my mother, joan carpenter cashin, took me with her in her arms to a sit-in in april of 1962. i was four months old. she gets herself arrested with me in her arms, and that event was a turning point in the sit-in movement in huntsville, alabama. and within a few months of that event, they had negotiated a nonviolent desegregation of public accommodations in huntsville two full years before the civil rights act, before the water hoses in the birmingham. >> did it help that huntsville had, was an educated city, that it was in northern alabama? did that make any differences? >> what helped, i think, more than anything was that huntsville had tied its fate to the space industry. and there were, you know, westerner von braun was already there, a lot of people, a lot of engineers and scientists had descended on alabama, and the city, um, wanted to dissociate itself from the rabid, racist image of the rest of the state, and that helped them to negotiate this quietly. so, yeah. from the beginning i have memories of -- so my participants were civil -- parents were civil rights activist