Courted and fell in love with a woman and married a second time. He wrote thousands of passionate love letters to each of these women. This was a real living breathing human being and i dont think we have seen that about woodrow wilson. Next Diane Mcwhorter on her look carry me home birmingham, alabama the climactic battle of the civil rights revolution. She focuses on the 1963 bombing of the 16th st. Church that killed four young girls in times when the police try to disperse young demonstrators with fire hoses and dogs. This is an outward. Cspan the last lion under acknowledgments as i think my father for delivering me as Robert Renoir wrote out of the history into history and the awful responsibility of time. What are you getting out there . Guest at the last line from all the kings men which was an inspiration for this book because as you recall in that book the main character is able to tie his own history to characters he thought had nothing to do with him when he was growing up as a child of privilege. So the emotional impetus was trying to figure out my father and trying to figure out his personal history. I was able to figure a real history. Cspan why did you want to do that . Guest well he was a really interesting figure to say the least. He was downwardly mobile renegade son of a civically prominent family in birmingham and he did not make sense to me. He was an individualized spirit and i wanted to find out why he turned out the way he did. Cspan is he alive today . Has he read your book . Guest he is. The last time i heard he is still reading it. Cspan what does he think of what you try to do and what was his action to the way you characterize him . Guest i think he said that it was honest and true and i think one of the reasons he is taking it so well as we always have a very strong bond and even though i reveal some perhaps painful and embarrassing things it was not done vindictively. It was done in an attempt to understand. Righto painful thinking about you . Guest about him. Cspan whats the most painful thing you wrote about him . Guest the thing that i was worried about was he had a troubled relationship with his own father. His own father had been a harvard educated lawyer for the Power Company and they think he gave my father a fairly short shift when he was growing up. Oddly enough even though i reveal things about my fathers bigotry i think that wasnt the thing he was worried about the most but that was the original wound in a way that made him rebel against his past and his background. Cspan what is the first thing you can remember about birmingham, alabama . Guest funny you should ask. The first thing i remember is that the time my father was from birmingham but i was growing up and he lived in a small town out in the sticks. We would always come to town to visit his mother and grandmother. There was an inderal paint sign that had the sort of the unlike figures with blue hair sprouting almost like a troll doll. We call them bushy hair and we saw bushy hair we knew we were at my grandmothers house. That of course the largest ironman in the world who held a neon torch that shown green on days when there were no traffic vitality is an red when there had been a traffic fatality. Cspan this is what the pictures about . You say in the early part of your book the 1976 bicentennial or centennial of alabama was the first reason why he got interested in doing this. Explain that. Guest i have grown up thinking that defense and 63 which is the climax of the book had nothing to do with me. Dr. Kings demonstrations in the fire hoses and police dogs in the church bombing, i was over the mountain away from all that and totally alienated from that. The book you mentioned was the alabama volume in a series in 50 states and had had a very brief account of the troubles in birmingham. I realize for the first time that a man named Stetson Meyer had been the only white man in town as a businessman who agreed to let his name be used in the negotiations with dr. King. I screamed to my apartment in cambridge massachusetts thats my cousin. It was the first time i realize realized this had anything to do with me embarking on this journey home. Cspan heres a picture of him and where was he . Is he still alive . Guest he is not alive. I knew his son and grandson quite well. He was a businessman who i didnt realize he sort of touched every corner of the book. He started out as one of the big segregationist architects of the dixiecrat secession from the Democratic Party in 1948 when the south seceded from the party it was compared to the original secession it was so important. He was the sponsor and partial bankroller and one of the most rampant racist demagogues and a man named ace carter the author of the the education of little tree. Finally he became the friend of the Civil Rights Movement and he went through some strange process of faith and redemption. I never quite understood either put a switch sides and ultimately did the right thing. Cspan the 16th st. Leftist church bombing. This is recorded before we aired it last night on the radio in the middle of this book i hear its still an issue from 1963. Whats going on there . Guest well it took a long time to bring any case because for several reasons. One is that the evidence is just really weak and the perpetrator of the crime was convicted by the state of alabama in 1977. Since then before the two specs is suspects in the crime they couldnt build enough evidence. Nobody ever talks about his so we may never know what really happened leading up to that explosion. Also the investigation initially birmingham was the johannesburg of america the time the most segregated city in america. The Birmingham Police were in cahoots with the client and i had a long collaboration. Some of the movements of the klavern that perpetrated the bombing had been under the protection of the police so that investigation was flawed. Cspan what happened on that day . What was the exact date . Guest it was september 15, the 1963 and the schools of birmingham had just been desegregated over the last previous couple of weeks. Cspan who was president . Guest kennedy as president George Wallaces governor and wallace had called up the state troopers to prevent the Young Children from entering the schools and birmingham and had given a signal to the segregationist that it wasnt necessary to do segregation of the schools. What had happened was that president kennedy had introduced federal legislation to outlaw segregation as a result of the demonstrations there with the police dogs and fire hoses that spring. So if the sub nine realized they would do anything to stop integration from coming about in the ended up owning the church did that. Cspan what was best klan . Guest the klan was an interesting terrorist arm of the establishment for a very long it started out in the 20s in earnest as sort of oddly enough the liberal arm of the Democratic Party, this insurgent radical populist sort of incarnation of the havenots over the previous couple of decades. That is how hugo blocks the great libertarian Supreme Court justice had his collateral political career launched. So he was a new dealer and Supreme Court justice in the meantime the klan becomes the terrorist arm of the antinew dealers. They are to fight the union, to tar it up with racism and tar it with claiming social equality among the workers and family industrialists of birmingham who owned the city having courage to it because the last thing i wanted was organized labor so they encourage the terrorism to disrupt labor and then finally in the late 50s the terrorist become bad for business because its moving away from heavy manufacturing toward service and the industrial Business Committee starts disavowing the klan but its too late. They have let him loose in the community and that leads to the church bombing. Cspan in 1963 how many people lived in birmingham . Guest they there were about 250,000. Cspan what was the racial mix . Guest about 40 black. Cspan the most segregated city in the world . Guest it was called the johannesburg of american dr. King called it the most segregated city in america. Cspan how would that be though . What were the things that guest that were exceptional and alabama . Segregated cars. Why would they have to segregate the cars because they couldnt have sex and that is what it boiled down to. I could did you learn that in your studying . Guest and went back to this industrial base. There was a very strong economic motive to enforce segregation to foment racial strife and what it boiled down to was keep the labor force divided so they could keep wages down. White workers identified with management and they would tar the union as the n word union to try to repel whites from joining. Cspan it took you 15 years to do this . Guest 19, yeah. Cspan what were you doing during those 19 years . Guest i have to say fiber the years were spent cutting the book because the amend the original manuscript was believe it or not five times longer than what you have in your hand there. Cspan we are talking about look that is 700 pages. Guest the original manuscript was 3400 pages. So i cut it and i started over again and finally i was able to figure out a way to tell the narrative in a more streamlined fashion although the reviews called exhaustive. This is like the cliff notes version of it. Cspan where we living when he did the version of the . Guest i was living in boston when i read the campus sits meyer and have been working for an alternative legal there and was the managing editor of boston magazine. Cspan what was the name of the alternative . Guest the boston phoenix. Cspan how did you get into journalism in into journalism and the firstplace . Guest i was a literature major in college and the only thing i felt qualified qualified to do was read books. I started reviewing books for the boston phoenix and is result of that moved into journalism and taught myself on the job. Cspan where did you go to college . Guest i went to wellesley where my grandmother had gone so i was destined from birth to go there. Right to what we should dad doing when he went to college . What was his work . Guest he had a Small Business with eric and pressers to fill scuba. Cspan what was your relationship to him . Guest that was a strange period. I had into the counterculture in boston in the early 70s and during the vietnam war and he really fell out over the war and he was the archie bunker type. We have a few years where we did not speak very much. Draco there is a name that pops out of this book almost out of nowhere that we know in this town margaret tutwiler. Guest she was a Sorority Sister as the Brooklyn School for girls. She was a class ahead of me and it turns out that her family, she was from the family in birmingham. That is actually margarets middle name. Her family are Major Players in the book. Cspan white . Guest well they were a very prominent cooperator family. They were the fifth largest producer in commercial in the country i think. They were quite big and during the new deal they had become sort of the staunch antiroosevelt family in the south. They had bankrolled a lot of antiunion antinew deal propaganda and margarets grandfather had become this antiunion icon nationwide. He was the only to resist john l. Lewis to keep him out of his camps. Cspan he used to be a spokesman for the Bush Administration and the state department . Do you know her very well . Guest i dont know her very well. Our families were very close. My aunt and her mother ran each others weddings. Cspan in this book you have pictures of a lot of the characters and if they are my age we will remember the names. Do you remember them . And 63 would have been how will . Guest i was 10 and 63. I was totally ignorant of what was going on and it turns out that i ended up getting the interview for the book. Cspan this is a picture of a man named oconnor. Who was he . Guest bull connor, most people know him as the cartoon villain of the civil rights era. He was the Police Commissioner of Bob Birmingham who was the perfect enemy for the Civil Rights Movement. He is the one who sits the dogs and the fire hoses on Martin Luther kings demonstrators and 63. One of the purposes of the book is to present the segregationist in full dimension to try to really explain who they were and why they were, how they came to act seemingly against the values of their Christian Culture and it turned out that bull Connor Stockton city hall in the 1930s by the corporate interests of birmingham. The industrialists were trying to figure out a way to turn them against the new deal ample connor turned out to be there mascot. They put them in city hall. Cspan who was fred shills for . Guest fred shills berg is my hero. Hes a very controversial militant baptist preacher who led the silver right struggle in birmingham. He was known throughout the super Rights Movement as the because you is crazily courageous. He put himself in harms way in order to test got to see if god would protect him. His church had been bombed in 1956. But that he was lying on flew up like a magic carpet. He felt that he was anointed to lead the fight and ended up being a really important figure. Cspan . Cspan wears a twoday . Guest he is has a church in cincinnati ohio. Cspan do you talk to him about this . Guest a lot. Cspan whats the most important thing you learned from him . Guest what i really learned was how important he was an pushing king into the greatness. If it hadnt been for shuttlesworth we wouldnt be celebrating a National Holiday for dr. King today. Cspan why is that . Guest birmingham have been extremely passive. There was a sense he really did not want to accept this mantle of leadership which make the same more than he was a man of destiny. It was shuttlesworth who pushed him and he said you have to stop talking to the white people. You have got to galvanize the people and lead us to the promised land. He realized he had the authority to do that. Shuttlesworth was always pushing he was the vanguard, strategic vanguard of the movement and the one that pioneered direct action as opposed to passively resisting and he was just a major figure and hasnt gotten credit. Cspan who is this man right here with a tie on and his code. Guest the kind of dizzy looking guy . That was the reason the fbis investigation was flawed. This was the fbi chief informant inside the most violent clan or based in birmingham. Ike let me stop to ask you what is a clan or . Guest its like a club. One of the small groups of landsman, a subset of the state clan. Its the name of his violent clan based in birmingham. Cspan did you talk to anybody before the book that had been a member of that klan . Guest oh yeah. Cspan what about your family . Guest kind of my hands went clammy when i was reading this fbi informants report and i came across a man named loyal mcwhorter. My last name and i thought wow it sounds like a name my father would make up the cassette was kind of mythical and romantic. I had some tough weeks thinking that mightve been my father but it turned out there was a real loyal mcwhorter and he was probably a country cousin of mine but i ended up talking to his rather and loyal was murdered by his girlfriend while lying in bed and i guess he was such a bad person that the girlfriend got off. Cspan did you ever ask your father pointblank were you a member of the klan . Guest oh yeah. He never gave me a straight answer. I know he was never a member of the klan but he never told me what he was doing in the nice win is out fighting in the solar Rights Movement. There is a verbatim transcript of my interview with him in the epilogue trying to pin him down and he would just never quite tell me. Cspan why . Guest i dont know. One of the touching things he said to me was that, he said im afraid i didnt do all the things you may have thought i did as if i was hoping that he had done the worst. He almost apologized that he wasnt going to offer up any big purse line or something. It was sort of touching but frighteningly grandiose that he would claim false credit or blame for some of this klan criminal activity that he hadnt participate in. Cspan the transcript in the epilogue starts with you new chambliss. You knew gary and thomas roe. I knew them all. Who bombed the church you asked. He gave me a half witted look and said it was the janitor. Thats not the only time i saw that in the book. Guest right, you read it. You pass the pop quiz. Cspan it was the janitor. Why would they always give advance that answer . Guest a lot of people thought that blacks had loaned their own church in order to get publicity for the movement. That was just a very popular theory among thinking people as well as cases. The janitor had been called into questioning by the fbi and because of that and im not sure whether he was a suspect or not but he was questioned by them so as a result of that there is this popular theory that the janitor did it. Cspan you spend a lot of time in the book telling the story of the bombing. As you have gone around and talk to people how many guest the adults remember it. One of the reasons i wrote the book was because i didnt remember it. I dont remember when i found out and it was almost as if i had always known that president kennedy was assassinated two months later and of course i remember everything about that. It was just that i was too young for it to register. I wondered why when it happened a couple of miles from my house but it hadnt registered on my consciousness at all. Write to is the church still there . Do you still call it sixteenth Street Baptist Church . Guest its across the street from a great museum for Civil Rights Institute and the church has been restored. A lot of it was damaged in the bombing. It is looking for an identity and it was looking for an identity at the time. Ironically 16th st. Was the seat of the black bourgeoisie and they have been hostile to king. Their accommodation was segregation and they had too much to lose. They didnt have to risk that much in order to participate in the struggle and