speeches, i was honored together with the very dear, beloved friend of mine and a major adviser to him by the name of stanley levenson. periodically to provide suggested material, in connection with the speech he gave on the march on washington, i had provided him with a summary of ideas and summary of language that he had previously discussed. so it wasn t as if i was providing him with some creative ideas that were solely mine. i was more like a secretary who was summarizing and putting in the form that could be used for the speech, the opening paragraphs, little did i know, until i was sitting listening to him, i was standing some 50 feet behind him, when i was listening very carefully, i said, oh, my god, i guess he decided to use those opening paragraphs. to those paragraphs, which constituted the first seven
0 protests in baltimore to try to make that theater admit black patrons as early as 1955, it opened in 1950, it was whites only. this was 1955, big interracial groups of students going down to that theater, lining up, trying to get admission into the theater. the early protests never worked. after years of the intermittent protests, in february 1963, a group of local students from morgan college, loyola and johns hopkins, they decided they were going to stop taking no for answer answer and they were going to get this thing done. by this point, other businesses in the downtown, including drug steers, even some other theaters, they were already getting desegregated. but the northwood theater was a holdout. the students and the civil rights activists ramped up their protests that february. they ramped up into a confrontation that looked like baltimore city hall, to trying to figure out what to do. groups of students and protesters picketed. black students, and white students and all sorts
0 out and published an ad calling on dr. martin luther king to stop the protests, to work inside the system and stop organizing these demonstrations. to stop being the outside agitator, he responded with a letter from the birmingham jail which he wrote longhand in the margins of the newspaper in which he was able to read the ad and read the stories of his fellow ministers criticizing his tactics. his arrest was one component of a big activist plan for birmingham that year. birmingham was seen as being among the most impossible places for progress. it was the most stubborn, the most violent, the most rigidly opposed to desegregation. the plan was to push there in one of the worst places notice country. and see what happened. see how they responded to pressure. and after what they thought was a slow start of sit-ins and protests in the first eight days a total of 150 people had been arrested and taken to jail, that sounds like a lot, but for the pens. children, and they held them in jail
rights leader bayard rustin, organizer of the 1963 march on washington and adviser to dr. martin luther king jr. and an openly gay man. mr. rustin s letters cover over 40 years of his life, and the correspondents include eleanor holmes nor month and martin luther king jr. this is an hour, ten minutes. i, as a lifetime human rights activist, i m especially excited to be talking to you about bayard rustin because, as you can see in his collective letters and as i d like to ask michael to talk about, he was, um, really the, the in some ways sole voice in the civil rights movement who really saw a complete set of linkages between all forms of injustice. and, um, you know, a very sad story of the split between civil rights and human rights in the united states that, actually, the schomburg center is going to be looking at in an upcoming event on march 30th, and which is certainly the subject of a whole other discussion, but it s one of the things that s very inspiring in his sto
understanding of dr. king s life the reedy spent a solid eight years with them to read for five years out there, they mention your insight you. i need to catch up with them. i need to get some of that same information. i was never successful, but someone else was trying to catch up with you at that time, and that was dr. king. what would martin said, your first book, a very, very ribbing section in which you talk about the first encounter, the first time that you had an opportunity to speak to the opening paragraph. just quickly. first of all, i am delighted to be here. talking to you. we have so many mutual friends in common. while. your question brings me back so many years. i was 29 years old. i will be 89 years of age. i was in 1960, the jury seven months out of the university s says. i get a call from a very distinguished judge and lawyer, herbert delaney. he had known me. he had written a letter of recommendation for me at law school. he called me and said, clarence, he