i'm sorry john c. calhoun and the church, calhoun is the street in which the -- the street on which the street fronts. the church is on calhoun street and not too far there's a statute of john c. calhoun and in the book i interviewed austin, mr. austin told me that as a boy growing up there, he used to throw rocks up there, he and his friends use today throw rocks and try today hit the statute but they never could hit the statute but didn't prove baseball arms. years later, i met harvey jones. harvey is a few years older than me and harvey was probably one of the first persons who told me of his relationship with the church and his role as a young r protestor in the civil rights movement, abby emmanuel, one of the churches that organized a youth movement in the 1960's to protest against the segregated lunch counters on king street which is still today the central business district on the peninsula of charleston andd harvey jones shared with me an essay he had written and i kept that away and i didn't do anythi

but what kirk did and why he could put a john c. calhoun next to an abraham lincoln is simply because he recognized that they both had abilities, they both had excellences. and by very fact they were excellences, they couldn't be equal. and excellence can never be equal. that's why it's an excellence. and so kirk saw that, and and he saw in those human persons that he brought up, 29 of them in the conservative mind, he saw elements of dignity in each one of them, and he could bring them together and not be a contradiction. so i think it's a beautiful act in many ways of poetry concern probably more than political philosophy by looking at the conservative mind, but he did so much to understand the nuanced nature of the human person. so i want to just give you a quote, and some of you may be familiar with this. kirk wrote this. he was in -- he could get into kind of feisty moods, which is funny, because i'm sure our image of him is of a very stoic personality in many ways, but especially as a young man, he was full of energy, intelligent, alw

secretary of state john c calhoun, the hawkish south carolinaen, by the way continues to besmirch theday with prominent buildings with his name on it, and not only ideologies for slave owning, a long history of covert actions in the united states, john c calhoun played a role in helping to split the island. you notice a small island shared by two nations, haiti and the dominican republic. and it led to conflict between the two countries that exist today. and in the 1930's when the dominican dictator mass-- massacred haitians. the haitian government had to pay reparations to the french and of course, many of the french migrated to louisiana and in the antebellum period. there was occupation by the united states about a hundred years ago, the supported of duvalier and i hope my left wing friends don't get mad at me, the clinton foundation after the earthquake in 2010 and indications of wrongdoing there. so, so the path for haiti has been difficult for them, politically. i've written about india, written about african countries, you know, caribbean. often times i've seen my role as focus