About his new book watching dark midfall which recounts the rise of the third reich in germany and the road to war from the perspective of two for american ambassadors in key western capitals. London, berlin, paris, and moscow. And in tuesday february 1st, we will hear from sara paulo who will discuss her book, fdr, and american memory. Roosevelt in the making of an icon. She analyzes rhoda roosevelt as a cultural icon in american memory, and historical leader who carefully and intentionally builds his public image. Kevin boyle begins his look at the 1960s with the story of ed cahill, who in 1960, one organists neighbors to check their houses with American Flag for the fourth of july. Boyle is inspired by a photograph of cahill, and his neighbors that he had seen the years before in a book published by the National Archives. The book, which reproduce more than 200 images from our photographic archives lets call the american image. Oils book about america in the 1960s, the shattering, takes us a decade into the american image and focuses on the periods transformative conflicts. The New York Times calls the shattering a rich layer to kind of the 1960s history is not simply the unfolding of events but it is the story of individuals behind the events. In the shattering, oil introduces us to the people that propelled the changes. The Washington Post review declares that boyle has a gift for synthesizing and translating the often dry arguments and analysis of former scholarship into artful and empathetic storytelling. Kevin boyle is the William Smith mason professor for of American History northwestern university. His previous book, arc of justice, won the National Book award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the pulitzer prize. He is also the author of the uaw, and the hay day of american liberalism. And coauthor of muddy boots and ragged aprons. His essays and reviews have appeared in Washington Post, the New York Times, baltimore sun, chicago tribune, and detroit free press. Suzanne e smith is professor American History at George Mason University and teaches opera and American History, 20 century culture history, history of death in america, american popular music, and African American religious history. She is the author of dancing in the street, motown, and the cultural politics of detroit. Now lets hear from kevin boyle and suzanne e. Smith. Thank you for joining use last minute there were today let me begin today simply by letting you know the professor smith was and able to join us. At the last minute there were complications of made it impossible for her to join us, and i am very sorry that she is not here. I would love to be sharing this afternoon with her. But i am 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, im particularly i want to thank Susan Clifton for putting together todays program. 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 elses book. In particular, but i want to do is i want to start with a book by a woman who has been in the news a bit lately because of her passing. I want to start with joan didions second book of essays, the white album. In particularly, when i want to do for a second, ayes i want to read just the start of it. It is a famous start. This is the start of the very first essay of the white album which is a collection of essays 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 free see shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while. Such a beautiful, elegant way of describing what historians really do. What we do as historians is we take all of the fragments, the complicated pieces of the pass, and we tried to shape them into a coherent story. And then overtime, we start to wonder whether the story can be shaped is really the best way of telling the events of the past. And so we start to think that we might need a new story. And that is what the shattering is. It is my attempt to take the phantasmagoria of the 1960s, this extraordinary sprawl of events, and to reshape them into a new story of the 1960s. And a lot of that story centers on powerful figures of the 1960s. In the book duels with a considerable extent the president of the 1960s, john kennedy, lyndon johnson, richard nixon. And to my surprise, Dwight Eisenhower, who hovered over the 60s to an extent that i had not realized when i first started working on this book. It deals with those people who tried to become president. Barry goldwater, bobby kennedy, hubert humphrey, george mcgovern, George Wallace who runs through so much of the 1960s. He talks about Supreme Court justices, a general or two, and talks about the we are so see it with the 60s. Dr. Martin luther keane junior, malcolm x. But if theres one thing that animates my sense of the pass, my sense of myself as a historian, i also really believed that ordinary people are central to history too. Ordinary people who we dont know help us understand the past in a new way, and ordinary people in the american past changing this nation. And so alongside all of those famous people who run through the shattering, what also try to do is tell the stories of ordinary people. What i want to do today, i just want to tell you for stories. And this is the first one. This is the 4th of july, 1961. On the 6100 block of west any street in the northwest corner of chicago. The day before, and cahill in his neighbor, clarence mitchell, draped their block in 38 flags. That is a lot of flags given that there are only 36 houses on the entire block. And ed, being ed, had written to the chicago tribune, one of the major newspapers in chicago, to announce what they had done. And the trip decided that they would send a photographer out to take a picture of this block. And so the neighbors are gathered on the lawn, right next to ed cahills house. And and got clearance, thats ahead right there, that is clearance right there, and two of ads kids, he had three children, two of his kids got into the picture to. That is his son, terry, standing at attention up on the top of the steps. And that is his daughter katie. Win back, right back there, you can barely see, there is a heads wife, Stella Cahill. Smiling into the 60s. Still 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 she, where her parents lived, and water father 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, which was then raging through the poorest neighborhoods of american cities. And her mother, with two young children, face the aspect of tumbling into the worst forms of poverty. She tried to break the families fall by getting married again in 1920. She married another police emirate, this time and then who did not have a trade that hurt now deceased husband have had. He made his living as an unskilled labor, meaning that he made his living on the power of his back. A power that he tended to dissipate, it turned out, by drinking that he could not control. And so all through the 1920s, stella, her brother and now stepfather lived on the edge of poverty, and there is no clear sign that from the sign that they moved every single year, every single year, all the way through the twenties, they lived in this part of town, that part of, town and in that part of town the way that poor people do. And, then 1929, the economy collapsed around them by the spring of 1930 stella stop father was unemployed in the family was getting by and the family was getting by whatever money her mother was bringing home boxing candies in a candle factory. It was not enough. Within a year or so, stellas older brother left school to take a factory job that he was lucky to get. That one in just enough money that they could keep scalp stella in school between the two years of a commercial course that she was taking it to chicagos public schools. In the middle of course was over, they pulled her out and center off to work too. She was 15. Stella met and cahill i blind date in 1938. The cahill family, they were hardly wealthy. But in the working class world of chicago, they were a step above stellas family, a considerable step above. As father who had been born in downstate illinois of irish immigrant parents, his father worked as he foreman for a Construction Company that did road work for the city of chicago. What that meant, especially in the 1920s, was that work was steady. In a way that it had never been for sellers family. And with that steady, work as father earned enough that in the late twenties, he was able to buy a house. Im a 6100 block of west eddie street, the black you are looking at right now. In those days, it was a half finished brandnew Development Going way out on the outskirts of town. It was a completely white neighborhood. Much of the new developments that were going up and chicago in the 19 twenties where wrapped in restrictive covenants, the little closets that developers put on their deeds to say that this property can never be sold to a negro, and oftentimes to a jewish american. But i have no evidence whatsoever that when as family bought that house, that they thought at all about race. Chances are that they took it naturally, as a natural thing that neighborhoods are going to be segregated. That is 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 with an unfinished attic up above, they could finish off, and the boys can have a place to sleep. And what they saw was that they were buying a house with a little backyard, a little front yard, and it wasnt half finished neighborhood and it was six blocks away from a brand new catholic parish that they could join, st. Ferdinands. But it did have a great school where editors brothers could go. As part of the commitment to the cahill family, the deep commitment to the cahill two catholicism. And that is where ed grew up. Adam and stella got married in may of 1940. 1940, to they had their first child. A baby girl they named judy in november of 1943, when judy was about a year old and got drafted. He was gone for two and a half years. Most of that time he spent in europe. In the signal court, trailing along behind the front line troops as they marched towards berlin and the end of the war. And stella satan with a newborn. Now, stella knew on some level that ad was safe. She knew that we from the letters that he wrote home. These sweet personal letters that he sent as often as you possibly could. But you have to stop for just one second and think about this young woman in chicago in 1943, 1944, 1945, living surrounded by war. Living surrounded by death. By the gold stars that she would see in the windows as she walked that baby along the streets. For the prayers for those boys who had gone missing, the prayers and sunday mass. For the boys who had gone missing from that parish that she was a part of. And you have to believe, i believe with all my heart that deep in the night, that fear came creeping up to her to. That it would have been impossible for her not to imagine the Western Union messenger coming to her door with that notice. And if that were to happen that she would become her mother in 1918. A too young widow with a toddler at her skirts, and her life collapsing around her. That is not would have been. Ed got through the war just fine and he came home in the spring of 1946 as part of the massive demobilization of that year. Within a few months, to know and surprise, stella was pregnant again. And ed decided that with the new baby coming, he couldnt really afford to take all the benefits that gi bill was providing him. He needed to go get a job, and he did. He got a job as a clerk in the front office of the vaccum can company of chicago. Vacuum can company a chicago made industrial strength coffee urns. And one of their major clients was the United States military. The u. S. Navy really like their coffee urns as did the army. In 1948, well their son was born in 47, thats terry. And 1948 this now young family, ed and stella and their two kids, moved in to his fathers bungalow on west eddie street. And they moved him partly to take care of him, his wife had recently died and everybody knew he couldnt take care of himself. And i think partly because ed had such a powerful sense of place. He wanted to go home. And so they did in 1948. And that neighborhood was still half finished. Half the houses on the black has not even been built yet because a development that had started back in the 20s had stalled during the depression and then start old again during world war ii. Over the next few years, from 48 on into the early 1950s, the neighborhood started to fill out as developers came back to put in small reasonable houses. On to the empty lots. Houses that they then sold overwhelmingly to Italian American and polish americans who were moving out from the center city of chicago in a process we called white flight. As the neighborhood filled in, as the population filled in, it became a more prosperous area. In the mid 1950s developers built a brand Shopping Mall not that far from eddys street. One of the first Shopping Malls from chicago went in the not that far from antistreet. And that catholic parish that was so important to add, finally got the church that it had never had. A gorgeous Beautiful Church wrapped in marble. A place for families like the cahills to feel a sense of solidity that neighborhood had never had. And the cahills started to do well for themselves too and started to move themselves up in the vacuum can company until by the end the 19 50s he was the head of sales. They had a third child in 1952, that is capping down here. And the cahill were not extravagant people. But they had more money than ever before, so in 1953, 54, they bought their first car. Never had a car before. But now they didnt see the need for ed to take the bus all the way down to the vacuum can company down in the center of the city anymore. And in 55, they bought a tv and put it in the little living room. And when the kids were old enough they sent them all off to the school, the grade school that was connected to their perished of saint ferdinands. And then when judy their oldest daughter got a High School Age they centered to a Catholic High School and when she finish there, 1959, they sent her to depaul university, one of chicagos two large catholic universities. 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 eddys the 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 and the tv, and some are kids to schools 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 wasnt all about missiles systems and bombers, it was also about industrial strength coffee urns. But you also have to think, just for a minute, about what this world looks 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 anti street. Here was a woman who in her early days of her marriage and of motherhood wasnt sure whether her husband was going to come home. Now living in this extraordinarily Stable Family centered world. Here was this woman who a 1961 had her older daughter in college. When she had had to leave school at 15. Is it any wonder that Stella Cahill was smiling into the 1960s . And already that world, built around eddie street, already there were cracks in the exclusions that that world had created. None more dramatic, none more important, then the one symbolized by this young woman Elizabeth Eckford. Elizabeth eckfords story would would have been fundamentally different if her mother and father had had a phone. But they were working people and they had six kids to raise and they couldnt afford that sort of extravagance. And so, on the day before school was to start in 1957, september 1957. On september 3rd of 1957 the eckfords didnt get the phone call from the National Association for the advancement of colored people, the nations leading civil rights organization, the eckfords didnt get the call telling her that elizabeth was supposed to meet with the nine other kids who were going to desegregate little rock central high the next morning. And that together the kind of that would be escorted to the school. And so on the morning of the first day, september, fourth 1950, seven elizabeth got up early to make sure that she could get herself dressed in the clothes that she had carefully picked out for her first day. She made this skirt. She had breakfast with their family, and when breakfast was over, her mom called kids together so they could all pray together the 27th 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 bus dropped her off two blocks from the school. I dont know if any of you have been to little rock central high, but it is a massive building. It covers two whole city blocks. And elizabeth got dropped off near one of the corners, two blocks off from that big two block school. She walked down, as he was walking out towards the school, she could see down towards the school in front of the school, she can see the white mob. She could see all the way to the corner the National Guardsmen that the governor of arkansas had called out the night 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. But as she was coming up to the line, she could see that the National Guardsmen were letting white kids through, and that mind of a 15yearold, what she thought was, well they will let me through to. But when she got up to the corner, the guardsmen told 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 and she walked along the street, along this Long National guards line and 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 dont 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 there of course, because this was a Major National story. They traveled along next to her with her notebooks asking her for comment, which she refused to give. And the photographers walking backward in front of her to get this very picture. And she refusing to say a word. And finally she got to the center of the school, the center of the line on 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 asked if she could get through, and they told her she wouldnt be going to school, that you needed to move on. And for a second, she had no idea what she was going to do. She couldnt go back to where shed come from because the mob was behind her. And so she thought she had no choice but to just keep going. And thats what she did. She kept walking all along the street, the mob trailing along behind her, the reporters gathering around her, the 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 bus 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 reporter said, well, they created a kind of court around her to protect her from the mob, and maybe thats, true i dont know. But beyond her stood in the mob, screaming and yelling, and that person, still there, threatening to hang her from a tree. How long shes out there, no one can ever say. Maybe about 20 minutes, half an hour. And at one point, an African American man, middle aged African American man came up and offered her a ride home. But her parents had told her, never takes right from a stranger, and so she politely refused. And then finally, a white woman came out of the mob. And this white woman started to hearing the other whites around her to say that they would be sorry for what they had done some day. And elizabeth was horrified, because she feared that what that white woman was going to do by trying to tell off the mob was going to make it wears. But all elizabeth really wanted was 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 ran in all of the major newspapers in the United States, meet the front page of every major newspaper in the United States. And in that image, what happened was that millions of white people were forced to confront, for only a moment, the confrontation, the contrast that the Civil Rights Movement wanted them to see. Not the individual one, though thats obviously terrifying, but the systemic one, the one between his 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. Into defending the indefensible. Over the course of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement with twist and turn in all sorts of complicated ways, and i tried 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. Four years later, this woman, Estelle Griswold, got herself arrested. Estelle griswold, once upon a time when she was young back in the 1920s, and she had dreamed of being a professional singer. She even gone to paris for a couple of years to try to make a go of it. It didnt quite work out. And in 1927, she came back home to her home state of connecticut, where she fell in love and married and aspiring ad man. And for the next 30 years or so, she trailed along behind his career wherever it took him. 1945, it took him to germany. Where the state department had hired him to help with the occupation of defeated germany and with the reconstruction of western europe after the devastation of the war. And she went with him. And from 19 45 to 51, she works herself with a refugee agency, an agency trying to help the mass of refugee crisis is that engulfed europe in a terribly beautiful brutal days after the war. In 51, they finally decided to come home. They settled in new haven, connecticut, came back to connecticut. And fouryearold, so she continued to work with the refugee agency. Its headquarters were up in new york, and you got tired of the commute. So she quit. And went looking for other work. But she had to kind of particular skill set as an administrator that wasnt an enormous demand for a woman in new haven, connecticut, in the early 1950s, so it took her about a year to get the 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 nations leading advocate for Birth Control. Now, she said afterwards she had no idea about Birth Control when she took this job. Didnt know what a diaphragm was. But she thought the work could be interesting, and she had administrative skills. And 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. When 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 didnt really want to do it. There were political costs to doing that, and the truth is nobody enforced the law. And so it stayed on the books. And when Estelle Griswold took over as executive director of Connecticut Land planned parenthood 1950s she to try to get them to withdraw the. I didnt have any luck. And so in 1958, she decided to change tactics. She arranged for two married couples who were ready 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 declared unconstitutional. And in the way these things work, that case wond its way up all the way to the United StatesSupreme Court. Finally reached the Supreme Court in 1961, in the spring of 61. Four of the nine justices were 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 a real harm. You cant just have a case that is an obstraction, you have to prove that somebody is being harm, and these married couples couldnt prove that. And so, thiss case failed. And thats when she decided to get herself arrested. To be more precise, what she decided was that the way to test this law wasnt 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 parenthoods Connecticut Branch to open a Birth Control clinic in new haven, where women could come in and get, presumably could come in and get the information that she thought inaudible women, getting the information she needed on how to use Birth Control in their families. Which she always assumed that this was about married women. They opened their clinic in 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. Now, they were distributing information about Birth Control. But at least one person in new haven did. A man who worked for a car rental company, in fact, a devout his churchwith five children at home, who believed, according to the teachings of his church, that the use of Birth Control was a sin. And therefore should not be allowed by the state. And the law said that this was illegal, and he wanted that Birth Control clinic shut down 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 Estelle Griswolds clinic. Nobody wanted to do it. Spent a better part of a day being shunted aside, shunted along from one office to another in new haven by everybody saying, well, you really want to talk to this person, you want to talk to that 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 p hone all sent a couple of policeman over. And he did. He sent over a couple of policeman to Estelle Griswolds clinic. And when they arrived, she came bounding out of her office, and she grabbed hold of these two people and she brought them into the office and she set the officers down and for an hour he gave them every little bit of information she possibly could about Birth Control, all the pamphlets, all the information. She was dredging up every bit of Technical Knowledge she possibly had throwing it at them. They sat politely, taking notes. And when she was finally done, they all got up at 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 connecticuts 1879 statute, exactly as she wanted to be. She was convicted, as she knew she would be, in january of 1962 and fined 100 for this enormous crime of distributing Birth Control. She then appealed that conviction all the way through the state legal system up through the connecticut Supreme Court. And when she lost, as she was going to do, she then went into the federal courts, and in that long, complicated way that court cases have, i dont know if youve ever been in a court case, you know what im talking about, her case finally reached the Supreme Court for oral arguments in 1964. And in the spring of 1965, at the end of their 1964 65 Supreme Court term, the Supreme Court ruled in her case, griswold v. Connecticut, not only that the 1879 connecticut statute was unconstitutional, but it was unconstitutional because it violated a write that up to that point no american had 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 has lived in and opened up such dramatic litigation to come. And most dramatic of it, roe v. Wade. And then theres this young woman. Alison krause. The see, alison, had been a graduate of wheaton, wheaton, maryland, john f. Kennedy high school, just a year when the Washington Post reporter came to the school to ask about her. 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, they didnt have much to say. They pulled out her hire file, gave him a copy of her grades, her sats scores, left him see the letter that her guidance counselor had written on her college application, it said something like, alison is a very mature young woman. But really, nobody remembered anything much except how pretty shed been. And even that wasnt necessarily a memory of her, because already the photo you are seeing her heckle graduation photo had made the papers by then. Not that anyone really at john f. Kennedy high in wheaton short have remembered to. 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 had been hired by the Westinghouse Corporation in cleveland, ohio, in 1949, when he was a young man. And there he and his wife started to raise their family, allison and her younger sister. 1963, her dad was transferred to the pittsburgh office, so the family trails along behind him to pittsburgh. Then a few years after that, he was transferred again to the Baltimore Plant of the Westinghouse Corporation, but by then, allison was a sophomore in high school in her and our 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, settle into 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 opened a couple of years when allison in rolled. And for some reason or another, allison didnt really make much of a market in high school, probably because she had arrived as a sophomore, probably because she was 15. Didnt join the sort of clubs that the cool kids joined, didnt earn the sort of grades that made her a standout in the classroom. And when she reached her senior year and decided that it was time to apply to college, she only applied to one school. But she remembered what she remembered loved thoses just drive an out in the countryside. Sunday, her mom and dad and her little sister, theyd all pile into the car and they would drive out of cleveland, out into the countryside, and that way folks used to do. She loved those trips. Just driving aimlessly out in the countryside. And so she decided that she would go to a college, it was out in the countryside, too. She enrolled at kent state. And in her first year at kent 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 guess it was in the winter to ask that they send her transcripts to the university of buffalo, because she was thinking of transferring. No one had an idea, why shouldnt explain why she was thinking of transferring, but it turned out she had met a young man from long island. Theyd become boyfriend girlfriend. And the young man didnt really fit in at kent state. He wore his hair too long, he didnt care about football. His roommate used a homophobic slur about him. And so he decided that he had some friends at the university of buffalo and hed like to transfer there, and allison was going to follow him just as her mother had followed her father all those years. She and her boyfriend were together on the 4th of may, 1970, crouching in a parking lot when the bullet of from a National Guardsmen ripped through the kennedy high tshirt 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 to Kennedy High School too. A group of kids went out of the school and they went to the flagpole in the front of the school and they demanded that the flag be lowered to half mast in allisons honor. And another group of kids came out and said, no, that flag had to stay at the top. And there was a lot of tussle, a lot of pushing and shrubs and shoving until the principle came out, he worked out a compromise. He said that the black and white could be lowered to half mast but they leave the one over on the side all the way at the top. And that got the kids back into the school. But at some point or another somebody came out and they took that flight at half mast and they pulled it all the way down on the burned it. In a garbage can. And it was a few hours after that the post reporters came to find out what he could about allisonss story, and after he talked to the folks in the main office, he wandered around the hallway to see if any of the kids had anything to remember, and they wanted to talk about the protests that they wanted to talk about the war. And some of them argued that why 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 allison, most of them said, well, maybe they saw her once or twice in the hallway. But really, nobody knew her at all. That fourth of july, ed cahill puts flags back up on eddy street. It had become a tradition every year, and all the flags multiplied, he loved it, he kept, likely kept boxes of flags down in this basement and every year he take them out and drape eddy street. And he added music and put his record player out on the window and it would blast out patriotic songs and he set up by parades for the kids and cookouts for the neighbors. As what she probably called and oldfashioned holiday. Some of that seemed appropriate for 1970s that the displays that he had embraced in 1961, the world that he had embraced in 61, somehow seemed a relic of the past. Im not trying to say that the social movements of the 1960s were all triumphant. Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s where Elizabeth Eckford came from, where her moment has to be understood, had its triumphs in the 1960s, dramatic triumphs, and i will argue to the day i die that they were important. Triumphs. But they were also limits to what the Civil Rights Movement could do. And among them was the segregation that embraced little rock high in 57 and that ran around eddy street all the time, that the cahills were there. And its true that Estelle Griswold and those who followed shattered, opened those restrictions of the world that was so important to the cahills. But the issues they opened clearly havent died. We live with them still as it is so clear in whats coming from the Supreme Court in the next few months. And its true that the anti war movements and i insist there were more than one movemet did have an enormous impact on the war in vietnam, even as it cost far too many lives. But the larger framework of americas place in the world wasnt fundamentally transformed. And thats the story of the 60s im trying to tell. A story of the 60s this complex, thats intimate, thats personal. Thats 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 a question. No . My mistake. Thank you so much for letting me join you today, thank you so much for taking the time. Weekends on cspan two are an intellectual feast. Every saturday, American Television documents america story. And book tv brings in the latest in nonfiction books and authors. Funding for cspan two comes from these companies, and more. Including spark light. More. Including spark light. Cspan brings earn unfiltered view of government. Our newsletter recap the day for you from the halls of congress, to daily press briefings, to remarks on the president. Scan the qr code at the right bottom to sign up for this email and stay up to date on everything happening in washington each day. Subscribe today, using the qr code, or visit cspan. Org slash, connect to subscribe anytime. It good evening, everybody. I am Betsy Fischer martin director of the policy