Congress is going to keep you up at night because you dont want to put the book down. But i really found it when i said riveting, i meant it. Absolutely fascinating. Okay. Your book emphasizes what you call the complex and contradictory cast of characters who pulled the toward or away from the president s desk. Guest let me just say thank you very much to green lying for having this as jarred mentions this is my neighborhood book store. I lived down the street and was here all the time and in fact we bring our kids to listen to the wonderful sounds of jarred on sunday morning. So its a pleasure to be here to talk about this book. Of course, thank you very much, nell. We have Work Together on essays in the past and i have a deep respect for your work, since ive encountered it. And not so much as a child. So, i have long had a deep respect for your work and its a signal honor to have you read at all the book and then to recommend it so highly and to be here. When i sought to do the book i knew it was a good story, but wasnt clear to me, especially at the very beginning, whether it was much more of a story of how a bill becomes a law. Theres a story behind every story but whether there was something that could drive it on a narrative level. And theres a general story about how the bill is often seen in our history as something that it was almost inevitable at the time when it did pass and there were certain figures and certain forces that simply guaranteed its passage. And without being a revisionist, i found, is a got into it, a lot more complexity to the story, and a lot of it did revolve around individual characters who pushed and pulled the bill in different ways, and from both sides, and i think ultimately made the bill better. Certainly you had the southern democrats opposing the bill. You also had this very nefarious organization that i talk about for a while, almost comicbook like, the cords nateing committee on fundamental american freedoms. A lobbying group set up and funds by a number of really far right industrialists, who gave their money gave money to a slush fund, to the mississippi government, and then converted into the funding right, the Mississippi State sovereignty commission, which was set up to oppose civil rights legislation anywhere, nationally and in mississippi. And so they funded this lobbying group that was really pretty well a small staff but pretty well funded and pretty sophisticated. They ran ad around the country. They had what today would be millions of dollars in funding, and the head 0 of it was a former president of the american bar association. And so really some within a particular world, some pretty powerful figures. So, obviously they were not successful in the end but i think their story yeah, right. Ill give away the ending. The bill does pass. The bill passes. But, no, i mean what i think is interesting in this story is the bell obviously we all know the bill passed, but its what could have happened. Was the bill as it moved along would bit stronger or weakened. A lot of people dont know the details of the bill in its final passage, and when it emerged it was not nearly as strong as it was when it finally passed. So you had host and that was unusual for civil rights. Guest right. And thats something i tried to get to at the beginning. Normally civil rights bills would be these dream bills at the beginning, like in 1957 and 1960, and then whittled around and traded away so when they passed they were acceptable to enough people. This bill actually started pretty strong, and then a number of figures these are also some of the interesting folks clarence mitchell, who was really one of the great Unsung Heroes in civil rights history. Certain people know his name but a lot of people dont. He was the head of the Washington Bureau for in the naacp and also the head lobbyist for the Civil Rights Movement. He was the guy who all through going back to the 40s but picking up steam in the 50s and 60s, someone who had the power and influence to move in and talk to obviously libbal senators but held enough charismatic sway with people he opposed. He was fearless. He would go in and talk to richard russell, the head of the southern democrats, and he could couldnt win russ toll his side but could at least talk to him in a way that maybe whittled down, ruffled opposition a little bit. The was that kind of a guy, and he was instrumental in making the bill stronger as it moved to the house. So, the bill did not really include any protection for employment discrimination. Of course, now we look at the equal Employment Opportunity commission, and the revolutionary changes it has made in the workplace, work force, for minorities and for women. Its signal piece of legislation in and of itself. And it was not there at the beginning. It was largely because of clarence mitchell, really going in and pushing the bill and then defending that, once it was added. So you have these both sides pushing and pulling the bill, and i tried to tell the story as a conflict among characters and among associations and fife domes and the movement at large. Well, musical accompaniment. Theres a marching band out. Happens all the time port green. I youre looking for a fun place on a wednesday night, marching bands. But to really tell the story is that interplay. I think that really gives you a sense of how the bill evolved and how legislation works in washington. Host that was a question more [laughter] i feel like dancing. That was a question more politically economy and so forth. Enough i want to ask you a painter question. Small p, painter question. Your book is not highly illustrated. Your book is not highly illustrated. Okay. Usually the musical interlude comes twothirds of the way through the program. Tonight it is at the very beginning. So, if you need to okay. Get a cough drop yes. Okay. Host so if you had been not writing but drawing or painting or photographing your book, what scenes would you have included, either images that you actually came across or images that you imagined or things that you came across and thought you might have imagined. Guest let me cheat that at bit and say there was one image that when i first read about this scene in the story within the book, i really wanted this image, and i imagined it in my head and then i ended up finding an image that illustrated it. It has to do with win the bill was in the senate and there was a full buster going on, and a filibuster going on, and people active and pushing and lobbying senators, so there were a group of seminary students here in new york, one was already a young monk, i guess a francisan. And a student at union theological. And then a student at jewish theological. And they were talking and said, what can we do as young people, as students . We think of the Student Movement and student activism that happened in the 60s but it started earlier, and they were very much animated by the idea that students needed to be activists, and of course as religious figures, as men of the cloth, they felt the need to get involved, which itself is something new. Host lets come back to that. Guest absolutely. So they said, lets do a vigil. Lets have a vigil and lets do something that is demonstrably ecumenical. So well go down to washington and have one person from each of these three faiths, stand in quiet vigil in front of the lincoln memorial, and theyll do it for some hours and then theyll be replaced byes could then others and well just keep this going so that even though there are only three people at a time, there will be dozens, scores. They didnt know how this would turn out but they said, lets make this happen. So they drove down there and had some other people lined up to feed the project. Within a couple of days people were pouring in from around the country, and they had little camps set up in the basements of churches around washington, and they would just take turns. They had a roster sheet and three of them would show up, they had a shuttle going back and forth between i mean a car, someone would drive from morning side heights down to washington and go back and forth, and but people were coming from chicago and across the south. So i had this image, and they had a banner they held that said, vigil in support of civil rights. And i had this image in my head. This is so evocative of what the movement was about, this kind of civilian citizen activism i wanted to build the story around. And then i found a picture of three of these students. It wasnt those three, the three founders, but three of them, and standing in front of the lincoln. Perfect. So that one i didnt have to imagine, but there are so many others. Certainly there are a number of high points in the book that were very familiar with. So birmingham is one of them. The birmingham protests in the spring of 63 were critical getting kennedy to create the bill and move it forward. So many iconic scenes from there. The march on washington, obviously. The Birmingham Church bombings, assassination of medgar efforts medgar evers, and these all played into the story of the bill. Another one that i wish i could have gotten, more of a moving picture scene and not so much something you can catch tour in capture in a photograph, but when the bill was in front of the house, being debated, there were a lot of amendments being present, and the bill was very strong when it went to the house. But there was a fear that amendment process, because it was so rapid and a lot of times even when the bill this important was being debated, a lot of times there werent a huge number of members actually on the floor, and the voted werent recorded by name, just record by total. So you werent necessari that spoke to what the bill was about and what the book is about. Host that leads to another question. We understand why black americans and for me, i remember this era, and its full of blood. Just so many people being maimed and killed, assassinated, chased away from homes. So, its understandable why i am not a southerner but black american why we would be very interested in this, and i think it is usually considered something that is for the benefit of black americans. But as you tell the story in your book and as you mentioned it now, a lot of other people were very much involved, and maybe the didnt necessarily put their lives on the line but the spent a lot of time and trouble. What was in it for nonblack americans . I think its important to kind of distinguish between the broad support that was out there in White America for the bill, and in the very focused support that came out of specific places. So the bill in some ways couldnt have happened at another time because you had this confluence of other groups that were for example, up through the late 50s, the Protestant Church and the Catholic Church was a little more socially active on civil rights issues, and jewish synagogues were, or organizations. But by and large the Protestant Church is not that active. The National Council of churches war very apolitical and really uncomfortable with getting involved in so when emmett till was killed, lynched, national story, and clearly a crime, and yet the ncc released a statement that said, you know, we dont really want to pass judgment on this. This is a matter for the local mississippi authorities to deal with. Guest thats right. Host well see what they say host oh dear. Guest but that changed because the leadership changed. A number of people came to the fore who were senior people who were very socially active and a whole new generation of young people coming into leadership roles or just into kind of rankandfile roles in the church, both in the ncc structure, the bureaucracy of the National Council of churches and individual churches and individual denominations, and starting to see the urgency of civil rights. They were really spurred on by what they saw in the south, and Martin Luther king was very critical to add to the long list of things he did to inspire this country. He inspired the Protestant Churches, fellow protestants, they saw what he was doing, the litter from birmingham jail was so signal. It was published in almost every local newsletter guest all of you know host all of you know. Guest yes. People saw the and read and it it was incorporated incorporates in due buick, and tacoma, and all over the country, and people felt like they had to do something and they felt ashamed because they hadnt done anything. So you had this religious activism. Labor activism as well. Labor had been active on civil rights but you had the rise of a particular cohort under Walter Luther, the head of the united auto worker and coming into his own as a force, a leading force in the Labor Movement, by the late 50s and early 60s and he was motivated as a moral cause and also he saw it as the future of labor. Lab could not be a segregated sector of society. You couldnt exclude blacks from the Labor Movement. It was immoral and just didnt make sense in terms of dividing why divide workers when the real enemy is corporations, from his point of view. So you saw this that kind of organizing. And then of course you had the movement itself that was really just largely because of king and because of so many years of this kind of groundwork being laid, there was a lot of good will around the country for the movement, and then things like birmingham and of course the church bombing, medgar evers assassination, these all added to the sense that something has to be done, something needs to be done, and so you had people who otherwise would not have been and polls showed, otherwise didnt care, were not particularly racist but not actively racist, but just didnt see civil rights as a pressing issue, suddenly by 63 start to see it not just as a pressing issue but the pressing issue. Guest something host something about them. Guest exactly. The bill was very carefully crafted and its one of this in the failings of the bill, it didnt touch a lot of the things that White America, even in the early 60s, felt would be threatened. It explicitly slide affirmative action. Did not deal with housing segregation, de facto school segregation, all of these things that had been a concern for White America since the early other 5s. You had riots in cicero illinois against housing discrimination. Against desegregation or housing segregation. And so by the time the bill came around, the crafters were very cognizant and they wrote the bill in a way that explicitly did not deal with these things. So a lot of White Americans who would later on, when these things did become issues, allowed them to kind of push them away from civil rights, were willing to approach this bill the bill is very sectional in that regard, and so White Americans in dubuque could say it isnt a challenge to me. Its a solution to a moral issue being played out somewhere else; and so i feel comfortable in supporting that because its going to right a wrong that doesnt really infringe on what ill see as my rights. Which is very different from some of the debates we then later had about affirmative action, housing, schools, busing, things like that. Host i want to ask you maybe three more questions and then open it to the audience. Were you surprised by the intransigence of segregationist senators who routinely deprived anywhere white con constitute opportunities in order to keep down people who might be black constituents. Guest yes and no. I grew up in nashville, and even in the 80s there were a lot of certainly people accepted the Civil Rights Act as the law of the land, but kind of deepseated i dont want to say mundane dont want to take away from the it was very much sort of assumption about race, that defined so much of the world view of even people that i interacted with when i was a child. So in that sense, no, because i could understand the way that it defined everything that everyone else they saw. It was so central to the way that they viewed the world, that to Say Something like, why deprive your constituent you white constituents of a particular program because it might benefit blacks, for someone who is so wedded to the importance of segregation and white supremacy, that simply is not a thats not a bad tradeoff. And also but also theres also a class as well. The programs that were being that they were will ago oppose, new deal programs, for example, that would have benefited working class whites in the south and also blacks, these were people who were very wealthy, came from wealthy, typically came from very wealthy families, hobnobbed with other wealthy southerners who, other than agricultural programs, wasnt really a big deal. So, in so they were looking at it from both a class lens and a racial lens. But i was surprised in the sense that, look, the southerners negotiated in 57, on the 57 Civil Rights Act and got a big bill down to a small bill. They did that with the 1960 act. Big bill, whittled down to a small bill through negotiation and compromise. This bill they put up a wall and said, were not going to negotiate. Were just going to identifying to the very fight to the very end and hope you give up first and you wont be able to organize this coalition to overcome the filibuster. And that was pretty striking, and to read the behemoth and arussell said we will fight this battle to the very end and the filibuster, theres a preliminary filibuster before the main one, intend when they lost the first filibuster, russell said you may have won the battle but now the war begins, Something Like that. I think for a lot of these guys this was a last stand. They understood they were probably going to lose but they had to fight, so they had this kind of end of the world sensibility. But also that they were the last defenders, and the rest of the country was changing in a way that made it untenable for the south to keep up its kind of jim crow structure. And so for them, they had to good out on a bang so to speak, and i was just struck because these are not stupid people. They are obviously very much immersed in a racist ideology, but at the same time they were some of them were very sam irwin, who is by far, along with Strom Thurmond, the most adamantly opposed he went to harvard law school, former justice of the