this week on q & a, a selection of speeches going back to 1989. >> the 20th century senator who has been written about the most is joe mccarthy. there are a dozen books about mccarthy yet there is no biography of the senator who had the back bone to stand up to him first. margaret j. smith. host: do you remember how you went about preparing for that speech? guest: the hardest i've ever worked on anything i've ever delivered from a podium. >> historian david mccullough on his book "the american spirit" a selection of speeches going back to 1989. sunday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span's "q & a." for the next hour 10 minutes a book tv exclusive. our city's tour visits, well monsignorton, north carolina. for five years now we've traveled to u.s. cities

bringing the book theme to our viewers. you can watch more of our visits at c-span.org/cities ur >> operation baby lift was an evacuation of 2,000 to 3,000 vietnamese displaced children from saigon at the very end of the war there in april of 1975. the purpose of the baby lift was to remove from vietnam the several thousand displaced children who were considered orphans and therefore in need stable homes somewhere else and this was at the time when the war in vietnam which had been basically going on since 1945 in different forms was about to end. so in march of 1975, the north

vietnamese began their final move into south vietnam and within six weeks the 30-year really quickly came to an end. there were a number of small and larger adoption agencies in vietnam that were working with children and preparing them for adoption. and these agencies decided at that point when the north vietnamese was about to take over that they needed to expedite those adoptions and get the children in their care out of vietnam as quickly as possible. and so with the help of the u.s. government they arranged an air lift and they evacuated these children. the united states left vietnam or pulled out for the most part in the early 1970's but it took a while for -- it was the -- the war was still kind of at a stalemate. it wasn't until march of 1975 that the north finally began to

make the moves that ended up bringing the war to an end. that was by moving south, starting in the central highlands, and then sort of slowly moving, continuously south from there. and the south vietnamese government made really bad choices to kind of pull back hen the north began this final move and pulled back and tried to fight in the area they felt most comfortable. that caused a panic. and so people in the northern part of south vietnam felt that they had been abandoned by the south vietnamese government and they started fleeing further south. d so you had hundreds of thousands of people fleeing one part of the country and moving south toward the -- east and south so toward the coast and then south toward saigon.

and i guess the best way to describe what was going on in that last six weeks of the war was increasing chaos and panic and a lot of south vietnamese wanting to get out of the country as well because they were afraid of what was going to happen when the communists took over. that point, there was something children 00 displaced in vietnam. so that's a really, really large number. that was the result to a large extent of the war. by displaced i don't necessarily mean that they were orphans but that they were not able to be raised by their parents. when it became clear the south vietnamese government was going to collapse the adoption agency administrators in saigon understood this was going to be a crisis for their agencies and for the children that they were trying to send for adoption

overseas. many of these children had been in the adoption pipeline as they called it for months or years already and they were just waiting because adoption generally can take a long time to process. so they became concerned that the children who were in their care were not going to end up being able to go overseas because the government would collapse and they would have to leave them in vietnam and they were worried about what would appen to them. they began to appeal to the u.s. government to help remove these children from the country. it took a while and it took -- there was a man named ed daly who ran his own private airlines. i mean, he -- his airline was called world airways and he brought in a lot of military equipment into vietnam. so he made a lot of money in vietnam but he also had some concern about the children. so he ended up flying the very

first plane load of children who left vietnam on operation baby lift were actually air lifted out on one of his planes. i mean, it was -- you could say it was a big publicity stunt. you could say that he was doing it because he was really concerned about these children, for whatever reason he air lifted the first group. and the u.s. government, seeing that he had done this on his own and that it was done in a way that was not legally proper, decided to get involved. with that, gerald ford decided to begin a more organized evacuation that was eventually called operation baby lift or the orphan air lift. the children who were being adopted were for the most part going to the united states although a significant number went to europe and also australia. many if not most of them were scheduled to be adopted

by families who had been going through the process for a while already. but in the end especially the last few weeks, anybody who has seen the photographs of the fall of saigon and the very end of the war and the helicopter on top of the u.s. government building, people climbing up to get in and just the complete chaos at that time, knows that nothing worked in a really organized and efficient manner. one of the results of that in terms of the baby lift was that a lot of parents at the very end of the war, vietnamese parents, were so panicked about what was going to happen to their children after the communists took over that they did whatever they could to get their children into these adoption agencies and on these planes to be adopted overseas even if it meant giving up those children and their ability to care for them. , d so a lot of the children maybe 10%, or 20%, not a

majority but a significant number sort of ended up on these planes at the last minute and they were not already in the adoption pipeline. and then by the time they got to the u.s. or the countries they ended up in, there was a question of where are we going to -- how are we going to place these children and where will we put them? rst, -- the first u.s. sponsored plane that was dedicated toward the baby lift was a galaxy aircraft which is a military aircraft. and it came in to vietnam on april 4th, and children were very quickly loaded into the plane. i think there were 200 something children loaded on to a big cargo jet. so, i mean, you know what the inside of a passenger plane looks like. it's got seats on it. this was a cargo jet. so most of it, the bottom part of it was like the inside of a

warehouse. so there were no seats. there's no way to sort of protect anybody that's on there. but it was such a moment of chaos and concern about what was going to happen that all the children were just put on to the plane very quickly. there were many older children on the bottom of the plane in this cargo area, plus the care givers who got on with them, and then in the top part of the plane, which is kind of a passenger area, there were a lot of infants and nurses and people who were taking care of the sickest children. so a few minutes after that plane took off, the rear cargo door blew off. there was a big explosion. and the pilots were able to maintain some control of the plane. they turned the plane around. there are testimonies from people who were on the top part of the plane who tell us what happened. what it was like inside the plane. the fear that they felt. they were out over the water,

over the ocean at that time. the pilots were incredible and they were able to turn the plane around and try to get back to saigon but they couldn't make it back and the plane crashed in the rice fields outside of saigon. we doan even know how many people were killed because we don't know how many people were actually on the plane. as i say, everything was done in such a disorganized, rushed way, and then a lot of the papers were destroyed so it is hard to know. there were children who survived up above but in the cargo area i think almost everybody was killed. so that was like one heart break following so many years of heart break already. so there was a question briefly about whether or not the baby lift would continue, but the president gerald ford said we're going to keep going. operation baby lift lasted from -- for about three weeks. maybe i should say a month.

in april of 1975. and when saigon fell, there were no more planes leaving vietnam with children in them. so it was a very short time and a very intense time. and during that period, something between 2,000 and 3,000 children were evacuated. following the baby lift, and the fall of saigon, in the months after that, a group of lawyers filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of these children just to slow down the process of the adoptions and make sure that all the children who were being adopted were legally eligible for adoption under the terms of the geneva accord. and that lawsuit was eventually thrown out because more for legal reasons than on the merits of the case, because the

judge decided that these children didn't serve as a class, a class action lawsuit, everybody has to have suffered in the same way. anyway, there were individual lawsuits, though, that did go through, and these were mostly based on birth parents who gave up their children at the very end of the war, mostly birth mothers, and then they managed to get out of vietnam themselves and get to the united states as refugees. when they got to the united states they looked for their children and they, when they found them, there were certain situations where the adoptive families had had the children for months or maybe even a year to he birth parents filed regain custody of their children, saying they had to give them up under duress. those lawsuits played out. and a number of those, there was maybe less than 10, i think. those lawsuits generally ended with the birth parents receiving custody of their

children again but they were very complicated and difficult. for the most part, adoptive families ended up raising these children. i actually have been doing research for a new book on the refugee situation in europe and the middle east and it's been very interesting to be learning about that in the context of what happened during operation baby lift because there is very, very little talk about adoption now. the discussion of refugees focuses on keeping families together, if there are orphans, and there are orphans, unfortunately, there seem to be real serious efforts to find the family somewhere. a lot of times these families who are fleeing, syrians, for example, already have some family members living in europe, and so a lot of times those orphans end up going to

live with aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents in countries in europe. so i think that i'm not saying they're directly thinking of operation baby lift when they think about this policy, but i think a lot has changed in the decades since the baby lift and that public policy makers and humanitarian agencies and probably adoption agencies as well are making an effort to really do their homework and not be pressed by chaos to rush into anything. there was an earthquake in haiti a few there was an earthquake in haiti a few years ago and there were some children there that were in the process of being adopted by american families. and those children, because the situation in haiti was so bad, those children were airlifted out of haiti and brought to i think pennsylvania. and the adoption agency made some effort to just expedite the

adoptions so that the children could go into the families that they were supposed to be adopted with quicker. the u.s. government said no. we are not speeding up the process of adoption just because of what happened. there's still things that need to be done to make sure that this is appropriate. i think that's great. i want people who read this book to understand that these issues of what happens to children and their families are really complicated. they can't be solved easily. but that with time we can get there. we need to do that for the children so that we don't make mistakes that can't really be emedied later.

>> left to right. ero intervals. rolling thunder. [gun shots] >> we're actually standing on the crest of fort anderson. which was the largest confederate fort in the lower cape fear, in the interior, that guarded the western land approaches and the river approaches to the seaport of wilmington. the fort was initially started in march of 1862. construction was ongoing throughout the war. and they were still working on it when it was attacked in february of 1865. the fort was built on top of the old seaport of brunswick. which was the leading seaport on the cape fear river in colonial times. in fact, it was the first enduring settlement on the cape fear river. after the american revolution,

brunswick kind of faded into oblivion. the entire site was sold in 1842 for $4.25. 20 years later, during the civil war, confederate engineers picked this site to build a line of artillery batteries to protect the western land approaches to wilmington and the river approaches. so beginning in late march of that year, they came here with a couple of companies of confederate soldiers and enslaved african-americans and they started to clear the site. and build the fort. the fort ran from the cape fear river one and a quarter miles westward to the edge of orton pond. which is actually a lake five miles long. only in the south do you call that a ponled. and they used orton as kind of a giant mote. so the earth works ran to the lake and then you had another

five miles of extended area that was impenetrable to ground orces. the fort was greatly expanded and artillery departments were built where heavy guns would be placed to point down river in case enemy vessels, union vessels, ever breached the inlets, got onto the river, to attack wilmington. well, next to charleston, which was the main southern seaport along the atlantic seaboard, wilmington was the most heavily fortified of the southern seaports. wilmington became the most important seaport in the south by 1863. it was the largest seaport in north carolina on the eve of the war. it was the largest city in north carolina when the war broke out.

by 1863, when charleston was put under siege by union forces, wilmington became the most important southern seaport for receiving supplies that were smuggled into the confederacy onboard vessels known as blockade runners. surprisingly the union did not go after the forts or made an effort to capture wilmington until late 1864. by the spring of 1862, union forces had captured and occupied 2/3 of the coastal plain of north carolina. the outer banks. the sound. all the major river systems. and all the river towns. so they controlled everything from southeastern virginia to within 50 miles of wilmington. wilmington should have been the next target. but instead they hop-scotched

over wilmington and went after charleston instead. charleston is where the war had begun. battle fort sump ter much it was the nest of secession. and public and political interest centered there. even secretary of the navy, who had proposed taking wilmington in 1862, when the city was still relatively undefended, and the defenses weak, wrote that we should skip wilmington and go after charleston instead. for charleston is satan's kingdom. so they concentrated their efforts militarily on capturing charleston. they poured man power, resources, naval forces into capturing charleston without success. charleston underwent the longest siege of the civil war. 587 days. and did not fall. even though federal forces were able to make blockade running there uncertain at best, those firms simply transferred their

operations 175 miles up the coast to wilmington. and by then wilmington was the closest major seaport to virginia. arming and supplying robert e. lee's army of northern virginia. in fact, wilmington's importance was so great that it became known as lee's life line. and eventually the life line of the confederacy. so this was a main artery of supply for robert e. lee's army. so much so that by 1863 robert e. lee said, wilmington must be defended at all hazards. by late 1864, he said, if wilmington falls, i cannot maintain my army. >> confederates got good intelligence that the attack on wilmington was finally coming by october of 1864. they knew that the attack was planned against fort fisher. and so fort anderson's garrison

was largely depleted to send reinforcements to fort fisher. so you might have had a company or two of troops here. there would be two attacks on fort fisher. one at christmas of 1864. that turned out to be the largest may value bombardment of the -- naval bombardment of the civil war. but the fire on fort, which was the longest fortification, was large lady fuse and ineffective. -- largely diffuse and ineffective. the army that went onshore saw the fort, saw the defenses were still strong. the canyons in the fort still pointing up the ground. so they aborted the mission. the confederate were victorious. 2 1/2 weeks later they returned with a slightly scaled-down naval task force. more soldiers. and this time they were determined to capture the fort. after 2 1/2 days of bombardment, the second largest bombardment

of the civil war, union ground forces attacked late on the afternoon of january 15. and overwhelmed the confederate defenders. outgunned, outmanned, exhausted. they put up a good fight. but the fort fell that night. then the union forces turned their gun sights upriver to capture wilmington. and that's when fort anderson came into play. general braxton brag, who was the departmental commander, abandoned the forts at the mouth of the river and withdrew them to fort anderson. that's when the most soldiers, you know, were in fort anderson during the war. there were 2,300 confederate soldiers here. about 4,500 confederate soldiers across the river. a division of troops that had been sent by general lee from the petersburg lines to make sure that wilmington remained in

confederate hands. it had to be safeguarded. remember, if wilmington fell, he could not maintain his army. so you've got troops over here. you've got confederate troops directly across the cape fear river. but general grant wants to capture not just fort fisher and close the harbor to blockade running, he needs to capture wilmington. why? well, at the time that the federals were being defeated at fort fisher in the first attack at christmas, 1864, the federals gained an important victory 300 miles to the south. general william t. sherman's army captured savannah. after capturing, occupying and destroying atlanta in the fall of 1864, general sherman marched his 60,000-man army the entire breadth of the state and captured savannah on december 21. he presented the city to president lincoln as a christmas gift. now safe on the sea coast,

general grant wanted to transfer sherman's army by sea from petersburg -- i'm sorry, from savannah to petersburg for one last push against robert e. lee's army. the greatly expanded army. so wilmington became so important that u.s. grant left virginia, came to the cape fear river, and on january 28, he consulted with the leaders who had captured fort fisher, how do we capture wilmington? the naval task force commander and the union general whose forces had captured fort fisher, they said, well, we've been here for about two weeks now. we've scouted the confederate positions. the ground on the east side of the cape fear river is a peninsula. and too narrow for military operations. and strongly defended by a line

of works known as the sugarloaf lines. what we propose is you send us reinforcements. we'll transfer them to the west side of the cape fear river. we'll have admiral porter's flow filla move up the river -- flotilla move up the river, provide covering fire for both wings of the army on the west side and the east side of the cape fear rive river. but really there's only one major obstacle between us and wilmington and that's fort anderson on the west side. but the main room will provide a lot of elbow room for our army. so we can attack fort anderson from the river, we can attack it from the south. if possible we can attack it head-on with the protection of the navy. or if necessary we can outflank it by going around the defenses that go all the way to the west end of orton pond. so that's when the battle occurred. bruary 17, 18, early morning

of the 19, 1865. admiral porter's flow fill -- flotilla of gun boats, almost 30 of them, would unleash a bombardment over about two days on the fort. fire being 4,000 shot and shell at the fort. one of the vessels in the fleet was a floating tank. the monitor monday talk. big ironture its. 15-inch guns onboard. that vessel was able to get within 800 yards of the fort and fire big shells. in the meantime, grant sent reinforcements. they were transferred as cross the cape fear river. approached the fort. about two miles to the north. from smith field, where they made their landing. and got within 600 yards of the fort. the ground between the fort and the tree line for 600 yards had been cleared out for a field of

fire. and what they discovered when they got there, that this was a very strong earthen fort. attacking it head-on would be almost murderous. like the attack by the 54th massachusetts on battery wagner charleston in 1863. so while they debated whether or not to attack it straight on, even with the protection of the navy, an african-american showed up in their camp, i late on the afternoon of february 18, and said, i know a way around orton pond. and fort anderson. and so he guided them. his name was lynn brown. he guided the union forces, two brigades of forces, around the fort to the west, around orton pond, and they positioned themselves on the north side by late on the night of february 18. the weakness of fort anderson, like the weakness of fort fisher, was that it was just a two-sided ward. so if union forces could get on

the north side of the fort, they could attack it more easily with less opposition. union soldiers who were captured and some deserters informed the general commo commanded the garrison here when it happened and so they decided to evacuate the fort and retreat towards wilmington. early morning hours of february 19, confederate forces packed up their belongings and abandoned the fort and headed toward wilmington. the united states army overran the fort about dawn on february 19. they'd heard the army just south of the fort, had heard the sounds of evacuation throughout the early morning hours of february 19. as soon as the sun started to come up, fired a volley, charged

the fort, stormed over the walls of the fort. in time to capture about 40 or 50 of the confederate rear guard that were protecting the rear of the main army in retreat toward wilmington. they also found the garrison flag lying on the ground of the fort. but union forces by sunrise had captured and occupied fort anderson. well, the united states navy didn't know that. when at sunrise they renewed their bombardment. now they're exploding project aisles in the fort among the union -- projectiles in the fort among the union soldiers. they rushed down to the river front where we are now and they're waving their hands and they're waving their hats and blowing their bugeles. to signal the united states navy. that the army has captured the fort. well, for admiral porter, that's not good enough. he has a marine contingent row

him to shore. he walks up to the top of the fort. he plants his flag in the fort. and declares that the united states navy has captured fort anderson. and it's the only incident in the civil war where the united states navy captured a confederate fort from the united states army. wilmington fell on february 22, 1865. just 2 1/2 days after fort anderson was evacuated. wilmington fell. and then robin -- robert e. lee . rrendered his forces no longer able to maintain his army, as he predicted, he was forced to abandon petersburg in early april and retreated westward, but was run down and forced to surrender by grant's forces on april 9. that was only about six weeks after the fall of wilmington. most historians focus their

attention on virginia or, in terms of the seaports, on charleston. but wilmington played an incredibly important role during the war. not many people know about fort anderson. if they hear about the forts guarding wilmington during the civil war, they hear about fort fisher. and understandably so. the site of the two largest naval bombardments of the war. the site of the largest amphibious operation in american military history until d-day world war ii. but we have this great earthen fort that is very, very important in guarding the city too. >> standing right here in front of the 1898 memorial which was put up on the 100th anniversary of the events here that occurred in wilmington in november of 1898. it was a long time coming. it was sort of controversial because there were many citizens, both black and white, i think, who really just wanted to forget the whole thing.

in the black community it was thought that if they brought it up too much, it might bring further repercussions and there was the fear of that. in the white community, they preferred the sort of, no pun intended, but to white wash the past and pretend as if we'd always been a progressive city. i think as one radio host said, you can't put something behind you if you don't put it in front of you first. in 1898 wilmington achieved a very interesting status. you have to understand that this was a huge slave holding area before the civil war, because of the river, which is back there, just about a block away -- away. all the plantations in north .arolina were along the river so the roanoke, the tar river, the cape fear river. huge concentration of the 330,000 slaves in north carolina in 1860 were right here in the cape fear river valley. so there was always a fear of a slave uprising. it was sort of the terrible nightmare, if you will, of the white gentry. so they had very repressive laws against both free blacks and slaves. all throughout that period.

and when general sherman came and invaded north carolina, not from the north but from the south, he had liberated some 25,000 enslaved blacks with the army. he got to the head of navigation of the cape fear river, which is fayetteville, and he put all those people on flat boats and mule trains and brought them to wilmington where they were then processed out through the friedmans bureau. a great many of them stayed here. in 1898, wilmington was one of the largest cities in north carolina. of the 17,000 or so citizens, 2/3 of them were black. so they had achieved an amazing thing in just a little more than a generation after being enslaved and coming out of bondage with not even owning the clothes on their back, literaly. they had achieved a status of middle class. they had achieved some political leadership and power. they had achieved social standing and economic wealth in large degree here. it got the reputation as a great place to come to work if you were black. african-americans were the skilled artisans down at the mill compresses. they were the skilled artisans

in the cotton mills. it was a great place. and there was a huge thriving black middle class. they had taken political power from the old democrats and remember that in those days democrats and republicans were sort of reversed. so in 1898, the state democratic party decided it was going to quote-unquote take back their state and their cities. from what they thought of as negro domination. this was their kind of way of putting it. they wanted to take back all the electoral offices that were going to be coming up in 1898 which included a lot of the state offices, the senator, which was won by bellamy. it didn't include the city council. what was then called the board of alderman, or the mayor. what they did was stole the election through intimidation, literally guys with shotguns standing at the polling booths. people stealing ballot boxes and recounting them and so forth. and leading up to that, they had a war of words. the war of words took an interesting turn. there were all kinds of sort of

anti-black speeches all over the state. the most famous orator of which was alfred moladell who was an ex-con fed ral colonel. there was another piece of writing that figured prominently in this. a newspaper editor named alexander manly. he published a newspaper he billed as the first afro-american newspaper in the country called the daily record much it was a newspaper for a community within a community. it was read largely by the black community and ignored by the white community. in an editorial in august of 1898, he was responding to a speech given by rebecca felton, who was the wife of a congressman. i think she ended up going to congress later herself in georgia. in which she said that the greatest danger to white farm wiveses across the south was being raped by black brutes. and that if it took lynching 1,000 of them, then so be it. so she was all in favor of lynching. he responded to this or at least the newspaper did. there has always been at least a little bit of doubt as to whether manly wrote the editorial himself.

in the editorial, he says, mrs. felton from georgia makes a speech before the agricultural society in georgia in which she advocates lynching as an extreme measure. this woman makes a strong plea for womanhood and crimes of rape were so frequent as is oftentimes reported. her plea would be worthy of consideration. but he goes on to say, we suggest that whites guard their women more closely. as mrs. felton says, thus give nothing opportunity for the human feend, be he white or black. you leave your goods out of doors and complain because they're taken away. poor white men are careless in the manner of protecting their women, especially on the farms. so on. he goes on to say that sometimes white women are attracted to black men. and the like. it's unclear whether thises was meant in earnest or whether this was maybe a satire. or if he even wrote it himself. but you can imagine the reception that this got in the white community. although there are two curious things about it. one is that the thing that he

was responding to, that speech by mrs. felton, had happened i think as much as a year earlier. so why it was at that moment that he chose to respond, we don't know. also, nobody in the white community read that paper. until someone did and then they reprinted that editorial on the front page of the daily messenger which was white wilmington's newspaper. pretty much every day until election. between august and november. and so there began to be calls for manly to be removed from the city. for the paper to be shut down and so forth. couple this with a couple of other events. white government unions were making the rounds. these were basically caddying rays of people that would come into a community and make the case that you should fire your black workers and give those jobs to whites. and make people take a pledge to that effect. you were starting to see the employment picture shift a little bit. then the third piece of that was a thing called the white man's declaration of independence. this was signed by more than 400 of the leading white citizens of

wilmington. just a little while before the election. it begins this way. believing that the constitution of the united states contemplated a government to be carried on by an enlightened people, believing that its framers did not anticipate the enfranchisement of an ignorant population of african origin, and believing that those men of the state of north carolina who joined in forming the union did not contemplate for their descendents subject to an inferior race. the hall was the place where the night before election day, the colonel stood on the stage, gave what was later described as a sizzling speech, and he said, if you see the negro out voting, tell him to go home. if he won't go home, shoot him down in his tracks. so there was nothing subtle about this. the place erupted to furious applause. and that was the tone that was set for the election day the following morning. so you can see there was nothing subtle about this. there was nothing that was

nuanced about it in the sense of the power grab going on. furthermore, they had already made arrangements in washington. the mckinley administration, that no federal troops would come to the aid of wilmington. that they would leave them to settle their own things their own way. so they went into it knowing there would be no federal intervention. they ran the table on election day. white supremacist candidates elect aid cross the board. but they still -- elected across the board. but they didn't didn't have the board of aldermen and the mayor. they sent an ultimatum to a so-called committee of colored citizens that were pretty much chosen at random and held the demands that were in the white declaration of independence. the black community met or leaders of the black community met and decided pretty much to give them what they wanted. they were going to throw manly out. they were going to shut down the paper. they were going to do the other things. the reply never reached the white supremacist could he horts because the man who was supposed to deliver it mailed it instead. he was too afraid to go into that part of the white

community. so on november 10, about 8:00 in the morning or so, a crowd of up to 1,000 armed white men gathered at the wilmington light infantry army which is between fourth and fifth on market street. they marched up following the man a couple of blocks, turned right onto seventh street, and then sort of ram pagesed on down to the daily -- rampaged down to the daily record which was leasing a church hall. had they got there, they surrounded it, they bashed in the door, they shot one man who has remained unidentified to history. who apparently ran out the back wounded. then they burned down the newspaper. so in so doing, they not only stopped manly, he wasn't at the newspaper at that point, he fled the city with his brother. but they not only shut down the newspaper but they burned the entire archive of the black community. all the back records. very hard to find even a single copy of the daily record. i think there are three or four that i know of. so there's famous picture of all these white men and their sons, i suppose they are, standing in front of this burn-out hulk of

the daily record office holding shotguns and win chesters and they kept the black fire brigade from fighting fire to ensure it burned to the ground. only when it looked like the church next door would catch fire did they allow the firemen to fight the blaze. these guys start to disperse. they go home in mobs. they get over to bladen street and there are some black working men who have come out to find out what's going on. they've been hearing the commotion. they're smelling the smoke, seeing the flames. at that point gun fire erupted. we know a couple of things. one is that all the dead were black. we know that the rampage lasted about three days. it had been orchestrated and planned for many months before this. the outbreak on bladen street was probably spontaneous. but the white community had been stockpiling winchester rifles, they even had a sort of machine gun of the type used in the 1898 war. and all of a sudden all thesemy litschia groups were coming in -- these militia groups were coming in from elsewhere.

it would take a couple of hours for each of them to get here. they all showed up pretty immediately. you had the wilmington light infantry which was a paramilitary organization with all their high-powered rifles. you had the wilmington naval reserve. they had a small cannon. these people shut down wilmington, declared martial law. they were strip searching men, women and children, black men, women and children on every corner. there were a number of black letter carriers who were beaten nearly to death by white mobs. some white women actually came to the rescue and got the hooligans off of them and gave them shelter in their homes. there were a number of other white women who sheltered their black servants in their home. in order to keep them safe. but this was catastrophic for wilmington in so many ways. a lot of these people that were being chased and harassed and shot at fled the city. they swam the river literally. they went out to smith creek and hid in the swamp. they went to ground basically. for three days wilmington shut

down. you can pretty much mark the end of wilmington's asent densy as a city in north carolina to the date of this coup. it really -- it's been called a riot but it was a a single piece of legislation took voting rights away from blacks until 1965. not just north carolina, but

throughout the south. this had huge national repercussions and here locally for the city, and of course about 1000 people that included , and they on a train were banished from wellington, leaders, lawyers, preachers, funeral directors, local politicians, the people who had been the african-american aldermen, firemen, policemen, sheriff's deputies and so on, and wilmington went back to being ruled by this cadre of white supremacist and white families. big legacy to overcome, and one of the things i think about is that so many people involved on the white have prosperous

lives, children, grandchildren come and stay here, built their wealth for many generations. some family became great philanthropists and we owe a , but some to them families were gone. have seen a deed for property there was owned on chestnut street, but he was told he never had property here. you have a situation where the intelligentsia and leadership of the black community has wiped out for a generation. from there, we are looking at something a hundred years later and people are asking what can we do to change that. in wilmington behind every decision about , orning a redistricting at-large voting first city council or district voting, all of that has a legacy directly

tied to 1898. we are the future of that history. event asthink of that the tunnel that ran under wilmington from seven straight down to the river. it used to come up in the fine houses and churches, and they were urging for drainage, but probably used for other things, but they were a secret underneath the traffic on wilmington. i always think of that as that secret that runs underneath the memorial,until this it was really not acknowledged. it was something that was whispered about usually in versions that were far less than accurate. we don't know how many people died. i think they say 10 on the monument. j allen kirk, who hid in the cold air for the number at over 400. one of the legends they grew up

based on eyewitness testimony were that wagons of bodies were dumped into the cape fear river, so that has become the iconic image of violence, those bodies being dumped into the river. there was no investigation, nobody looking into this, nobody interviewing witnesses, so it is all speculation at this point. my guess is that it is way more than 10 people, not 400, because it rocked the community, black and white. i come from chicago, a very diversity, and i got here and realize that everywhere i went, i was with all white people or all black people. thought, what is going on here? i realize that nobody had

written written about it. it had been written about at the turn of the 20 century. good fathers and husbands, deacons in their churches, and in one case a pastor of a church , and i was trying to imagine my way into their mindset. thereactical question was were 70-80 people who figured into the narrative, so what i ended up doing is picking representatives of each facet of the thing, the planners, the victims, and so forth, and using those to tell the story. i was as scrupulous as i could in the novel you read about someone being shot at a certain intersection or read about a certain speech being made, that happened. where i took liberties was creating composite characters and viewpoint characters because these guys did not take minutes

at their meetings, so i knew they went in and what happen when they came out, so i had to write the scene inside was so i imagined my way into their morality and way of thinking to try to pull some truth about how the human character behaved well remaining true to the historical basis of events was of that is why i wrote cape fear rising as a novel. many people had the reaction that he just made that whole thing up and it never happened. i can't tell you how many radio interviews i did where someone called in and said that never happened. i have had conversations with hundreds of people over the years. we studied history. we learned about the civil war. we never heard anything about this. with to the novel, i met university officials who were concerned that something would happen.

that point, and african-american sheriff, and , they gotpolice chief together with our chancellor on campus and talked about what might happen in the black immunity and white community when the book him, and in the end, nothing like that happened, but what did happen were anonymous phone calls to me, letters to the editor, speaking engagements that went away, very organizations. i know there were at least a boards that met related to various places in wilmington and tried to figure whether they could sue me for in the bookeryone was deceased and there was nothing there. i just learned last year because i wrote this book as a tenured professor, i just learned from our former chancellor that the order of trustees were going to deny my tenure, and

there were a number of descendents on the board at that point. i did not know this, but one stood up for the integrity of university in the system and said come you cannot do that. so i was saved. i never knew that for all these years. all that is to say that this event, while it seems like ancient history, over 100 years now in the past come isn't. it resonates as though it happened yesterday for many people in the community. we have recognized this and it is now fully in the sunlight and not singled out. they were only victims because of their own success in doing one of the most remarkable transformations of any people i know in history coming from slavery into a burgeoning, prosperous middle-class political leadership, and what i would like to do -- it has been a slow read back -- what i would

like to see wilmington do and the people who come here is encouraged the process by which we get back to robust leadership and all the communities working together towards the common good. >> i wanted to put together a only whatour to not is happening now, but what our history concludes. , there isof this still an association in a lot of people's minds that the south is not a place of intellectual advancement, success, and accomplishment. my whole life,re i have found that is not the case. i am continually startled and frustrated by the number of

people who visit the bookstore and are stunned that i speak in complete sentences and read. that thereou know were writers who cannot read or write, all writers from north carolina. it frustrated me a lot, and i really wanted an opportunity to literary heritage with people. the first stop is going to be the dixie grill. wilmington has played host to a visiting writers, one is arthur miller. you might know him. one of his most famous place was the crucible. that arthur miller came to wilmington at least twice. the first time we know he came to wilmington was in the 1930's it he and tennessee williams went to the university of michigan playwriting program and for the jobs working

federal arts administration's during the depression. tennessee being tennessee decided he would head off on his bicycle and have adventures, but arthur miller had that arthur miller-like new england strain, i am doing it. .e toured up and down the coast one of the things they were history's from people who had been a line during slavery. in the 1930's, you could still meet people who had lived through slavery and the united states. that was really one of the last chances you were going to have to collect first-person accounts of one of the satyr chapters of american history. , publishers starting putting out a series of books on a state-by-state basis, the one for north carolina is caught my folks still want me to talk about slavery.

there is one specifically virginia, south carolina, alabama, mississippi. the second time we know arthur miller came to wilmington was the early 1990's, the last full-length movie he wrote is caught, everybody wins and start nolte and debra winger and was filmed here. sad that he ended his career with that, but we don't hold it against him. first next stop is presbyterian church. we are on 3rd street, one of the major thoroughfares in wilmington. and you are probably wondering why we are stopping at the first presbyterian church. is -- you areer probably all surprised by the answer.

presbyterianrst churches minister had a son named woodrow wilson. woodrow wilson went on to become the 20th president of the united states. most of the time his father was a minister was when he was away in school. first come at davidson college north of charlotte, but he got sick and had to withdraw. he came home to live at the family while he was recuperating, and then he reenrolled at johns hopkins university and met another young named,m north carolina dixon. he wrote a sensational romance the oned probably people remember is the klansmen, but you don't remember them because the book to do remember them because those books became birth of a nation. film that griffith

became the first movie to be screened at the white house he called and said i made a movie. woodrow wilson said why don't you show it to me, and that is how that happened. of people are amazed how much material we cover. preparedhink they're -- we are stressing to get it in under two hours. we are trying hard to get it in under two hours. our tour is aon beautiful house built to the a theater and our municipal building. something we don't have a lot of in the 21st century anymore is a lecture series. the closest thing would be the ted talks. but it was expected a couple of times of week that you would go here experts speak on the topic

two hours.tes to among the many people who came to lecture, which was a major stop on the lecture circuit, oscar wilde came on his american tour. you may have heard of him. william jennings bryan, douglass come in booker t. washington also spoke here, but something else we like to talk about at this point in the tour is willis richardson. he was born in wilmington in the 1800s and his family left very suddenly and the fall of 1898. moved to washington, d.c., where he finished his schooling and got work at the bureau of engraving and printing. he went on to be the first african-american to have a hit may 1923.oadway in he also put together this book, the place in pageants from the life of a negro.

he edited this and included five place of his own, and it was used as a textbook in segregated schools for theater students and begins with age appropriate place for kindergarten and goes through high school. mr. richardson lived until the late 19 70's, and during his lifetime and wilmington, a theater company was founded in his honor. predominantly african-american theater company to performs his work and other minority playwrights and put on usually two shows the year. they were grateful to keep his legacy alive what is sad is that we did not have the entirety of his lifetime here with his work. the next stop on our tour is the 1898 memorial.

there have been several books written about 1898. i think you met philip gerard, who wrote cape fear rising. there is also john sayles. as well.ood i think one of the more brave books that has been written, the marrow of tradition by charles chestnut. he was born before the civil war to freed slaves and was the first african-american to publish a short story in the atlantic magazine. last theionship would rest of his life, and in 1901, he published the marrow of tradition, which was the story of what happened in wilmington written within two years and written by a person of color. he had to change everyone's name for his own safety, so he made composite characters and change the name of the city, so it is not wilmington, it is

wellington. william dean howell reviewed the book he said it is a book that has more justice and mercy in it. in addition to the marrow of tradition, he had two short stories made into films by the madet filmmaker and 1926 into the spider, and the house behind the theater was made into the millionaires in 1927. because of his legal training, chestnut did a lot of work with the naacp. he succeeded in getting prohibitions against a public screening of birth of a nation in the state of ohio or it chestnut died on november 15, 1932 at the age of 74. so wilmington as also the burial place of several famous authors, thomas gottfried and

one of my favorite writers. in the 1940's, 1950's, 1960's, she was hot stuff on the new york times bestseller list. born after the civil war and the midwest and have the life of an aristocrat's daughter. she never cooked a meal or did any laundry into the day she married her then she married a man named john fletcher, who was a mining engineer. he moved her to a mining camp in california that was a two date mule ride from the nearest other female person. it was a bit of a shock for her, but she persevered and adjusted, and that's when she started writing. she wrote short stories to entertain herself, then somehow she manages to connect with hollywood right when it was starting to develop, and she became one of the early screenwriters for the silent era . as they moved around with her husband's job, she continued writing and did a couple of a good game hunting books in africa, then she came to north carolina to connect with her ancestors entire rail county and

fell in love, and that is when she started riding her carolina chronicle series from the books that would make her famous. i call her the james michener north carolina. you might remember james michener. he read this big epic novels. -- the first is i hope people will discover writers they had never encountered before, that not only broadened but deepen their understanding of our human experience in the southern experience, which i think is for

more complex than many people realize. that is one of the most important things that literature can do. if he can show you something you think you know from an entirely different perspective and deepen the way you think about it. we are kind of unique as a special collections, because special collections are usually , a university or historical society, but because we are in a public library, we are open to everyone. if anyone wants to use our materials, they just come in, read our rules, fill out a registration card, then they can use the materials. the north carolina room is a room in the new hanover county library where we focus on materials that have to do with north carolina. biology, books about rivers, geography of north carolina. our special collections and

archives room is only at the main branch here. we do have small north carolina collections, some of our popular books about north carolina, and of course the ghost stories about wilmington and new hanover, but we have this books because people like to read those and check out a lot, but the special materials, the one-of-a-kind things, are only here at this main branch. this collection is one i find really interesting that we have here on the north carolina room. it is part of the iowa and very collection, and was donated to us from a descendent of the the particular thing that is interesting about this collection is that there is a little bit of everything, civil war letters, information about the oh when family, and governor john owen, governor of north carolina, this was his family, so those are interesting things, but there was a gentleman that

was enslaved by the family, and omar -- and he was born in africa. around the area where the , and he wasr is raised in a family that was quite well off, and he was a scholar. he was an islamic scholar and taught people in his village. something happened. there are questions on what exactly happened, but he was was into slavery, and he brought into the port charleston and had a slaveholder there who treated him quite kindly. this is in his words that he described in his autobiography. that slaveholder dive, he was purchased by another gentleman, who did not treat him kindly, and he ended up running

away and made his way to fayetteville, north carolina, where he was caught as a runaway slave and put in jail. there, the sheriff realized he was a literate man because omar wrote on the walls of the jail in arabic, and he contacted john owen and let him know that we have this gentleman who is an beaped slave and would you interested in talking to him. john owen came and decided to take omar home with him. so he is living with the owen family and they quickly realized how intelligent of a man he is. other scholars to come speak with him in arabic, and he has conversations with them and they said he is one of the most well spoken gentleman that we have talked to from that area. when we received the collection we saw that there were some of

his original writing. this is the journal of his wrote ineliza, and he her journal in arabic, so there is still some of his writing that exists. this is particular interesting because he was born around 1770 comes of this writing is probably from around 1830, and the family cap these and passed them along. there were a lot of legends that spread about him. a lot of people thought he was a prince, some people called him and from what i understand he did not dissuade them from believing in these legends. a lot of people don't realize that wilmington does have a claim to fame with the .resident woodrow wilson's father was a presbyterian minister, and he served at the first presbyterian church year. when woodrow wilson or tommy as

he was known locally came here, it was around november 1874. he was at davidson college and became ill. him here to rest and take a little time off, so here until 1875. while here he had quite a few adventures. there is a great story here about how it is believed that he had the first bicycle in de itngton, and that he ro into the river. i don't know if that is true or not, but that is supposedly what he said. this is the kind of bicycle he would have owned. we also have a page from a biography of him, and he actually signed it and donated it to the library, so we do have his signature.

that is notomething so happy to talk about in wilmington's history, in fact a very sad part of our history, the coup d'état of 1898, when the legally elected government was overthrown. a collectionas had of materials about 1898 for quite a while. they did preserve these photographs so that they would be available and kept safe. so what we have here are just a few images that i pulled from , theollection that sort of images sort of speak for themselves. a photographre is that was taken during the burning of the hall. there are firemen in the crowd burn the building,

but this is a photograph and the daily record. the press was kept in this building. this was a photograph of the actual press for the daily record after it was burned. you can see how the building just burned around it. so the photographs that are able to more chilling are ones that mark where people were killed. photograph,rait -- this one is where a white gentleman was killed, and there "x" right here and there is a description that says this is where a white man was killed during the coup d'état. and this photograph here is actually where to african-american gentlemen were two x's, and there are

in this photograph is well. i think a north carolina room is important to the community because it gives easy access to the materials. feel, andat people more and more so, assume that you can find everything online, and really you can't. you really can't, especially archivalre looking at materials, genealogy materials, one-of-a-kind materials. you cannot find those things online, so having this room out open, people can come in and ask us a question and we can answer it. we get all kinds of different questions and do our best to find the answers for people. our visit to wilmington, north carolina is a book tv exclusive and we showed the two today to introduce you to c-span city tour.

we have traveled to u.s. cities bringing the book seemed to our viewers. you can watch more of her visits at c-span.org/citiestour. announcer: coming up on c-span, a senate hearing on alzheimer's research. a commission giving an update on investigation into serious civil war, and the syrian government's use of chemical weapons. defense secretary james mattis is in israel and meeting with the israeli defense minister. mexico's finance discussing their economic relations with the u.s. an estimated 5 million americans are living with alzheimer's disease at a senate hearing looked at the state of alzheimer's research, journalists and women's alzheimer's movement founder maria shriver testified at the hearing. this is two hours and 20 minutes.