Hope that the fcc moves with dispatch in the proceeding that youve mentioned where weve proposed to get rid of the sports blackout rule. Host does that have to go through congress, or can you do that administratively . Guest oh, theres steps the fcc can take administratively. Weve already started the process of doing that, and were getting comments from the public about that proposal. Host you recently made a proposal about 9 11 calls from hotels. Why . Guest it really struck me that this was a gap in our Public Safety communications that was screaming out for some kind of public awareness. I saw the story on twitter, actually, of someone gave me notice about the issue on twitter, and i read the story, and i couldnt believe that this poor little girl, 9 years old, had to watch her mother get stabbed in a texas hotel, dial 911 four times and wasnt able to reach anybody and ultimately, as you might know, her mother died. And it just brought home to me the fact that Public Safety communications are critical. So it got me wondering how common is this problem. So i brought in one of the preeminent Public Safety experts on this issue, and he told me a large number of hotels and motels across this country use the pbx or private branch exchange, it simply isnt programmed to recognize when someone dials 911, theyre trying to reach emergency personnel. Thats a situation that needs to change. And it can be changed in most cases, i think, simply by reprogramming the telephone system. I had the opportunity to speak with the grandfather of the girl who called 91. 911. I spoke to him last night. And he never expected this issue to become the National Issue it has. But hes grateful for the attention that everyone is bringing to it, because if one life can be saved by tweaking the existing technology, thats a good thing. And so i support his efforts, and im determined to do whatever i can to raise awareness. Host have you heard back from the hotel chains . Guest i have not yet, but im hopeful ill hear back from them and others about host and finally, why were you not supportive of commissioner clyburns push to lower prison call rates . Guest i was very much in support of the fcc taking action. I thought the position shouldnt have been sitting around the agency for over a decade, and i did put a proposal on the table that would have reduced these exorbitant rates, would have cut them significantly in 36 states and would have sustained legal criticism. But as i pointed out in my separate statement, there are, the order that was ultimately adopted was on a very shaky legal foundation, and im sad to report that the d. C. Circuit this past monday agreed with me. Host as always, commissioner pai, we appreciate you coming over to our cspan set and spending a half hour with us on the communicators. Monty talo of communications daily, thank you as well. Thank you. Guest thank you both. Cspan, created by americas Cable Companies in 1979, brought to you as a Public Service by your television provider. Gary younge is next on booktv. He examines Martin Luther king jr. s i have a dream speech delivered during the march on washington on august 28, 1963. This is about an hour and a half. Good evening. Thank you so much for coming. We have a number of thank yous, a lot of people worked to put this program on. Executive dean david scoby at the new school for public engagement, the nays institute, nation books and magazine, haymarket weeks, the guardian all really worked to make tonight possible. We, obviously, have a special thank you both to all of you who came out tonight and all of the people who are watching this event which is being live streamed, and it is also being taped by booktv for booktv and free sweep tv. So i would free speech tv. So i would ask everybody to check their cell phones just to make sure that your cell phone is off. And also just so you know that it is being filmed tonight. We will be taking questions later and passing around notecards and then reading the questions from up here so that they can also be part of the live stream and the booktv. And there will be a book signing afterwards. Haymarket books has a table, and gary will be signing books, so please join us afterwards. So this weekend i went to d. C. S and i had a couple of exhours, and so is extra hours, and so i went to see the king memorial. How many people have seen the king memorial . Its exceedingly depressing. The original plans for the monument included alcoves to honor other civil rights martyrs, but those were scrapped for insufficient funds. King towers over us. The sculpture is flanked by a granite wall. Fourteen quotes are on that wall, not one uses the word racism or segregation or Racial Injustice or apartheid. Not one. Theyre arranged like crossstitches, 196 be, 1967, 1955, 1963, 1964, completely out of context of movements and mobilizations in which king spoke them. The monument was made in china to save money. A man who excoriated the triple evils of materialism, militarism and racism, who risked his life and went to jail 30 times to challenge the courage of american the scourge of american racism, who was quick to point out the racism of the north as well as the south, who wrote from jail in 1963 that the biggest problem was not the klan, but the white moderate. That man of god and courage is now honored with a memorial that refuses to speak the problem of racism. It is into this moment, this moment when the history of the Civil Rights Movement is regularly invoked and distorted and used to celebrate the greatness of the United States that we turn to our speakers tonight. Both of tonights speakers write eloquently to help us make sense of this paradox, of these perilous times we live in where the history of one of the greatest social movements of the 20th century is used to talk of the peril of the task today. Indeed, to cover up, at times, the continuing scourge of materialism, militarism and racism. And yet of the visions we can gain from a fuller and much richer sense of that history, to help us see and work for justice in our time. Michael denzel smith is a blogger at the nation. Com and a knobler fellow at the nation institute, also a freelance writer and social commentator, and his work has appeared in places such as the guardian, ebony and the huffington post. Gary younge is author, broadcaster and awardwinning columnist at the guardian, a monthly columnist at the nation and a knobler fellow with the nation institute. He has written four books. His fourth book, the speech the story behind Martin Luther kings dream, is why we are here tonight as gary gives us a bit of the fuller his rhode island of the march history of the march on washington and reflects on the current politics of this civil rights history. So im going to turn it over to gary to kind of give us some introductory remarks and then michael, and then well have some conversation up here, and then well open it up to questions and conversation with you. Thank you. So thanks very much for coming. For those who have never seen me before, im gary younge. For those who have seen me before, im gary young this a suit. [laughter] because this is not a particularly familiar sight unless you see me at a wedding or a funeral. So the book is called the speech, and its about kings famous speech at the march on washington. And its left there as an idea that you have a great man and a great talk. But king could not do that on its own. The speech and the march came from somewhere, and i want to start by giving some context to that text. Because in the absence of that, there would have been no march, and there would have been no speech. And so i start with some of the people whose names perhaps we dont know but who paid for that speech in a range of ways. And i begin with Franklin Mccain who was a 17yearold in greensboro, North Carolina, who made his stand by taking a seat at the woolworths town town on february the 1st, 1960. And when i interviewed Franklin Mccain, he said that up until that time as a young man in North Carolina he felt that his life was worthless and that his parents had lied to him. And the lies that they had told him was the Great American lie that you can be anything you want to be. And he said as he grew through adolescence, he knew that wasnt true as a 17yearold black male in North Carolina. He knew that that wasnt true. And just as a symbol of how untrue that was, a completely different story that i was doing several years later, i interviewed a guy called buford posey from mississippi. A white guy who became an antiracist who told me quite kind of mart of factually d matteroffactly, he said i never knew it was illegal to kill a black man until i joined the army. I knew it was wrong, but i didnt know it was illegal. And true enough, in mississippi the people who were as likely as not to be killing black people were actually the Law Enforcement agencies. So it was not an entirely incredible thing for him to think. So we go back to Franklin Mccain, he knows this as well as buford posey does. And he says he was angry at his parents for this lie. So they sat up, him and his friends, late into the night january the 31st before they talked themselves into the actions they took the following day. Not knowing when they showed up at woolworths in greensboro whether any of the others would be there. He says, we wanted to go beyond what our parents had done, and the worst thing that could happen was that the klan could kill us, but i had no concern for my personal safety. The day i sat at that counter, i had the most tremendous feeling of celebration. I felt that in this life nothing else mattered. If theres a heaven, i got there for a few minutes. I just felt you cant touch me, you cant hurt me. Theres no other experience like it, not even the birth of my first child. A few years later, in may 963, in birmingham, alabama, a Police Officer attempted to intimidate some black School Children to keep them from growing the antisegregation protests. They assured him they knew what they were doing and continued their march towards the park where they were arrested. A reporter asked one of them her age. 6, she said, as she climbed into the paddy wagon. The following month in mississippi stalwart civil rights campaigner Fannie Lou Hamer overheard a fellow activist being beaten. Can you say yes, sir, nigger, the policeman demanded . Yes, i can. So say it. I dont know you well enough, said ponder. And then hamer heard her head hit floor again. The polish journalist once wrote all books about all revolutions begin with a chapter that describes the decay of tottering authority or the misery and sufferings of the people. But they should begin with a psychological chapter, one that shows how a terrified man suddenly breaks his terror and stops being afraid. This process, man gets rid of fear and and feels free. The period preceding kings speech at the march on washington was one such chapter. Until that point there had, of course, been many fearless acts, but in that moment the number who were prepared to commit them reached a critical mass. In may 63 the New York Times published more stories about civil rights in two weeks than it had in the previous two years. During a ten week period following kennedys address on civil rights in june that year, there were 758 demonstrations in 186 cities resulting in 14,733 arrests. Such were the conditions that made the march on washington possible and kings speech so resonant. And this context was global. Two days after mccain made his protest in greensboro, the british prime minister, harold mcmillan, addressed the South African Parliament in cape town with an ominous warning the wind of change is blowing through this continent, he said, and whether we like it or not, this is a political fact. Some, including his immediate audience, apartheid parliament, didnt like it at all. But as the decade wore on, that wind game a gale. In the three years between the speech and the march on washington, the following countries became independent togo, mali, senegal, zaire, somalia, niger, chad, Central African republic, congo, nigeria, mauritania, sierra leone and jamaica. Internationally, nonracial democrat and the black enfranchisement that came with it were the order of the day. The longer america practiced legal segregation, the more it looked like a slum on the wrong side of history than a shining city on a hill. Now, the story of that year in particular is a story of the base, the grassroots continually running ahead of the leadership. King spoke in harlem just a few months before the march and was heckled by protesters shouting we want malcolm. When the naacp hold their conference in chicago, they invite mayor daley to give introductory remarks, and he is heckled from the floor. When their leaders go to speak to kennedy about holding the march, kennedy says to them we have legislation thats currently going through congress. We would rather have new laws than have the negroes out on the streets. And a. Philip randolph, the trade Union Organizer whos primarily responsible for calling the march, tells kennedy, the negroes are already in the streets, mr. President , and i doubt if you called them, that they would come back. That is the mood of the moment. That the patience has worn out, the forbearance, the ability to withstand the clubs and the hoses, hoses that can fire so strong they can knock the bark off a tree at 30 feet being fired at children and dogs. Its become too much. And so africanamericans who are always fighting back start to resist like with like. In birmingham there is eventually they respond to the bombings of the klan with violence. And theres a fear both among the civil rights leadership and among the Kennedy Administration that black people will resist and will meet like with like. That is the mood that creates a necessity for a march which is called at the beginning of the year but very few people want. The polls show most americans dont want it, kennedy doesnt want it. Its insufficiently radical for many of the youth and the too radical for many of the more conservative leadership. But by the time it happens, there is a sense that if they dont do this, then what are they going to do to channel this frustration, this mass frustration . And so the march happens. Now, the key fear primarily of the state is that there will be violence. This is peculiar because most of the violence in the south has come from the white segregationists, not from africanamericans. But nonetheless, the fears that there will be violence, so it is literally policed as a military operation. Its called operation steep hill. 82nd airborne ready to fly up from North Carolina at a moments notice and drop 19,000 troops on d. C. A thousand troops in d. C. Deployed, 6,000 police working, all leave canceled, all elective surgery canceled, baseball game canceled, alcoholic sales are made illegal, and even on the mic, the mic that king speaks from, there is a kill switch that the Justice Department put in surreptitiously. The idea is that if anybody calls for insurrection from the stage, that they will flip the switch and play hes got the whole world in his hands. Thats their response. And so it is into that, into that atmosphere that king plans his address. Now, king gave around 50 speech 350 speeches that year. You take time off for holidays, thats about a speech a day. And generally hes not giving up a speech, hes an africanamerican baptist preacher, and in that tradition he drafts his sermon or, but then he crafts it in response to how the audience is taking to what hes saying. And he has a number of arsenal, a kind of a series of weapons that he can use, rhetorical weapons. And, but i the difference is that this speech, unlike other speeches, is going to be televised. If youre in the black church or the Civil Rights Movement, you had heard king speak before. But if you werent, this was his oratorical introduction to the speech. Ken kennedy had never heard him before, and at the end of the speech he turns to one of his aides in the oval office and says, damn, hes good. So king wants something on a par with gettysburg. We know a lot of these details because the fbi were kind enough to record them for us. [laughter] he wants something on a par with gettysburg. And so his, one of his main aides, wyatt t. Walker, says to king dont do the i have a dream thing. Its trite, its a cliche. Youve used it too many times before. And thats the first line of the book. And, indeed, king had used it many times before. He first recorded using it in 62. Its thought that he probably used it in 61, a couple of years before. Hed used it in june at a rally in detroit and even a week earlier at a fundraiser for black insurance executives in chicago. So this was not the first time that, by a long stretch, that he had used the i have a dream refrain. And king worries away at this speech. He seeks counsel, he has a lot of input, much more than he would generally. And what we know is that when he goes to bed at 4 00 in the morning the morning of the march, i have a dream is not in the text of the speech. That we know. And according to Clarence Jones, his lawyer and his speech writer, it was not in kings mind to do that. The next day. So the next day there is a series of meetings they have with congress. Theres a funny kind of moment at the beginning of the day where theyre in meeting congress, and they come out, and the march has started without them. Very symbolically, given what ive said earlier, Bayard Rustin, the gay excommunist Conscientious Objector and thats before you get to the fact hes black, hes the organizer of this march. And he runs out of congress, sees the march leaving and says we are supposed to be leading them. They jump into their limousines and try to catch up with the march but are blocked by the traffic, the traffic caused by the martha they martha they the