 Greetings from the National Archives Flagship Building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's a pleasure to welcome you to today's conversation with Kevin Boyle and Suzanne E. Smith about Boyle's new book, The Shattering. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two programs coming up soon on our YouTube channel. On Wednesday, January 26th at 1 p.m., David McKean will tell us about his new book, Watching Darkness Fall, which recounts the rise of the Third Reich in Germany and the road to war from the perspective of four American ambassadors in key Western European capitals, London, Berlin, Rome, Paris, and Moscow. And on Tuesday, February 1st at 1 p.m., we'll hear from Sarah Pollock, who will discuss her book, FDR in American Memory, Roosevelt and the Making of an Icon. She analyzes Roosevelt as a cultural icon in American memory, a historical leader who carefully and intentionally built his public image. Kevin Boyle begins his look at the 1960s with the story of Ed Cahill, who in 1961 organized his neighbors to deck their houses with American flags for the 4th of July. Boyle was inspired by a photograph of Cahill and his neighbors that he had seen years before in a book published by the National Archives. The book, which reproduced more than 200 images from our photographic holdings, was called The American Image. Boyle's book about America in the 1960s, The Shattering, takes us a decade beyond the American image and focuses on the period's transformative conflicts. The New York Times calls The Shattering a rich, layered account of the 1960s. Here's not simply the unfolding of events, but it is the story of individuals behind the events. In The Shattering, Boyle introduces us to the people who propelled the changes. The Washington Post review declares that Boyle has a gift for synthesizing and translating the often dry arguments and analysis of formal scholarship into artful and empathetic storytelling. Kevin Boyle is the William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University, his previous book, Ark of Justice, won the National Book Award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He's also the author of the UAW and the Hay Day of American Liberalism and co-author of Muddy Boots and Ragged Aprons. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune, and Detroit Free Press. Suzanne E. Smith is a Professor of American History at George Mason University and teaches African American History, 20th Century Cultural History, History of Death in America, American Popular Music, and African American Religious History. She is the author of Dancing in the Street, Motown, and the Cultural Politics of Detroit. Now let's hear from Kevin Boyle and Suzanne E. Smith. Thank you for joining us today. Let me begin today simply by letting you know that Professor Smith wasn't able to join us the last minute. There were complications that made it impossible for her to join us. And I'm very sorry that she's not here. I'd love to be sharing this afternoon with her, but I am honored to be sharing it with you. I just want to say how much I appreciate the National Archives giving me the opportunity to talk with you today. And particularly, I want to thank Susan Clifton for putting together today's program. To start today by doing one of those things that I think you're not supposed to do when you talk about your book, I want to start with somebody else's book. In particular, what I want to do is I want to start with a book by a woman who's been in the news a bit lately because of her passing. I want to start with Joan Didion's second book of essays, The White Album. And particularly, what I want to do just for a second is I want to read just the start of it. It's a famous start. This is the start of the very first essay of The White Album, which is a collection of essays that Didion wrote in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is what she said at the start. We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while. Such a beautiful, elegant way of describing what historians actually do. What we do as historians is we take all the fragments, the complicated pieces of the past, and we try to shape them into a coherent story. And then over time, we start to wonder whether the story that we shaped is really the best way of telling the events of the past. And so we start to think the way Didion did, whether we need a new story. And that's what the shattering is. It's my attempt to take the phantasmagoria of the 1960s, this extraordinary straw of events, and to reshape them into a new story of the 1960s. And a lot of that story centers on powerful figures of the 1960s. The book deals to a considerable extent with the presidents of the 1960s, with John Kennedy, with Lyndon Johnson, with Richard Nixon, and to my surprise, really with Dwight Eisenhower, who hovered over the 60s to an extent that I hadn't realized when I first started working on this book. It deals with those people who tried to become President Barry Goldwater, Bobby Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, George Wallace, who runs through so much of the 1960s, talks about Supreme Court justices, it talks about a general or two, talks about the towering activists we associate with the 60s, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X. But if there's one thing that animates my sense of the past, my sense of myself as an historian, I also really believe that ordinary people are central to history, too. Ordinary people who we don't know help us understand whose names we've never heard of, help us understand the past in a new way. And ordinary people in the American past changed this nation. So alongside all those famous people who run through the shattering, what I also try to do is tell the stories of ordinary people. What I want to do today is I just want to tell you four stories. And this is the first one. This is the 4th of July 1961 on the 6100 block of West Eddy Street in the northwest corner of Chicago. The day before, Ed Cahill and his neighbor, Clarence Mitchell, draped their block in 38 flags. That's a lot of flags given that there are only 36 houses on the entire block. And Ed, being Ed, had written to the Chicago Tribune, one of the major newspapers in Chicago, to announce what they had done. And the Trib decided that they would send a photographer out to take a picture of this block. And so the neighbors all gathered on the lawn right next to Ed Cahill's house. And Ed and Clarence, of course, got pride of place as they should have. Again, that's Ed right there, and that's Clarence right there. And two of Ed's kids, he had three children, two of his kids got in the picture too. That's his son, Terry, standing at attention up on the top of the steps. And that's his daughter, Katie. Way in the back. Right back there. Barely seer is Ed's wife, Stella Cahill, smiling into the 60s. Stella had good reason to be smiling. Stella was born a couple of days after Christmas in 1916, deep in the Polish ghetto of Chicago, where her parents lived on what her father, who was a tailor, managed to bring home from his trade. She had an older brother, Chester, and the four of them lived in a tenement deep inside the ghetto. Just about two years after her birth, her father died, killed by the Spanish flu that was then raging through the poorest neighborhoods of American cities. And her mother, with two young children to raise, faced the prospect of tumbling into the worst forms of poverty. She tried to break the family's fall by getting married again in 1920. She married another Polish immigrant, this time a man who didn't even have a trade that her now deceased husband had had. He made his living as an unskilled laborer, which meant he made his living on the power of his back. A power that he tended to dissipate, it turned out, by drinking he couldn't control. And so all through the 1920s, Stella, her brother, and her mother and now stepfather lived on the edge of poverty. And there's no clearer sign of that than the fact that they moved every single year, every single year, all the way through the 20s, they lived in this part of town, and then they moved to that part of town, and then they moved to that part of town the way poor people do. And then in 1929, the economy collapsed around them. By the spring of 1930, Stella's stepfather was unemployed, and the family was getting by on whatever money her mother could bring home from her job boxing candies in a candy factory. It wasn't enough. Within a year or so, Stella's older brother left school to take a factory job that he was lucky to get. That brought in just enough money that they could keep Stella in school through the two years of a commercial course he was taking in one of Chicago's public schools. And the minute that course was over, they pulled her out and sent her off to work too. She was 15. Stella met Ed Cahill on a blind date in 1938. The Cahill family were hardly well to do. But in the working class world of Chicago, they were a step above Stella's family, a considerable step above Ed's father, who had been born in downstate Illinois of Irish immigrant parents. His father worked as a foreman for a construction company that did road work for the city of Chicago. And what that meant, especially in the 1920s, that work was steady in a way that had never been for Stella's family. And with that steady work, he earned enough, Ed's father earned enough, that in the late 20s, he was able to buy a house on the 6100 block of West Eddy Street, the block you're looking at now. Though in those days, it was a half-finished, brand-new development going out way on the outskirts of town. It was a completely white neighborhood. Much of the new developments that were going up in Chicago in the 1920s were wrapped in restrictive covenants, those little clauses that were put on, developers put on their deeds to say, this property can never be sold to a Negro, and oftentimes to a Jewish America. But I have no evidence whatsoever that when Ed's family bought that house out on Ed's street, they thought at all about race. Chances are they took it natural. As a natural thing that neighborhoods were going to be segregated. That's how deeply that racial discrimination was written into the fabric of American society. What they saw was that they were buying a 900-square-foot house of living space with an unfinished attic up above that they could finish off where the boys could have a place to sleep. What they saw was that they were buying a house with a little backyard and a little front yard, set in a half-finished neighborhood, six blocks away from a brand-new Catholic parish that they could join, St. Ferdinand's. It was such a new parish, in fact it didn't even have a church yet, but it did have a parochial grade school where Ed and his brothers could go as part of the commitment to the Cahill family, the deep commitment to the Cahill family, to Catholicism. And that's where Ed grew up. Ed and Stella got married in May of 1940. 1942, they had their first child, a baby girl. They named Judy. In November of 1943, when Judy was about a year old, Ed got drafted. He was gone for two and a half years. Most of that time, he spent in Europe in the Signal Corps, trailing along behind the frontline troops as they marched towards Berlin and the end of the war. And Stella stayed home with the newborn. Now, Stella knew on some level that Ed was safe. She knew that, of course, from the letters he wrote home, these sweet personal letters that he sent as often as he possibly could. But you got to stop for just one second and think about this young woman in Chicago in 1943, in 1944, in 1945, living surrounded by war, living surrounded by death, by the gold stars that she'd see in the windows as she walked the baby along the streets, for the prayers for those boys who had gone missing, the prayers at Sunday Mass, for the boys that had gone missing from that parish that she was a part of. And you got to believe, I believe with all my heart, that deep in the night, that fear came creeping up to her too, that it would have been impossible for her not to imagine the Western Union messenger coming to her door with that notice. And if that were to happen, that she would become her mother in 1918, a too young widow that toddler at her skirts and her life collapsing around her, it's not what happened. Ed got through the war just fine and he came home in the spring of 1946 as part of the massive demobilization of that year. Within a few months, to no one's surprise, Stella was pregnant again. And Ed decided that with the new baby coming, he couldn't really afford to take all the benefits that the GI Bill was providing. He needed to go get a job. And he did. He got a job as a clerk in the front office of the Vacuum Can Company of Chicago. The Vacuum Can Company of Chicago made industrial strength coffee urns. And one of their major clients was the United States military. The US Navy really liked their coffee urns, as did the Army. In 1948, well, their son was born in 47, that's Terry right up here. In 1948, this now young family, Ed and Stella and their two kids, moved into his father's bungalow out on West Eddy Street. And they moved in partly to take care of him. His wife had recently died and everybody knew he couldn't take care of himself. And I think partly because Ed had such a powerful sense of place. He wanted to go home. And so they did in 1948. That neighborhood was still half finished. Half of the houses on the block hadn't even been built yet because the development that had started back in the 20s had stalled during the Depression and then stalled again during World War II. Over the next few years from 48 on into the early 1950s, the neighborhood started to fill in as the developers came back to put in small, reasonable houses onto the empty lots. Houses that had been sold overwhelmingly to Italian American and Polish Americans who were moving out from the center city of Chicago in a process we call white flight. As that neighborhood filled in, as the population filled in, it became a more prosperous area. In the mid-1950s, developers built a brand new shopping mall, not that far from Eddy Street. One of the first shopping malls in Chicago went in, not that far from Eddy Street. And that Catholic parish that was so important to Ed finally got the church that it had never had, a gorgeous, beautiful church wrapped in marble, a place for families like the Cahills to feel a sense of solidity that neighborhood had never had. The Cahills started to do well for themselves, too. Ed slowly started to move himself up in the vacuum can company until by the end of the 1950s he was the head of sales. They had a third child in 1952. That's Kathy down here. And the Cahills were not extravagant people. But they had more money than ever before. And so in 1953, 1954, they bought their first car. They never had a car before. But now they didn't see the need for Ed to take the bus all the way down to the vacuum can company down in the center city anymore. And in 1955, they bought a TV, put it in the little living room. And when the kids were old enough, Judy was certainly old enough, they sent them all off to the parochial school, to the grade school that was connected to their parish, to St. Ferdinand's. And then when Judy, their oldest daughter, got of high school age, they sent her to a Catholic high school. And when she finished there in 1959, they sent her to DePaul University, one of Chicago's two large Catholic universities. Now, there is no doubt that this was a parochial world that the Cahills lived in. They lived inside this tight upper working class, lower middle class Catholic world. There is no doubt that this neighborhood out on West Eddie Street was wrapped around racial exclusion and discrimination. You can see that just in the picture of the folks standing out here in 1961. And the Cahills, at least, their prosperity, their ability to buy the car, to buy the TV, to send their kids off to schools, private schools, was paid for in part by the vacuum can's connection to what Dwight Eisenhower would call the military industrial complex. Because the military industrial complex wasn't all about missile systems and bombers. It was also about industrial strength coffee urns. But you also have to think just for a minute about what this world looked like for Stella Cahill. Here was a woman who grew up right on the edge of devastating poverty, who never had a stable place to live. And now she and Ed owned their own home out on Eddie Street. Here was a woman who in her early days of her marriage and her early days of motherhood wasn't sure whether her husband was going to come home, now living in this extraordinarily stable family-centered world. Here was this woman who in 1961 had her older daughter in college when she had had to leave school at 15. Is it any wonder that Stella Cahill was smiling into the 1960s? And already that world built around Eddie Street, already there were cracks in the exclusions that that world had created. None more dramatic, none more important than the one symbolized by this young woman, Elizabeth Eckford. Elizabeth Eckford story would have been fundamentally different, really, if her mother and father had had a phone. But they were working people, and they had six kids to raise, and they couldn't afford that sort of extravagance. And so on the day before school was to start in 1957, September of 1957, on September 3rd of 1957, the Eckfords didn't get the phone call from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the nation's leading civil rights organization. The Eckfords didn't get the call telling her that Elizabeth was supposed to meet with the nine other kids who were going to desegregate Little Rock Central High the next morning, and that together the 10 of them would be escorted to the school. And so on the morning of that first day on September 4th of 1957, Elizabeth got up early to make sure that she could get herself dressed in the clothes she had carefully picked out for her first day. She made this skirt, and she had breakfast with her family. And when breakfast was over, her mom called the kids together so that they could all pray together the 27 song. And then Elizabeth picked up the binder that her mom had bought her, and she put on the sunglasses that she hoped might hide how scared she was. And she took the bus to Little Rock Central High School. The bus dropped her off two blocks from the school. Now, I don't know if any of you have ever been to Little Rock Central High, but it is a massive building. It covers two whole city blocks. Its frontage runs two whole city blocks. And Elizabeth got dropped off near one of the corners, two blocks up, but near one of the corners of that big two block school. And she walked down, and she was walking down towards the school. She could see down towards the center of the school on the street in front of the school, down towards the center. She could see the white mob. And she could see ringing the school all the way to the corner, the National Guardsman that the governor of Arkansas had called out the night before in order to prevent Elizabeth Eckford and her nine other African-American kids from going into the school in defiance of the federal court order. She was 15. Now, as she was coming up to the line, she could see that the National Guardsmen were letting white kids through. And in that kind of mind of a 15-year-old, what she thought was, well, they let me through too. But when she got up to the corner, the Guardsman told her that she had to go down to the center of the line, all the way down to the main entrance of the school. And so she did. She walked along the street, along in front of this long National Guards line. And as she walked, the mob came up behind her, trailing along behind her, screaming at her, shouting at her, some of the kids shouting as if it were a football game. Two, four, six, eight, we don't want to integrate. And others yelling racial slurs. And somebody in that mob yelling over and over again, lyncher, lyncher. And there were newspaper reporters there, of course, because this was a major national story. They trailed along next door with their notebooks, asking her for comment that she refused to give. And the photographers walking backward in front of her to get this very picture. And she refusing to say a word. And finally, she got to the center of the school, the center of the line along the street in front of the school, where she had been told to go. And she came up to the Guardsman who was standing there. And she asked if she could get through. And they told her she wouldn't be going to school and she needed to move on. And for a second, she had no idea what she was gonna do. She couldn't go back to the where she'd come from because the mob was behind her. And so she thought she had no choice, but to just keep going. And that's what she did. She kept walking all along the street, the mob trailing along behind her, the reporters gathering around her, the screams, the yells, the threats, until she finally reached the end of that two block stretch in front of Little Rock Central High where she saw a bus stop. And she sat down at the bus stop and she smoothed out her skirt, the way a proper young lady should. And afterwards, the reporters said, well, they created a kind of cordon around her to protect her from the mob. And maybe that's true, I don't know. But beyond them stood the mob screaming and yelling and that person still there threatening to hang her from a tree. How long she sat there, no one could ever say, maybe about 20 minutes, half an hour. And at one point, an African-American man, middle-aged African-American man came up and offered her a ride home. But her parents had told her never take rides from a stranger, and so she politely refused. And then finally, a white woman came out of the mob and this white woman started to harangue the other whites around her to say that they were gonna be sorry for what they had done someday. And Elizabeth was horrified because she feared that what that white woman was gonna do by trying to tell off the mob was she was gonna make it worse. When all Elizabeth really wanted is to be let alone a warrior of the civil rights movement, sitting on a park bench, trying not to cry. The next day, this photo ran in all of the major newspapers in the United States, made the front page of every major newspaper in the United States. And in that image, what happened was that millions of white people were forced to confront, for only a moment, the confrontation, the contrast that the civil rights movement wanted them to see. Not the individual one, though that's obviously terrifying, but the systemic one. The one between a social community that could produce a woman, a young woman of such grace and dignity. And the social system that could take ordinary people like the people you're seeing in this picture and twist and turn them into thugs in defense of the indefensible. Over the course of the 1960s, civil rights movement would twist and turn in all sorts of complicated ways. And I tried to trace some of those in my book. But it would never have more power than when it built this extraordinary contrast that Elizabeth Eckford brought out on a glistening September day in 1957. Four years later, this woman, Estelle Griswold, got herself arrested. Estelle Griswold, once upon a time when she was young back in the 1920s, she dreamed of being a professional singer. She'd even gone to Paris for a couple of years to try to make a go of it. Didn't quite work out. In 1927, she came back home to her home state of Connecticut, where she fell in love and married an aspiring ad man. And for the next 30 years or so, she trailed along behind his career wherever it took him. 1945, it took him to Germany, where the State Department had hired him to help with the occupation of defeated Germany and with the reconstruction of Western Europe after the devastation of the war. And she went with him. And from 1945 to 51, she worked herself with a refugee agency, an agency trying to help a massive refugee crisis that engulfed Europe in the terribly brutal days after the war. In 51, they finally decided to come home. They settled in New Haven, Connecticut, came back to Connecticut. And for a year or so, she continued to work with a refugee agency, but its headquarters were up in New York and she got tired of the commute. So she quit and went looking for other work, but she had a kind of particular skill set as an administrator that wasn't in enormous demand for a woman in New Haven, Connecticut in the early 1950. So it took her about a year to get a job. Finally, in 1953, she got a job that she thought would be interesting. She was hired as the executive director of the Connecticut branch of Planned Parenthood, the nation's leading advocate for birth control. Now, she said afterwards, he had no idea about birth control when she took this job. She didn't know what a diaphragm was, but she thought that work could be interesting and she had administrative skills. And the work turned out to be very, very interesting. In the late 19th century, any number of states had passed laws trying to prohibit in one way or another, birth control. And Connecticut was one of two states, Massachusetts was the other one, that had particularly stringent laws in Connecticut from 1879 forward, it was illegal for anyone to distribute, to sell, or to use any form of birth control. When Planned Parenthood was formed in the early 20th century, it made it a special effort in Connecticut to get that law repealed. And for decades and decades, in the middle decades of the 20th century, Planned Parenthood kept lobbying the Connecticut State Legislature to repeal that 1879 law. But they didn't really wanna do it, there were political costs to doing that. And the truth is, nobody enforced the law. And so it sat on the books. And when Estelle Griswold took over as Executive Director of Connecticut's Planned Parenthood in 53, she tried too to lobby the legislature to get them to withdraw the law. Didn't have any luck. And so in 1958, she decided to change tactics. She arranged for two married couples who were willing to cooperate with Planned Parenthood to sue the state of Connecticut for prohibiting them from using birth control they wanted to use, they wanted to get the law declared unconstitutional. And in the way these things work, that case wound its way up all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Finally reached the Supreme Court in 1961, in the spring of 61, four of the nine justices were willing to say that that law was in fact unconstitutional. But the other five, they said that there was no real law here. It was on the books, but no one was enforcing it. And as you undoubtedly know, to have a Supreme Court case, you have to have real harm. You can't just have a case that is an abstraction, you have to prove that somebody's being harmed and these married couples couldn't prove that. And so Estelle Griswold's case failed. And that's when she decided to get herself arrested. To be more precise, what she decided was that the way to test this law wasn't by getting married couples to say they were being prohibited from using birth control, it was to get herself arrested for distributing it. And so through the summer of 1961, she arranged for Planned Parenthood's Connecticut branch to open a birth control clinic in New Haven where women could come in and get the, and men presumably could come in and get the information, that she thought about it in terms of women, getting the information they needed, how to use birth control in their families. And she always assumed this was about married women. They opened their clinic in October 2nd, on October 2nd, 1961, in direct defiance of the law, and nothing happened. Because nobody in position of authority in New Haven cared that they were distributing information about birth control. But at least one person in New Haven did. A man who worked for a car rental company, in fact, a devout Catholic with five children at home, who believed, according to the teachings of his church, that the use of birth control was a sin. And therefore, should not be allowed by the state. And the law said that this was illegal and he wanted that birth control clinic shut down. And so he contacted the local authorities in New Haven to demand that they go over and find out what was happening and shut down Estelle Griswold's clinic. Nobody wanted to do it. Spent a better part of the day being shunted aside, shunted along from one office to another in New Haven by everybody saying, well, you really not to talk to this person. You ought to talk to that person. You ought to talk to this one. Nobody wanted to deal with this guy, but he was so persistent and so insistent that finally the prosecuting attorney said, all right, all right, basically to get him off the phone, I'll send a couple of policemen over. And he did. He sent over a couple of policemen to Estelle Griswold's clinic. And when they arrived, she came bounding out of her office and she grabbed hold of these two people and she brought them into the office and she sat the officers down and for an hour, she gave them every little bit of information she possibly could about birth control, all the pamphlets, all the information. She was dredging up every bit of technical knowledge she possibly had, throwing it at them and they sat politely taking notes. And when she was finally done, they all got up and they shook hands and they walked out the door. Two weeks later, she got a letter informing her that she was being charged in violation of Connecticut's 1879 statute exactly as she wanted to be. She was convicted as she knew she would be in January of 1962 and find $100 for this enormous crime of distributing birth control. She then appealed that conviction all the way through the state legal system up through the Connecticut Supreme Court. And when she lost as she was going to do, she then went into the federal courts and in that long complicated way that court cases have, and you've ever been in a court case, you know what I'm talking about. Her case finally reached the Supreme Court for oral arguments in 1964. And in the spring of 1965, at the end of their 1964-65 Supreme Court term, the Supreme Court ruled in her case, Griswold v. Connecticut, not only that the 1879 Connecticut statute was unconstitutional, but it was unconstitutional because it violated a right that, up to that point, no American had a right to privacy. It was out of that court case, in other words, the Planned Parenthood cracked through that pro-Kiel world that the K-Hills had lived in and opened up such dramatic litigation to come. The most dramatic of it, Roe v. Wade. And then there's this young woman, Alison Crow. She, Alison had been a graduate of Wheaton, Maryland's John F. Kennedy High School just a year, when the Washington Post reporter came to the school to ask about her. He went to the front office as he was required to do. And when he asked for any information they could give her, give him about Alison, he really didn't have much to say. They pulled out her file, gave him a copy of her grades, of her SAT scores, left him see the letter that her guidance counselor had written on her college application. Said something like, Alison is a very mature woman, young woman, but really nobody remembered anything much except how pretty she'd been. And even that wasn't necessarily a memory of her because already the photo you're seeing, our high school graduation photo had made the papers by then. Not that anyone really, John F. Kennedy High in Wheaton should have remembered Alison Crow. She came to the school the way a lot of kids did to a place like Kennedy High, trailing along behind her father as he pursued his corporate career. Her dad had been hired by the Westinghouse Corporation in Cleveland, Ohio in 1949 when he was a young man. And there he and his wife started to raise their family, Alison and her younger sister. 1963, her dad was transferred to the Pittsburgh office. So the family trailed along behind him to Pittsburgh. Then a few years after that, he was transferred again to the Baltimore plant of the Westinghouse Corporation. But by then, Alison was a sophomore in high school and her younger sister was in middle school, I think. And they were a little worried about how the schools would go. And so they decided to settle in the Washington, D.C. greater area, settle into the suburbs. And her dad would get the drive up to Baltimore every morning and Alison and her little sister would get glistening new suburban schools. Kennedy High had only been open a couple of years when Alison enrolled. But for some reason or another, Alison didn't really make much of a mark in high school, probably because she had arrived as a sophomore, probably because she was 15. Didn't join the sort of clubs that the cool kids joined. Didn't earn the sort of grades that made her a standout in the classroom. And when she reached her senior year and decided that it was time to apply to college, she only applied to one school. What she remembered was that when she was little on a Sunday, her mom and dad and her little sister, they'd all pile into the car and they would drive out of Cleveland, out into the countryside in that way folks used to do. She loved those trips, just driving aimlessly out in the countryside. And so she decided that she would go to a college. It was out in that countryside too. She enrolled at Kent State. And into her first year at Kent State, the 69, 70 school year, the folks back at her high school only heard from her once. She wrote once in the spring, I guess it was in the winter to ask that they send her transcripts to the University of Buffalo because she was thinking of transferring. And no one had an idea why, she didn't explain why she was thinking of transferring, but it turned out that she had met a young man from Long Island. They become boyfriend, girlfriend. And the young man didn't really fit in at Kent State. He wore his hair too long, he didn't care about football. His roommates used a homophobic slur about him. And so he decided that he had some friends at the University of Buffalo and he'd like to transfer there. And Allison was gonna follow him just as her mother had followed her father all those years. She and her boyfriend were together on the 4th of May, 1970, crouching in a parking lot when the bullet from the National Guardsmen ripped through the Kennedy High T-shirt she was wearing that day. The next morning, the anger was flooding through the country. In what would become the most intense moment of the anti-war movement, college campuses shutting down all across the country and the protests reached to Kennedy High School too. A group of kids came out of the school and they went up to the flagpole in the front of the school and they demanded that the flag be lowered to half-mast in Allison's honor. And another group of kids came out and said, no, that that flag had to stay at the top and there was a tussle, a lot of pushing and shoving until the principal came out and he worked out a compromise. He said that the flag in front could be lowered to half-mast but they'd leave the one over on the side up all the way at the top. And that got the kids back into the school. But at some point or another, somebody came out and they took that flag at half-mast and they pulled it all the way down and they burned it in a garbage can. And it was a few hours after that that the post-reporters came to find out what he could about Allison's story. And after he talked to the folks in the main office, he wandered around the hallway to see if any of the kids had anything to remember and they all wanted to talk about the protest and they wanted to talk about the war and some of them argued that why should the flag be lowered to half-mast because one kid was killed when so many young men were dying in the war. But when he asked if they remembered Allison, most of them said, well, maybe they saw her once or twice in the hallway. But really, nobody knew her at all. That 4th of July, Ed Cahill put the flags back up on Eddie Street, he'd become a tradition. Every year, all the flags went up and the flags multiplied because Ed loved this. He collected flags, kept boxes of flags down in his basement and every year he'd bring them out and drape Eddie Street. And he added music, he'd put his record player out at the window and he'd blast out patriotic songs and he'd set up bike parades for the kids and cookouts for the neighbors in what he proudly called an old-fashioned holiday. And somehow that seemed the appropriate thing by 1970, that the displays that he had embraced back in 1961, the world that he had embraced in 61, somehow seemed a relic of the past. I'm not trying to say that the social movements of the 1960s were all triumphant. Civil rights movement of the 1960s where Elizabeth Eckford came from where her moment has to be understood had its triumphs in the 1960s, dramatic triumphs and I will argue till the day I die that they were important triumphs. But there were also limits to what the civil rights movement could do and among them was the segregation that embraced Little Rock High in 57 and that ran around Eddie Street all the time that the Cahills were there. And it's true that Estelle Griswold and those who followed shattered open those restrictions of the parochial world that was so important to the Cahills. But the issues they opened clearly haven't died. We live with them still. This is so clear in what's coming from the Supreme Court in the next few months. And it's true that the anti-war movements and I insist there were more than one movement did have an enormous impact on the war in Vietnam even as it cost far too many lives. But the larger framework of America's place in the world wasn't fundamentally transformed. And that's the story of the 60s I'm trying to tell. A story of the 60s that's complex, that's intimate, that's personal, that's terrifying and inspiring and deeply profoundly ambiguous. A story of the 1960s for our own troubled time. Thank you so much for spending some time with me today. Now I see that there is a question. No, my mistake. Thank you so much for letting me join you today. Thank you for so much for taking the time. I appreciate your commitment and I appreciate having the ability to share the afternoon with you. Bye-bye.