krause. 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. her dad have been hired by that was sitting house corporation in cleveland, ohio, in 1949, when he was a young man. and there, he and his wife started to raise their family, alison and her younger sister. in 1963, her dad was transferred to the pittsburgh office, so the family trailed along behind him to pittsburgh. a few years after that, he was transferred again to the baltimore plant of the what stink house corporation. but biden, alison was a sophomore in high school, and her 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, settling in 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. kennedy high had only been open a couple of years when alison enrolled. but for some reason or another, alison didn't really make much of a mark in high school, probably because she had arrived as a sophomore, probably because she was 15. she did not join the sort of clips that the coop is joined. he did not earn the sort of greats that made her stand out in the classroom. and when she reached her senior year and decided that it was time to apply to college, she only apply to one school. what she remembered was that when she was little, on a sunday, her mom and dad and her little sister, they all piled into the car, and they would

drive out to cleveland out into the countryside. and that way folks used to do. she loved those trips. those drive-in, aimlessly around the country. she decided that she would go to a college, it was out in that countryside, too. she enrolled at kent state. and in her first year at penn state, the 69 70 school year, the folks back at her high school, only heard from her once. she wrote once in the spring, i think it was in the winter, to ask that they send her transcripts to the university of buffalo, because she was thinking of transferring. and no one had an idea like, she didn't explain how was thinking of transferring. but it turned out that she had met a young man from long island. they became number, boyfriend girlfriend. and the young man didn't really fit in at gun state, he wear

his hair too long. he didn't care about football. his roommate used homophobic slurs about him. and so, he decided to deal with some friends at the diversity of buffalo, and he'd like to transfer. there and allison was gonna follow with him, just as her mother had followed her father all of those years. she and her boyfriend were together on the 4th of may, 1970, crouching in a parking lot, won the national guardsmen ripped through the kennedy high t-shirt she was wearing that day. 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 kennedy high school, too.

a group of kids came out of the school and went up to the flagpole in front of the school, and they demanded that the flag be lowered -- and another group of kids came out and said, no, that flag had to stay at the top. and it was a tussle, a lot of pushing and shoving, until the principle came out, and he worked out a compromise. he said that that flag in front can be lowered to half mast, but they lead the one over on the side all the way at the top. and that got the kids back to school. but at some point or another, somebody came out, and they took that flag at half mast, and they bolted all the way down and pulled 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 story. and every time he talk to the main office, he wondered around the whole way to see if any other guys have anything turned up. and they want to talk about the protest. and they want to talk about the war. some of them argued that what should the flag 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 alison, most of them said, well, maybe this offer once or twice in the hallway. but really, nobody knew her at all. that fourth of july, ed cahill but that flag backup on a dissuaded became a tradition every year. all the flags went up. elected flags, getting boxes a flex down in his basement, and every, year he would bring them out and drape at the street. and he added -- it put his record play out on the window and he would blast out patriotic songs. and there is a backward for the kids and cookouts for the neighbors. and what he proudly called an old-fashioned holiday.

and some of that missing the appropriate thing by 1970 that the displays that he had embraced back in 1961 the, world that he embraced and 61 somehow seemed a relic of the past. i'm not trying to say that the social movements of the 1960s were all triumphant. civil rights movement of the 1960s was when they came from, for her moment has to be understood. had those stripes of the 1960s, dramatic once, and i will argue till the day i die that they were important. >> but there were also limits to what the civil rights movement would do. and among that, was the segregation that embraced little rock high in 57, and that ran around any street all the time when the cahill where

there. and it's true that estelle griswold and those who followed, shattered open those restrictions of the brockville world that was so important to the cahills. but the issues they open clearly haven't died. we live with them, still as it's so clear and what's coming from the supreme court and the next few months. did you have an enormous impact on and it's true that the anti war movements, and i insist there were more than one movement, the idea that enormous impact on the war in vietnam, even as it cost far too many lives. but the larger framework of america's place in the world was not fundamentally transformed. and that is the story of the 60s i am trying to tell. a story of the 60s that's

complex, that's intimate, that's personal, that is terrifying and inspiring, and deeply, profoundly ambiguous. a 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 questions. no. my mistake. thank you so much for letting me join you today. thank you so much for taking the time. >> american history tv, saturdays on c-span two exploring the people and events that tell the american story. at 8 pm eastern, on lectures and history, kermit roosevelt, university of pennsylvania law professor and descendant of

theodore roosevelt, argues that modern america choices is political sentiments to lincoln and the reconstruction era, rather than the founding fathers. and at 9:30 pm eastern on the presidency, historian david which russia looks at depressionary markets with a personality and presidency of franklin roosevelt, and his 1936 landslide election with his book, roosevelt sweeps tion. explore the american story, watch american history tv saturdays on c-span two. and find the full schedule on your program guide, or watch online anytime at c-span.org slash history. ♪ ♪ ♪

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