[applause] >> tomiko brown-nagin is the author of "courage to dissent." what was the importance of atlanta in the civil rights movement? >> right. it's not been discussed very often in civil rights movement. although it was the home to several national civil rights organizations. the place i wanted to explore because i thought it would be a success story. is usually considered of interest only because it was the home of martin luther king jr., but i wanted to explore it because i knew it was a home to a sizable african-american middle class. many black colleges, and i thought that in part because the white city fathers always considered it a place of racial moderation that it would be a good place from which to explore dynamics in the civil rights movement. >> what did you find? was it a success story? >> in some ways it was a success story, including for many members of the black middle class who came of age after the landmark civil rights legislation in the 1960s, but the story that i tell in my book, "courage to dissent," is a little more complicated y

. >> we're talking with professor tomiko brown-nagin here at the festival of books. what is your day job? >> well, i'm a law professor and a history professor at the university of virginia, a job that i enjoy very much. >> what do you teach? >> constitutional law, constitutional history, and i also teach a course on education law in policy. >> how long have you been doing that? >> at the university of virginia for five years. before teaching at uva, i taught at washington university in st. louis for two years. >> what's your education? you were editor of yale law review i believe? >> that'sing right. -- that's right. i was an editor of that journal, so i tended yale law school. i also got a ph.d. in history from duke university, and prior to that, i got an undergraduate degree in history from thurman university. >> where did you grow up and what did you parents do? >> i grew up in a small town in south carolina, greenwood -- it's called. my parents, well, like ethel may matthews parents, my father was once a sharecropper. he later on worked in a factory, both of my p