Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book TV Visits Kansas City Missouri 2

with the help of our spectrum cable partners we'll explore the city's history and literary community, beginning with author pat o'neill on the history of irish immigrants and how they helped build kansas city in what it is today. >> one of my favorite places in the whole cold is brown's market run by john and -- john mcclain and cary brown. and they start the business in the late 1880s. irish style. the oldest continual retail operation in west of the mississippi, maybe in the whole world. but brown's is kind of our community center. one of those great little corner neighborhood grocery stores where people are extended credit in the neighborhood, people came here for generations, and it's now kind of the same thing. people come here just to gossip and compare notes notes and head kids. so, it's a much like a small town crossroads store in ireland. >> the title of the book, from the bottom up, it's in the sense that in kansas city, we're along the rivers, and the missouri river in the kansas river and it creates this river bottom land where a lot of the eye issue immigrants first lived because it was inexpensive and lived in shanties along the river. eventually worked their way up the hill to the bluff, top of the bluffs, and so physically they moved up and also came up the social ladder at the same time. so from the bottom up just kind of means both geographically and socially. in the 1850s kansas city was a muddy little riverfront community, storehouses and shanties and shawn eindians and half breeds and a lot of french traders, and -- but a tiny -- hundreds of souls. the priest that was assigned to this area, actually had a -- he traversed an area called it his parish and likened to a small european kingdom. went for 300-miles one way and 150 miles another way. when he settled in scans city party and the church on the hill he was part of the civic community that was trying to expand the estimate when you have 150-foot bluffs along the river you can't -- agent shelf of a town in order to expand the town you have to go through the limestone bluffs. so he put out a call, father donnelly, put out a call and put advertisements in boston and new york and the irish papers, and he advertised for laborers, and skilled tradesmen to come to kansas city. they'd pay your fare and guarantee a job and place to live to help cut the streets. they made like a dollar a day to carve these streets, sometimes 80-foot deep through the bluffs. that was the genesis of the irish population in kansas city, which hundreds of immigrants responded, mostly from baltimore, boston, new york, along the coast. the irish that dime kansas city in 1850s -- there were hubs of them. they were mostly male, women followed, kids followed, but they were brought here for the very simple reason, to wield the pick and shovel and cut the straights they but, cisterns, foundations for buildings, latrines, they put up brick, put up stone, stonemasons. they put -- kansas city is built on limestone, there are caverns where we sit right now, underground caves carved out of the limestone, now used for storage and office space. the irish that would book around the see and see the foundations of homes and walls, primarily irish stone masons who built that. from union station to liberty memorial to the basement of my house. we were stockyards, a major stockyard operation so they were cutting the throats of cattle, cutting them into steaks and putting them on the railroad, and the guy driving the train was irish, the guy oiling the train was irish. those kinds of jobs that brought the irish to kansas city, and really they built the city. the american protective association, which i out of clinton, iowa, was a very ian irish, anti-immigrant sort of group because irish were coming across the country and settling in on the railroad jobs and those kinds of something, and and before you knew i they were taking on the city halls of clinton, iowa, and place inside the midwest. there was pushback then, but the irish population was burgeoning. by 1870 almost ten percent of the population was irish born, so they were able to -- there were conflicts, some violence, killings between the american protective association deputies, and local eye wish politicians that were ward healers, and that was in the 1890s, and then as we grew past the century mark and coming into world war i, that's when the penter gast dynasty was established. jim pen at the gast. his parents were from ireland carriages from a big family of brothers and sisters and work as in ironworks in kansas city, and the store is -- it is true he liked to gamble on the horses. and he won a bet on a horse named climax, and with those wings he open a saloon and a boring house on the west bottoms where the irish lived, along the river, among the shanty houses and boarding houses and the train station, and did very well. he was -- considered a up, very positive sort of guy, very honest guy, he held a lot of the old immigrants money in their saloon, he was their banker because they didn't trust banks. he wanted to take young men in and deencouragement of their parents to take the pledge and quit drinking. he was hugely poplar? he upon -- encouraged to run as alderman, city councilman, and he won and continued to win, until the -- until he tied in 1914. he built up a trust among the poor, especially, because he did it the old-fashioned way. today's politicians promise platitudes and these just -- things they can never deliver. he delivered with coal when you needed it. talked to immigrant sons and grandparents and grandsons and granddaughters of immigrants who said he paid fortune road. their little brothers and sisters when they died young, all the diseases and all the different malady that would take young lives in the early 1900s and he would deliver coal to people who were freezing in the winter. and so those kinds of things, in return for votes. he built this gigantic political dynasty in kansas city, comparable to curley in boston or to hogue in philadelphia, and that lasted up until the '30s. and unlike his brother, big jim, tom had more of a penchant for race horses and betting, and in fact it took him down the path into really tax evasion and all kinds of issues that sent him to prison eventually, and then the political dynasty crumbled. that political dynasty -- there was accusations of corruption but you didn't hear of a lot of violence associate with the irish political structure. there was patronage was rampant, and giving people something they needed, not just latitude but giving them jobs, giving them coal, giving them funds when the tragedy occurred in the family. so, it was built on benevolence and, yes, built on self-interest. but by the same token, when you people and the era of prohibition, the stakes got higher and higher in terms of the underworld, if you will, and i think that's really when the irish started to lose their grip on the political system, was probably in the depression, even though that was their -- at the highest because they were providing jobs and whatnot, but when they were losing on the other end during prohibition, because the stakes were so high for sugar, for bootlegged whiskeys, that that's really when the italian element began to take over that part of the vice in the city, and that-i think the irish backed away from the violence of that ear remark might have but our cousin and our second cousin and his cousin on the payroll at the county courthouse but we weren't killing -- shooting people at the polls and weren't burning cars and that kind of thing. not to -- don't want to denigrate the italians but the mafia influence came into kansas city, which everybody knows became a major, major, really you look at the irish political structure, -- the irish didn't have quite the penchant for force to get a perspective on this, the evolution of kansas city. people think kansas city is horses and buggies and cows, but kansas city started out when the irish first arrived here, there was like 500 people, half of them were half-breens, full-breed red indians, african-americans, french, a melting pot, and melting in the sense you were practically melting in the mud because there are were no streets, right along the river, steep roads in clay, and it smelled. it was people were dirty, people were -- it was -- to build out of that core, the irish basically helped build this, put stone down on the streets, built the buildings, put the bricks together, put out the fires, started and stopped the fights as policemen. we did those kind of things. the irish came into a little bowl of mud, essentially, with some shacks, and turned it into a city, and i'm very proud of that. >> foundered in 1873, the kansas city public library is the oldest library system in the area. come inside with us as we see the special collections of tom bendergast. we'll more than about his rise to power and impact on the city. he the political machine got the start from tom's older brother, jim pendergast, who came to kansas? i 1880s and got started establishing this machine and the first ward of conditions city in the industrial west bottom, down by the river. there were many -- there's an irish community, african-american community, very diverse. a lot of working class people. and jim pendergast had saloons and he had -- he went basically precinct to precinct, building this machine that was based on favors. basically. helping people get jobs in exchange for votes, helping people through giving them loans you didn't have to get a formal bank loan, and jim would loan the money, settle gambling debts, skimming money off of the top of illegal activities such as gambling and prostitution and so on. and when jim pendergast was getting older, his health was failing, and his younger brother, tom pendergast, good at started in the machine around the 1900s. he was elect city alderman and was in charge of streets for a few years in the early 1900s. and tom pendergast really was in a position to take over the machine by the time that jim died in 1911. and a political machine, it's basically -- i started to describe it with the act of doing favors in exchange for votes. when you boil it down to its base elements, that's what it amounted to. it's being tied into organized crime and other elicit activities, taking bribes and kickbacks. and using influence to make sure that your preferred candidates are elected, and then once you control the city government, by 1925, the pendergast machine had full control over the city, they had five out of nine city council members were hand-picked by tom pendergast. through the city council day appointed henry mcelroy, city manager, and the city manager position was really more powerful than any other position in kansas city at the time, and so henry mcelroy is manager, was in charge of the day-to-day operations of the city, and reformers hoped the manage we're be this professional, kind of just takes care of business in proper ways, but since he was pander gast's man, it was very improper, and whenever they did city construction projects, mcelroy would make sure that the contracts wend to companies that were owned by tom pendergast, and pendergast owned mostly construction companies. there was basically everything from quarries to cement to -- there was a redi-mix, that company is one of his big ones. he had insurance companies. he had liquor companies, of course, which at least officially they changed to beverage companies during prohibition at the time, and so all of these city contracts went through mcelroy to -- back to pendergast, and the gets the money. so there's this circle of money that piepowder gast is always getting his cuts and the moon would get their custs and in exchange he gets votes. on election days they can pay people to vote. they can bill date vote for the opposition or bring out their own voters the election of 1934, for example, there were four people killed at the polling sites by pendergast's ward healers, and the way they were able to do this through power and money is they can get away with it because, after four people were killed and 11 injured, people demand that the governor call out the national guard and come in and re-establish order in kansas city. well, who would do that? the governor of missouri, guy park. well, park himself was a pendergast crony. so the power went statewide by the 19 -- by 1932, when he got guy park elected. and they had influence for the state of missouri, representation at the democratic national convention, in the 1930s, pendergast eventually selected truman to be senator from missouri. he was elected in a statewide vote, and -- but at this point, through pendergast's -- i believe the that he could produce about 70,000 fraudulent or ghost votes in any given election at this time. so there's the sheer number of votes that he could produce out of kansas city that we be tallied and they were official, whether they were real or not. he had the power to do this, and he had plenty of support. pendergast's machine affiliates could win elections, even without stuffing ballot boxes, because they gave people jobs. they built infrastructure throughout the city. they had roads. they had -- if you look -- walk around the city today, you can see this courthouse still there, municipal auditorium, 10,000 seats. still there. by 1932, on top of the world. sending delegates to democratic national convention. he had senators, governor of missouri, a big portion of the state legislature, and pendergast himself had a gambling addiction, specifically horse racing. so, at some point he racked inseveral hundred thousand dollars in bets -- that's 1930s great depression era dollars, several hundred thousand dollars gambling debts, and he needed to raise even more money than his corrupt machine could raise to pay off these gambling debts. eventually in the late '30s, 1937 or '38 he got involved in insurance kickback scheme, and actually the scheme, it's not clear whether he broke the law with the scheme itself. i'm not a lawyer so i can't explain that. where he ran into trouble is he didn't report the income to the irs for income tax on his tax returns. so, just like alka opinion, -- al condition capone it was the irs that caught up with pendergast and he was indicted in 1939 and went to jail in leavenworth, at the federal penitentiary. pendergast was nothing by this opinion, by 1945, and pendergast died of natural causes. truman came to this funeral. truman, who just became vice president, came to the funeral of tom pendergast during wartime, on a military plane. a big controversy. and weeks later, roosevelt died, and truman was president of the united states. so truman could never completely distance himself from his background with the machine, and he owned it. he said that pendergast always kept his word, and he wasn't going to abandon his friend. so what we're trying to do is complicate that history and i've done a little bit of that in this interview, but we are building a web site that will include -- currently we have 9,500 scans of original documents. we have photographs, letters that people have written to one another back then. i mentioned the court cases that unveiled voter fraud and other crime. and it's an interactive web site that will combine the original documents with new scholarship so we have -- we reached out in 2015 to 18 different professors, who were either museum professional or historians, who have produced full-length articles that -- they would go on a book -- there's some new ideas in there or new topics that just haven't been explored in any kind of depth before this. we're taking web site versions of those, a little shorter, gordon to the public audiences, and those will go on the web site. everything is going he linked together so when you're reading the essay you can click and see the documents that support the research. you can go read the court case that put pendergast in jail, and it's not as dry as a typical court case might sound when you think about everything going on at the time. so we are basically those are the elements of the web site. it will look something like this when the graphics are finished. we have eight or nine different categories of topics we're covering. so there's machine politics, organized crime and reform, economic doom, depression, recovery, kansas city jazz, prohibition, labor and industry, race relations, communities and neighborhoods, women's rights. we've got an awful lot, obviously, but the scope is focusing on pendergast and the machine, and then exploring all of the implications of machine rule in kansas city, especially in the 1920s and '30s at their peak. so when we look at georgia, we're mostly interested in jazz from the perspective of the machine, how did the machine enable a culture of nightclubs and people called it the wide-open town at the time. kansas city was the original sin city before vegas, basically. so, we're looking at that as aspect. how everything ties together. makes sense to do this digital platform. you can do a lot of things on a web site you can't do in a book. we're developing ward maps. it's using google, showing the wards. you can click and see the first ward and that's where tom pendergast came from. that's where they got their start. and you can see the other machine bosses, and be able to click and good back to the documents and be able to go from documents to essays, back to maps. there's a timeline. we might be able to create some kind of line maps that shows connection us within the machines to visualize. it's really difficult to do any of that in a book in an interactive way that is an immersive experience, and this gives people the opportunity to really learn about the time period. >> our c-span cities tower of kansas city, missouri, continues. up next, wealth inequality in the u.s. as he talks about his book, land of the fee, lid 'costs and the decline of the american middle-class. services render odd are good provided and that's a fee. for much of recent sort of history 20th century, we thought of fees as covering an administrative cost, specified administrative cost, so you go to dmv and there's a price for what you have to pay for them to provide you a driver's license, and cover that cost with nominal revenue, or profit, for the government. it's revenue for or profit but increasingly fees have been used as a form of profit stream. that is the material difference, i'd sort of say in the recent development. no longer just simply to cover revenue coster cost or expenses but it's an actual profit, rev flew for government, profit for the private sector. when we see that take off in the 1970s, 1980s, actually. you may also hear about fees here and the in terms of hotel fees. my research and fees looks at fees primarily in the consumer financial industry and the rise of fees in throw areas, which are central to upper mobility in america. housing, education, employment, and what gets us from home, to school, to work, in transportation. so, these four areas are essential to upper mobility and post warmer. and see the incredible rise of fees and relate expenses in those areas. let's say student loans, for instance. again, i'm talking about fees, but fees are part of a larger expense for this student loan. the origination fee and then the fees which attach to that, late fees and it's a tuition fee, student loan is -- the student loan is a fee. for the average student loor borrower, come out of graduating and come out $28,000, $30,000 in debt. the argument is put forward, beats not going to college. but that ignores -- is misleading because ignores the hangover effect that a student loan has. by being a hangover effect or the cascading effect. so you're a college student, $30,000 in debt you come out of college, and you have a worst debt-income ratio and have more point on your mortgage loan and have to take out mortgage insurance as well. for the next 30 or 40 years of the mortgage loan, too, you're constantly behind the person who did not have to take out a student loan. so you pay more for your home, pay more for your car note, and that means you have less money to save, less equity to build. at the same time, too, you have a kid, you have a child, the child is born you want to put money into their 529, college account, and you have his to put in that 529 college account, which has a dilatoryus fight on upper mobility. the cascading effect of student loans is ignored so much by people who want to talk about the advantage of a student loan compared to those who don't have it. home ownership, higher education, issues of employment, transportation, and every one of these fears, the key driver is often the financial services lobby. this lobby who are actually write the st. germane act, and so in the act is basically written -- and actually chicago tribune, this is a, quote, aid bill for the lehning industry. that's what they call it. not for the consumer, and lobbyists are crafting these bills, ga freddie st. germ is in congress the son of a laborer and leaves a multimillionaire. you're not supposed to become a' multi millionaire in public service, and then things take off. so, lobbyists are driving driving much of these creative financial products you see. same thing with student lending. cost benefit nouns, someone like a lawrence lindsey, economic adviser for ronald reagan. staunch republican, talks about how guarantee student loans are less efficient than direct student loan, costs the taxpayer more money. a bad financial product. basically. and others talk about it. and both democratic and republican administrations, cost analyses saying the direct loan is a better financial product for the student borrower. bets more more directly to them, and the financial aid officers are saying this is a streamlined system. we can get the money in their hands of the students much faster for less cost, and heavens it cost this students less, which means they're less lick to go into detail and the taxpayers less likely to have to pick up the tab. nonetheless, the direct lending is forestalled, held off and drowned in the bathtub bay guaranteed student lending lobby. all these things are driven by the financial services lobby. same thing we payday lending. can't get a federal law because of the financial services lobby. same thing with auto insurance, which is so critical. it's unlawful to drive without it, right? so auto insurance, the insurance lobbies, which in the 1980s which put more money into campaign in california to forestaal a proposition that was spent on the presidential election that year, yes. whether it's insurance industry or student loan industry or banking industry, which allows for perpetuation of the creative financial products which helps the drive wealth inequality in america. sociologist talking about majoring to a majority-minority society and talk about women in terms of the fastest growing consumers in society, and so this demographic population is also -- has been the ones who increasingly been the ones marketed and targeted by the consumer financial products, the, talk about student loans, pay daylanding, auto insurance, and the ways which auto insureins predated not on mother but -- in fact not related to the quality of the driver. all these factors have a disseparate impact upon the fastest growing segment of society, latinos, asian-americans and women. auto insurance, want to talk about insurance, my gosh. more boring than insurance, nowhere do you find the private sector actually more protected than having a good service which is required by law to purchase, but is delivered exclusively by the private sector. health insurance is not in that cat gore. medicare and medicaid. all the odd toy insurance has a protected class in our society. auto insurance is in large part determined not by how you drive but by where you live. called the territory rating system, the pc profiling. no longer politically correct to profile people by gender or race. can'tarch a latino woman more because she is a woman or lat teen nor or she has a latino sounding name. they try to do that in texas years back. but you can charge them more based upon where they live, their zip code, politically correct profiling, postal code profiling. so a latino women who lives in a neighborhood which is marked latino, latin is more likely to pay for auto insurance, having the same exact driving record dish mean number of years driving, safe driver seven or eight years, has a perfect driving record, she has no tickets, not been in any accidents, she drive this same distance, whereas a white male who lives in 90210, the most famouses zip code, as opposed to latin x who lives in a latin section of california, is still more likely to pay more in auto insurance, even though she has the exact same driving profile, but a auto insurance not preedited on individual merit. it's preedited on social factors, social environment, where you live, the social factors. you pay auto insurance one year and extrapolate this over 40 or 50 years. paves a 500 or 600 didn't more, and you you can see the couple they've amount that these wealth gap pay -- costs, the fastest growing population in our society. what the future hold is that as right about these fees and related costs have a dramatic impact on middle class america, both erecting barriers to the middle class as well as eroding the middle class as well, but i think sort of looking ahead, as detrimental as costly, the hidden costs of these fees and related expenses have had upon the middle class, it's had even more damaging and dilatorious effect upon the fastest growing segment of american society, people of color are far more likely to have a subprime loan than the average american. women are more likely to take out a student loan than men. racial minorities more likely to take outstunt loan than the majority of the population and be deeper in debt. some of the fastest growing segments of american society, latinos, women, asians, immigrant populations, all of these things are sort of laid out, have hat acute impact upon the fastest growing segment of our society, and so what might -- what impact might this actually have that the fastest greg society is the most -- arguably the most overleveraged of theist and what might that have on things like public financing, infrastructure, retirement savings, medicare, and for the standard democracy itself. so this is -- i'm a historian and i write about the past, but looking ahead, we have to understand that if we're moving toward a -- since we're a minority -- majority-minority society and that these things i've laid out have a disparate immigrant pact on the fastest growing segment of the population, that the future is quite concerning. >> the kansas city stockyards were established in 1871, making the kansas city livestock industry the second largest behind chicago. as we continue our look at kansas city's rich historical heritage, we'll learn mow about the industry and imits basketball on the city. >> we're in the work room of the missouri valley special collections, which is the local and regional history department of the kansas city public library. we have been a department since 1960, with the mission to acquire, preserve and make accessible documents and materials pertaining to the history of kansas city and the surrounding region. today we'll talk about the kansas city stockyards collection. it's a collection we acquired back in 2008. need to give a little background about the kansas city stockyards to begin with. it existed in kansas city for 120 years. really the beginning of the stockyard had to do with the railroad, first of all. in 1869, the hannibal bridge opened, the first span across the missouri river, and -- which is a real population and economic boon for kansas city in 1869. then we had a -- the livestock industry. abundance of livestock in texas. there was a market in the east that were high demand for beef, and so they were bringing those steer to kansas and missouri, putting them on railyards and shipping them to the east coast. with the hannibal bridge, kansas city hat railway access to chicago and eastern markets. so in 1871, some livestock dealers and railroad men decided to build pens and chutes and a facility to hold cattle there and to ship that cattle back east or to chicago. a few years late are you starred seeing meat packers and the meat-packing industry move into kansas city so the meat could be processed here in kansas city rather than in chicago. so that was a real boon for the economy as well. that was really the start of the kansas city stockyards in kansas city in 1871. the livestock industry was very important to the growth of kansas city. it was the -- writ was located in west bottoms was the central business district from the late 1890s through the early 20th 20th century to the mid-20th mid-20th century. it was the main employer between the stockyards, the -- meat-packing industry; that area employed as many as 20,000 people at any given time. there were communities down there, people that work at these plants, worked at the stockyards, so there were schools, churches, retail operations down there. it really was the heart of kansas city in the business community at that time. really, -- what those jobs aided in kansas city's population growth. early on, you would have as many as -- say in the 1860s, 1870s, as many as 150, 160,000 head of cattle that would come through the stockyard. by the earl 1900s you're looking at over a million head of cattle coming through the stockyards. in 1943, they had a record day of 64,000 head of cattle were yarded -- received and yarded in the stockyards. wasn't just cattle. not only cows but hogs and sheep as well. it was -- the stockyards was successful but also ran interest a lot of obstacles, namely, flooding. the obstacles are located at the confluence of the kansas and missouri rivers. was very prone to flooding. in 1903, 1908, 1911, they had major flood they had to overcome. in 1917 there was a devastating fire that took out half of the stockyards. you can imagine the stench in the stockyards at that time. then in 1951, it was really kansas city's great flood and that's the one that really was the begin of the end for the stockyards. before then, after the flooding -- the flood of 1911, until the flood of 1951, the stockyards was a very successful venture. the livestock industry, at the time -- since the time that the stockyards closed, is really changed. for that reason, that is why we no longer have the stockyards in kansas city. part of it was the flood of 1951, had a last impact on the area, really the cattle industry changed. the was really no reason to bring cattle to an urban center, and as kansas city grew, certainly was an urban center. there will environmental concerns, there were -- of having cattle in the urban center. there will rising costs in shifting economics, and so what -- how it's changed most is farmer -- excuse me -- people that raised cattle, farmers, created stockyards in more rural areas where the cattle are located rather than have them in a centralized area in a major city. in 2008, we -- the library was offered a collection of materials related to the kansas city stockyards. they were held for men decades -- many decades, gathering dust in the livestock exchange building at 16th and general -- genesee. we didn't know a lot about the collection but is was offer us, come and get it or we might have to throw it out. so sight unseen we accepted a donation, a large donation of maps, land abstracts, photographs, post cards, and architectural drawings pertaining to the kansas city stockyards. really the focus of the collection is the built environment of the stockyards. these are architectural drawings of the pens, the layout, the space, how it was used. we say that we could take the materials we have and recreate the stockyards if we wanted. to there's that much detail in the collection. of course there's photographs and other interesting artifacts from the collection as well. but really the strength is the architectural drawings and maps in the built environment. we have some of them here today to show you. >> so, one of my favorite things from the collection is that there are multiple maps, documenting the stockyard area. the collection has a map of the stockyard area from everyom to the 1890s to the 1930s which i think is interesting because i love maps, and i think that they're a really interesting way of tracking the changes in an area throughout the years. so, what i have on the table here is a map of the stockyards from 1899 and one from 1905, and even though there are few years that passed between those years, you can compare the maps and see how much has already changed just in those few years. new railroad tracks have been built. no road traffic. streets have been built. new packing plants have been built. so, it's just a really facinating way to see how the stockyard area developed and grew and changed throughout the years to be able to look at all these maps throughout the years and see that change right there in front of you. so, this document i have here is a locker room blueprint for the standard rendering company. so, after the nail animals went through the packing plant and they got the parts they could turn interest meat, the rest of it went to the rendering companies to turn into various products. so they had locker rooms there because it was pretty dirty work. so, one thing that is really interesting about this is that the locker room actually shows segregated sections of the locker room. you can see here it says, white, mexican and black, and they have separate entrances to go into separate sections of the locker room. this is really interesting as -- from an archiveal perspective because we don't have many document that show the segregation that is labeled as such. this is something that when i found i thought was really interesting. offering you see on the table has to do with the construction of the american royal building in 1922. we have this in our collection because stockyards company financed the construction of the 1922 building and built it on stockyards property. the american oil and the stockword hads a very symbiotic relationship. kind of codependent. both needed a thriving livestock industry to survive so the more than royal needed the backing, the finance, the space, the staffing, from the stockyards company, and the stockyards company is the promotion that the american royal provided, getting people into kansas city, getting eyes on kansas city as a focus of livestock industry. so, we have the architectural drawings for the 1922 building and construction photographs as well. and so the american royal had been an annual tradition since 1899, and while this building no longer in existence, the american royal is still a thriving organization. in many ways it's a legacy of the stockyards. another remnant of the stockyards this livestock exchange building, which is still on genesee street on the west bottom. one of my favorite items in the stock areas collection is this complete set of blueprints from the 1911. building. at the time it was considered the largest livestock exchange building in the world, and also during the 1951 flood, the building filled with water all the way up to the second floor. so you can see the high water mark to this day. so this is a facade of the building, and i'm not an engineer so i can't tell you a whole lot about the blueprints but there are titled, the interior, details of the main stairs. the thing to keep in mine is this more of the administrative part of the stockyards. one thing about the stockyards companies that people in kansas city will tell you is there was this pride in business being done with, quote, a handshake and a man's word. the commission there and people selling cattle would give a word of mouth agreement in the yards, then transactions were actually made at the livestock exchange building. basically the documents we're showing you, they're a drop in the bucket of the whole collection. there's over 6,000 items, 6,000 maps, blueprints, documents, photographs, but people interested in kansas city stockyards history can view in person in the missouri valley room. the 18th and vine neighborhood in kansas city, and the area known for its rich history in african-american businesses. as we continue our literary tour of kansas city we'll hear one authors story of slavery on the missouri border. >> the fact is that a little -- under half of enslaved people lived on small-scale slave hold examination the vast majority of white people who were engaged in slavery were small-scale slaveholders. th that has led to the view that slavery was milder in kansas city, missouri. some people argued it was a more domestic institution because people were living and working closely with one another. sometimes enslaved people in fact lived inside the households and that somehow that might have made it better, and there really hasn't been a lot of research into trying to figure out if in fact that was the case. we are in the john warnle house, which is in kansas city, washington, and john warnell was very influence sal early kansas citian, and he was a farmer and a banker but he also was a slaveholder. slavery was a substantial institution out here in western missouri. many of the counties along the missouri river, all the way out the border and then sort of stretching up the border in the years before the civil war, the enslaved population was from 25% to 30% of the population of the countiesful while most people think -- men they thinklet slavery they public president plantation slavery. large slaveholdings west virginia perhaps 100 or 200 enslaved people on the property. they think about cotton plantations and sugar plantations, that it don't think about farms, and in fact the vast majority of slaveholders in the united states, throughout the antebellum era, were engaged in small-scale slavery. near missouri that was the case. the vast majority of individuals who owned slaves, owned fewer than ten slaves. in fact, many owned just a few, and so the question is, did that make a difference? does that make slavery operate in a different way than it did in other parts of the south? so that's what i set out to do try to look at whether slavery was different if -- according to writ was located, or the size of slaveholding. so, the immigration streams to missouri were mostly from the upper south. people came from virginia and kentucky to lesser extent from tennessee and from north carolina, and there was all this wonderfully fertile land. land was cheap. so they came out here and they engaginged in diversifieding agriculture but also grew some cash crops. they grew corn, they raised a lot of hogs but also grew. he and tobacco, and those are both -- the last or two very labor intensive crops and white men did not want to engage nat labor so they forced african-american men mostly to do that work. so, enslaved people were working in all kinds of capacities. most typically on these farms, the way it would work is that enslaved women would engage in tremendous amount of domestic work, and within the household, in the kitchen, like this. this was not easy work. most people out here did not have stoves. often times they were cooking on open flames. they had to tend the entire day long. so, cooking certainly, washing clothes, cleaning. men typically worked at general farm hand. every task from clearing fielding in the wintertime, to get them ready for the spring planting, to tending to the crops over the course of the year, to tending to livestock, whole host of other kinds of work that they were engaged in as well, just to keep these farms going. i will admittedly say that enslaved people -- they didn't want to be sold down the river. it was literally down the river. to new orleans to the slave market down there, where they would end up in the cotton fields of mississippi or the sugar plantations of louisiana, which were just brutal working conditions. so, as far as working conditions, they were better here than there. one other way that it was really different -- this i think is probably one of the most significant things that i found -- is that small-scale slavery had a dramatic impact enslaved people's families and communities. so if you're think about it demographically, there are just a few people in any of these farms. typically just a few adults. those adults may by related to one another, may be brothers and sisters or parents and children. so that did not allow for the opportunity for people to marry people that lived on their own farms. when i say marry issue don't mean legal marriages. didn't allow legal marriages, but very clear through the records that i read that people were married to one another in their own eyes and their communities eyes and their -- the slaveholders eyes. they were married. they were engaged in what were called a broad marriages. ... typically was a day off from work. most white people recognize that gave people a day off from work for them. didn't mean they weren't working for themselves, but it meant they were in the field so they would be with her family on sunday comeback late sunday night or maybe in the wee hours of the morning monday morning if they were close enough to work on monday at sunrise's. what i argue is a kind of capital system working is ultimately they are interested in the enslaved population growing through natural reproduction the only way that can happen is if these relationships, they allow the establishment of the relationships and they also believe that it made people they be not more content in their enslavement, but perhaps i think they thought they were more controllable and they had something to hold over their head, you know you can visit your wife or i will sell you away or whatever, so i think they used it as a control factor, but that it was this sort of reciprocal thing, all of the white people within the community that they were allowing these relationships to go in these different directions and that kind of kept the whole system running. it is more into mintz that it would have been the experience of the typical person who was working on a plantation or barge, large property in a place like mississippi or louisiana because what it meant was there was constant interaction with white people and a visa slaveholding family members and you can imagine that sometimes i could end up in more positive situations if that white person was inclined to some kind of kindness, but it often times could end up in horrifying results, so for an inflated individual they were walking this tightrope all the time trying to figure out how to navigate through this situation that they had been placed in and it was really important that they very carefully study the person who claimed them to try to understand whether or not they could push them in different ways or what would run them into trouble with that person, so one example, i have spent a lot of time with the diary of a woman named pollyanna stroud and put it in household of her mother-in-law paired paulina and mary stratton, her mother-in-law did not like each other much. there became a power struggle within the household over who was in control, so a one-woman property, but her daughter and lies living there she's married to the man who's running this farm, but he does not own it so that was sort of a problem, classic sort of mother-in-law daughter relationship they don't get along, but what was intriguing about it is that the enslaved women and-- understood fully well and they tried to manipulate it in any way they possibly could, so they would tell stories about one woman to the other woman. they would go to one woman trying to ask for things and then go to the other women if they could not get them. this went on for years, so that is example and i think a good example of how enslaved people try to work within the bad hand they had been dealt basically and try to influence the circumstances in ways that might not have been-- might not have altered their life dramatically, but they felt like at least they were able to alter it-- i think this act of resisting this powerful in itself this happened everywhere, but i would argue that all of this is more charged because both black and white people on the slaveholding for living and working so closely with one another and white people imagine somehow that enslaved people cared about them and that they had this positive relationship with them, but the reality is they didn't i mean why would they have? slavery is a brutal exploitative labor system. why people like to talk about how slavery was more domestic here or milder here and i think that there was a lot of incentives to do that especially as a political situation heated up over across the state line into kansas and they were trying to turn kansas into a slave state and would talk about themselves in that way. certainly i think there is evidence to show people in the deep south looked with suspicion at people in the upper south feeling like they were quite right with slavery and it wasn't a mixed labor system here. if you went to st. louis there is a large population there and not all of the folks are coming from the south. by the time you approach a couple decades lead to the civil war there is a huge german population who were not all abolitionists, boat most were anti- slavery. there were quite a few irish immigrants and people from northern states as well and so the population was becoming more mixed and that's one of the reasons why the state is bitterly divided during the civil war, does not mean votes not to secede, so it's a divided place. it's essential we understand the story of slavery in america. it's really the foundation of our modern race relations and if we don't try to understand the story from the perspective of the people who experience slavery, but also understand the way slavery operated in this country and how essential it really was to the growth of the nation, how slavery was used economically, how it was used for socially and politically, i mean, the institution itself then trying to get an understanding experience of people who were actually-- you know the experiences of the people who actually had to experience the horrors of this institution and the ways in which they were used in order to create wealth and political power for white people to really -- >> book tv takes you to the national archives in kansas city missouri as author david jackson talks about his book "jamie-- changing times". >> please give a warm welcome to david w jackson. [applause]. >> thank you for coming out tonight. i don't mean to out anyone, so that was not the appropriate word to say, is it? thank you for coming out to night and roughing the traffic we all had getting here. i would like to think c-span for being here tonight in the national archives for all the work they do. kimberly was correct. on have been doing genealogy since i was 11 years old and have been coming to the national archives since i was that old. my grandparents would drop me off and let me do my thing and come back for the next round. tonight is changing times, one of my newest book an almanac and digest of kansas city's lgbtq i a history. i will talk about that acronym in a few moments. we will get busy here. a bit about me, it has kimberly mentioned my background of it. i have been an archivist for more than 20 years and i'm 48, so i was eight years old when i got into this. i would listen to my grandparents talking go outside and play with the kids as a child, so that really interesting family history led to my career as an archivist when i was in high school i took the aptitude test to tell you what you want to be and i was supposed to be a forest ranger or archivist and i didn't know what an archivist was. i really wanted to be a forest ranger, so i think i answered the questions correct. both of those interests are about saving paper entries. of an orderly packrat. is the genesis for my long-held business and my website and if you like to know more about me or my work you can go to orderly packrat.com. enough about me. to "changing times" it's a decades long project that i've been working on for 10 years and the first edition came out in 2011 and a meal he working on this edition. it's 414 pages and literally a doorstop, so if anyone needs a doorstop night. the most interesting parts is what i've done a study all of the lg bt. that's one of the first things people will talk about when they remember their youth and so those are indexed by name and if you can remember where you went out in those days or by address as well. first i document kansas city's lgbtq i a history providing a distinct timeline. we would note any instance in the paper where there was. men were arrested for sodomy. there were men dressed as women, women dressed as men believe it or not caught on the streets of kansas city breaking the law. there was even one instance of a husband and wife who swapped their garments and they found out as well and were taken into the court and they made it into the newspaper. whites and blacks were arrested equally without discrimination. most were sent to the work as a kansas city to work off find they could not pay in the fines are pretty steep. the work has building still survives today in the 18th and vine district. it's kind of a shell of a building today, but their dreams and hopes of restoring it to an event space, but that beautiful building is still there today. some where in the missouri state penitentiary and others were sent to fort leavenworth and there are records here at the national archives dealing with the fort leavenworth penitentiary, so if anyone is interested in digging into those records they are located here. the laws were many against people like us and i will read a few because in the 1880s the kansas city star, our local newspaper summarized all of kansas city's current then current ordinances and i pulled off some of them and you will see some of the songs on these people particularly women, i'm afraid you're getting one affair-- appearing in dressed not belonging to his-- his or her sex, any female of lewd character frequenting saloons. improper dress not belonging to one sex. occupied-- occupied rooms for purposes of prostitution and permitting girls under the age of 17 to remain in the house without notifying the police. body house was a house of prostitution. any vagrant person as an inmate in a body house or person or keeper of a body house, vagrant nagel-- male procurer or pimp or keeper of a body house and i thought it was interesting in 1882 that word pimp was in the newspaper, so there are all kinds of laws that are summarized for the changing times from the 1882 newspaper. there was this activity going on that indicated the need supposedly for these laws to ban the behavior. new term start to enter in our lexicon over time. we had the first use of the word lesbian in 1883, bisexual 1892, heterosexual also 1892. then are president of the united states used the words sissy in the 1913 publication of the boy scouts of america publication. thank you, teddy. this is a picture of teddy roosevelt, the roughriders he was was. you can laugh. the worded transsexual in 1949, transgender 1965 and of course the acronym that painful acronym we have today lgbtqia, so i'm hoping as time goes on and we continue to evolve to mean this just shows how much overtime looking at this issue and expanding how we see gender and sexuality, identity and all of those things has evolved over time and it's getting better and more finite and we are realizing more and more that it's not just a black and white issue or gay and straight issue, for those of you that don't know the acronym, l lesbian, gk, v bisexual, t transgender, the q stands for queer or crushing, anyone who my question their identity or sexuality. i intersect-- intersects and letter a is asexual, the mafic-- romantic i think it should say. [laughter] and there are also ally, so for those of you that don't fit into any of those categories there are allies. if you are friendly to any one of these kinds of people and i think there are some in the audience today, you are allies in this e-book in this presentation and history is about you as well. the greatest generation, our grandparents and some of you your great grandparent may be in your great grandparent if you're watching this program a few years from now it really was a great time to be alive and also scary time to be alive whether you are greater straight or anything in between. with freedom also became-- also met with restrictions per per instance in 1929, in germany the knotty regime repealed paragraph -- or tried-- i'm sorry , they stood against the repeal of paragraph 175, which was their long-standing prohibition against homosexuals and in 1937 they started using pink triangles to identify suspected gay men and those were used in the concentration camps and became a symbol for the movements for gay freedom. world war ii between 1941 and 45 saw a backlash for our people shortly thereafter when eisenhower administration had some pretty let's say a oppressive executive orders against gays and lesbians that became known as the lavender scare. of this was when the federal government was seeking out people who were gay or even suspected to be gay and forcing them out of federal employment at every level. any federal employee wasn't suspected or could be suspected of being gay or lesbian and could lose their employment and the benefits. in 1993 we had don't ask don't tell it was repealed into 2011 thanks to president obama. where you have from the 1940s undesirable discharges to her today when you can see pictures on the internet of servicemen and women coming home and being able to openly embrace their partners, people that have been together for years and years in some cases this is a picture of that brandon morgan from his facebook page that was certainly did widely when it was published shortly after the repeal of don't ask don't tell, so to those challenges we have saw triumph and in the 1920s henry gerber at chicago started the society for human rights and by the 1950s the organization of many women coming together to fight the oppression the administration was putting upon them. so, we began to gather and assemble to talk about how we could overcome and come through on the bright side and in kansas city we had our own to that howard foster, ms. foster works for alfred kinsey in the institute for sex research. has anyone heard of the 10% rule , supposedly 10% of our population that are not straight that research comes out of the kinsey institute and ms. foster was part of that research from 1941 to 52 and she came to kansas city and 52 and worked at the university of missouri kansas city library until 1960. i think it's kind of cool that foster worked in the same organization that is now the home of the glamour connection, the gay and lesbian archive of mid-america took i think she would smile if she was here today. she published in 56 the worksheet worked on. she studied references to women in literature for eons and put them in this book. we also have many other people, too many to mention in tonight's presentation but i wanted to shout out to barbara grier editor of the latter. she lived here locally for many years and also was the editor and ran the naiad press which was oppressed and the kansas side that published lesbian literature. caravans to her, one of my former bosses at unity school christianity as some of you may know donate a huge collection of her books that she collected over the years of lesbian related books and many of them are from the night at press submit a great beginning collection of that. not in our history. a little aside now about the gay bars. is everyone chomping about-- at the bit to know about this? as i said earlier most people remember when they first started going out whether you are gay or straight going out to clubs and bars and it was the first time in many cases for gays and lesbians to realize they weren't alone that there were other people in the world like them, so we want to hear about people's first time coming out. we are always looking for people to share their stories matter what the story is so it can be preserved for future generation youth. and set up going to the internet for this online research i have screen captures to walk us through what's called the history pin. history pen.org is online site that organizes all kinds of different collection and this just happens to be a massive collection of lg bt maps across the country, so what people like myself have done in new york and california wherever we have taken sites that are pertinent to lg bt people and put them on a map so i done it for kansas city and right now there are more than 150 i'm as 160 hints in this collection. the oldest establishment i found was from the 1930s with one call to dante's inferno. does anyone remember it? there was a place called dante's inferno downtown that paid-- had a feature performer called mr. half-and-half that was split down the middle, groom on one side and a bride on the other, so i white address on one half of him and the other half was the groom. i would have loved to have seen the act. in the 1940s and we don't believe jewelbox a started in 1947 as a gay lesbian bar. it wasn't a making 57 when simi mimics with a feature performer at the jewelbox. how many remember the jewelbox? a lot of you intimately remember the jewelbox. that was the first year that drag female impersonators were introduced at the jewelbox lounge and there's a great collection of materials from my former cocktail waitress who worked at the jewelbox and is saved to things over the years and i met her when she was 96 years old. i think she is 106 now. she donated her collection of memorabilia that she collected about the jewelbox so is there for you to learn from it and enjoy. baghdad on broadway at arabian nights were bars that started in 196130 there must've been something in the air that your. and the redhead lounge a lot of people will remember from 1963 and still survives today, the building does as the ride room in westport. those are some of the earliest ones i detected and wanted to call out tonight. we get into the modern gay rights movement in the 1960s and the common lower about gay and lesbian modern gay rights movement, rather is that it started with the stonewall riots in new york city in 1969 and i'm not getting into a culture war with anyone, but i would like to know whether you are here tonight or watching on television that three years prior to stonewall beheading kansas city [no audio] [no audio] the fire today did kickoff. but the origins of the movement were here in kansas city and there's now a marker in downtown kansas city recorder from the location we erected this marker last october. october is lg bt history months and we wanted this marker to go out for the 50th anniversary of that conference and to also honored drew schaffer who became kansas city's pioneer gay activists. one side of the markers about drew schaefer and his phoenix society for any visual free to other side of the marker which faces the former hotel building talks about the maiko conference. i'm happy to report after a year the marker is still there. we have been sweating bullets all year long hoping nothing would happen to it and it set off the street quite a ways onto so it i invite you downtown to look at that first ever lg bt history marker in kansas city. drew schaefer started the phoenix society for individual freedom and purchased a home at three first amendment and created the first lgbtq-- lg bt community center, phoenix house and it was from there that they decided to make kansas city the clearinghouse for lgbt organizations and became a publishing house to distribute literature across the country so we were gathering literature from east coast and west coast mashing it all together and sending it back outs and not happen for number of years here in the early days of the movements. they published a newsletter that the phoenix magazine were trying to locate people who still have copies of the 1966 and a 72 publication because this is the genesis of the movement here in kansas city. we have a few individual issues, but if you come across any remember as. a lot of organizations begin to form over the years with these next few years of the liberation movement for gays and lesbians like other movements in america at the same time. women's liberation union with a sample of their 1973 newsletter, volume three number four, so we know when the organization kicked off their newsletter by that there. this is from a donation to the collection. a lot of organizations began to form to help people with social things for social activity, for equal rights, for women's rights and in those early days i will tell you and it's a subject a whole mother night and broke the gays and lesbians did not get as long quite well in those early days and it took the aids epidemic to bring them together. these are more organizations that were formed over the next few years. information about each of these is available in the collection to 1 degree or another. each of these could become a chapter in a book, could become books themselves than they also can become documentaries and i would like to give a shout out to austin williams who is here tonight. austen, stand up. a young student and you are working on a-- is it the scissor doctorate, doctoral thesis. is working on his doctoral thesis on the human rights ordinance project in 1991 and i would like you to stick around afterwards if anyone is interested to find out more about this important chapter in kansas city history and indeed lg bt history because it's an historic moments and not only local, but national history, so thank you, austin. we look forward to your documentary that will hopefully be included in part of your college coursework, let's call it. thank you for the work you are doing. gay pride, of course, is one i expect of the liberation. the first gay pride parade was in 1970 in new york. it was the first anniversary of the stonewall riot. that was the reason for the parade. this is another image icon and paid for off of ebay. i thought that was a fantastic picture. think love. it can't you just see if there from 1970s? our first parade in kansas city was in 1974. the metropolitan community church has been serving for a number of years since 1977 and at a time when jackson county were suffused to issue marriage licenses to gay couple that went into the recorder's office in 1977, they began performing holy guineans left and right. mrs. schaeffer, the women i told you about earlier that kept scrapbooks and the scrapbooks are part of the collection. she has some holy unions taped and stable then glued into the scrapbooks, not the best way to preserve them, but they are available today to see. a lot of these people in kansas city were wanting to pledge their loved one another, but were not allowed to do so legally and today we take it for granted because it is legal all of a sudden. we will get into that any minute. the gay people student union i like to point out because it was at the university of missouri kansas city in the early 1970s we have gay groups-- i'm sorry, we had groups on campus, but when the first group wanted to be known as the gay and lesbian group on campus the university said no and so the people student union took them to court on the way to the supreme court and we had campuses across the country that have gay and lesbian groups today because of these peoples of struggle in the fight they took all the way to the supreme court. we have backlash an uphill climb, of course day-to-day, don't we? i'm going to speed through because in these days and we are getting to a time where i think a lot of people in this room have lived through it. in the 1970s, for instance, the republican national convention met in kansas city with a huge crowd in downtown kansas city and in the west bottom that protested when the president came to the republican convention out there with their pickets professing for gay rights and it was because anita bryant, the orange juice lady was also in town that they were also holding signs that said, hitler, mccarthy, anita. it was a peaceful protest until anita went to iowa and got a little fruit pie thrown in her face. the mayor's human relations commission ricotta fight to review the human rights problem in 1981 and the next year the civil rights ordinance was adopted establishing a civil rights board to work in concert with the human relations commission may look at this government in kansas city coming together to help who? help everyone. this is in advance of not only lg bt couldn't-- issues, but also african-american issues as well and in 1982 the first report of aids within the kansas city star, the same year that the jewel box closed its adores. my first knowledge and awareness of aids was when rock hudson appeared on the inquirer magazine. i was quite young than and i knew i was gay, but it was my secrets. at least i thought it was a secrets, but this introduces the entire episode of the aids epidemic that if you're living in this room and lived through it you have stories to tell and no one yet has recorded local, personal stories of what was like to live there this time, so we are looking for people to really help us understand when we read about how there was panic and fear of not knowing what was causing this in the early days of this pandemic-- what became a pandemic i should say and just to know how you lived through it and what it was like for you to lose and how that loss in your life. fantastic tragedy. kansas city inns came together and responded to the aids epidemic fairly swiftly and fairly successfully and they incorporated in the good samaritan product with a couple organizations i can point out that are included in this collection. they are not here tonight are they, by chance? these gentlemen collected clippings in the kansas city papers and have assembled 48 scrapbooks including 500 periodicals, 200 pictures and video tapes all covering the aids epidemic in kansas city and they kept them nice and tidy and needs and they donated them so they are now available and preserved for future generations to learn from. i'm hoping someone might write something for changing times future edition. i'm hoping to publish this book every five years or so to update the almanac and i hope our calls will come forth as time goes on so don't let others tell your story. you be the one to do it. we all think our lives are pretty ordinary monday, but i say this a lot of lectures to get the point across and it involved the great depression. will have relatives who lived through the great depression took many kansas city and did. it was a worldwide depression. , a first-hand personal recollections of kansas city inns do we have per serb locally of people who lived through the great depression? anyone want to give a gas? one hundred? fifty? we have one that i know of, so all of those people that went through the great depression in kansas city, only one person that i know have had written about it and donated it to public archive and it's because i twisted her arm to do it. don't make me come out there and twist your arm for these stories we are always looking for donations to the lesbian archive of mid-america. i have happy faces and instead-- sad faces as we go along in the next few years took this as a 2003. seems like so long ago, does it not? a decade ago, maybe. 10 years already. i'm not the mathematician, as i said. in 2003 that creation of the gay and lesbian chamber of commerce kansas city. mid-america freedom banning 2003. sodomy laws i mentioned earlier from 1812 were taken off the books into who thousand six and i'm sorry to say in 2004 missouri was the first state in the union to connect a constitutional amendment prohibiting same gender marriage not very good moment in our history, but that's then turned around. when we started looking into creating clamor in 2009 we went to ku on the kansas side and talk to the person who created under the rainbow and choose our motivation to get it created on the missouri side. the first latino gay pride festival is in 2009. the first gay marriage announcement in the kansas city star and historic moment like tonight rather is a historic moment because i don't think before we had a program like tonight. i don't remember one. it might be because it's the first book on this topic, but the first gay marriage announcement in the kansas city star that started in 1880 and was not until 2009 when they had the first gay marriage or same gender marriage announcement and the star had to rewrite their editorial policies for that announcement. pictured and reproduced in the changing times. today we might take things like that for granted, but a few short years ago it was not a possibility. the first gay kansas city tours were 2010 admin 2011 you and casey ranked fifth on news week gay friendly campuses. just a few moments ago when we were in the 1970s and they were not allowing gays and lesbians to have their group on campus and all of a sudden in 2011 they are the fifth a friendly if campus in the country took i love that. i love how we turned that around. vice president biden in 2012 became the first highest ranking american officially endorse same gender marriage. three days later president obama expressed his turnaround on the subject. you know how he had to come along and it's the same struggle many people have had and hopefully are still coming around to. really fantastic example for all of us. film project is in its 14th year as of 2013. lots of supreme court cases where coming up in the late part of the first decade of the century and it seems like so long ago. hollingsworth versus perry, invalidating call for his prop eight. us versus windsor, ed windsor defining marriage as between one man and one woman unconstitutional. of drawl of those attempts and misery becoming the first state to say it was law across the state invalidating that. melinda writer was the first very princess. 2013 and we'd like to introduce her and recognize you. thank you for being here tonight you guys are great fundraisers in support of our community, so thank you for what you do. the fairy princess was 1940s at the kansas city museum, every december they have the fairy princess their little girls and some boys, i bet, went to have a seat on the fairy princesses lap and get pictures taken like sitting with santa claus and in 2013 we got to sit on the mary princess. phoenix newsletter started in 2014. it's an insert in the kansas city star location. anyone ever picked up the soft newsstands? inserted in the first issue each and every month is the phoenix newsletter and this is kansas city's lg bt news letter, things going on in the community and i have been riding the heritage piece for this publication that comes out every other month,. in 2014 some things were happening and i will just summarize this slide if you look at the rate. seems like one after another i was glued to the television as times were changing fast. we have judges locally on the kansas side and missouri side invalidating these constitutional amendments as unconstitutional and issuing marriages licenses for gays and lesbians. breaking the law, basically, defying the law and st. louis began issuing marriage licenses 2014. in jackson county where we are today two days later started issuing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples six months before the historic landmark decision. anyone remember sitting at the television that they waiting for the person to run out of the supreme court building? i was there watching and it seemed to me because i'm studying this making notes fast and furious with these books that as soon as the decision was passed we started immediately with a lot of transgender news. so much news. it was almost like the marriage equality thing was off the shelf and they are turning to transgender issues for good or not. it did bring transgender into the media and a lot of average americans who had no concept about what that means started learning about this issue. we also had they foist the peace or mono car in caitlin jenner, love her or hate her as a someone to see as a transgender. then, bathroom bills and religious freedom laws were starting to be pushed on books across the state and they are still being promoted state-by-state making their way to the supreme court. some good news that i mentioned earlier in 2016 week directed kansas city's first lg bt related history marker in downtown kansas city, so this is mickey ray on the left-hand side with me in front of the new marker we unveiled thanks to melinda writer and kirk nelson who again are here tonight. looking a little differently tonight. one year after that decision i was really pleased to be in hallmark and hallmark is a kansas city institution that's been here since 1909 and to be looking at the card rack a scene anniversary cards for gays and lesbians. first time ever and so i took this picture of the two cards that hallmark offered. one was our anniversary. we are husbands with an image of two gentlemen embracing and then an anniversary for same-sex back women. that was pretty fantastic and pretty historical. but, it's 2017 and while lgbtq could-- and citizens can be mirrored across the country we can so be fired come monday morning because there are very few protections for gays and lesbians in the workplace. across the globe, there are terrible things happening gays and lesbians. in the last week, there were news reports in egypt of amanda suspected of being gay being hunted down. really terrible things are still happening across the globe, so while the battles are won the war continues and the rights we have recently been afforded not guaranteed as you well know. times are still changing and i again encourage you to do which you can to be creative and how you can hold onto these rights that we have been given. this is just my humble patient-- opinion that you should record the story so they are available to younger generations. don't let those stories ago. rally to vote in every election. run for office volunteer to register and help others get registered to vote. collier board of election commissioners kirk i just sent them an e-mail last night to say what are you going to do to preserve our next election in kansas city. should we do paper ballots? unplugged the voting machines for now? keep fresh out of our elections? it goes on and on and there are things you can do and i hope you will. the kansas city royals, two of our most famous players when they won the world series dressing as the ambiguously gay duo for halloween. is in that kind of cool when you have sports figures being able to say look, i'm comfortable in my manhood and so should you. we have athletes able to be gay, to come out. where we have a film festival that is becoming more and more widely known across the country as the place to be for lg bt film, independent films. so, this is wrapping it up a bit about the history of the activism i have had since 1994 when i started out as a newsletter editor for a little unity church of oakland park newsletter for their gay lesbian group they had way back then when i was probably 13 or 14. i been editor of several other magazines and of course cofounder of a glama in this book and magazine, newspaper articles that are out, so i'm doing what i can to put the word out about our history and the need to preserve that history and i hope you'll join me. i went to thank you for helping us to stand together as times continue to change. you can contact me at orderly packrat.com. and i was to grant for questions and answers. >> you are watching the tv on c-span2, television for serious readers. here's our primetime lineup. lindsay fits harris and surgery in the 19th century and the medical advancers who-- and eight, george mason university professor examines human trafficking. 8:50 p.m. david horowitz examines the less impact on america's university in colleges and on book tv afterwards at 10:00 p.m. jeanette recants the career of her grandfather, administrator director of the manhattan project and later that the president of harvard university and we wrap up at 11:00 p.m. with rolling stones report on the life and death of erica garner that all happens tonight on c-span2 book tv. 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. television for serious readers. >> i was appear on the side and they were here, president trump is getting his address. he's sworn into office and then he speaks. hillary says that she was sitting there and donald trump was talking about what had happened to the country and how things flatlined meaning income had declined in real dollar terms and that people wanted a new approach to the border, trade deals etc. and hillary says that george w. bush looked at her and said, this is the craziest, weirdest bunch of horse hockey that i've ever heard like laughing to hillary. the media loved that. of a loved when a republican like george w. bush or pick your republican, john mccain, lindsay graham, jeff flake, on and on, they love it when a republican trashes a conservative populist especially a republican president in office like donald trump. i thought to myself that kind of really does-- that little vignette of bush's snickering with hillary, laughing at donald trump, that explains this. trumpet didn't come out of nowhere. he didn't kind of just pop out of a vacuum and he didn't win by the way, because of james comey or the russians. he didn't win because he's a celebrity or because he's self financed. he didn't win because of the facebook ads. donald trump won this election because americans in the critical states that make up our luck portal college or kind of sick of being snickered at. their kind of tired of being laughed at. they are tired of being told one thing in the campaign season and having governance of another thing next he make you can watch this and other programs online book tv.org. >> a look as some authors recently featured on book tv's afterwards, our weekly author interview program. daily call her news foundation editor in chief export the leadership skills of president trump, fbi agent camera unveiled his experiences fighting terrorism as a muslim american and former face the nation host bob schieffer examined the role of the media today. in the coming weeks on afterwards, golda * father will recall his immigration to the united states and offer his thoughts what it means to be an american. christopher scalia, son of the late supreme court justice antonin scalia will share collections from his father's speeches and this weekend on afterwards best-selling author will report on the work of her grandfather, manhattan project scientists. >> there was a great fear that this weapon was so powerful that it could really destroy the world in the wrong hands and become something that terrorists could use. all this was clearly envisioned by its creators, really before the war was over and they began trying desperately to put in place some kind of international control so this weapon could not pull the fray and you would not have people stockpiling and building nuclear weapons left right and center and so this meeting in moscow on christmas eve was so crucial because my grandfather and the americans that went toward desperately hoping that they could convince stalin to agree to control the future of this terrible terrible force. ..

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