 The 1964-65 World's Fair was a unique event in American history. It represented the promise of tomorrow to millions of people. The promise in technology, the promise in cutting-edge art and design, and the promise in terms of what America could provide to the world. Its official slogan was peace through understanding. The only problem was that there were people who were left out and there were issues that were left out that belied that image of peace through understanding. You can't understand what happened at the New York City World's Fair unless you understand the immediate backstory, which was that New York City, which seemed peaceful and prosperous, actually was riven with conflict. And it was mostly a conflict between the white majority and the African American and Puerto Rican minority. One of the main targets of protest was a man named Robert Moses. And he was one of the most powerful people in New York City and New York State at the time. He was the leader of urban development in the city and also what was called urban renewal, which was a policy that replaced deteriorating housing with good housing or with cultural institutions. And the problem was that a lot of the so-called bad housing that was replaced was the housing of working class people and particularly of non-white people. Robert Moses was also thought to be a racist, and that was because all the projects that he supported were created by virtually all white labor forces. In 1959, Robert Moses became the president of the World's Fair Corporation, so he was the top leader. In some ways, people saw what Robert Moses was doing at the World's Fair as just like the other projects that he had sponsored. They saw it just as a billion-dollar boondoggle, a huge public works project that was again going to hire only white people and was going to leave blacks and Latinos out of the picture. Robert Moses made things even worse by not listening when people asked him again and again to have some kind of a pavilion or an exhibit at the fair devoted to African American history and achievements. He was the dean or the captain of a huge project devoted to peace through understanding, and yet he wasn't willing to acknowledge the world-changing effect of the black civil rights movement. And that was a standing affront to millions of people, black, white, and Latino. People wanted to do something in response, especially some of the younger activists, so certain chapters of the Civil Rights Group core, the Congress of Racial Equality, decided that they were going to do a major action, what they called a stall-in instead of a sit-in, and they were going to stop cars on highways on the way to the fair and keep traffic from going to the fair on its opening day. The stall-in idea kind of fizzled out. It was controversial even among civil rights activists. The young activists were criticized, but many, many people decided instead that they would have a demonstration on the grounds of the fair on that same day, the opening day of the fair. So we see senior members of the civil rights movement like James Farmer, who was the president of core, coming to the fair protesting and being arrested, and there were 750 other people who protested at the fair that day. This was a major disruption of the opening day of the fair. There were opening ceremonies with dignitaries from around the country and around the world, even the president of the United States was there, and the activists shouted down President Johnson, saying, Jim Crow must go because they said that President Johnson wasn't doing enough to pass a national civil rights bill. And they protested at all the pavilions, protesting the southern states that still had segregation laws on the books, protesting northern states like New York, that they said also practiced segregation, protesting private employers, that they said didn't hire black people. They were everywhere. Robert Moses was furious, and he was prepared. He had already hired about a thousand private detectives and in essence his own private army to deal with any potential disruptions, and he had people summarily arrested by these private actors and dragged off the fair grounds and held in pens, the New York Times called pens, on the edges of the fair grounds. In some ways things at the fair returned to normal after this huge opening day protest, but it was never the same. People in New York didn't forget. There were smaller protests throughout the life of that fair. There was a major riot in New York City that summer, inspired in part by those protests, and the fair itself wound up being a colossal failure in financial terms and in terms of people's reactions and attitudes to it, and I think the protest had everything to do with that. The fair and the protests of the fair are a forgotten historical moment, but I think we should remember them. And one reason is that they marked the beginning of the end for this great New York City planner, Robert Moses. They revealed his tactics and I think they revealed his partiality, his discriminatory side. But there were other reasons why the fair was important too. It also led to the breakup of the Civil Rights Group core. The kind of bitterness that emerged between the activists who wanted to do a Stalin and B. militant and the ones who didn't want to do that and who pursued a different kind of strategy, those splits just get wider and wider in the course of the 1960s. And by about 1966, when some activists are declaring black power, they're really departing from the Civil Rights movement of the fathers, of people like James Farmer. The fair also shapes politics in New York City and even nationally. On a local level, it helps destroy the Democratic mayor who was in office at that time and leads the way to a whole new political configuration in New York City. He's succeeded by a Republican who's a very liberal Republican and there's a real transformation in politics as a result. At a national level, these protests probably helped pass the Civil Rights Act because President Johnson did not like being shouted down and he did not like people saying that he wasn't fighting hard enough for that Civil Rights Act and this probably made a difference.