Transcripts For CSPAN2 The New Brooklyn 20170225

Hello. Excuse me. Hello, everybody. I hope you enjoyed your lunch. We are going to start. Good afternoon and welcome. Im sarah snyder, the Program Director at the William Simon foundation, and im absolutely delighted to introduce todays speaker kay hymowitz. Shortly, i will sit along with all of you as she discusses her latest book, the new brooklyn what it takes to bring a city back. But let me briefly tell you ive come to know and admire kay. The William Simon foundation started supporting kay 13 years ago, and i know that i speak on behalf of the foundations president jim pearson, and my colleague janus, and all those who couldnt join us today in saying that supporting kay as the fellow at the Manhattan Institute continues to be one of the proudest investments that we make each year. A quick overview of her prolific work. She writes extensively on childhood, family issues, poverty and cultural changes in america and has authored by very successful books. She is written for the New York Times, the washington post, wall street journal, the new republic, new york newsday, public interest, the wilson quarterly and cometary, among others. She is a highly sought after present at conferences, on television and on radio. And she sits on the board of National Affairs and the future of children. She holds degrees from brandeis and columbia universities, and with a resume like that i dont know when she has free time but i know she does make it now that she is a doting grandma. Bear with me for a second as i tell a quick story. Back when kay was thinking about what would eventually become her previous book, manning up, i was and that those of being on new york singles scene. Offhandedly i told her i was so perplexed by the radio silence i was now getting from a fellow i thought it was getting along with, that is even checking the obituaries to see if his name popped up. [laughter] thankfully, his name wasnt there and as far as i know it hasnt shown up and i wish him well. I did find mr. Right, and he has already worked to the manchild phase of life as kay had so pointedly point in the last book and were currently working on expanding our family for a second time. Thank you. But more than a year after i mentioned my dating woes, kay asked if she could use the example in her book. Thats the point of my little story. Its kays skill to pick up on some instances my obituary story, collecting and weave them into the Bigger Picture that examines a trained in society that makes her such an influential successful and interesting scholar. Shes able to step back and see trends both negative and positive at the larger public is taking for granted, is too busy to notice, simply doesnt want to acknowledge. Kay knows how to identify a problem in society, to speak the future implications and make recommendations on how to best address these trends with the interest of families at the core. She develops recommendations the resident across the aisle, across the sexes, across skin tones and cross fiscal brackets. That is not an easy feat. Perhaps some of you share my inclination to drift off into a daydream when reading or listeninlistento something thato technical. I promise you wont do that today or anytime you the pleasure to engage with trying to work. That is another beautiful aspect of her writing. She seamlessly weaves the evidence for policy recommendations into a store that her audiences actually is interested in. The new brooklyn examines the recent line of brooklyn through zoning form, im reduction and arrival of College Educated americans and what impact that has on the local population. She helps the audience understand how this renaissance is not the first of its kind. Brooklyn started and questioned if it was before. The difference is this time they change is based on Creative Destruction rather than traditional industrialization. Chapters include research on a block by block split where there are bars and one block and nightshade on the next. The work ethic of the chinese in sunset park, the change in manufacturing in the navy yards from goods to ideas, the slow but steady mobility of the jamaican population, they get a state was in york and brownsville, the hipster population in williamsburg, and the yuppies. Kay uses these examples to steer the conversation towards policies and cultural norms that can foster upward mobility among the urban poor. Stable families, java axis, policing policy, housing transportation and education options. Its a page turner and im sure you will be transported across the river when she takes the podium in a minute. But before hand mic over i encourage anyone who doesnt have a copy of the book yet to stop in the back and get one at the end of the luncheon. And a very favorable review will be published in the fabric in addition of the New York Times book review. So as you will learn, anything with a name brooklyn and it is bound to please. And kay will be happy to find them. So please join me in welcoming somebody i greatly admire, kay hymowitz. [applause] well, im speechless. For to have some notes in front of me. Much too kind, sara pickens been such a pleasure to work with the Simon Foundation in addition to being very generous towards me, they are just great friends. I feel very, very warmly towards the entire crew, including sara, of course. 1982 my husband and i bought a house in the park slope neighborhood of brooklyn. When i tell people about these days, new yorkers in particular or want to be new yorkers, they get this look in their eyes and it looks a little bit to me like in the. I can understand why. Park slope, in 2010, the statistics to prove nate fisher called parksville the best neighborhood in all of new york city. It is an amazing place to own a home, but i really have to admit to you that we dont feel that lucky like he is at the guy down the street who bought two houses. Of course in 1982 when i tell people i knew that i was buying a house a house in brooklyn, they didnt look envious. They looked alarmed. Brooklyn was not the kind of place that a jewish girl from suburban philadelphia was, should aspire to live in. People who could work leaving brooklyn for the suburbs, not vice versa. There were many moments over the next two years that it wondered what on earth we had been thinking. I think particularly of a moment in 199 1990 when the mother of y younger daughters classmate had a can put to her head as she exited the train after Christmas Shopping in manhattan. We took that train a lot and still do. In a lot of respects is about brooklyn came to this decrepit state resembles what weve heard repeatedly during the past election season about the failing cities and towns of Trump Country and the rust belt in appalachia. I dont bring this up just because i like and what else cant stop talking about the election. The parallel is real. For about 100 years from the middle of the 19th to the middle of the 20th, brooklyn was a thriving Industrial City. If you look, by the way, each of you has a map which unfortunately doesnt show you where the east river is bu but i guess you can imagine where it is. And if you look you will see in sort of to the left of the middle of Prospect Park and just to the left of that is park slope. Which is where i live all these years later. At any rate, brooklyn was a thriving and actual city. If you think of this waterfront from sunset park to red hook, going up the coast with me, all the way into the navy yard, williamsburg and greenpoint, this part of brooklyn was really where the story was. Because in the days before there were trains and planes and automobiles, we were of course dependent on boats. Brooklyn became a center even of trade even before we had, even before there were motorboats or anything like that. It was all ships. The waterfront was crawling with bustling peers, warehouses and factories. Nearby were a variety of tenement neighborhoods, 07 07 characterized by the predominately irish, german, italian or jewish immigrant residents. Yet brooklyn really was an additional powerhouse in those days, something i had no idea of when they moved there. It had a multitude of coffee, she and textile factories, sugar refineries, dozens of breweries. Innovated and entrepreneurs of the 19t 19th and early 20th century. Brooklyn intended chocolates, the teddy bear, benjamin and more, paints and domino sugar, to cite just a few. In 1849, youll like this one, a chemist named Charles Pfizer, one of the many german immigrants to arrive during that period, opened what would become one of the Largest Pharmaceutical Companies in the world. You probably know and revere Charles Pfizer companies for invading such central products of modern life as zoloft, lipitor, and let us not forget, viagra. Over the years like, Companies Like visors employed millions of immigrants in brooklyn neighborhoods and businesses grew to accommodate them. But history is sickle. Brooklyns fortunes shifted in the second half of the 20th century. The factories that sustain so Many Americans started to leave, not for china and mexico as in the case today, but for far less crowded and more truck friendly american suburbs and exurbs. In 1957 when dodger owner Walter Omalley broke the heart of every redblooded brooklynite by taking the beloved Baseball Team them bombs as they were referred to by locals to los angeles, in retrospect it seemed to foretell the boroughs sorry fate. By the 1960s the waterfront was becoming a sad computing shall of its former self. In 1966 the navy yard which come during world war ii have been the largest and bestknown employer was decommissioned. By the time i moved to park slope, about a mile away from the navy yard, it was home to a few operating warehouses, but mostly acres of antibuildings, feral dogs and the occasional body that had been reportedly dumped by one of brooklyns legendary wiseguys. There were still plenty of homeowners onto holdovers at the time that we moved in from the earlier waves of immigrants. Our nextdoor neighbor were an elderly irish couple who had once taken in borders as so many did in the brownstone areas of brooklyn during the depression and in the decades following. They were now being paid by the city of new york to house elderly. Many of them sick and moaning, and that was the musical accompaniment of my childrens early years. Hopefully they cant remember it. In fact, brooklyn was actually losing population. Years later the writer handle the grew up in workingclass park slope would say about this time, you heard it over and over in these come in those days. Weve got to get out of brooklyn. And you know what . A lot of people did. So the question that i had in my mind as i approached this book was, how did the old brooklyn become the new brooklyn . That place that g2 magazine called, and i still cant get g2 read this without laughing, the coolest city on the planet. How is it that when i moved to park slope, Liquor Stores have bulletproof cages to protect their cashiers and they now have picture windows and free tastings of their expansive and expensive pinot noir selections. How could we have gotten to a point in history as we did in the fall of 2015 where the fabled Parisian Department store spent a month celebrating brooklyn mania with an exhibit called brooklyn how could the always chic permission before interest and buying products intimate in brooklyn or see me as about they could be worn or eaten by brooklynite, or at least a parisians idea of a brooklynite. One final question. Why should anyone care what happened to brooklyn . The place isnt even a city. Its a borough. It has to might 600,000 people in the city of 8 million come in a country of 330 million, whats the big deal . But but i tried to show in the , the reason we should interest is brooklyn is a microcosm for the vast anomic and social changes that have been roiling our politics and it should be mentioned the politics of western europe over the past 30 or 40 years advanced economies like that in the United States have been shifting away from manufacturing, or to put it crudely, making stuff, towards knowledge, information, or aching to be crude, thinking about stuff. New york city was already becoming a u. S. Capital of the t economy of the 1960s as corporations centralized and moved their headquarters to downtown and midtown. By the end of the 60s, 59 of the new york City Labor Force was in whitecollar occupations. This gave new york a real competitive advantage over other fading industrial cities. Most of the people who are whitecollar, they were predominately men who were working downtown, took the train to new rochelle just like rod petrie, played by dick van dyke, the fictional husband of laura petrie played by mary tyler moore, who i did want to mention today. But if you of those whitecollar workers, especially the more creative types in media, started moving larger workingclass brownstone brooklyn. They were gentrifying, to use a word that only became popular many decades later. Brooklyn heights, cobble hill, park slope. Perhaps you can chase those a a little bit on your map. These were all lovely 19th century brownstone neighborhoods that had gone into disrepair. Over the next decad decades ther of whitecollar workers increased, as did the number and variety of whitecollar jobs in new york. Government was expanding and sewer colleges and universities. And along with them, jobs for lawyers, administrators and professors. By the 2000s, technology was opening up new occupations for the educated and creative young, including occupations people had never heard of before. That you operators at the domino Sugar Refinery may be gone, but the new brooklyn has many thousands of web designers, developers and social media consultants. In the house next door to me that it referred to earlier is a perfect illustration of this shift from the older to the new knowledge economy. Its really gentrification in a single brownstone. I already mention that there was an elderly irish couple living there. The husband like other, who, like other immigrants had been long enough had a Civil Service job, had been a postal worker. While his wife had been in charge of the borders, as i mentioned before. Fastforward 15 years. The house was sold, renovated and subdivided into condominiums. Marble bathrooms, granite counters, recessed lighting, the whole deal. The first people to move in were people that you would never have met in the old brooklyn. An architect and his wife, a furniture designer. An editor and her husband also an editor at a music magazine. A wall street trader moved in soon after with his wife, a freelance writer, and their three children. Same block, say mouse, old brooklyn, new brooklyn. One thing that some times gets forgotten when people talk about gentrification and this shift from the knowledge, from the old to the new economy, is that this shift also brought about very dramatic changes in domestic life here these changes also helped to reverse brooklyns decline and, in fact, tha the decline of many other cities. First, the knowledge of jobs in media, in design, law and education were proving especially appealing to educated women, even after they became mothers. While a lot of young knowledge economy workers are drawn back to the suburbs once they start families and begin to take notice of the local Public Schools performance, others are unwilling to tolerate the hourlong commute that worked well enough for the own fathers who are often the single breadwinning parent. They want to live where they work. And with that they want the kids to be safe where their living, and that the decline in crime that occurs in new york and brooklyn of course in the 90s was really, hasten the gentrification that it already begun in ways that worked to brooklyns benefit at all of new york city. Second, the second domestic change that is worth noting is that the knowledge economy, as the name suggests, demands higher levels of education from workers, as well as early Career Training in the form of internships and associate positions. That was leading young men and women to delay marriage and parenthood until they were well into the 20s and 30s. These educated singles who dont need much living space and dont care all that much about their School Districts test scores, gravitated to Center Cities with everything that they did care about, lots of interesting jobs, bars, clubs, art galleries, and a Large Population of suitable romantic partners. Now as i mentioned earlier, brooklyns story is far bigger than the borough itself. The same knowledge economy and educated young people are reshaping cities and ways of life in most advanced economies from london to copenhagen, sydney to philadelphia, vancouver to washington, d. C. College educated young singles and professionals are moving into repurposed old factories and warehouses and glassy highrises that might even have a rooftop Swimming Pool and a gym. Gentrification has launched a Global Aesthetic pic you can go to almost any western capital now and find your gentrified neighborhood, and it will have the same kinds of wine stores, infusion restaurants, music clut galleries. To be honest the time for travel is little interchangeable. So its easy enough to poke fun at some of the new class of urban folk, especially those hipsters with her endless number of stock signifiers, bike lanes, are too small pickles, light bulb fixtures, slouchy wall hats and statement facial hair. And to be honest i engage in a little of that myself. But the caricature, irresistible caricature misses something really important. These educated newcomers are bringing innovation back to stagnating cities. In brooklyn where seeing sort of creative dynamism that has largely disappeared from the borough by the 1930s. Some of the new companies moved into the very spaces built by the earlier generations of entrepreneurs. Green points pencil factory, for instance, has been transformed into the headquarters of the crowdsourcing website dick starter. Kick starter. Makers are launching high tech manufacturing ventures. Look at again that waterfront that he mentioned earlier. Along the east river and the new york harbor from greenpoint in the north to sunset park in the southwest. This is brooklyns socalled creative crescent where abandoned and underused warehouses are crammed with offices for 3d printer companies, biotech robotics and digital design companies. With, by the way, fantastic views of manhattan and the harbor. Many of the young businesspeople are what i call artist entrepreneurs. They are artists of all kinds who, with help of computers, have found a way to pursue their career will make a decent living. There boutique businesses designing and making clothing, jewelry, soap and stationary, and maps like the one in front of you. There are also a stunning number of new businesses that are centered on food, im happy to say. Restaurants, beer halls, cheese shops, small batch, artist known is known as a word, chocolates, granola, pickles, takeout dinners to serve a well educated and traveled population with little time to cook. So thats the good news as they say. But the transformation from an old to a new brooklyn, from industrial to a knowledge economy and gentrification itself have not been nearly so kind to the urban working class and the poor. The you would never know it from the media coverage, almost a a quart of brooklyn lives below the poverty line. A similar number are on food stamps while 32 have an income low enough to qualify for medicaid. In the past and Industrial City like brooklyn could absorb these lower skilled immigrants into a Large Network of manufacturing and port related companies. These were dirty, tedious and sometimes dangerous jobs but you didnt need an education to get one. In places like brooklyn you didnt even need to speak english, or at least brooklyns idea of english. As tough as the jobs were, they gave a foot up on the ladder up to the middle class. The question that i tried to explore in the book is whether brooklyn can offer the same foothold to this generation of poor workingclass as it did previous generations. It is really one of central themes. Brooklyn today is seeing what is sometimes described as a manufacturing revival, but it is unlikely to perform the same service as the older manufacturing for the boroughs less educated population are traditional smokestack Assembly Line companies required, workers by the hundreds or even the thousands. Todays technologically sophisticated Companies Need only a small fraction of that number. President trump needs to take notice. Those jobs that do appear in the want ads tend to require skills that are not in the repertoire of the people most in need of work. Lowwage service jobs with few benefits and unpredictable hours, waitstaff, food preparers, hospital orderlies and genders, thats the kind of job mostly available now. Immigrants often take these jobs, if not happily, then eagerly. Some 39 of brooklyns population is foreignborn. This is something you can easily forget again if youre just reading about the hipsters of brooklyn. Like the boroughs immigrants from previous centers, most arrive very poor. Along the major avenues traversing the borough from his river waterfront toward the Atlantic Ocean you can find people from pakistan, afghanistan, bangladesh, haiti, trinidad, jamaica, to name only a few. Well they thrive . I profiled the two Largest Immigrant Groups in brooklyn in two very different neighborhoods, the jamaicans in the southeast and the chinese to the west. And i try to address that question. The chinese are now the Largest Immigrant Group in the borough, a fact that would stun the folks who had rooted for dem bums. In sunset park newly arrived chinese are frequently living for to a room and working in restaurants in near feudal conditions. And i dont exaggerate. I also dont exaggerate when i say that the fanatical devotion of the entire community towards childrens education is so notable that newcomers learn the first word, harvard. Second word, stuyvesant. Those children are on track to leave their parents poverty behind, but what i find in the chapter on the jamaicans is the picture is much more ambiguous. In parts of brownsville and eastern europe, black poverty remains entrenched over generations. I devote a chapter to brownsville at one of the most troubled neighborhoods in new york city. Its history is a fascinating one. Brownsville started as a jewish ghetto, or slum in the mid20th century. As blacks escaping the jim crow south move into the area, the did not flee, at least at first. Rosso became an experiment in integration. The failure of that experiment and the continuing distress of the neighborhood are well worth understanding in more detail. There are groups and individuals who will find pathways to the middle class. The major task for policymakers indeed for all of us is to ensure that many more can move up in the future. Thank you very much. That was terrific. She is happy to take some questions. Thank you so much. Policing as a precondition for this transformation where their other Government Policies that were necessary or is this really just a spontaneous free market because it is so loaded but how would other cities go about it. In my part of brookland it really was kind of from the ground up. It was people like me moving in and finding ways to renovate their homes that was certainly not planned. However, there has been more planning going in as i think both the city officials and developers begin to realize what was happening. It took a while by the way. One thing that the city did in the 90s was to give money or put a lot of money into the Brooklyn Navy yard. It was a very sad shadow of its former self. The buildings were in terrible disrepair the elevators didnt work. Nobody could do business there really they decided to upgrade the infrastructure this was under julie and anna takes a little while but by the late 90s they were full. They were full and part because in part because of the grassroots thing happening in williamsburg. Nearby creative communities. You have lots of young people who are interested it was a synergy in cases like that. There has been as many of you probably know the zoning drama and brookland particularly in williamsburg which i described a bit. One of the problems that brookland basis and for cities around the country that are similarly crowded the zoning makes it impossible to really expand and create more opportunities for more people. There are a lot of people who like to come to new york. Its can be very difficult to do that. With the prices as high as they are. A great speech. Ive always thought that brooklyn was a much better off as a separate city. I used to be a neighbor of yours in park slope. There were the warehouses that couldve been housing and the idiot idiot neighbors were fighting the developers. In the zoning laws and all of these other regulations how much does that hurt brooklyn now. I think its location would have come back much sooner. It just has a is has a great location. John wrote an essay about this which i stumbled across a year or two ago. I love that. I know have a great title. He makes the argument that brooklyn never should have become a part of new york city. So we nurture classic abuse here. I would find it hard to believe that it wouldnt be a problem if brooklyn were its own city. I think there are very few cities in the United States more people money to live in the cities and places to house them. I think the waiting list went up by 40 . That is true there. San francisco one of the worst places no building would be given a permit unless it was affordable housing. And guess what there were no buildings. The way that i try to approach this problem is not to simply say more building more building it could relieve some of this problem. I think what were learning and everything about this a lot since election is that people feel a certain attachment to a place we cant completely ignore it. And where we find the balance between that kind of nostalgia and the need for a vibrant new city is a question i think that well had to be dealt with casebycase. Michael myers new york right assimilation. Civilization. I remember the rising above brooklyn. A member of the Crown Heights i remember the black and italian conflicts in the beatings in the violence the conflict between blacks and koreans. All of this has it changed. What is going on in terms of the racial conflicts. I dont know that brooklyn can be thought of in very different terms than a lot of cities in the United States when it comes to the racial tensions. I would say the kinds of things youre talking about which i do mention in various chapters depending on which neighborhood im talking about we havent seen anything quite like it. I would say one thing thats happened is although the black population in brooklyn has remained more or less at the same percentage somewhere around 34 percent of population it is a different demographic a lot of that black population is now immigrant from the west indies and the in the caribbean and also from africa. I think also there are so many different colors now that some of the black white binary is being broken down. Another thing. That has happened i was very interested to discover. In the neighborhood like that which has become at least if you read the brooklyn press. The center of jenna vacation yes there are some white educated newcomers and some of them are buying houses there which by the way if youve never been there has some of the most beautiful architecture i think in the city. What i found was a lot of black middle class. They were just coming back from college they wanted just like my kids do to be in the city some of them are starting businesses. I spoke to one woman who have gone to the university of chicago when she got there she cannot find a decent coffee. She wanted to recreate what she had had at chicago and she set up the first 45 dollar coffee place it was actually not. There are other trends going on that i think are breaking through some of the problems that we have in the past. I wondered if you could tell us a little bit more about the decrease of crime in brooklyn. You made the statement that it was a decrease of crime the people who came in didnt want to have the crime not wanting it doesnt make a decrease in crime. Was it a phenomenon. Was there a cause and effect. How did it compare with the decrease in crime generally within the city of new york. As many of you in the room now Heather Mcdonald has done very important work on the decline of crime in new york. That affected brooklyn. Economy a bit by surprise that the gentrification actually started before the crime declined. Certainly when i was there in as ive said i was not alone. There was still a significant crime. We have a revolution in the way policing was done. There is research that just came out saying that in fact safer neighborhoods do promote gentrification. I had found very persuasive on this. It also blurred in more people once a crime went down. Now you meet people who are newcomers in my neighborhood and they have no clue what used to be like. And you try to explain what used to be like. Okay we will go back over there. The book of the invention of a brownstone booklet talks a lot about with the early ones in particular striving for authenticity that a lot of these people were leaving manhattan because they wanted to live next to the people im wondering do you agree with that and also are there still any remnants of that looking for authenticity in the current weight we see. Is a wonderful book by the way. There is no question that it remains brooklyn word is something that you see turn around all over the place. The people that wanted to move next to into an irish neighborhood actually didnt care for the aluminum siding in the way that they kept their backyards with their laundry out there so there were tensions from the very beginning. I quote some of the immigrants they were not particularly happy with this new group of what they called some of them were professors and lawyers. The tensions i think are still there. I think a lot of what the gentrification drama is about it has to do with the idea that we are changing with authentic about brooklyn and turn it into something homogenous. One of the things if you read the book that jim is referring to the people who moved to brooklyn at first really wanted city living in the sense that they wanted to be able to walk places and they didnt like the suburbs. I know it was by the way for me. Weve been living in westchester. Many of the people i know thought the same way. The thought of that is somehow more authentic. Too orderly not diverse enough of course. I would say the authenticity issue becomes not only still very much prominent in the discussion but its a word that has not gotten the kind of selfexamination that it needs. Because it is leading to a foolishness about what the real bed site is. The real bed sty is what it was like when you moved in. Even if it was just two years ago. That was an excellent talk. The bearer of brooklyn was held by two natives in the bronx had the two natives. Can you guess two things one is why didnt the bronx benefit but there is a city journal about taller is better. I had one or two thoughts about that. The original as i mentioned was started in the brownstone areas. And people liked the look of those areas there is not that much of that in the bronx. I actually dont know this for sure. Did the crime come down as fast think they partly had to do with the abilities of infrastructure in brookland the neighborhoods were really like neighborhoods in a way that sometimes the case in the bronx but not always. In addition and correct me if im wrong about this. My sense is that the housing projects are scattered all around. We have many housing projects and in fact one of the reasons that the community i spoke to earlier earlier that remains and such distress i believe is because there are so many. When you have that kind of environment its not going to attract a lot of new people. So im guessing or speculating a little bit. That this is part of what has held the bronx back as well. But more generally the Housing Stock i think is just not as appealing. I will volunteer kate to stay after. Do you think that the presence of stable urban ethnic enclaves like the chinese in sunset park is a pre requisite for this kind of adjudication. Has been a prerequisite for immigrants to eventually assimilate. If it is done the right way. All of the immigrants who came to the United States almost all went to the areas where their people were. They were essential for finding jobs. What to make of the strange food and all that stuff. In addition it was really an Educational Institution for newcomers. The problem that we find today i cant give you a simple answer anymore. It depends on the out the enclaves. Where the culture of them in that particular community is not helping to create the next generation of successful students and citizens. So what i found here the jamaicans who i write about our extremely hardworking. Very committed and kathy has one of the largest homeownership rates in the city. And yet the families they want their kids to achieve but they havent figured out how to do it. Theres an assumption and i will tell you when its false. They can turn their back. The schools today i dont need to tell anybody sitting here the difference between now and earlier generations of immigrants is not just that the schools are worse the education has been much more important to getting into the middle class. So you have low skilled immigrants which youve always had but instead of being able to move up the ladder through the industrial sector there can have to go through that knowledge economy which they have to be successful in school. Nothing happening and an awful lot of enclaves. Please join me in thanking her. [inaudible] your watching book tv on cspan two the top nonfiction authors. Television for serious readers. We had 48 hours. On afterwards the parents of the late trip on my and remember their sons life. This weekend marks the fifth anniversary of his death. Also this weekend David Horwitz weighs in on what should be the top priorities. And Harvard History professor provides a history of the civil wars from around the world. Plus university of delaware history professor Erica Armstrong dunbar on the life of of not judge an escaped slave once owned by george and marsha washington. They recall g and john adams. And how everyday items in occurrences can help explain physics. That all happens this weekend on book tv. Fortyeight hours of nonfiction authors and books. Television for serious readers. Your book is the Voting Rights war. Which Supreme Court ruling do you think have the most Significant Impact on the ability of africanamericans to vote. I think the very first one which struck down the grandfather clause. Basically said if your grandfather couldnt vote you couldnt vote. It was the very first Voting Rights case brought by the naacp before the u. S. Supreme court