Honor Taylor Branch. Taylor is best known for his trillage of the Civil Rights Movement, america in the king years, the first volume parting the waters won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989. Two successive volumes and still remain essential text to any understanding of the role that Martin Luther king played in transforming our nation. Along the way, taylor won an in addition to the pults administer prize and many other prizes. I think he would agree that this extraordinary career really began in 1970 when he took a very low paid job with Charlie Peters, the legendary founder and editor of the Washington Monthly, a very small circulation political opinion and reporting magazine which still exists. I strongly suspect that taylor learned his trade as a journalist and book author while working for peters for three years. A few years later i went through a similar process myself but working for victor navaski at the nation magazine here in new york. Both of us arguably became buy og gras fers after immersing ourselves in journalism. Oddly enough, taylor and i both worked in the 1972 campaign for george mcgovern. He didnt know this, but i was just a lowly canvasser knocking on doors in california and nebraska and minnesota. Taylor however had a slightly more elevated Campaign Position in austin, texas, where he happened to share an apartment with one bill clinton. That friendship survived the mcgovern electoral debacle and taylor later was routinely sneaking into the Clinton White house to record bills thoughts about the presidency. This resulted in taylors 2009 book, the clinton tapes, wrestling with history. All of this is to say that Taylor Branch has led an incredibly Colorful Life as a journalist, historian and buy og gras fer and now hes going to share with us a few words about the peril of biographical history. Taylor branch. [ applause ] thank you. Thank you to the levy center, to ms. White, for all of you who are here and the previous fellows. Its an honor to be the im just happy to be here with previous speakers for this occasion, like bob carro. We once spent an evening wondering whether we could survive multidecade, multivolume enterprises and im blessed to see that we both have so far. So it is its an honor to be here and to discuss biography and i want to say right from the beginning that my topic is perils of biographical history but i dont want any of you who are doing biographies to believe that you cant go blythy right along without any perils. Mill perils have to do specifically with biographical history in the area of race where i believe that we grossly underestimate the subject at hand and im going to try to explain why and why that is both a burden and a huge opportunity for citizens and scholars in this era. I think biography meets history at the beginning in basics like vocabulary and point of view, which are crucial in that and of course im always asked how can you write a book about a black man when youre a white southerner but im also asked i thought you were black, so it just goes to show the quicksand in the terrain here when you approach that. I began to learn lessons about about the special properties of trying to understand race through people long before i ever dreamed of becoming a writer. In 1969, less than a year after dr. King was killed, i was a graduate student at princeton and i was haunted by the fact that the Civil Rights Movement had changed the direction of my lifes interests against my will growing up in atlanta, it was relentless all through my childhood. I was in the first grade the year of the brown decision. I graduated from college in the year dr. King was killed and all through those formative years the movement was pounding away and it scared everybody to death. It was only later that i learned most people were lying and were in the middle of the movement and were dr. Kings best friend. It was a scary event, but i i was upset that i had missed it other than picketing the white house once when i was in Al Lowenstein but if you were with al, you were going to picket the white house. I couldnt take too much krild for that. I had missed it and i really wanted to have some experience with it so in the summer of 69 between my two years at the Woodrow Wilson school i defied the program which was that you were supposed to work for the Ford Foundation or some policy Relevant Institution and i got a job from john lewis and vernon jordan. They told me they had 20 counties in far southeastern georgia that were so small they didnt even have any names on their rolodex about people who might be willing and able to run a Voter Registration project in counties with black majorities and virtually no register black registered voters. This was a shock to me, first of all because it was four years after the Voting Rights act and i thought since i had seen black people voting for the first time that it was a universal experience. So it was a shock to go down there and find that it was not only like it was before 1965 but like it was before maybe 1865 in some of these counties where i saw black prisoners come out of the jail on the Courthouse Lawn on saturday morning with shoes of the local upstanding citizens that they had shined for them to go to church on their way to mow their lawns. This was really like a time capsule to go there and i was profoundly unprepared to be alone and i had three days to go into sight unseen into these counties to see if i could find somebody that vernon and john lewis could talk to. Columbus was not more lost when he set sail for the west than i was when i went into these tiny little counties looking for the next Martin Luther king and all the preachers through me out instantly, so did the School Principals and especially the funeral parlor directors who gave me lectures about how they had things very well under control. Then i will went out into the jib joints thinking that i could recruit the rebels, the black power types who didnt exist in places like big epa where i was arrested for being on the wrong side of town so i was lost and it took me about a month before i started talking to i am which i never would have done at the beginning. You go in with your preconceptions of the time and that was difficult too until one day i was recommended that this old they called her an 1800s person, this tiny county in georgia, if anybody knew anybody that was brave enough to be interested in this voting stuff it would be she and i got these directions, you know, old country style, you go down this road until it dead ends and then go until you will see two big dead trees on the right and turn at the next left and any way, there she was on her porch rocking and i started talking to her about voting in the county and how important it was and she rocked and didnt say anything, she didnt acknowledge my name. I had talked for a long time and i was beginning to panic that it was the wrong person and finally she said, young man, do you really believe we landed on the moon last night . Because this was july 23rd, the day after neil arm strong landed on the moon and i said, yes, maam, i do. I saw it on Walter Cronkite at the motel last night. Yes we landed on the moon and she looked at me and she didnt say a word. She just kept rocking and im trying to figure out what that has to do with Voter Registration or whether she was just a fan of the Space Program or something so weird. I knew that she knew at least something about Current Events and she had a wise face and i kept talking and she didnt say anything and youre around a lot of graduate students. When graduate students get nervous, they tend to use bigger words so im trying to explain im trying to explain to her what a 501 c 3 organization is and how the grants are necessary and some of the statistics about voting and she didnt say anything and um, it went on for at least five or ten minutes and finally the next question out of her mouth was, she said, have you ever seen the simonizeed wax commercial and i was really flux moxed and i said you mean the one where the little children float across the Kitchen Floor on an invisible shield of wax and they dont scuff the floor and she didnt say anything but i think i know what shes getting at. Yes, i saw that but thats a commercial. They can make it look like the kids are floating on an invisible shield but i saw the moon landing on a news show so now im trying to explain the difference between a commercial and a news show about whats real and whats not real. Any way, this conversation went on for about an hour but she only chipped in every now and then, you know, with questions like have you ever been in a fistfight . And that she could prove that we didnt land on the moon because if we had, all we had to do was fill up our tank on the moon and on the next leap we could make it into heaven and you know god wouldnt let us do that, so we didnt land on the moon and by then i already knew that meant she was not interested in Voter Registration in this county because it went to the marrow of life and death people trying to vote. But at the time way she made this point was so indelible to me and so dumb founding to me that i went back to the motel and scribbled down every bit of dialogue, everything i said, everything she said and it was the beginning of a summer diary that reached 400 pages by the end of the summer, the first thing i ever wrote that was not assigned, was not meant for publication. I will turned it into princeton and got in big trouble in the graduate program because i was supposed to write a memo, but one of the professors sent it to Charlie Peters at the Washington Monthly who published excerpts of it almost without asking me. Thats what led me into journalism. The point of this, though, was that i had been reading everything i could about the Civil Rights Movement to try to find out what had happened that it had so much power on southerners and so much power on the nation in my early youth and most of it was analytical and food of labels about who was militant, who was radical, what was economic, what was religious and political labels and none of it felt like the movement that i saw, but the personal discovery that i had from people in south georgia like this simonized wax woman made me realize that discovery and race is when things get very personal and you forget all these labels and they scramble and you can put them back together later, and i resolved that if i ever could write about the Civil Rights Movement i would try to write in the narrative style about the people involved rather than the analytical concept which i think float over the realities of race like paper airplanes. Thats why my books on race or long and fat because theyre stories and it raises the tension about the reality of stories that are personal versus the Historical Impact that comes from the concepts that we deal with and that is to me the perils of historic biography grounded in race. I started it was only the beginning of my troubles with point of view, though after a few years at the Washington Monthly. I realized im never going to grow up. I thought i was just in journalism until i could decide to be a professor or political activist and that journalism was a good place bide my time and be an observer but i thought i would become a writer and the way to break in to book writing was with as a ghost writer. My first ghost writing book was about john dean about watergate. I lived in his house in the basement with moe and wrote Blind Ambition which has ruined by Wikipedia Page but conspiracyists constantly say i helped perpetrate the conspiracy of john dean blaming nixon when he was the master mind. But it gave me experience in writing from the point of view of someone else. I was just john dean in this book and the next one i did was with bill russell. I thought i would write with somebody as different as possible from john dean and so i went and lived with bill russell in seattle and learned it was an amazing year and i learned from him that hes not only got the worlds greatest laugh and Cracker Barrel fill loss fer but he thinks deeply about sport. Each sport is its own mix of art and war and anybody whos going to be good in the sport understands that, there are many uneducated top tier athletes but there are no dumb top tier athletes who understand the nature of their sport. So i thought having finished the russell book, which he insisted be coauthored by him and me in his voice so that the point of view really didnt make a lot of sense but i wrote it in his voice. Then i thought this is what novelists do. They create lots of characters and the writer writes and a lot of these different points of view so im ready to write a novel so poor alice may who did the dean book, and i said to alice, how many more books do i have to do until i can do the Civil Rights Movement, i want to right a narrative history of the Civil Rights Movement and she said, well, race books dont sell. You probably need to write another one so i wrote some other books but finally came back and i didnt enjoy reading in novels any way, which is what novelists do and thats why i dont really enjoy reading im going to read you the previous face to parting the waters because i think it stands up after six years immersed in the research for parting the waters, the first question i wanted to address is the question were here to talk about tonight. The tension between biography and history where race is involved, because i think that it goes to the tension that i want to discuss about how our history is so screwed up now because of race but i didnt know that this time. This is written in 1988, 20 years after Martin Luther king and 19 years after i met the simonized wax lady. Its only two paragraphs. Almost as color defines vision itself, race shapes the cultural eye, what we do and do not notice, the reach of empathy and the alignment of response, this subliminal force recommends care in choosing a point of view for a history grounded in race. Strictly speaking, this book is not a biography of Martin Luther king jr. , though he is at its heart, to recreate the perceptions within his inherited world would isolate most readers including myself far outside from boundaries but to focus upon the historical king as generally established by his impact on white society, would exclude much of the texture of his life which i believe makes for unstable history and collapsible myth. To overcome these pitfalls of race, i have tried to make biography and history reinforce each other by knitting together a number of personal stories along the main seam of an american epic, like king himself, this book attempts to rise from an isolated culture into a larger history by speaking more than one language. So thats how i undertook to spend 24 years writing the movement in three volumes, the king years. I think king wags the best metaphor for a movement that set in motion changes in america grounded in race that spread far beyond race and the question was how well do we understand the blessings that they engendered and the lessons that that leaves for us now and the answer is not very well. Not very well so far and i think a lot of this is because of this tension between race being personal and our history being the concepts, the vocabulary, the lessons, the point of view that we have for all of history, and so i told stories in the book and im going to give you three examples that i think resonate with larger lessons but that the lessons are lost. One was, i told the story of the the New York Times v sullivan case. It is still the prevailing law, taught in law schools about libel, Supreme Court decision. It grew out of the sitins. Ill talk more about the sitins and king and what the sitins meant to king but in the sitins in 1960 they had sitins around the alabama capital in montgomery and at the same time, king had been indicted for income tax invasion on a trumped up charge and they had these sitins around the capital and harry bell fonty still here and wrote an ad for the the New York Times to raise money for kings defense in his tax trial and it was a full page ad in the times and it said here there are rising voices and there was a picture of the arrests in montgomery and it said that constitution breaking enforcement officers arrested students for protesting the segregation laws. For this ad the governor, the police chief, assorted officials in alabama filed a libel suit against the signatories on the bottom of the ad many whom didnt even know what was in the ad and against the the New York Times, took it to court where under alabama law they proved there were two factual errors, the text said that they surrounded the alabama capital when, in fact, they only were on two sides and not the other two sides and it said that they sang, my country tis of thee, when in fact they sang america the beautiful. These two facts allowed under alabama law the jury to decide whether the factual errors were libelists and they heaped upon the signatories, ralph and the people there, and the the New York Times, 3 million in libel judgments. 50 times larger than they had ever done before. This is the governor, the mayor, all of these people trying to break the movement. Law students today rea