women, like the yellow wallpaper and it went on to create some of the first texts of women and gender studies movement in universities and now that every publisher publishs some feminist books at least we publish the most cutting edge, issues other publishers are not touching because they don't know to or too controversial so all our books have an urgency to them but also might have kind of new and cutting edge. >> host: what is your background? how did you get into this? >> guest: i am a journalist. i was born 45 years ago, a lot of feminists things happen. i have written six books, made two documentary's traveled the country speaking about feminisms all i know it is very mainstream. the word feminism is not the worst people would label but it probably is feminist or their belief system is often very feminist allies don't get hung up on the word, i love the title the feminist press. we were really expansion definition of that but i think my career as the way i practice it demonstrates i write a lot, mainstream magazines like harper's bazaar and books that i write are meant for mainstream commercial audience. >> host: what are some of the books the feminist press has coming out? >> i am excited about this, it shows what we do. the first book coming out in the fall in september is the reprint, we recovery in retreat feminist works that were very important, something we published first called the some of us are brave, black feminist studies so the most important black feminist intellectuals are in this book and joy it was a touchstone for so many important authors from hollis walker to roxanne gay, very important. next book in october is the feminist utopia project a collection a well-known actor, rachel 23 is already in new york times best selling author so they are pretty turbo and put together this election because they want to say what we don't believe in and we are mad about but what is the world's supposed to look like? what is the feminist utopia? it is affirmative, imaginative, what is a better world, 57 pieces and november, standing over here doing a literary chef memoir, so worth cutting to because she is hilarious. the way she writes about food is unpretentious. there is a way in which i feel like i'm part of it but it is kind of elitist. will the american food and nonetheless knows the food is love and when we cook for people it is something to be more law in the world and her food is amazing, we have peanut butter and bacon sandwiches and i have to say it has been popular here. >> host: what is your connection to the university of new york? >> we are fortunate because we are affiliated but not really part of that. they give us our office space and supporters in a variety of grades 34and fifth avenue, i don't thing we could afford it otherwise and very supportive. the university of new york educating 500,000 students a year, feminism is part of that and they support us in other centers. >> host: you are an author people are interested in your books what are they? >> guest: young women's 7 is in the future grassroots activism and the third one about 6 about it, abortion and life is what i did the book press for, this is a collection in my journalism and the most recent one is we do, a classic published over here somewhere about gay marriage. >> host: what is next? for you? wikipedia for me? >> guest: where my mind would my children have a recital and what else after that? work/life balance is the next. next thing for me at the feminist press is we have been working to build platforms around issues we care about. there might be a book but we are doing this book called sweat and it is a book but also a play, it is going to be a movie and movement we are trying to find assets that can be iterative. we think the message is so important, the book buying public, is it king you waiting some time and you read them one at a time, things like a variety of different ways and is easy to do with our books. >> booktv on c-span2. >> on sunday july 5th booktv is live with best-selling author peter schweitzer un "in depth," our monthly call in show the author of nine books which often take critical looks at government and politicians. peter schweitzer is founder of the government accountability institute and senior editor at large for bright barred news. his most recent bestsellers clinton cash where he looks at the money made by bill and hillary clinton since leaving the white house. other recent titles include extortion in which he argues president and congress planned to solicit donations in exchange for political favors. he also wrote architects of ruin where he contends liberal politicians will cause the 2008 financial crisis. peter schweitzer examine how members of congress use their positions to financially benefit themselves in throw them all out. is covered topics like liberal hypocrisy, profiles of the bush family and ronald reagan's fight against communism. peter schweitzer live on booktv on july 5th on in-depth. sending questions and comments to facebook.com/booktv on twitter at booktv or call in. >> presidential candidates often release books introduce themselves to voters and promote their views on issues. declared candidates for prison. immigration worse, former florida governor jeb bush argues for a new emigration policies. .. ♪ ♪♪ welcome to ohama and booktv. founded in 1854 along the missouri river ohama was a stopping point for pioneers traveling westword. today it's nebraska's largest city with a population of over 400,000 people with prominent industries such as meat packing and insurance. with the help of our cox communication cable partners we'll learn about its history from local authors. we begin with the ohama deporres club, group who fought against racial discrimination in the city. >> the ohama deperes club was this phenomenal story of onunlikely group of people in an unlikely place and an improbable time in history that faced and challenged racial discrimination and segregation in ohama nebraska, and it was -- it took place in the late '40s and early '50s, predate ago civil rights activities, if not be decade at least by years and it was a group that maybe defied the stereotype when you thing behalf civil rights group. it was men and women young people old people, black and white, held by two white men so this very wonderful story that has all these amazing connections in an unlikely place. the quote the birmingham of the north, was a quote i found by john howard griffin the author of "black like me" and john howard griffin used that quote and ohama had a reputation in the african-american community in ohama and the united states as a city that when you came in, of you were black you need teed keep your head down and needed to be aware you weren't going to be served in restaurants-weren't going to be able to stay in hotels and there was -- like there were in many cities, there there was this informal industry of staying in homes in the black community, eating at the restaurants in the black community, even if you were an african-american that part part of a band playing in a white hotel, or a play in a mostly white attended theater and that's not a quote that ohama shares proudly but it is a quote i found prepeted. it was known and that description of birmingham of the north was apt strings. the club started in 1947 by two gentlemen, one was a catholic priest a jesuit at creighton university john markoe, and the other founder of the deporres club was a gentleman named denny holland who is actually my father. he was a 20-year-old crate top student and he and father markoe talked about what they called at the time social justice and he started a group and my dad says he thought he was joining a prayer book, sit around, talk about what the moral and theological implications war and father markoe had different ideas and over in the next seven years was the core and he center of that group as they moved into boycotts and picketing and challenging and doing things that my dad said scared him spitless. when the deporres club began their operation, the ceremony civil rights -- they used the term social justice because civil rights want part of the national lexicon at the time. the idea of civil rights was so far removed from the idea of the greater community of ohama or the united states, that they were kind of operating in a vacuum. i like to say day were operating without a net. there were not the support groups there were not the prior experiences of other groups to challenge racial discrimination and segregation so in some cases they were making up their strategies, the techniques they used because there wasn't a -- i'm an edcountior and i do this preparation often for high school and middle school students. i say you can shoot somebody an e-mail and say how did that protest go? there wasn't any of that. they were sitting down and saying okay, we'll try to challenge this business and we're going to hand out leiflets but not yet because we're not sure if it's legal. in the meeting minutes they were going to check with a lawyer to find it if they can legally hand out fliers in front of a business. they were that far ahead of what bill the norm later. the ohama urban league was strong in ohama it was led by whitney young, the national leader of the urban league in the '60s. a strong branch of the naacp and then came this ohama deporres club that was operating outside of the bounds of the regular established rules of how you got things done in the city. and it created a tension in the black community but -- in fact, one of the very first levels of tensions that was created by the ohama deporres club was because they were racially mixed. black men and white women and black women and mite when meeting together, having a beer after their meetings and that created a stir because people in north ohama saw that as a problem. they didn't need to have any attention drawn to north ohama because they didn't -- the deporres club was seen as a dating center, one of the terms used and there was that tension of, you got black men and white women meeting and they're single and that's a problem. so that was one of the first problems they came up against in the black community. but really once people understood what the deporres club was trying to do, they garnered support over the years from the urban league, from the naacp. in fact they worked closely with both of those groups. from ministers of local churches as they'll saw the deporres club was about challenging and changing the institutional racism in ohama and once they understood that is what they were about -- in fact, father mar co-once gave a supreme to a group that thought maybe the deporres club had other motivations, and he toad up and quickly said, the goal of the ohama deporres club is to kick jim crow's ass out of ohama and the sat back down. that was the message. they weren't there for anything else. and when people understood that they tended to get onboard or at pleas not resist the efforts of the club. the first boycott was a block down the street here, it's now a daycare but the ed holme sherman lawn dray, they refused to hire blacks to do anything except wash the laundry. all the customers were black. the wouldn't hire anyone to work in the office, wouldn't hire any black employees the office for to drive the deliver yvans. so the deporres club -- this is 1950, after a couple of years of doing the -- as my dad said, the sweet mess santa things -- pleasant things, went to this business and said we think this isn't fair and the business said, why are you here? this hasn't been a problem. we've been doing this for years and nobody has ever complained. we're not changing our policy. so the deporres club -- it caused a big stir -- they decided to organize a boycott and the black community should say do this? is it going to cause problems beyond what we want it to? and they started a boycott and the business went out of business they sold to another laundry, and eventually that laundry hired a black clerk and then as it happened in a lot of these efforts it ripple effect. ulaundrys to avoid a challenge by the deporres club, started hiring african-american employees, and one brilliant businessman opened a business that employed only african-americans, including the manager and the assistant manager. so that boycott started in july of 1950 and came to fruition in february of 1951. so it was over a period of months efforts letters leafletting, that happened, and they had that successful boycott there then they boycotted the coca-cola bottling company and same thing. they went and said you're located in a black community you don't hire any african-americans, and coca-cola said yeah? so? we never have. why should we? and the deperes club started a boycott, and coca-cola after the club picketed and leafletes and got a petition and got 45 businesses to say they went care coke anymore the coca-cola finally hired a couple of african-americans to work in the plant. there was an ice cream plant and when at the deporres club approached them to hire black workes they said we'll go out of business before we hire black works. the deporres club said, display so they organized a boycott. took a year, and after a huge loss in business, reed's ice cream finally hired african-american workers and the one that was the ongoing -- i think the one that would have cowed the most frustration and the most exhaustion especially for my dad was the ohama railway company which was the company that was given the charter by the city to do the street car and bus services at the time, and unlike in some places it wasn't about blacks being able to ride the street cars. wait about the company hiring blacks to drive the buses in 1948 members of the deperes club including my dad went to visit at the leadership of the company to ask them why aren't you hiring african-americans to work for your company to drive buss and street cars? and the leadership gave several answers but the one that my dad remembered most vividly was the vice president telling them, well you know, that if we hire -- if we have a black driver and we come to the end of the line and there's a white woman on the end of the line, you know he'll rape her. that was one of their justifications in 1948 and my dad would have been 22 at the time and i can just see him walking into the meeting thinking my goodness, did he just say that? they went become to father mark co-and he said, i know. so go back out -- he turned them and percentage. the right back out the door. so in 1948 the company said they wouldn't hire black drives, '49 to '54 the deporres club picketed. leafletted held rallies and finally in 1954 the bus company hired four black drivers because the city threatened to take away their charter if the didn't change their hiring policy. those are the high -- the four main efforts but at the same time they were helping a black world war ii veteran who had been a tuesday skiing be -- tuskegee airman, and he had been shot down, and he bought a house, and he house was stoned by neighbors and threw paint on it and the white neighborhood threatened to run the family out, and whitney young the head of the urban league issue came to the deporres club and said can you help this guy move in? they helped, and they protested a black face act put on at a local high school. as they were doing those long-term boycott efforts against businesses there were dozens and dozens of other things going on, and all of that was met with incredible resistance, as hard as the deperes club pushed against it, the resistance was just as forceful over that same period of time. one of the interesting things was that's did these activities and did these efforts, they were operating in a cone of silence in that north ohama, the black community knew of it because of the black newspapers but if you were white in ohama this never happened. for all intents and purposes it was a nonevent. all seven years, because the greater main stream media never carried it so. if you weren't black and didn't read the north ohama star, didn't read the ohama guide you didn't know what happened. so when -- and people were asking me, what was the community's response? the community's response was nonexistent because there was nothing to respond to. the main newspaper wouldn't carry it. and in 1954 there was a television program that carried an episode that talked about the deperes club and that was the first time if you were white in ohama you would have never heard of these people. so that sense of pushing and not getting any response did wear down on dad. the deporres club dishappened in the fall of 1954. the montgomery bus boycott took place the next year. you think if they had just stuck it to they might have caught that draft and been one of the national movements. part of the national movement. but it really came down to they just ran out of steam. they were tired. their support wasn't there the membership was -- the leadership, my dad had been the president all seven years. he had married the club secretary, jean waite in 1953. their first child was expected in october of 1954 which was weapon the club ended because my dad then had to get a real job to support a family, and he was no longer able to put in the hours it took to lead the deporres club and that is the members -- the members i interviewed said once denny holland was no longer there to lead us there was nobody that stepped up to provide that ongoing leadership, and the club went dormant for about five or six years and then in the late '50s a form deperes deporres club members resurrected the club to get the public schools to hire black teachers and then after the one year campaign, the deporres club officially folded, the summer of 1960. but the reason they have ended after that seven-year push is they had just run out of the resources, the leadership, that it took to keep that effort sustained all those years. this wasn't a six-month operation or a two-week protest. it went on -- that group was active from 1947 to 1954 and the entire time they faced resistance from religious leaders, civic leaders educational leaders and the never backed down and kennedy pushing, one analogy -- a form club member said i always felt like the were those guys in butch cassidy and the soundness kid, they keep trying to lose the guys and the people tracking them keep staying behind them and the keep trying to use all these techniques to lose them, and finally butch cassidy and sundance look at each other and say, who are these guys? i think that was the response that many people had in ohama of the deporres club? what do they want and why are they here? threat a great question. had you moved them to any other location in the united states that would have been the same response. it wouldn't have been like, oh, this is another one of those groups because there weren't any other groups like that. that to me is one of the most important parts. it was sun of such a pioneering effort in such an unlikely place. >> during booktv's visit to ohama, nebraska, we visited john price, who argued that the tallgrass prairie deserves to be protected like the forests and mountain ranges in "the tallgrass prairie reader." >> the prairie hasn't had as many literary accounts in literature mostly because part of that is the prairie was the tallgrass prairie was destroyed -- the majority 90% was destroyed so quickly between 1830 and 1900, so it didn't give authors, nature writers a chance to appreciate it and to write about it in the same sense that john muir went into the sierra mountains and wrote about that wilderness. the prairie wilderness was gone by the turn of the century. it does still exist in the imagination of people, and that was -- should i say in the very earliest treatments, literary treatments of this region, in exploration literature, it was very much a plans, like in the journal of lewis and which, for instance he describes this area being filled with wildlife and beauty and diversity and also george catalan an artist and explorer came those region, wrote about it. his description of prairie fires were immensely popular in the early and mid-19th century. so as a place of adventure yeah it was -- in that early literature it could be found and appreciated. but most of the literature after that is really about the conquering of the prairie. willa cather's book is about the transformation of the prayerly should cropland. often times you hear this region referred to as prairie but they're not talking about actual prairie, they're talking about grazing grasses talking about cropland. so part of the motivation for this book is to correct that inaccuracy. so what happened, i think essentially was that -- there are number of reasons why the prairie was destroyed. most importantly the utilitarian value of it, as cropland place to grow food. the first people looked at this place and saw no trees and they thought, it can't be fertile so they skipped over and went west. then they discovered these rich -- this dark soils created by the prairie war immensely firstle and that's when the great plowup began in the mid-19th century up through now. and with the introduction of the steel plow in mid-19th century, that hastened the destruction of this prairie. went very quickly. i grew up in iowa. and like a lot of, i think young people here, i knew nothing about the prairie. it was pretty much gone, and if i saw a postage stamp prairie i wouldn't have been able to identify it. so i really had no emotional connection to that to my home landscape. i was from lots of corn fields and bean feet e fielding are agricultural area in north central iowa. in' 1993, when i was writing at the university of iowa, finishing my graduate studies and my wife and i were living in a small iowa town and the great flood occurred during that summer. and fields were left unplowed, ditches unmoan, and there was this eruption of strange flowers and grasses that were eight feet high. and i was blown away by the beauty of these things. as i'm crawling around the ditches and my identification guides and my neighbors thought i was nuts but i kind of fell in love with these prairie plants. and then the floods went away, and even though i was glad the human destruction was over, i found myself in a kind of mourning and longing to understand and connect to that lost landscape. so i went out on a downy travel across the region, reconnect with some prairie sites but it became clear to me it would take more than just knowledge of the prairie to maintain this new connection as a writer, to this place. i needed also accounts of an emotional connection, even maybe in a spiritual connection, and for that i turned to nature writing, american nature writing, and found that just like the prairie in reality is endangered as a literary landscape it is endangers. most of the nature books do not include very examples of writings about the tallgrass pray prairie so i had no model for how to write about it, how to connect with it, and because the prairies were gone, the wild prayer riz the wilderness area, i had no way to understand what that it immensity looked like. so that gap my search for that literature. so it began really back in the '90s and then has fumely come to fruition in this anthology now. that's where i think literature has role to play, that this isn't traditional natural beauty right? as americans we like our mountains, or forests our discertains, our oceans, we have lots of literature on that. lots of poetry dedicated to it, art. this is -- can be kind of an acquired taste and so i think when people first see a prairie especially here in the spring when it's short and still not in its full glory they don't appreciate the intricate beauty of it. and so there are lots of examples in here of writers who are speaking to that beauty. both in a grand scale when the first encountered the willnerness area in the 1800s in and early two little postage stamp prairies like this one even though it's definitely small and contained still a great deal of beauty here, but you have to stay. you have to look at it up close. walk among the grasses and flowers to truly appreciate it. walt whitman in this book describes the prairies as america's characteristic landscape. he felt more than any other landscapes in this country the prairie represented its unique character. it was unlike anything else in the world and he was blown away when he came out here and visited it. you hear that again and again once you experience the prairie directly come back in the summer -- please do -- and it sticks with you. it's the way the grass the way it waves like oceans, it had that profound impact on people. the color the diversity the wildlife. the lilt tour for those who can't visit the prairie can give people a taste of that and hopefully inspire them to care. >> you're watching booktv on c-span2. this weekend we're visiting ohama, nebraska, to talk with local authors and tour the city's literary sites with the help of our local cable partner cox communications. next mark scherer tells us about the supreme court case, nbc press association v. stewart, which debt with press freedom and the right to an impartial jury. >> the nebraska press association case vs. stuart is a landmark supreme court decision in the field of first amendment rights and in particular it addresses the question of how the courts and the journalism profession balance the competing interests at stake when we find a confrontation between the first amendment right of the free press and the sixth amendment, rights to a fair trial by an impartial jury for all criminal defendants. these are two conflicts that -- two interests that come into conflict quite frequently, quite naturally. in the courts have always had to deal with this sort of balancing act that occurs when you have those sorts of constitutional collusions. the case originates out of a rather horrendous mass murder tragedy that occurred in a tiny town called sutherland, nebraska in western nebraska, back in 1975. fall of 1975. a local itinerant ne'er-do-well by the name of erwin simants killed six members of a local family in the mos heinous cold-blooded way. he killed henry and marie kelly they're son david and then three children, grandchildren of the kellies ages 10, 7 and 5. in an atmosphere and region and geographic area that is rural relatively isolated, lightly populated, and so it created obviously the murders and simants arrest and prosecution for the murders created a huge whirlwind of press attention. national regional, local. hundreds of journalists and news organizations descend on north platt, the county seat to cover the investigation and the prosecution of simants. and ultimately, in order to control some of the pretrial publicity, about the case, and about simants' involvement in the case, the local trial courts there in lincoln county, nebraska placed a gag order on the press that purported to prohibit the press from publishing certain information about the crimes and about simants' involvement in the crime, and it was from that beginning that the constitutional collusion occurred between first amendment and sixth amendment interests and ultimately the case makes its way to the supreme court. the trial courts -- actually several versions of the gag order, but to get to the essence of it, the trial courts there two judges in particular, judge ronald rough the county court judge who handled the arraignment of simants and then later judge stuart, the district touter judge who ultimately heard the case, presided over the trial of simants. they were concerned about protecting simants' sixth amendment rights to an impartial jury in what had become a very feverish and emotional sort of almost feeding frenzy among the press and journalists. they were concerned that the jury pool for simants' trial would be tainted by all of the information that was flooding the region. and that would be difficult if not impossible to seat a jury of 12 impartial jurors that didn't have so much information about the crimes and simants' involvement in the crimes that he might somehow be able to escape conviction through a sixth amendment claim. and that is what they w. about when the issued the gag orders. the local press and the nebraska -- various nebraska press organizations, who are involved in the coverage of the crimes were for obvious reasons alarmed, i guess is the good way to put it, joust rage might be another way to put it. at this entire of a prior restraint on what the could or couldn't report. especially when it related to information that was otherwise easily obtainable from the public record, from open court proceedings, proceedings that were required to be open under nebraska law at the time, and from public records that had been filed in the case, the prosecution's complaint against, and the amended complaint filed against simants all of these contained great amount of detail and all of these were public records and to be told you're not allowed to print what is otherwise completely available to the public, was alarming and they decided to challenge the propriety of the gag order the constitutionality of the gag order through a variety of rather esoteric and technical legal means. the process that the press went through in order to challenge the constitutionality of the gag order was, i thing i used the word labyrinthian. very convoluted and rightfully so. they were in a situation where they wanted to challenge the propriety of this order but they weren't actually parties to the criminal prosecution. it became very tricky, very complex. the bottom line is that ultimately the press -- the nebraska press organization decided to intervene that is be admitted into the criminal prosecution as a party in the criminal prosecution which was extremely unusual,en orthodox legal strategy, but it worked, at least initially. judge stuart did grant the press' motion to intervene and from that position really within the litigation, the press was able then to make their arguement to judge stuart that he ought not to do what he ultimately did that tis impose the gag order on the press. then the press immediately appealed from judge stuart's imposition of the gag order to the nebraska supreme court. they didn't get action from the nebraska supreme court in the time frame they hoped. they were anxious to have this expedite it. they wanted to be her immediately because of the continuing nature of the violation of their constitution contractual rights but the sentence supreme court for reasons of its own good faith reasons of it own chose not to or decided it couldn't hear the case for what turned out to be almost a month from the time that the appeal was originally brought to them. in the meantime, the nebraska press, not satisfied with this long delay that they were getting from the nebraska supreme court they decided to file a motion with the united states supreme court to take action on this constitutional deprivation, and that matter was heard by justice harry blackman, who was responsible for the area where the nebraska courts were lock it couldded and judge blackman got into a spat, i guess you could say with the nebraska supreme court in which justice blackman was urging the nebraska supreme court to move forward on this in an expeditious manner, the nebraska supreme court was resisting or just ignoring the matter and saying we'll get to it in the normal course of our procedures and so justice blackman ultimately issued a decision in which he partially invalidated judge stuart's order. this got the attention of the nebraska supreme court who ultimately then did hear the case and it, too then ultimately issued its own gag order in the case, making it the third, or depending on how you count, the fourth gag order. this point is that none of the courts up until that time had completely invalidated the order that judge ross and then judge stuart placed on the press. and even though the later courts both justice blackman and the nebraska supreme court had reduced the breadth and the depth of the nature of the gag order they still left it in place and still prevented the press from publishing certain information that they felt they had every right to publish. so the case ultimately made its its way to the full supreme court for review. at the time that the nebraska press appealed to the full supreme court they asked the supreme court to handle it in an expedited manner. the supreme court has procedures for certain cases to be handled in a shortcut manner but that request was denied. so the -- to answer the question of when it was heard before the united states supreme court, it was in the spring of 1976. so still by judicial standards this is still going pretty quickly. the crimes occurred in october. it's being heard in the supreme court the following april. so we're still talking whatever -- whatever that is, six, seven months later. so that still pretty quick. judicial time. but for the press every day that this gag order remained in effect was another constitutional def privilege vacation. it was a unanimous decision to invalidate the gag order that judge stuart had placed on the press. and saying it was actually addressing the gag order of judge stuart is not exactly accurate even though judge stuart was the named respondent in the case. he himself later pointed out ex-really should heave been the supreme court of nebraska that was being challenged, because it was their order the nebraska supreme court's order which was really the third incarnation of this gag order that was the final state order before the court. but at any rate, the decision was that the order even as it had been modified by the nebraska supreme court was still overly broad excessive and constitutional infirm and so it was overturned. the precedent set here with the case is that for all intents and purposes there are no -- there have been very few if any further attempts by local courts trial courts, at any level, anywhere, to try to place direct gags on to the press. telling them what they can or cannot publish related to criminal proceedings. more specifically, the decision made it clear that any such efforts by trial courts to stifle the press are presumptively unconstitutional, and would have to meet a overwhelmingly high standard to withstand judicial scrutiny. the standards that were set in the nebraska press association case for per miss illinois gag orders are so -- permissible gag orders it pretty mump eliminated them for all time. that the most important aspect of this as a precedent. that is what makes what i believe to be an extremely important pronouncement by the courts on this first amendment versus sixth amendment balancing act. there aren't any villains. both -- all the parties involved here did their best to represent in a good-faith way the constitutional interests that they represented. and i just think it's a story that mixes human and personality dimensions with constitutional history. it's an important part of the story of first amendment history and sixth amendment history in the country and it's a story that i think brings those issues together in what i hope is a very relatable sort of way. >> while in ohama nebraska, we talked to amy forss whose book "black print with a white car nation" profiles mildred brown founder of the ohama star, the longest running newspaper founded by a black woman. >> mildred brown was a woman of character. she was a woman who cared. she was a matriarch of north ohama. she was the ohama star. if you asked somebody they would say she was synonymous with the newspaper. the ohama star is a black newspaper, pitched toward the black community but a lot of people in ohama pick it up. it is technically the longest running black newspaper founded by a black woman in the united states. mildred brown started as a school teacher in birmingham, alabama, and citied second graders, third graders fourth graders, and then she met her husband, and he was a pharmacist one of the very few who had got an doctorate this is in the 1900s and they got married and they moved to chicago, and she started going to classes and then the wasn't to des moines and she went to more college classes and and then they ended up in sioux city and he was she superintendent for the church she was attending, and her minister came to her and said, there's a newspaper here in town, i think maybe you could do a better job and she said i know nothing about newspapers. neither my husband nor i know anything about a newspaper. he said i think you can do it. so they did. it was just like a little two-page -- nothing exciting, but eventually someone in ohama heard about it, named cc gallaway and he came up to sioux city and asked her husband and her if they would relocate -- he would give them a job at the newspaper and they would work at his newspaper the ohama guide, and after a year and a half they opened up the ohama star. it was started in 1938 and ohama was a pretty racist town. less than 20 years before they moved there -- because they actually got in 1937 -- there had been a really brutal lynching down at our courthouse, and oddly enough, the victim's last name was brown no relationship to mildred. but she knew that it was very racist town. sioux si citiwas fairly racist town. her husband was the first black pharmacist in sioux city, and she kind of knew what she was going to be facing. she was more of the advertising woman. she realized her strength was people skills. so she kind of left it to him at the beginning to go ahead and write the stories and he was pretty radical. the fbi was actually watching him. they weren't really sure what kind of elements were going into this newspaper. and so they were very political. there wasn't a lot of family outreach and positive news. it was very much, this is what's going on nationally. they didn't have as much ohama coverage but when she and her husband divorced in 1943 and she took over the newspaper and he left the city, then she put her mark on it. then it was all about the family and making people in the black community prominent. it wasn't news that was reported in the mainstream newspaper which unfortunately if you didn't know better you would not realize there is a black community other than the ohama star reporting about it. she had a lot of different things going on in ohama to address. in the '30s, probably housing the biggest thing. and the government came in during the great depression and they built some projects. her husband actually was one of the people registering people for apartments in those projects and at first she was so excited and then the newspaper she said, we need to move in with this, this is fantastic. the black community is finally equal to the white community for housing, and her main goal in this newspaper even today she has been gone for over 20 years -- is to always write positive news, because she said, i want to present the positive side of the black community. so instead of focusing on, say desegregating, which yes she did have lots about segregation and maybe the deporres club, who she was aligned with and various things they were doing to change discrimination in the city she would always end it with something positive and say let's focus on this family celebration of something else, and so she always -- she had a habit of sandwiching the news. very forward thinking. she thought it was important to always support the positive aspect of the community because it was a way of uplifting. it was a way of showing people reading the newspaper this isn't the way it's always going to be, and yes you hear a lot of negativity, in our media but that's not who we are. so she was validating that the community not only was worth her living there the rest of here life but worth everybody else living there. and she wanted to show we're really important here. she did that numerous times in various events that she organized. she told people to vote with their feet. i your unhappy with discrimination such as the unemployment in businesses that people are refusing to hire someone of color she said don't buy anything there. she ran a huge campaign in her newspaper for years. she had a list of companies that she boldly put them right out there on the front page saying, these people are not hiring people of color do not buy their products and tell your friends don't go there. that pretty nervy when a lot of her advertising is from white businesses and she sometimes had to juggle things a little bit to make sure the next copy of the newspaper came out because there were times that i'm sure she was digging into what was left of her savings trying to make sure it continued. and one thing she was super proud of was that she never missed an issue in over 50 years. never missed an issue. she started the newspaper on january 9, 1938, right at the very tail end of the great depression, and she actually ended being the person in charge of the newspaper on november 2, 1989 because she passed away. true businesswoman true newspaper woman at heart she had just signed off on the copy because the newspaper would come out a certain day of the week, weekly newspaper. she just signed off on it and a few hours later she passed away. her legacy is like turning a rock into a lake, and all the ripples keep coming and you think you have seen them all and they're still coming. to start with the newspaper. that newspaper is still being printed right now and so many people have been reading that newspaper since 1938. that made a huge impression, huge legacy, and i could say well maybe it was -- all of the people she affected in the commune, the white and black community, who desegregateed who understood what she was trying to improve the community but i would say the biggest legacy is almost invisible because it's all the people she touched. i never met her. i kind of feel like i did with all the research, but i would have really liked to have spent five minutes with her. she was that kind of person. >> we continue our visit to ohama, nebraska, with heather fryer, whose book "perimeter's democracy" examinings the united states' use of internment camps during world war ii nice internment in various forms has actually gone on since the creation of the first indian reservations really. when i started this study i became really intrigued with how many people were living in these hastily built cities, camps closures in world war 2, and it turned out there were about 367,000 people moved into the west during world war ii. so i looked at, how is it that they came up with the idea that the government could simply move people in a mails they wanted them to be -- a place they wanted him to be, created a community that made them adopt life ways that were supposed to make them more american, although most were quite american and doing quite well to begin with. and then reef lease people when the government decided they didn't want them there and going back to things like the japanese american internment camps, the people who organized and developed those were people who were borrowed from the indian bureau because it was the reservation system that was the first set of created enclosed communities that did kind of regiment the way that people would live in order to ostensibly make them more american. i focused four various communities of different types and the first one that i looked at was vanport city, which was right between portland, oregon, and vancouver washington, hence the very, very creative name, which housed 40,000 workers during world war ii. from there i looked at the central utah relocation center, which is one of the ten kind of euphemistically named relocation centers. the site of incarceration phenomenon japanese americans and people of japanese ancestry on the west coast mostly from california. third was the los alamos site for the manhattan project in new mexico. it was another one of these cities that materialized out of nowhere. to pats -- topaz utes fifth largest city. van port was oregon's second. los alamos was second or third in new mexico so these gigantic wartime efforts most for cities that subsequently disappeared for become something else. i was interested in the range of people who were brought to live niece confined spaces, because we might kind of imagine pretty naturally, given the racial anxieties and the racial ang silt of the time, that preponderances this was a segregation -- what been well to do celebrated scientists who were coming from universities and laboratories across the u.s. and across the world? the fourth community my study was the klammath indian reservation in southern oregon because i started to realize that more i looked at the three communities i was examining the more that the expertise and the model for these communities had come from the indian bureau. so no one was re-inventing the wheel in world war ii. the government has persistent concerns and hence they were based in something that might be fairly real, often based in trying to respond to the existing communities' anxieties. a lot of the purpose actually, for incourse rating people or containing them in these communities was it was a tangible way for the federal government to show the surrounding communities that they were managing these seemingly unmanageable problems. so if we're fearful of people bombing the west coast and taking over, it's not really that those particular japanese american people had actually had anything to do whatsoever with the pearl harbor bombing and as much looking as was done by the fbi and other surveillance and security organizations there was no evidence that anyone had anything to do with the bombings. but the government can show that we're containing the threat. we're doing something. there are bodies. there are people, there's movement there's abashed wire perimeter, there's armed guards. the government is taking care of this. the shipyards in portland the same thing. there was tremendous concern that if we did not have the ships and the war material that we needed, the united states was already pretty far behind in the game. there had been in places, most famously detroit in 1942, 1943, very very large episodes of racial unrest that threatened the war effort, and also became great material for nazi prop begannists. if the united states was making these claim is it was a site for freedom and democracy globally, and within the united states african-americans are struggling for equal treatment within these defense centers this is a propaganda problem. so the thought was well, okay, for portlanders who have racial anxieties -- it's not just a camp. it was a city of 40,000 people that within a matter of just a few months showed up on the columbia river flood plain and housed 40,000 people. it was kind of presented as an integrated city, but it was also very clear that there was a white sector and a very, very clear sector for african-americans. so it managed racial anxieties while at the same time playing it as though this is a moment for american democracy because it's an inclusiveness within the space of confinement. some was forcible. depending on which group you're looking at, for the klammath tribe, a lot of that was by force and also not the greatest -- certainly not the way the klammath people or the people who are from the klammath reservation would consider forming a community. the enterment camps again there was not a lot of decisions to be done about this. there was initially in the aftermath of the pearl harbor bombing the weak invitation for people to abandon their homes and belongings and to go move into the interior west voluntarily, but a lot of people couldn't do that. i mean, up and moving and leaving your business, your home your family, is an expensive and difficult proposition. so with this, it was an executive order from the president that just said, if you're of japanese ancestry you're now in a military area and you're going to be evacuated, whether you like it or you don't. people tried to actually go back people who did all kinds of things and resisted but they were then arrested and treated as criminals. van port is the interesting case here. vanport was not a place that people were compelled to go to. it didn't have bash barbed wire. it had internal security. lots of plain clothed fbi lots of people looking for communist looking for problems like enter interracial dances. juke boxes were a problem because it was seen to perpetuate african-american culture and music and this could be disruptive. so a lot of that sort of thing. but it wasn't a clear surveillance structure and for a lot of poem out of the great depression this was their first opportunity at stable housing good job it was a pretty great place to live on the whole. so at vanport you'll hear mixed stories about this. the problem was that of course it was pretty segue degree -- segregated. people were cut off from the local community didn't have voting rights often in portland unless they were from there resistance to opening up polling stations in van port, and there was no bank and people were going to shipyard, collecting earnings and putting it in coffee can under the mattress and end the flood came and the government told people, stay in your homes there's no danger, and they were wrong people's earnings washed away. so the gains they got from the great depression didn't pan out. although in that case i think the sale was reasonable. people got what they expected and they were free to come and go. los alamos was interesting too because most of the scientists who were there -- in fact nearly all weren't really given the full picture of what it is they were going to work on. the manhattan project from a couple of scientists, one is not allowed in the project because he is considered too radical to jew jewish, and too great a potential for sub version but he actually clued the roosevelt administration into the fact that germany had some kind of project going to weaponize atomic energy in some way and with the capture of shaq slow satisfy yack they had the ability to do it. so they had to build and it make sure nobody knows this is happening. so scientists took this kind of great leap of faith that was paced a lot on their commitment to their discipline, saying are you're going to go to the desert you're not going know where you're going your dress is po box 1663, when your children are born, if you have children in the compound, their birthplace is just po box 1663. there's no such place as los alamos. the big concession was family members were allowed to come and that was really big concession because there was the concern the more people, the more you have to manage them. so for most of those people it was the scientist's hollywood but what a lot of the scientists didn't know is even their own bodyguards were actually there to watch their moves. we have more private information on scientists in the manhattan project than anyone could ever want to know. we know where they would get their hair cut prior to being brought to manhattan project how many bagels they ate and whether that it indicated whether they were jewish and potentially more of a political tendency to be subversive. so the are were structures of those kind of con finement and surveillance with this promise of there's something really wonderfully american about your participation in this odd community. i think that one of the things that i would really like for readers to take away from the book is to realize that our story as americans is so much more complex than really just some of the standard narratives we have been given. there are lot of hidden histories and hidden experiences. also that the west kind of has a unique and interesting history but it doesn't end within the when the last pioneers reached the pacific shore. if we hang on to that history too long, i think some very important issues that we're still contending with get lost. i think if we really want to understand out here in the west how our neighbors came to be here and what histories they bring, and maybe what difficulties from their past or what they might have overcome, really need to look more closely beyond the mythology of everybody coming to the west because they were seeking freedom, and they were part of this great march of progress, to looking at how much richer and deeper and more textured the history of this region really is. it's not just kind of a great storybook tale but it's the aggregate of a lot of complex moves, experiences that include the hand of the federal government although a lot of people go to the west or have gone to get away from the federal government, it's been here in a lot of different ways and forms that are worth considering. >> one of the things we like to do on booktv is preview some of the big books that are coming out in the fall. ... ing both of the dreams are from childhood. one of the dreams is about being hunted down, hiding being terrified for my life. the other dream is about being a murderer and trying to hide the evidence. and i had them more years as a child. -- for years as a child. as it turned out, i learned much later that my mom shared one of those dreams, the first dream. she was an immigrant from lithuania. she lived through the war there with her dad and her siblings, and as, you know, many people who have gone through war and have suffered, you know trauma, she had a dream that her sister shared the same dream for a years. so somehow i enmeterred part of -- inherited part of this dream line. and i think one of the curious things for me as a writer and just as a daughter is why i have the second part of the dream -- the second dream and not just the first. >> host: when did you when did you discover why you were having that second dream about being a murderer? >> guest: well, i discovered it about five years ago when i first learned that, first, i should say i come from a blended family. my father, who died ten years ago, was an eastern european jew. my mother is lithuanian catholic first generation. and about five years ago in a conversation with my mom, i learned that her father the lithuanian grandfather i had loved, was not just a resistance fighter against the russians, he'd actually been a chief of security police of the gestapo during world war ii. and instantly i felt among, you know, a myriad range of emotions the need to find out what that meant. but, certainly in lithuania 95% of the jewish population was exterminated. so that was when, the moment i learned that he had had this position during the war as a collaborator the second dream began to make a little sense to me. >> host: how did that come up in conversation? >> guest: well -- >> host: just five years ago? >> guest: um my water break. you know, there were many years where i felt there was a dark thread running through that, the lithuanian side of my family. and the narrative in my family had been that my lithuanian grandfather had been a hero. he had fought against the russians, he had saved the children his wife had been deport toed to the gulag -- deported to the gulag prior to the german occupation. and, you know, as in many families, those stories are not ones you tend to pick apart. you accept them. but there came a time in my life and i think in part the passing of my dad, in part having an amazing adopted stepdaughter who's from a country where it's very difficult to find your birth parents and ask them questions. when i thought to myself, you know, if i have questions i need to ask of my one remaining parent, this is the time. so we sat down over coffee, and i began to ask her questions about her mother, her father and the conversation evolved into this discovery. and i have to say that, you know i -- as soon as she told me about his -- she didn't use the word "collaboration," of course i felt, you know, all this -- it's taken me all this time to ask. i was stunned, you know at my own reluctance to open that door. and i think that's not an uncommon experience. many people feel that way. >> host: did your mother feel relief at telling you this? was there shame involved? was it a secret? >> guest: i think she certainly did feel relieved. i think that there was reluctance. i think that had she known that my experience of hearing these words would compel me to, you know fairly relentlessly go about the business of researching who he had been during the war she probably, she probably would not have told me. but then i can't speak for her. >> host: how well did you know your grandfather who was with the gestapo? >> guest: so i i, you know, he was my, the lithuanian word for grandfather, i adored him as a young person, you know, a child. i would say he was in my life as a fairly dominant figure until i was 13, 14. and then for different reasons, i drifted away from that side of my family. but, you know, he was, he was a loud joyous, loving grandfather. and, you know, there were a few instances, there was one instance where he said something to me which, you know in retrospect i now realize was terribly anti-semitic but at the time i was very young and i didn't it didn't resonate in that way. but i loved him. >> host: what was doing the research like after you found this out? >> guest: it was starting from zero in ignorance and really finding an amazing team of people every country i went who became not just, you know translators for hire, but people who really were interested in this project. and that was terribly important you know? i felt a lot like a detective. one of the books the many books that i read and, obviously, you know 400 pages of archival material in many different languages, but was actually a classic text on unsolved homicides. especially long unsolved homicides. because one of the things i wanted to be certain of was that i wasn't going to, through supposition, through proximity, make assumptions about my grandfather and what he had or had not done. i really wanted to source whatever i learned very carefully, and i also found out that in order to find out about him, i had to really find out about this area where he was partially in charge, a region of lithuania. so there was a total immersion and my research involved published material material from russia, lithuanian archives, archives at the holocaust museum here, individual interviews last eyewitnesses last survivors. and there were dead ends, and then something would happen and i would start again. there were many surprises along the way. >> host: just give us a taste one surprise that you -- >> guest: so early on i went to the holocaust museum in d.c. i'd asked for, you know i was completely inexperienced. poetry is really what i teach, and so i had 200 microfriendship reels -- microfiche reels waiting for me. although now i can speak a little bit of lithuanian a little bit of polish, i'm from the midwest. that's my only excuse, and a bad one, for not knowing more languages. but anyway i took four my cofish reels -- microfiche reels that had originally been part of the soviet trove of archival material, and then the soviets had returned it to lithuania and the lithuanians had given it to the holocaust museum. so i knew, you know, the spelling of the town where my grandfather was based. i began going through these german documents and as it turns out, if you look at german over the period of two hours it's one of those languages that actually it's easily knowable. i began toens -- began to understand what i was reading. i was distracted. there was so much material, i was taking notes on many different people that had nothing to do with my grandfather, but all of it was fascinating and horrifying. and then after two and a half hours, i was exhausted and i felt foolish, you know? what am i doing here? what am i looking for? i didn't have any background on my grandfather's history during the war, and it really felt like a fool's r rand. i -- errand. so i remember i got up, used the ladies' room, came back and said ten more minutes. i put in the last reel, i started hitting the fact button, and then i thought no, no cheating. you have to look at each document one at a time, turning the dial, turning the dial. and then all of a sudden, there's my grandfather's name, there's his handwriting there's a report in lithuanian and then there's another report and another report and another report. and that was one of the beginnings. >> host: rita gabis, without giving away what you did discover is about your grandfather and his connection to the gestapo, now that the book is done where are you with this? are you resolved? >> guest: no. in terms of my, you know, my family history of my grandfather, i don't want to say too much because it will give i think, too much away. i think, you know there's a there's an excavation of a mass grave going on in belarus right now that's been three different can generations of war. i'm very interested in going there and reporting and writing about that. and i think that's part of my lack of resolution. i feel like this has started me on a journey and it hasn't ended. i also hope and suspect that publication of this book will actually give me more information, fill in some of the gaps. and that's already started to happen a little bit. through galleys. so i'm hopeful i'll learn more. >> host: is your mother still alive? >> guest: she is. >> host: has she read the galleys of the book? >> guest: she's not. she has asked for a copy of the book when it comes out, but, you know, this is very painful for her, and i'm not sure how much she's going to read. i made a pact with her early on, and i told her that i would not share any material with her unless she specifically asked for it. so what she'll do with the book you know, i don't know, but i honor her choice whatever that may be. >> host: final question, what is the jewish side of your family? -- what has the jewish side of your family said to you about this project? >> guest: in the beginning, my wonderful jewish aunt shirley pearl gabis was horrified, you know? you know keep silent. i mean, silence is the big, you know, it's the word of their generation. but she has become an incredible ally and it's really, you know, not just proud of me as her niece, but feels that this is an incredibly important part of history, you know, honors my effort to uncover what i've managed to uncover. >> host: the book is called "a guest at the shooter's banquet: my grandfather's ss past and my jewish family a search for the truth." it comes out in the fall of 2015 published by bloomsbury. rita gabis is the author. >> you're watching booktv. television for serious readers. you can watch any program you see here online at booktv.org. >> host: david ritz, what do you do for a living? >> guest: i am a ghost writer. >> host: what is a

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