Transcripts For CSPAN2 Tonight From Washington 20130905 : co

courted and fell in love with a woman and married a second time. he wrote thousands of passionate love letters to each of these women. this was a real living breathing human being and i don't think we have seen that about woodrow wilson. >> next diane mcwhorter on her look "carry me home" birmingham, alabama: the climactic battle of the civil rights revolution. she focuses on the 1963 bombing of the 16th st. church that killed four young girls in times when the police try to disperse young demonstrators with fire hoses and dogs. this is an outward. c-span: the last lion under acknowledgments as i think my father for delivering me as robert renoir wrote out of the history into history and the awful responsibility of time. what are you getting out there? >> guest: at the last line from all the kings men which was an inspiration for this book because as you recall in that book the main character is able to tie his own history to characters he thought had nothing to do with him when he was growing up as a child of privilege. so the emotional impetus was trying to figure out my father and trying to figure out his personal history. i was able to figure a real history. c-span: why did you want to do that? >> guest: well he was a really interesting figure to say the least. he was downwardly mobile renegade son of a civically prominent family in birmingham and he did not make sense to me. he was an individualized spirit and i wanted to find out why he turned out the way he did. c-span: is he alive today? has he read your book? >> guest: he is. the last time i heard he is still reading it. c-span: what does he think of what you try to do and what was his action to the way you characterize him? >> guest: i think he said that it was honest and true and i think one of the reasons he is taking it so well as we always have a very strong bond and even though i reveal some perhaps painful and embarrassing things it was not done vindictively. it was done in an attempt to understand. righto painful thinking about you? >> guest: about him. c-span: what's the most painful thing you wrote about him? >> guest: the thing that i was worried about was he had a troubled relationship with his own father. his own father had been a harvard educated lawyer for the power company and they think he gave my father a fairly short shift when he was growing up. oddly enough even though i reveal things about my father's bigotry i think that wasn't the thing he was worried about the most but that was the original wound in a way that made him rebel against his past and his background. c-span: what is the first thing you can remember about birmingham, alabama? >> guest: funny you should ask. the first thing i remember is that the time my father was from birmingham but i was growing up and he lived in a small town out in the sticks. we would always come to town to visit his mother and grandmother. there was an inderal paint sign that had the sort of the unlike figures with blue hair sprouting almost like a troll doll. we call them bushy hair and we saw bushy hair we knew we were at my grandmother's house. that of course the largest ironman in the world who held a neon torch that shown green on days when there were no traffic vitality is an red when there had been a traffic fatality. c-span: this is what the pictures about? you say in the early part of your book the 1976 bicentennial or centennial of alabama was the first reason why he got interested in doing this. explain that. >> guest: i have grown up thinking that defense and 63 which is the climax of the book had nothing to do with me. dr. king's demonstrations in the fire hoses and police dogs in the church bombing, i was over the mountain away from all that and totally alienated from that. the book you mentioned was the alabama volume in a series in 50 states and had had a very brief account of the troubles in birmingham. i realize for the first time that a man named stetson meyer had been the only white man in town as a businessman who agreed to let his name be used in the negotiations with dr. king. i screamed to my apartment in cambridge massachusetts that's my cousin. it was the first time i realize realized this had anything to do with me embarking on this journey home. c-span: here's a picture of him and where was he? is he still alive? >> guest: he is not alive. i knew his son and grandson quite well. he was a businessman who i didn't realize he sort of touched every corner of the book. he started out as one of the big segregationist architects of the dixiecrat secession from the democratic party in 1948 when the south seceded from the party it was compared to the original secession it was so important. he was the sponsor and partial bankroller and one of the most rampant racist demagogues and a man named ace carter the author of the the education of little tree. finally he became the friend of the civil rights movement and he went through some strange process of faith and redemption. i never quite understood either put a switch sides and ultimately did the right thing. c-span: the 16th st. leftist church bombing. this is recorded before we aired it last night on the radio in the middle of this book i hear it's still an issue from 1963. what's going on there? >> guest: well it took a long time to bring any case because for several reasons. one is that the evidence is just really weak and the perpetrator of the crime was convicted by the state of alabama in 1977. since then before the two specs is -- suspects in the crime they couldn't build enough evidence. nobody ever talks about his so we may never know what really happened leading up to that explosion. also the investigation initially birmingham was the johannesburg of america the time the most segregated city in america. the birmingham police were in cahoots with the client and i had a long collaboration. some of the movements of the klavern that perpetrated the bombing had been under the protection of the police so that investigation was flawed. c-span: what happened on that day? what was the exact date? >> guest: it was september 15, the 1963 and the schools of birmingham had just been desegregated over the last previous couple of weeks. c-span: who was president? >> guest: kennedy as president george wallace's governor and wallace had called up the state troopers to prevent the young children from entering the schools and birmingham and had given a signal to the segregationist that it wasn't necessary to do segregation of the schools. what had happened was that president kennedy had introduced federal legislation to outlaw segregation as a result of the demonstrations there with the police dogs and fire hoses that spring. so if the sub nine realized they would do anything to stop integration from coming about in the ended up owning the church did that. c-span: what was best klan? >> guest: the klan was an interesting terrorist arm of the establishment for a very long it started out in the 20s in earnest as sort of oddly enough the liberal arm of the democratic party, this insurgent radical populist sort of incarnation of the have-nots over the previous couple of decades. that is how hugo blocks the great libertarian supreme court justice had his collateral -- political career launched. so he was a new dealer and supreme court justice in the meantime the klan becomes the terrorist arm of the anti-new dealers. they are to fight the union, to tar it up with racism and tar it with -- claiming social equality among the workers and family industrialists of birmingham who owned the city having courage to it because the last thing i wanted was organized labor so they encourage the terrorism to disrupt labor and then finally in the late 50's the terrorist become bad for business because it's moving away from heavy manufacturing toward service and the industrial business committee starts disavowing the klan but it's too late. they have let him loose in the community and that leads to the church bombing. c-span: in 1963 how many people lived in birmingham? >> guest: they there were about 250,000. c-span: what was the racial mix? >> guest: about 40% black. c-span: the most segregated city in the world? >> guest: it was called the johannesburg of american dr. king called it the most segregated city in america. c-span: how would that be though? what were the things that -- >> guest: that were exceptional and alabama? segregated cars. why would they have to segregate the cars because they couldn't have sex and that is what it boiled down to. i could did you learn that in your studying? >> guest: and went back to this industrial base. there was a very strong economic motive to enforce segregation to foment racial strife and what it boiled down to was keep the labor force divided so they could keep wages down. white workers identified with management and they would tar the union as the n word union to try to repel whites from joining. c-span: it took you 15 years to do this? >> guest: 19, yeah. c-span: what were you doing during those 19 years? >> guest: i have to say fiber the years were spent cutting the book because the amend the original manuscript was believe it or not five times longer than what you have in your hand there. c-span: we are talking about look that is 700 pages. >> guest: the original manuscript was 3400 pages. so i cut it and i started over again and finally i was able to figure out a way to tell the narrative in a more streamlined fashion although the reviews called exhaustive. this is like the cliff notes version of it. c-span: where we living when he did the version of the? >> guest: i was living in boston when i read the campus sits meyer and have been working for an alternative legal there and was the managing editor of boston magazine. c-span: what was the name of the alternative? >> guest: the boston phoenix. c-span: how did you get into journalism in into journalism and the first-place? >> guest: i was a literature major in college and the only thing i felt qualified -- qualified to do was read books. i started reviewing books for the boston phoenix and is result of that moved into journalism and taught myself on the job. c-span: where did you go to college? >> guest: i went to wellesley where my grandmother had gone so i was destined from birth to go there. right to what we should dad doing when he went to college? what was his work? >> guest: he had a small business with eric and pressers to fill scuba. c-span: what was your relationship to him? >> guest: that was a strange period. i had into the counterculture in boston in the early 70's and during the vietnam war and he really fell out over the war and he was the archie bunker type. we have a few years where we did not speak very much. draco there is a name that pops out of this book almost out of nowhere that we know in this town margaret tutwiler. >> guest: she was a sorority sister as the brooklyn school for girls. she was a class ahead of me and it turns out that her family, she was from the family in birmingham. that is actually margaret's middle name. her family are major players in the book. c-span: white? >> guest: well they were a very prominent cooperator family. they were the fifth largest producer in commercial in the country i think. they were quite big and during the new deal they had become sort of the staunch anti-roosevelt family in the south. they had bankrolled a lot of antiunion anti-new deal propaganda and margaret's grandfather had become this antiunion icon nationwide. he was the only to resist john l. lewis to keep him out of his camps. c-span: he used to be a spokesman for the bush administration and the state department? do you know her very well? >> guest: i don't know her very well. our families were very close. my aunt and her mother ran each other's weddings. c-span: in this book you have pictures of a lot of the characters and if they are my age we will remember the names. do you remember them? and 63 would have been how will? >> guest: i was 10 and 63. i was totally ignorant of what was going on and it turns out that i ended up getting the interview for the book. c-span: this is a picture of a man named o'connor. who was he? >> guest: bull connor, most people know him as the cartoon villain of the civil rights era. he was the police commissioner of bob birmingham who was the perfect enemy for the civil rights movement. he is the one who sits the dogs and the fire hoses on martin luther king's demonstrators and 63. one of the purposes of the book is to present the segregationist in full dimension to try to really explain who they were and why they were, how they came to act seemingly against the values of their christian culture and it turned out that bull connor stockton city hall in the 1930s by the corporate interests of birmingham. the industrialists were trying to figure out a way to turn them against the new deal ample connor turned out to be there mascot. they put them in city hall. c-span: who was fred shills for? >> guest: fred shills berg is my hero. he's a very controversial militant baptist preacher who led the silver right struggle in birmingham. he was known throughout the super rights movement as the -- because you is crazily courageous. he put himself in harm's way in order to test got to see if god would protect him. his church had been bombed in 1956. but that he was lying on flew up like a magic carpet. he felt that he was anointed to lead the fight and ended up being a really important figure. c-span:. c-span: wears a two-day? >> guest: he is has a church in cincinnati ohio. c-span: do you talk to him about this? >> guest: a lot. c-span: what's the most important thing you learned from him? >> guest: what i really learned was how important he was an pushing king into the greatness. if it hadn't been for shuttlesworth we wouldn't be celebrating a national holiday for dr. king today. c-span: why is that? >> guest: birmingham have been extremely passive. there was a sense he really did not want to accept this mantle of leadership which make the same more than he was a man of destiny. it was shuttlesworth who pushed him and he said you have to stop talking to the white people. you have got to galvanize the people and lead us to the promised land. he realized he had the authority to do that. shuttlesworth was always pushing he was the vanguard, strategic vanguard of the movement and the one that pioneered direct action as opposed to passively resisting and he was just a major figure and hasn't gotten credit. c-span: who is this man right here with a tie on and his code. >> guest: the kind of dizzy looking guy? that was the reason the fbi's investigation was flawed. this was the fbi chief informant inside the most violent clan or based in birmingham. ike let me stop to ask you what is a clan or? >> guest: it's like a club. one of the small groups of landsman, a subset of the state clan. it's the name of his violent clan based in birmingham. c-span: did you talk to anybody before the book that had been a member of that klan? >> guest: oh yeah. c-span: what about your family? >> guest: kind of my hands went clammy when i was reading this fbi informants report and i came across a man named loyal mcwhorter. my last name and i thought wow it sounds like a name my father would make up the cassette was kind of mythical and romantic. i had some tough weeks thinking that might've been my father but it turned out there was a real loyal mcwhorter and he was probably a country cousin of mine but i ended up talking to his rather and loyal was murdered by his girlfriend while lying in bed and i guess he was such a bad person that the girlfriend got off. c-span: did you ever ask your father point-blank were you a member of the klan? >> guest: oh yeah. he never gave me a straight answer. i know he was never a member of the klan but he never told me what he was doing in the nice win is out fighting in the solar rights movement. there is a verbatim transcript of my interview with him in the epilogue trying to pin him down and he would just never quite tell me. c-span: why? >> guest: i don't know. one of the touching things he said to me was that, he said i'm afraid i didn't do all the things you may have thought i did as if i was hoping that he had done the worst. he almost apologized that he wasn't going to offer up any big purse line or something. it was sort of touching but frighteningly grandiose that he would claim false credit or blame for some of this klan criminal activity that he hadn't participate in. c-span: the transcript in the epilogue starts with you new chambliss. you knew gary and thomas roe. i knew them all. who bombed the church you asked. he gave me a half witted look and said it was the janitor. that's not the only time i saw that in the book. >> guest: right, you read it. you pass the pop quiz. c-span: it was the janitor. why would they always give advance that answer? >> guest: a lot of people thought that blacks had loaned their own church in order to get publicity for the movement. that was just a very popular theory among thinking people as well as cases. the janitor had been called into questioning by the fbi and because of that and i'm not sure whether he was a suspect or not but he was questioned by them so as a result of that there is this popular theory that the janitor did it. c-span: you spend a lot of time in the book telling the story of the bombing. as you have gone around and talk to people how many -- >> guest: the adults remember it. one of the reasons i wrote the book was because i didn't remember it. i don't remember when i found out and it was almost as if i had always known that president kennedy was assassinated two months later and of course i remember everything about that. it was just that i was too young for it to register. i wondered why when it happened a couple of miles from my house but it hadn't registered on my consciousness at all. write to is the church still there? do you still call it sixteenth street baptist church? >> guest: it's across the street from a great museum for civil rights institute and the church has been restored. a lot of it was damaged in the bombing. it is looking for an identity and it was looking for an identity at the time. ironically 16th st. was the seat of the black bourgeoisie and they have been hostile to king. their accommodation was segregation and they had too much to lose. they didn't have to risk that much in order to participate in the struggle and shuttlesworth was very unpopular with the black middle class because he was a mass leader and there was a big division between the black classes and the black masses. the masses were -- because they were an embarrassment to the striving elements of the community and they had made great strides in didn't want to risk that. so 16th st. was very much in that tradition and they let the movement used the church begrudgingly. c-span: so september 1963 president kennedy is in office. what else is going on in the world and has this issue been much in the news? >> guest: oh very much. the civil rights act were what became the civil rights act and 64 was debated in congress at the time and it looked like it might be a losing proposition. george wallace had been screaming about it and the civil wrongs bill. c-span: what is this picture of? >> guest: that is george wallace. that is george wallace standing in the schoolhouse door. he had run for governor on the pledge to hault the desegregation of the schools of alabama even if he had to stand at the schoolhouse door. there he is facing down the deputy attorney general hasselbeck. c-span: and on that sunday morning paint the atmosphere. >> guest: in the church? c-span: yeah. >> guest: a lot of the kids sunday school classes were taking place in the basement. a few girls had gone to the bathroom to print. c-span: what time is this? >> guest: this was about 10:15 in the morning and parmelee these girls would have -- on this church service that the pastor was inoculating a youth day because he was trying to bring new life into the congregation. three of the girls were wearing white as ushers for this youth day and they were going to sing in the choir and everything. denise mcnair carol robertson adeyemo collinson cynthia westlake. they were primping because they wanted to look really nice. they were combing their hair in the mirror and another one of their sunday school classmates came into the bathroom and he said something like they needed to get back to sunday school class because those who don't obey the lord live only half as long. at 10:22 a stick of dynamite had been put in the east wall of the church and blew out a man sized hole in the wall of the bathroom blew the clothing off the girls. they killed them all and one of them decapitated. c-span: did you talk to any of the father's? you tell some stories. tell the stories about going to the morgue. >> guest: in one case and most of that was actually from interviews with witnesses on the scene because the families had a hard time talking about it. they were willing to talk about it but calm about the four little girls and the church bombing. the pastor when i came upon the girls he didn't recognize them. he thought they were women in their 40s and he couldn't figure out who they could be because he knew there had just been kids downstairs. so the owner of the dry cleaner across the street from the church came up and he looked at the foot of one of the girls and he said, to that is denise and it was his 11-year-old granddaughter denise mcnair. that is denise. that was the first time the pastor had asked if these were children. one of the dash i think it was the father of denise westlake also recognized her shoe sticking out from the sheet in this makeshift morgue at the hospital. so those were the clothing and that is what ended up being blown off of them. c-span: what happened in the aftermath? >> guest: of the church. the area was sealed off and the white people were more worried about rioting blacks than they were about the victims. the only thing that i was able to find out, i found out from my mother stayed book that i have been in a civic production of the music and musical. my rehearsal that night was canceled because we were afraid that the black people would be out in the streets herding white people. as it turned out it was too more black children who were killed that day one by a police bullet and one by two white teenagers who happen happened to drive by this paperboy and shot him off the handlebars of his fight. it was a really tense situation. martin luther king came back to town and president kennedy's emissaries came back to keep the peace and there were high-level meetings at the white house at night to figure out how to deal with the situation and whether troops should be sent then or how to keep a lid on things. c-span: what have you found out about j. edgar hoover and all of this? >> guest: j. edgar hoover was a pretty bad guy. part of it i think stemmed from the fact that he was at totally bureaucratic creature and his main goal in life was to protect it any criticism of himself. whenever he got criticism he would find a safeguard as it happened the scapegoat was martin luther king. he had gone off on this vendetta against him that it was so ugly compared with the fact that this klan informant who we showed earlier was being shielded by his bureau and because they were afraid that his cover would be blown. they shielded the activity and his klan brothers from prosecution for various crimes of the prosecution of going after king and protecting the klan is one of the ugly chapters in the history of the justice department. c-span: what did the fbi do after the bombing? >> guest: the fbi did, they called out a manhunt that they would compare to dillinger to try to find them and they did quite a thorough job. because they were afraid gary thomas roe might offend the been involved and they told him to stay away from the scene. when they were showing pictures to witnesses they did not show row's picture or pictures of his car so they were concerned he may have been involved because he had been involved in other terrorist actions that the klan carried out. i concluded he probably was involved in the church bombing. i'm not sure whether he knew about it or not but i'm picky took part in it. c-span: years later i read an account about how there was a secret investigation, years later from 63. people went to them and this thing have been going on all these fears. how did it stay alive all these years? >> guest: yeah, the five main suspects including the one who was convicted in the two going on trial were suspects virtually from day three and they just could not build, they could not build a case against them. the evidence was nobody talked. the physical evidence in the bombing is always virtually nonexistent cuts its blown up. sometimes there's evidence on the timing device but rarely. and the investigation went through -- or some eager police chief would reactivate it and come up against the same problem which was of evidence. it happens that these two suspects one on trial probably has his heirs and one going on trial if they deem him mentally competent, mostly the evidence against them is self-incriminating statements made to third parties with virtually no new evidence itself c-span: in the epilogue of your book you talk a lot about your dad. where does your dad live now? >> guest: he lives outside of birmingham. he is you know virtually retired c-span: is your mama life? he is not married to her any longer. >> guest: correct. c-span: you said you'd he has a different way cities lived his life. does he live in a trailer now? >> guest: he doesn't live in a trailer now. one of the most humiliatihumiliati ng moments of my youth was when i found out my father was thinking about moving us to a trailer. i was going to this private girls school that my grandmother had found and it was this sort of star students and doing everything right and that my father is thinking about moving us to a trailer. i just remember thinking i can never live this down. we didn't move to a trailer but eventually in the 1970s he lived in a trailer for a while and he got it out of his system. c-span: why did he want to do that? >> guest: i think it was he grew up in this big house on a hill as my daughter's college and i think he wanted to get as far away from there as he could and the trailer seemed to fit the bill. c-span: when you were growing up how did you talk about blacks in the home and how long were they married? >> guest: they divorced when i was out of college so they were married during my entire childhood. we were taught like a lot of children were taught you never use the n word. it just was not a thing to say. my father did use the n word and i think i sort of adjusted -- rejected his politics on class grounds because i felt it was so offensive for our social class to use this word. i found out much later that the grown-ups did use this were just as they swore but they didn't do it around us. my mother was from mississippi so she wasn't really in the birmingham society at all. she was just a really nice person who would never be cruel to anybody and she sort of lived that affect whether it was to a white person art black arson. she didn't have any political -- take any political stance. c-span: do you have brothers and sisters? >> guest: i have two brothers. c-span: where are they now? >> guest: one is in birmingham and i think he was thinking about changing his name when my vote came out. i think they're all happy now and not as big of a bombshell as a feared and my younger brother is --. c-span: what were they afraid of? >> guest: i think they were just afraid of the reaction that it was going to be so hostile that they might suffer reprisals. c-span: hostel for what reason? >> guest: because i name names in the book and its a pretty him forgiving look at a lot of people that we know. as it turns out most of the really bad people from the book are dead. i have gotten some sort of sad reaction from the namesake sons of some of the people who are named in the book who are really upset about it. my uncle had been dissing me in the paper. c-span: is this your uncle? what is his story? >> guest: he was the guy who carried on the family name and a very prominent lawyer in town and sort of the country club wit and everything. he is still very much a visible part of the community. c-span: what do you think of them? >> guest: i'm very close to him. he was almost like a surrogate father to me so i was a little hurt when he told the republican news, diane has written an effective largely fictional book. c-span: did you ask them what he thought was fictional? >> guest: i was upset with the birmingham news about that. c-span: was he a clansman? >> guest: no, no that would be totally beyond the pale for someone like him. c-span: what did you not like about a? he talked about the mountain brook club and the birmingham country club. explain what that is all about. >> guest: it opens at the club which is the sanctum santorum of the birmingham elite. my grandfather had been one of the members and my uncle was one of the mainstays of the club. [inaudible] that is what he was upset about. c-span: where was that? >> guest: this beautiful tiny valley in mountain brook which is a suburb called over the mountain because there was a barrier between the gritty city and the beautiful suburb. the club is just this bucolic plantation style place where the big mules went as the big industrious were called. they had their cocktails. c-span: what was wrong with that? >> guest: from a? i loved it there. c-span: what is wrong with it now? >> guest: i don't know why he was so offended about what i wrote about it. i think he said the mt. brook club members disdained the country club members of birmingham and said it was the difference between the two clubs was the difference between kiwanis which ran the city and rotary which owned it. i don't know what problem he has with that. c-span: you did describe the fact that the club's head black leaders. what was their relationship with the members and what happened in the brook club the day the bombing? >> guest: well, it was sort of this classic paternalistic members of the family like members of the family relationship. they got a lot of perks and free legal advice. my uncle gave legal advice to club wagers and also the african-american family that worked for our family. it was sort of the classic gentile relationship that enabled segregationist to feel okay about it because they have genuine relationships with black people and relationships that were civil and kind so that was the way they were able to overlook the systematic totality of the system itself. right to sue if he went to mountain brook club today compared to what you have seen in 1963? >> guest: i went there when i was down there and people couldn't believe that i would shove my face there but i did. c-span: how long did you stay? >> guest: i stayed for a few hours but it was bingo night and there were a lot of young families there so there were people who would have known i didn't care about the book. the waiters were nice to me. c-span: did you do this after her before he wrote the book? >> guest: i would go back there at home when i was writing the book with the book came out and i was on my hauteur down there. i went down there to pay a visit c-span: did they know who you were? to the waiters know who you were? did you talk to them? >> guest: i interviewed them so they recognize me. c-span: what was the reaction when you went to birmingham and went to the bookstores and how much of the tour did you do? >> guest: i did an extensive tour and went on a lot of right-wing radio talk shows. the reaction has been fascinating. the typical reaction is and this sums up birmingham, is wide you want to trade that up after 38 years? why do people care about birmingham? the white people in birmingham haven't quite gotten that this was the most important place in the most important story in american history perhaps. finally i came up with an answer which was which you question why people would want to read about gettysburg? this is the gettysburg of the civil war at the turning point battle. finally people are beginning to accept that it's not going to go away. this is history that was made here and people will always be interested in it. the other reaction has just been shocked that all this went on. retracing the sources of the system back to the new deal and the labor movement and the anti-labour resistance was a big shock to a lot of people. c-span: in a knowledge meant to say my family lucy and isabel mcwhorter rosen were my companions on this journey and make my life complete. my in-laws were solid and carry rosen. your husband? what does he do? >> guest: he is a writer of mystery novels and nonfiction and also with television. c-span: where did the rosen's live? >> guest: the roses live in chicago. c-span: where you live right now? >> guest: manhattan island new york. c-span: besides writing this book what do you do on a full-time basis? >> guest: i hate to say it but i wrote this book on a full-time basis. i write for the op-ed page of u.s. today and -- "usa today" and have occasionally done journalism but this really kept me busy. c-span: how old are your daughter's? >> guest: lisa is almost 12 and isabel is nine. ike would if they think about this? >> guest: of course my older daughter calls me a loser and a crackhead or whatever is the popular expression of contempt and my younger daughter thinks that people will recognize me on the street now. they took two extreme positions. c-span: do they have any relationship with your father or mother? >> guest: oh yeah. c-span: does this all come up at family get-togethers? >> guest: not really. they have been fascinated with my father. they haven't been able to figure them out because he's not the typical grandfather. i'm not sure they really know yet. c-span: when it you --. c-span: you went to your father and bilmus. you have this in your epilogue. what happened up elma's? >> guest: delmas was the beer joint my father would go to after work. in the course of doing research i found one of the benefits of doing research with him was i reestablished a relationship with him because i had this ulterior reason to expose myself to stuff about him that may have been painful. coming into his beer joint bilmus and listening to the guys talk about using the n word and talk about yankees and the same old stuff. c-span: somebody says you were writing a book about birmingham and one man said tell them what it's about papa said to you. it's mostly about 1963 you said. and then your father said it's about the n movement. what did you do when you said that? >> guest: you mean did i correct them? c-span: when you go back there and he talks that way do you correct them? >> guest: i did it for a long time. i spent my main 20s trying to change him and i spent my 30s trying to understand him. i kind of retired and by then i definitely retired from the role of of trying to reform him. i just decided it wasn't my job. c-span: in the next paragraph you say for the next hour at velma's quote as far as i'm concerned you can take them all and with a minute vote and ship them all back to africa. you can send all the jewish right after them. i think there are right and everybody should own one, two or three of them. the people in that your joints said that to you. >> guest: they were talking to each other. c-span: did they know you are writing a book? >> guest: yeah and i think i may have been taking notes while i was writing and it may be one of the ways i was able to be present in that. i was not part of it really. c-span: can you figure out why people want to talk that way today? >> guest: these people were people who were socioeconomically marginal. c-span: socioeconomically marginal, on the edge. >> guest: on the edge and this is what makes them feel good. this is why the klansmen were the sort of dregs of society. they were at a the most threatened by integration because their jobs, they might lose jobs to white people if they weren't systematically discriminated against and also because it was their way of feeling important, that they were better than somebody. i think it's called the narcissism of small differences. the closer you are together the more you make of the tiny differences. c-span: you say your family has a connection to a man named bob bob -- robert welch. >> guest: robert welch was the founder of the society and as it turned out he was my grandfather's roommate at harvard law school. he introduce my grandfather and my grandmother to each other. c-span: what was the john birch society? >> guest: the john birch society was the super conservative anti-communist organization which was supposedly an educational organization to alert people to the communist man around the corner but to take over america. it became sort of a respectable alternative for a lot of his segregationist in birmingham to join after they certainly would be in the klan and if they want to organize they would be part of the john birch society because i was socially acceptable. c-span: later on you say they did believe in the russian domination and they didn't believe in a hierarchy of the union. they believe everybody was responsible for what they did for their own actions and i always thought everybody is responsible for their own actions if their actions ain't too good and they need to do a little bit more praying. >> guest: that is my father trying to explain why he believes what he did and why he was part of this resistance. he now says he had nothing against black people and there is a lot of stuff in the book about his relationships with black people. he spent the night in jail funds and he had seen a carload of white people run a red light and hit this carload of black waiters from the country club. he had told the police would have happened in the white kids would hit the car, of the waiters car and challenge them to a fight. they had a fight and it was my father and uncle who went to jail. he did have a complicated relationship with blacks and real -- with some black people. he would always say now that it was because he thought the civil rights movement was under the influence of communists and that is why he felt he had to get involved. c-span: any change in birmingham between 63 and 2001? >> guest: you can't conceive of what it was like in 63. the change has been just incredible and to me one of the great lessons of this is people always say that you can't legislate hearts and minds. people are people in human nature is human nature and you can get rid of the system overnight and guess what, they got rid of it overnight and it was amazingly peaceful. that is not to say that birmingham is not still a segregated society. c-span: is not in brook club integrated? >> guest: i don't think it is. i think might uncle hobart was designated to bring a black guest as a guest of the member. remember the whole show create controversy during the pga tournament. there is a customer in birmingham who had to undergo emergency desegregation to host the tournament. that put the country clubs on the spot and the scrambling for a qualified black member. c-span: in the early paragraph you talk about this right here. can you tell us what this is about? >> guest: that was the classic movement, a picture of the birmingham demonstrations. that was a picture of a police dog attacking a teenager named walter gladstone. it was that photograph that president kennedy saw andy said it made him sick. it's sort of galvanized the country behind this legislature to allow segregation. i compare it to uncle, -- uncle tom's cabin because it told the truth about segregation but they were misleading details in it. for example walter gadsden was not a demonstrator. he was playing hooky and was one of the bystander. he was not participating. c-span: also someone who resurfaced in the book that we don't hear much from a man named chuck morgan. who was he and where is he? >> guest: chuck is one of the heroes in the book. he was a young lawyer in birmingham and some people in washington may remember him. he was the head of the aclu for a while. he actually went from doing civil rights law to the other side representing establishment firms. c-span: when did he do that by the way? >> guest: in the 80s. right away to see live now? >> guest: he lives in florida. he lives in florida. he is a flamboyant liberal guide after the church was bombed he gave the speech to the young men's business club in which he blamed the entire community for the crime. he was essentially run out of town as my father put it. he and my father were close friends growing up. c-span: did you talk to him for this book? >> guest: many times. c-span: what was his attitude? >> guest: chocks? he could've been more pleased that the story was being told. c-span: you have a story and it's one of those things have happened during the day and may happen today but tom kaine who ran for mayor and a photograph. >> guest: this was one of the big mysteries of birmingham politics. tom kean was running for mayor against a man named art haynes who wanted to fame as james earl ray's first lawyer. he was to segregationist candidate and they were the liberals. bull connor,.com kaine was meeting with bull connor and one of his operatives had the tape black convict out of jail and paid him to come up to kaine and shake his hand. tom kean fell to over him because the black man held out his hand for a good 10 seconds and then just walked away and they got a photograph of it. that was just the ultimate sociopolitical taboo. c-span: when was that? >> guest: 61. c-span: the prisoner was waiting somewhere in the hallway and walked out and shook his hand. c-span: right, and normally the county politician would not have shaken hands with a black man. he hesitated so long and stuck his hand out and it was that photograph that cost him the election. by co-were where the 19 years worth that? >> guest: you you you know i'vei have been amazed at how quickly i went from a coma guy she is so pathetic she can't date -- a book in 19 years to wow a great achievement so yeah. it's all been worth it i have to say. c-span: in the reviews and in your time on the book to her what is the best they have said about you and what is the worst they have said about you and is it ever heard? >> guest: on the book to her? i haven't got much negative. i haven't gotten anything negative to my face. i've had plans for an show at a book signing and it had a few hard flutters but mostly you no, mostly the reaction has been phenomenal. somebody on the right-wing talk show would call up and say they should be required reading for everybody in birmingham you know and that was a white suburban nature and that called in the next color was a black arson and there were so many people in the book. this is just amazing account of this hidden history. c-span: your mom and dad have not been married for years. has your mom read that? >> guest: she has taken it all over town to the bookstores and flouting it like crazy so she is really proud. c-span: what does she think of your father? >> guest: what a lot of people done in birmingham is read the personal stuff to see about me and my family and possibly the people they grew up with. i think she was married to him so she knows what a perplexing character he is and i think she understands why i did this. c-span: what is next for you? another book? >> guest: i think so. i feel confident writing columns and the need to get out and see so i want to do that for while and i've a few other book ideas. c-span: like what? >> guest: one of them would be about another city but i have to wait for my kids to leave home to do the research for that. c-span: our guest has been diane mcwhorter and this is the way the cover looks and by the way this picture was taken when and what is that? >> guest: those are children bracing themselves against the firehouse pray and that was taken in may of 1963 in birmingham in ingram park. c-span: thank you for your time. >> guest: my pleasure. .. we're not asking america to go to war. and i say that sitting next to who well know what war is, and there are others here today who know what war is. they know the difference between going war and what the president is requesting now. we all agree there will be no american boots on the ground. the president has made crystal clear we have no intention of assuming responsibility for assad's civil war. that is not in the cards. that is not what is here. the president is asking only for the pour -- power to make certain that the united states of america means what we say. he's asking for authorization, targeted and limited to deter and degrade bashar al-assad's capacity to use chemical weapons. now, i will name clear for those who feel more ought to be done that, you know, in keeping with the policy that assad must go clearly -- use the weapon to use the impact on the weapons striebl him. it will have an impact on the battle field. just today before coming in to here, i read an e-mail to me about a general. the minister of deafen, former minister or assistant minister, i forget which. who has defected and now in turkey. there are other defections we're hearing about potentially because of the potential we might take action. it's not the prin. -- principle purpose for what the person is asking for you. gospel of freedom. martin luther king's junior for the birming haim jail and the struggle that changed the nation. mr. reider, spoke in birmingham alabama for an hour and fifteen minutes. good evening. welcome. we are pleased you joined us this evening. we want to welcome our good friend's from c-span who are taping this. it will be broadcast on booktv. we have books for sale in the back. i'm sure the author will be happy to sign them. the doors are locked. you cannot leave until the books are sold. [laughter] martinmartin luther king often quoted the 19th century ab listist thomas parker said the arc of the fifty years ago this very day, four young black college students walked in the tront door of the building down the stairs, they went over to a table and sat down and started to read. as one of them described to me later fake read. he was scared he was about to be arrested. the libraries were segregated. we had libraries for african-americans. the building was closed to blacks. they could not enter the building or use the collections here. those four students came in that day and sat down and did what you did at the library. they read for awhile. they knocked down wall. the next day more students from miles college came. they saturday down, they read, one of them went to the desk and for a library card. on the next day the library board somewhat reluctantly voted, but bending to the arc of justice, the library board voted to desegregate the birmingham public library. it was one day before king was arrested and began writing the letter from birmingham jail. think about the building that 50 years ago tonight was closed to african-american now houses one of the finest research collections in existence on the civil rights movement. and the african-american experience. and it's not out -- out of that collection in part that the book we're going celebrate tonight has been researched and read here. we're pleased to have two authors with us tonight. first, we have jonathan reider, professor of sociology at columbia university, hey the author of "the word of the lord is upon me" has been a regular commentator and contributing editor to new republican. also with us is -- appeared surprise winning author -- birmingham, alabama. and the battle of the civil rights movement. which is just been released in a new updated paperback edition. she's the author of a "deremer she writes regularly for the "usa today." everyone join me in welcoming jonathan reider. [applause] i should say not to add luster to my résume, to reassure i'm not a self-rich use northerner. i have written about white racism in brooklyn as well. the jews and italians in brooklyn again liberalism. let me say first off a certain humility is in order. for one thing, it's a tremendous delight to be here with diane, who is telling of "carry me home" is epic as the events in birmingham themselves or the epic quality that what people did in the town deserves. i can tell you, i don't want to be too gracious. buy my new book first. there's plenty of new stuff in the new edition. buy that too. there another reason for humility -- i couldn't have done "gospel of freedom "without two special people. our host for the evening, jim baguette, many years ago first prepared my way in the book connor collection. you have no idea how long it took me to get used to the bull connor collection. you may be used to the phrase. i thank also the things that his institution, the birmingham public library has done in making this history alive. i need thank another gifting archivist laura anderson for similar kinds of -- my dependent ens, i must say. she was the one who first connected me to some of the realtively unknown tapes of dr. king. some of which the sound system doesn't fail us tonight. i'll play a little bit. if i had any ability in my book to bring alive the mass meetings with the sounds of king, king in passive, king in majesty, king in bitterness, resentment. all the different sides of king, i owe those recordings and the man who donated them to the bcri, reverend c. herbert oliver. another great freedom fighter in birmingham who was fighting racism and segregation in 1948. i want to say what jim and laura what their institutions go is not logistical and practical, the words make it possible for us never to forget the courage and the blood and the sacrifice which america of born as a democracy. it's a sacred as well as a logistical which the duoresearch institutions do. as we know from a lot of other settings, if you're going avoid the past and understand something like never again, you have to know how to remember and you can't remember sentimentally or dishonesty. jim and laura make it possibility. if there's any humility here. i'm going think of dr. king in birmingham in keeping with him, i have only written in history. the anemia birminghaming haim made the history. in rising up fifty years ago, they, and i should for the people in the room, you didn't make only history in birmingham. you helped make the nation anu. i'll come back to that. that ultimately is the meaning of the 50th years. we don't want to give to some notion that history was easy. we, proud in america. we don't honor whatever the value and the institution and the decoration are by pretending it was the time of unfreedom in order congratulate ourselves we got to the promised land. i should add that part of the other -- i'll add quickly is in my other work on king i spent time with the foot soldiers. we know the famous people. there are all of those amazing colleagues of dr. king who went in to a dozen other places. people like reverend willie, and jt johnson. i never got a chance to meet james orange, i had the privilege of interviewing andrew some years ago that man of gentle defiance. he remind us it was the young people on the streets of birmingham who made flesh the theory that dr. king put forward until the letter for birmingham jail when he talked about extremist for love and justice, it was worth all the people in the alabama christian movement for human rights and james orange and meatball and andrew and all of those young people we can't forget the history forget what they did as well. now in this audience i'm not going spend lot of time rehashing the dramatic detail of the freedom struggle. i need set the context before i get to the letter. i'll try to do it pretty quickly. when i'm done, i'm going makes it up with questions with jim and diane. we want to get those in the audience. what is that history? the legendary and the acm, hr, the mass meetings vibrating with a sound i'm on my way to -- [inaudible] defiant young people who stare down the diabolical connor. connor losing it on may 3rd and the world owes him greatly as president kennedy once said, bobby ken day say it too, actually. that the movement owed connor for finally losing it and becoming a prop within the movement drama that would awaking, the nation. the eight clergy men who ended up criticizing king may not have liked tension, in fact within one day -- the next morning after the dog was biting that black young man, it was on the paper -- the front page of the "new york times." kennedy was sending assistant u.s. marshall. they were thinking we may not be able to avoid this as a moral issue. we may need to think about a civil rights issue all that have begins. american democracy wasn't vanquished -- wasn't vindicated in birmingham but a start of movement in changed the world we live in. now, i'm not going say much. i'll say one sentence. king in the letter is talking about the gospel of freedom. i have brought the gospel of freedom like the eighth century bc -- or like paul going through the greek or roman world and answering the mas done began call. it's not just for the hometown. he's going tout preach it. he's preaching the gospel of freedom to the whites. dr. king knew there was a gospel of freedom for blacks and the mass meetings were about his convincing them that you must deliver yourself. god will not take you there simply because you pray and king back in march, before the demon strappingses got going is an ebb kneeser you hear him in the voice of god saying to moses. tell the children of israel to go forward. why are they wining? go forward and king said if he's got -- i can't do it all myself. so that is the other drama of black awakening within the meetings. i'll say less about that in the questions. we can come back to that. we have after much indecision the movement is not going well in those days of april 3rd through april 8, 9, 10, 11. on good friday in the early morning king decides to inviolate the junction and go jail. he would suffer with the saver your on the cross. how many times did he preach they could put you in jail and transform you to glory? but once in jail, the jail became a dungeon of dispond sincerity. king spiraled down to depression, panic, and lost his spirit as a freedom warrior. then everything changed. he read the statement of eight white alabama clergymen criticizing him for being an extremist. it's untimely, the new mayor is going usher in a new day. why didn't you wait? suddenly king is propelling himself up that out of the valley up the mountain on a tide of indignation. so i want to start with what we think about the letter and where we get it wrong. yes, it's about injustice here. i'm here because of justice is here. it's universal. moral anger but anger. we, yes there's paul and saint august seen, but that is not where it begins. and understand the letter we need keep that in mind. so the letter and the man comes rippling off the page of the letter is try to recreate it in my book gospel of freedom it's not driven by fancy philosophy. he's not a dreamer. that man in a letter has a glorious come complexity. the accelerate hard to get a handle of. it's not one thing. academics try to figure. they classify it a public letter this, that, formal rhetoric? there are the constant display of these incredible marijuanas. we know how furious king is at the ministers. for criticize -- they call me an extremist. he starts off my dear fellow clergymen, precious gentility. when he's mad he says i'm dmointed. i hope you can see this patient men why is he wasting his time with white preachers we have an insurgency to run. we have the mass meetings. we have bailed and king is in a snit over the white clergy in a different way ct vivian said to me. it's what we expected because they were doing evil or comprising with evil. so we have that patient marijuanaly king. we have the professor king who lectures on the meeting of a moral law we have the tour guide king who takes white to the imminent recess of black vulnerability. when you have been humiliated. when your black brothers and sisters are lynched, when you have to explain to a 6-year-old girl that his daughter, that yo lane data why she can't to go fun town been you live with a debilitating sense of nobodiness. when you think king is going explode in anger. taxable property black u. it's the collective people. when you, when you when you, 276 word sentence he suddenly pulls out of it like an airplane in a swoon and says, now turning back to the you maybe you will understand why we have it hard. that's that eerie tour that king takes a voyage in to the depth of the white christian soul. he focused on the christian glery. and said i have gone through the wonderful spiers of the white churches and wondered who worships there. who is their god? it sounds like a room naitding. but there is cold distance like an anthropologist looking at it different. doesn't share the same god of king? who is their god. there's coldness there. masking the anger. there's the stay cottic after he spent paragraphs trying to say we're not reckless. i'm not an extremist. the more i thought about it, i am an extremist. gee us -- jesus was an extremist. ands up saying i don't care what you think of me. minnesota anything else it becomes a relentless smack down of ordinary white people. we need to understand the radicalism of king's disappointment. ordinary white people who consider themselves decent but never binged with indignation over the fact of jim crow. and we know some of the white clergy and their children to this day felt wronged love your. not because it's the law, not because law and orders but because she and she are your brothers and sisters. be when king preaches that elsewhere he's the voice of saint paul saying this is blasphemy. the smack county of ordinary white people which includes the kennedy administration that keeps saying wait as well. the eight clergymen. it's not that he's not answering them. but they perfectly distill all of this reluctance of a white nation that cannot, i'm quoting king, he say, i should have realized that the oppressed cannot understand the yearnings and longings of the oppressed. very powerful. we don't think of this king when we celebrate the dreamer as a tough chai'stizer. in the gospel freedom i try to show there's a transition when the first part is the dpip mat trying to persuade whites. appealing to the humanity. trying intellectual and manners. half way through it change. i must confess i've been disappointed. the whole second half is a profit pro -- it's as if we are meeting king anew. it's the king that many african-americans who knew him from the mass meetings and preaching new the ambassador of brother hollywood turns out not to be a dreerm but a christian warrior. he didn't think many whites had much empathy or willingness to act on it for black people. he wasn't naive. i should have realized he said it's important thans few members of the 0 prezzive race can understand the deep -- the exodus sneaking in there. despite the dignity and refinement you can sense the controlled anger if we read it question miss it. for years i heard the word wait. it rings in the ear of every negro. kick is now speaking not under universal mankind but a black man. if pierces him as well. i want to start moving toward the end and we can develop some of these themes and others whenever they want to take it. i want to mention some amazing things that happened toward the end. at the end of the letter king observes even if the white church does not come to our aid, i have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in birmingham. let's thought about. many of you know the history. he's still in jail. there's a little debate that he finish in a few days it's irrelevant. most is done. we edit our stuff. we're two weeks before d day. why is he confident? blacks had not risen up after he went to jail. and say we're going jail too. when was the confidence? we know the answer to this. it's king's faith in god. what he almost said to black and white audience he doesn't say at the end. the resurrection follows the cruise fiction. he re-- in a sermon addressed to fellow clergymen. he refuses to share a spiritual thought with them. he has disdain and anger. he's not going to go there. it's rare that he didn't go. nor does he say have a black and white dream of kids holding hands together. he doesn't quote the exceptional american nation. that democracy is destined for america. there's a mystery here. you can go in to it more if you are interested or diane or jim is. unralphing is key to understanding king in a new way. i'll say that years before the flowering of black pride, king was finding faith and love of his people. not just mankind but his people and the memory of the slain ancestors and the defiant grace in what he calls in the letter hoe shares it with white people. he didn't say for black audiences. the bottom vitality of our slave fore bearers. if we were able to survive the inexcusable cruelty of slavery, the setbacks in birmingham will not keep us back. i'll rev it at that for now. it's easy to see the lurch forward as inevitable. as sing saw it america was a need in redemption not a redeemer nation. it's there in the mass meetings. it's there when he's preaching. that becomes clear from one of the most dramatic discovery of gospel in freedom. there's an alternative version of the letter. nobody knows about it that king preached two days after he gets out of jail. he repeats many of the line of the letter. it's far black audience. he's not trying to persuade them. he's using it to goad them on. it allows us to adding the sound back. we add the emotion that is there. you can hear the angry tremor in king's voice. we are through with segregation now henceforth and forever. it's the same voice you hear on may 3rd, the day after -- hours after connor use the hoses and the dogs and king said our black faces will stand up to connor's white tanks. it's a defiant christian king but a defiant king. bear with me. we'll see if it works. if it does, i'll do it. he's better than i am. i would rather he do it. [inaudible] [inaudible] pushed out of the -- [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [cheering and applause] [inaudible] [inaudible] at the close of that spoken, black verse of the letter, king imagines freedom bells ringing from every mountain in the united. from red mountain in alabama and he imagines the day that blacks were to be sing "my country 'tis of though, sweet land of liberty." i'll close with this thought. with this celebration of the american nation, after all as in a few months later, he repeats this. it's in anticipation of i have a dream. when he sings hardly. his pronouncement in that church the sacred church if america is to be a great land was a taunt. it wasn't create great land. if black were able to sing with new meaning, my country 'tis of though, if they were singing able to sing at all, king lists a series of ifs. we will protest together and go to jail together. then we will be able to sing. in short, the nation most white americans thought they live in wouldn't exist until black people and especially the black people of birmingham helped create it. thank you. [applause] >> welcome back, i should say. i want to recognize a few people who are here who were and/or freedom riders. one is katherine berks brooks who was part of the second wave of freedom riders. she was part of the national student movement, and is now a local icon. can you stand up? [applause] and is dpowg john still here? he was the u.s. attorney here in birmingham who prosecuted the bombers of the 16th street church in 2002 and 2001. [applause] i guess it seem to be my lot in life establish the birmingham narrative of great event. i'm going give a little context about the letter from the birmingham standpoint. it sort of feeds in to this-ism we're in the mist of. yearning that the country feels -- explainer and the human resources facilitators. and probably if you don't know anything about the birmingham story you might think he wrote the letter from jail. people read and said that is great. what actually happened at the time was that the letter, which king's chief of staff had seen as a propaganda opportunity, actually. he couldn't get anybody interested in it. as if the letter was typed up and sent around. there's a copy in jim's archive in the birmingham police surveillance file. schfs a freefs campaign in georgia. he got out of jail too fast. he couldn't do it. at that point they couldn't get king -- it "new york times" magazine, you know, they couldn't get the assigning editor couldn't get it past the editor. so basically in this -- you see here which covered everything. there's only one page. and the reason is it made not one bit of difference at the title. the way i look at it is birmingham redeems anointed the letter. they said it's because of birmingham that now the sacred text in our democracy. i was interested in -- about how, you know, historians have to write about something that has been on the story that the story that how am i going to come up with something new? i think the letter itself as well as the "i have a dream" speech have become part of reconciliation of myth. i'm reading the book and thinking this is john has really carved out the own angle and has to be the first commentator in history to refer to dr. king as a bad ass. i have to give it to you, john. tell me how -- it's, you know, i read the letter as a seething document. still fundamentally diplomatic. can you talk a little bit how partly listening the recordings and hearing him cut loose before the black church? >> the recording -- [inaudible] what i sphownd unknown alternative version -- so much as the fact nobody -- [inaudible] nobody knew about it. and the fact everyone though you sense the seething in the words of the letter, it's just unmistakable when you hear it. but the other thing is in my last book, i had spent more than a decade cracking down recordings of dr. king and realize how much richness there was to the man that was left out of all the official narratives. scene so i have been discovering the other sides of king from talking to all the king's colleagues and tracking down again, the ordinary sermon. i had a sense of i already discovered how important black pride and, well, it wasn't a black nationalist. he wasn't so far away from many of the things that were radical people were arguing. so hearing king both this preached version of the letter, but also more generally really changing my idea of what king the man was about. i taught the letter for twenty years. i kept seeing things that were in front of my eyes. it's only in the last couple of years they thought what is the meaning of the fact that he doesn't address the clergymen end spiritually. i can't find almost any other moment in which king doesn't end like that. and there's the text of work involved that involves both, again, the recordings c. herbert 09 vif. my re acquaintance with king. if you know how the hear and read the letter from birmingham jail. it's all there. it's like meeting dr. king anew. you're a plover of sociology. how did you teach the letter during the twenty years of teaching it? >> i didn't teach that in a sociology course. i loved writing. i teach first-year writing seminar. i thought it was a great work. forget the substance for a minute. it's an amazing artistic establishment. we did a lot of looking at the text i took it out of the historical context. the anthropologists have a way of making everything proprietary. as an ethiopian an referred as white racial black lash in brooklyn. tell me about the -- i think of your birmingham. it's something that comes out. a movement, the prison, and then the awakening. what a is the reaction you're getting. as you said, we're exposed to a "i have a dream" speech sermon on the -- you talk about the seething king. how did student respond to that. if u yo taught that. and how is the response to the book? >> well, i think the response has been really extraordinary so far. it comes on a number of levels. last week i was on tsh he was saying, you know, you have the tough king. of course, that is the letter king. not the dream king. and i said, no, no, no wait. if you listen to i have a dream, the king is there. thing but that's in the first half. i said within no, it's in the second half too. if you know how to hear it. king i was a gene use at hiding and insinuating. he donees downtown anger in the second part book -- but look at the substance. he re-- preached version at 16th street baptist church at the end of dream he says we will be able to sing my country 'tis of though if we work together and protest together. so with king the stawns never varies. it's sometimes there in an insin situation in a hit. he's a jeeb use of adapting the tone to his intention. he wasn't yelling at the eight clergymen who made walker citied me his cup of endurance right over. he wanted a civil rights bill. he didn't want to sort of chastise america mainly. suddenly the interracial groups that were meeting. the clergy not the eight clergy here one or two of them were perhaps over time responded. but there were rabbis and catholic priests and ministers who were joining in. king didn't want to kind of get in their face. because he was welcoming those allies. but it's still the toughness very much there. yes. i guess what you're saying, john, you haven't gotten any pushback for turning king in to wright? >> well, -- i'm kidding. >> it's a great question. because people, you know, my last book came on deion wrote a column on wright when she quoted and he said, wright isn't martin luther king. we're not turning him in to that. neither is ryder. there is more than there in king that resonates with wright. if you read most of wrielgt's speeches which is something he also said. yes, i know diane can be a bad [ bleep ] as well. it's a good point that there is a long tradition in african-american theologies and preaching that has chastisement. there's the loving grace of the savior. they are all part of king. they are all there. the rebuke and the love. that's why ct said look he's telling them of the evil. that's what a preacher does in a prophet does because they can be redeemed. one way to think about it. that's why the transition is a midpoint. when skinning basically done explaining, than to me is the most significant part. he gets all the reasonable part under the way. if you read from where he says i must confess my jewish and christian brothers and boom, it reminds you how complicated king's relationship to manners was. he was refined that never kept him from being tough didn't come out tough. when joseph put it to me once, he was a gentle spirit with a tough message. and vitamin sent's line as most of us know. king was an inconvenient hero. he meant to be increant, but america wants a convenient king who makes us feel good. >> let's transition to a more convenient season right now. i think we should maybe read a little bit of the address to the moderate. -- the single page in my book about the letter pretty much dealing with his chastising of the moderate. i think that probably most of my -- i guess my biggest fear in terms of looking asking myself what i would have done back then is would i have been a moderate? the moderates don't do well in history. even the brave moderates who become liberals back then. somebody like david who really put a lot on the line. it you read -- , you know, went ton become mayor. he ousted bull connor from office. a young lawyer. if you read his quotes now from back then. he didn't look good. and yet he was really brave. and really progressive. i think i always wonder we know he wouldn't have been in the clan or -- i always ask myself would i have had the courage act on a conviction that only going hurt me in order to maybe help somebody else? then be marginalized. there was a word for people in white people in the south who did speak out. it was called the -- so if you are going put yourself on the line, you're endangering yourself and joining the group. so that's maybe that's why his address to the moderate really got me. do you want to read a little bit of that? i do. i want to underline your point. i think it's essential. there's a tradition in white liberalism or not even liberalism. the enlightened folk to define themselves in opposition to the red neck it's true in brooklyn, manhattan, or down here. there's a great statement that ralph has always made which is i always had great sympathy for the red knick and the wool hat. the second point that really, i think, diane makes. it's a prothreatic point which is none of can be smug or self-righteous. when he was mad, the northern liberal rabbi arrive on may 7 or 8th and walked down the 16th street baptist church. .. fred shuttlesworth here's grafting complaining about how tough it is and they don't want to become visible in birmingham and they want to get into this and whiteside and here is a guy who has the courage to risk death taking way more risks and these people are complaining. he is supposed to sympathize with the whites who say go slow so these things are complicated and we need to be careful. that is what i think going back to the text here and as many of you know, jim baggett has sponsored a reading that is spread -- of the letter that has spread across the country in the world which you should say something about pretty extraordinary. the far reaches of the world just like in europe. it's everywhere. andrew young said to me king preferred to speak rather than right and we all know that so if he could have delivered this he probably would have delivered it after all bad where is it? here we go. okay. this follows the section and i'm going to focus on his criticism first of the white moderate. he has not gotten to the white church. listen to the portrait of the white moderate and he says lukewarm acceptance is harder than outright hatred. i have almost reached the conclusion that the great stumbling block is not the white citizens counselor of of the ku klux of the white moderate and here's the little portrait who is more devoted to order them to justice who prefers a negative speech which is the absence of tension to a positive which is the presence of justice who constantly says i agree with you but i cannot agree with your methods who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom who lived by an a mythical concept of time and constantly advises to wait for a more convenient season. listen to passive/aggressive. i would hope that the white moderate would understand all of this. this is like what you would tell your kid. i'm very disappointed in you. i had hoped you would understand but i know you didn't. look what happens after he does that. the voice of the profit insinuates itself because not long after it he says we will have to repent in this generation not for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. human progress never rolls in on wheels and inevitability. now again we know what he said at 16th st. baptist church on april 22. we can add the sound back. he didn't say we will tell you to wait for a convenient season. he said wait for a more convenient season. that is all we have ever heard. so that is the critique of the white moderate and finally the white church that hides behind stained-glass windows. he has now gone through this great trip. i have traveled. listen it's the gentile. i have traveled the length and breadth of alabama mississippi and all the other southern states in sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings i have looked at the beautiful churches with their lofty spirals going heavenward and impressive religious education buildings. over and over i found myself asking what kind of people worship? who is their god? where were their voices when the lips of governor barnett dripped with nullification. where were they when governor wallace gave a clarion call for violence and hatred? when bruised and weary men and women decided to rise from the dark into the complacency to the bright hills of creative protests? and he has contrasted the church with the early christians and when he describes the christians it sounded like the foot soldiers. they went into town and were called outside agitators and extremists. because they were intoxicated by god and i will just read you one other aspect of the critique because now the preacher is back he writes, i have lost that great line but i will tell you what he says. oh how we have blemished the body of christ and king is saying maybe we have to get up on -- give up on the white equation. he is talking that talk but what he is saying is when he writes oh if you have heard king as i have when he preaches it once again it's oh oh how we have limits the church of christ, the body of christ. that is what he says. they have been conformist and not courageous and therefore they are really guilty of spiritual malpractice and one other thing he says in criticizing the way of the moderate christian. i have longed to hear them. right here is where he said i have longed to hear them say love the black because he is your brother. it is tough. calling somebody lacking in ecclesia may not be insulting their mama but it's pretty tough. it's pretty tough when you're talking to your fellow christians. >> you make an important point in the book that when these moderates are appealing to the better nature of the self is not from the standpoint of justice. it's from the standpoint of law and order, that we should follow court orders because that is what a decent society does. not that we should treat our brothers as equals because that is what a decent society does and i think that's very important distinction. >> really important and i think you have set up well. king is contrasting that in his mind with race and religion in chicago in january of that year where he repeats much of the lines that will stream into the letter from birmingham jail and there are seven or 800 white clergy mainly from the north from every denomination and what they are starting to say is racism is a sin. when christian century publishes a letter from birmingham jail on june 12 the day after kennedy's race speech they removed the names of the eight clergymen because they realize this is unjust for the eight clergymen. they are just the ones who put king over the edge. this is for all of us. including themselves that the white church cannot afford to be smug and we need to think what is our faith really mean? >> that is exactly what i was going to do agree with jim. it's kind of, some kind of weird fluke or a weird consistency i guess i should say of human nature. it's really hard for people to do something for the right reason. even in the debate about torture now it's like we have to prove that it doesn't work in order to make your argument. you can't just say it's wrong and we don't do that. and what was kind of interesting with the eight clergymen one of the reasons that they were so shocked that king had gone after them was that they had published a statement in january in protest of george wallace's segregation now, segregation forever a doctoral address. and for the first time they had said it's wrong and that was a really notable departure for someone to make a public statement. we listened to that now and it just seems so trivial for somebody to say that but at the time they were really going out on a limb. so when they get this back from king you know they go you are so misunderstood and when i interviewed him in the 80s he was still complaining about how king had made them out to be a bigot. that was what he had taken away from this experience. >> what the d. say? i miss some of that. >> rabbi was complaining in the 80s when i talk to him that king had made him out to be a bigot and he was really sore about that. >> if we could collect the written questions now and we will continue but we will go ahead and do that. >> you may want to research this later. i am roman catholic and i would remind you of this. dr. king when the -- the united states itself. [inaudible] the archbishop criticized the priest and the nuns. he criticized the priest and the nuns in support of himself to support the demonstrators but say if he will put the bishop said when he was a nationalist. he was saturated with segregation for many parishes and schools. [inaudible] >> i will just say a quick word because i know jim wants to follow with the questions but i do give a great deal of respect to him because it is true the eight clergy were not all the same and there was the callous bishop carpenter whose response was inexcusable and there was doric who became, he understood. he said i was against segregation but i did not understand it the way dr. king meant it and the one on two really embody the prophetic ministry of king and after king was killed, he preached the words, the critique of moderates at the commemoration. and because king loved to sample other people's language he would always quote people and imagine them quoting him. he would love the fact that doric was quoting his own words back to him. he would give him such pleasure that he would stream that in and doric became king in some sense. you make a very lovely point. >> did you all write any books about -- of the klan? >> i did not. i did a little bit on bull connor but it's really diane spoke "carry me home" is an extraordinary voyage into that world so absolutely. it's terrifying and it really puts you back in that time but again a very good points to keep in mind there. >> john let me ask you if you grew up as i did in segregation you heard -- always heard the expression extremists on both sides and what that meant was the civil rights activists were considered to be the moral equivalent of the ku klux and considered comparable. one of the brilliant passages in the letter from birmingham jail, uchitel when he's being called extreme by the clergy that the nerve on his temple starts going crazy. talk a little bit about how he embraces that label. >> well, before that again the very affable king is trying to say see, i am not extremist anti-does it in a number of boys and he talks about and reminds you of the conservatism. the boston tea party and everything but knox's did in germany was legal and i hope i would have been there for my jewish brothers and sisters if i was in nazi germany and in hungary. he puts himself with the hungarian freedom fighters who violated the wall -- law to fight communist oppression. he is not really an extremist and even says look in these two strains within the african-american community there are black civic there are blacks to become adjusted to segregation or have got a little bit of privilege because they are in the middle and upper middle class and they don't want to rock the boat and then there are these voices of hate who are black nationalists who sometimes border on hatred of the white man. so came, think what he's doing about there. it's a hope portrait. you thought i was an extremist but i'm a moderate like you. i have my george wallace is and i have his other people so he has now tried to do that and that is when he finally stops and this is how you know that king has been affable and friendly and being nice to the white man but then he turns on a dime. it's a series of slurs going back and forth. he takes the manners right back and becomes as rude as can be. i beg you to forgive me if i have shown an unreasonable impatience. who is going around begging and apologizing to the white man even in 1963? not shuttlesworth or james babil not very many people in sclc would have done that so you think he's not interested and he immediately says in the same parallel but if i have been unreasonably patient -- inpatient and goes whose convoluted phrase that says with justice i beg god to forgive me. what he basically does is he is taking the apology that because what really letters is what god thinks and not the people he just apologized to paid once he family embraces extremism and looks like he is still acting diplomatically but he takes it back and says because ultimately what defines justice is mike god and he says in the quaker edition he left a more explicitly. the differences in the other versions are miniscule. some scholars make a big deal out of that one of the things he took out between may and june was -- let me make sure i've got this exactly. i may be confusing it but in any case there is the importance always of this embrace of extremism. i'll go i know, he does leave it in. an early version he said think about there were three extremists on calvary. two were extremists for injustice and one was extremist for love and justice. king always identified with jesus more than moses. he used exodus often but if you listen to his weekly sermons overhears, exodus is and that import most of the time. jesus is the savior and the sacrificial endeavor so he says jesus was an extremist. love those who hate you. bless those who despise you. so again, but to really appreciate the power of this letter you have got to see. this is a little bit bad. at first he says c. i'm going to show you that i'm okay with you. i'm glad you approve of me. i'm not going going to show you who have you think i am and then the crowd turns around and says i am proud to be an extremist. he says i to pleasure the more i thought about it. there is such richness and that. >> john, as the attorneys on law and order say since you opened the door and as a way of asking the question i'm going to ask, what john mentioned the birmingham public library is sponsoring next years reading of the letter from birmingham jail and what we did, a very simple idea. we decided we would have people here at the library read the letter aloud to whomever shows up in months to hear it. we decided that we would issue an invitation to anyone anywhere who wanted to also do the same thing any time on that day. i am not someone who understands social media so i don't quite understand how these things happen, but through the hard work of a number of people here and through this magic of this social media thing it just took off and we have on our web site at page asking everyone to just let us know that you are going to be a -- doing a reading and where and how you might do it. when i left my office to come up here we had 176 locations signed up so far. they are all over the world. [applause] thank you john. we have locations in 28 states. we have people who will be reading the letter and the wonderful thing is it's going to go on all day because it's going to start in australia and it's going to come around the world. we have people in south africa somalia cameroon israel england northern ireland germany thailand. we have a teacher in taiwan who is teaching her students about the letter. they are going to read the letter on the 16th and then the students are going to write letters back to dr. king which we will be receiving. so i said all of that to ask you to talk about that because you can include in the book talking about the place of the letter has not just in birmingham history or american history but in world history and in freedom fighting all over the world. >> there are two complementary impulses at work in the letter. one, of the man who is a fighter for his people. he says i'm here because injustice is here but it's really because black people are suffering. but he never forgets that he is here because universal humanity suffers. so there is nothing that he is doing in birmingham in particular or not in particular but in the letter from the birmingham jail it's -- lazarus because the sid as king makes him is he was a rich man but it wasn't his riches that makes him the center. he is a center sinner because he did not recognize the gimpy beggar covered with sores at his door. he walked past him as if he didn't exist. in a sense for king his preaching as we have an obligation to respond to everybody, not just our own people. white people on the sidelines. that is the critique of the moderates. they have to respond and black people have to liberate themselves so it's utterly sensible that over time this document has been read not only as a civil rights in birmingham document but as it ascends psychotically to its status it takes a while to grow. it goes to the nobel prize and describes quote words spoken to mankind. is such a powerful document that it resonates at that very occasion. the freedom fighters in polish solidarity understand this speaks to our vision of christian militants. lech walensa so when he comes to america since people to talk to andrew young and to tell them thank you for teaching us to always give our opponents ace face-saving way out. he goes to south africa and apartheid and goes to the east german movement pastors movement against communism and eventually the european and christian and black world and goes to iran and tahrir square and tiananmen square. so i think the greatness of the document is as wyatt walker felt an and andrew young put it this way, is a philosophical document that summarizes the christian strain within the civil rights movement. it may not capture sncc but it captures an important part of the movement. it has been read by people around the world who see in king's critique of moderation and civil disobedience and his affirmation of protest kind of a reflection of their own struggles and is all great documents are, they usually read it in the light of their own world so it's all different. u ook at the ga movement there is a very well-known and bisexual web site which basically translates the letter from birmingham jail into what it means for people addressing white moderates. so, the answer is part of its power is its artistry. part of its story is the statement of black defiance and christian forbearance and the other part is that universal words spoken to mankind. >> i think we have time for one or two questions from the audience and this is touching on something i was wondering as well in terms of you know i think about president obama and the fine line he walks in not saying the angry black man because that so quickly you no, turns on you. this person has asked the u.s. a sociologist feel that king realized during his stay that -- with the apathy of the complacent and when he returned he had to change his statue. he had to push people out of their comfort zones to succeed. >> you know i have talked plenty tonight so i don't think i need to go on too long. but yes i think the question answers itself absolutely. remember he wanted to push blacks out of their comfort zone as well as whites out of their comfort zone. the gospel of freedom, there are versions for the oppressed and the oppressor. >> this is a good question to end with here for both of our authors. my question today with so many people of color in prison and a greater disparity between rich and poor, what do we need to do today to defend the promise of 1963? >> i think that we need to use 1963 to learn to teach ourselves how to recognize and is king said inevitability. human progress does not come on wheels of inevitability and i thought that when i was younger. i do think there is his arc that it was getting better and i don't really believe that anymore. they think things he coming around and it's really important to be able to break the code in figure out when these injustices are coming around again because they always, under a different disguise. now you know we have used some of the tools of 1963 now to fight back against the immigration law that was passed in the state that to me was reinventing jim crow. we couldn't quite -- the legislature couldn't quite recognize and of wasn't remembering that we have been there before but the resistance was ready. resistance has not succeeded so that is kind of you know but their assistance is there and knows what to do now. the clergy was the first out of the gate on that and they were ready to protest this immigration laws. and then you know of other people joined in as well including the newspapers who are king's enemy here. so you now it's just maybe you get a little bit better as you go on down in history but it's the same issues that keep recurring. >> you know i and "gospel of freedom" by saying we misunderstood what king meant by the arc of justice and it was related to what king imagines moses, god telling moses to tell the children of israel. the arc and i'm really repeating what diane just said in a somewhat different image. king did not believe the arc of the universe would bend towards justice without men and women doing the bending which is her point about co-workers. i hate to use a fancy word and i don't usually like them but king's vision of deliverance is quite difference from reverend cl franklin's version who was also a freedom fighter but aretha franklin's father one of the great preachers of the 20th century. when he preaches he says wait on him. he will part the waters. king's view was god wants you to deliver yourself and the bending of the universe requires that actual people bend it. the faith of the arc of justice because god is on your side. that brings us back to criminal justice and a whole lot of other things. king would say today our work is not done. he wasn't a glass is half full guy. not in a bitter pessimistic way. just because all black people do not suffer from jim crow doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of other suffering people who required the intervention of co-workers. or co-workers for whoever is your spiritual guidance. the co-workers of active human beings to minister their pain and bring justice. so the answer is exodus repeats itself in every time and every place. it just looks different in every time and therefore the obligation of people never ceases. >> i've always thought the ultimate lesson of birmingham is one that as diane pointed out was seen playing out in our own time with questions over and the current rights and i think the lesson is when you come down on the wrong side of justice that history does not judge you well. and you live with the consequences. i will say that i've been an archivist and a historian for 20 years and i am encouraged in that i see more and more people that are open to see this story in its complexity and to see this not only as a tragic story and some people feel we just need to stop talking about. and people who want to know and want to understand why this happened and why this does keep happening. i know you pointed out many times, kia birmingham conserve the world is a good example and as a starting place for all these conversations we need to have. speedway you all please join me in thanking both of our guests tonight? [applause] here are some of what he said about the question of going to war. >> if we do nothing what is the likelihood in your gut that bashar al-assad will use chemical weapons as a routine weapon to turn the tide of this civil war? >> i think the likelihood is very high. that he would use them again. >> mr. secretary? >> i agree completely. i might even put it at 100%. and you should check the intel on it and i think he will be convinced that i would say probably 100%. >> mr. secretary, if you like it's 100% we will see these weapons now used routinely in this civil war to turn the tide if we do nothing. what is the probability that such weapons will also get into the hands of hezbollah and other elements supporting the assad regime and thus perhaps too afraid the region against friend and foe alike? >> i can give you that probability. i just don't know what it is. i do know this. that there are three principle supporters of assad and the rest of the world is an horror of what is happening. the three principle supporters are iran-contra hezbollah and russia. and if iran and hezbollah are allowed to both see him stay in power as well as do so with the use of chemical weapons combat that is extraordinarily dangerous with jordan israel lebanon and our interests. now myrlie evers-williams the widow of civil rights leader medgar evers and the late historian manning marable recount the civil rights movement described in the autobiography of medgar evers. the civil rights leader was murdered in 1963. this is a little more than an hour. [applause] >> thank you. it is wonderful to be here this evening. i am going to read very briefly three short excerpts from the autobiography of medgar evers that captures different aspects of what the book covers. "the autobiography of medgar evers" was a labor of love for both myrlie and myself because medgar evers was more than simply a pioneer of the black freedom struggle. he was indeed a central figure in american history who has yet to be fully recognized for the giants that he was. this evening i would like to speak for about 20 minutes. myrlie is going to follow with her own personal reflections and comments on her experiences and the struggle were civil rights working side bayside with the central figure of american history maker wiley uppers and then we can entertain questions and your comments. the true origins of medgar evers political life can be traced back actually 21832 when the mississippi state constitutional convention was held establishing that state. the delegates at that convention adopted the principle of universal white manhood suffrage eliminating all property qualifications on the voting franchise. however lacks, slave or free were obviously not permitted to vote. during the. not following the civil war reconstruction from 186-52-1877 there was a brief experiment in multiracial and bi-racial democracy in that state but with the demise of reconstruction that was snuffed out. the legal and political regime of white supremacy was established in 1890 where the state held a new constitutional convention a series of provisions adopted including the poll tax letters he tests deliberately designed to exclude the african-american from voting blacks were also kept from the polls by outright violence and lynchings. between 1882 and 1927th there were 517 african-americans lynched in the state of mississippi. the highest number in the nation of any state during that. not. a backward politically regressive culture rooted in violence firmly established by the early 20th century making mississippi symbolic of everything undemocratic and oppressive in the american south. it was and that oppressive environment of white domination black subordination into which medgar evers was born on july 2, 1925 in decatur mississippi. he was one of six children of james and jesse evers. james was employed at the decatur simple sawmill and his wife jessie took in laundry and ironing for local white families. the evers family was never well-to-do get it managed to acquire land and a modest degree of security. jesse was a devout christian extremely active in the church of god in christ-centered piety and deep faith had an effect on all of her children. james attended one of the towns baptist churches serving as a deacon of the congregation. both parents preached to their children the qualities of self-reliance pride and self-respect directly contradicted by the customary values that african-americans in that state were supposed to assume. as a child metzger was taught that his maternal great-grandfather during reconstruction had actually killed two white men in a dispute and it somehow managed to escape white retaliation by escaping from town. metzger as he was growing up was taught to have pride in himself and an awareness of his own heritage and history. when he was about 14 years old and event occurred that had a profound impact on all the subsequent events in his life. a neighborhood friend of his father got into trouble supposedly for quote sassing a local white woman. at the local fairgrounds. the black man was promptly apprehended and brutally beaten to death. the lynching had a profound effect on his feelings about racist conditions surrounding himself and his entire family. he was determined to escape the omnipresent pain and fear that segregation imposed on every black person. as a teenager he sought to assert himself in various ways according to myrlie during our interviews last year in writing this book. in high school medgar for a zoot suit wearing large oversized suit coats and baggy slacks. the hip style also favored at the same time by a young malcolm little who would later become famous as malcolm x. medgar often wore large stylish hats tilted to the side and as myrlie put it his vocabulary was a little on the raunchy side. in 1943 medgar prematurely left high school by lying about his real age and followed his brother charles into the army. he served in europe during world war ii. in 1944 the u.s. supreme court in the smith versus ball out loud the right -- primary election which had solidly throughout the south was a principle means of disenfranchising african-american voters. in 1946 the mississippi state legislature passed a law -- from paying the local poll tax. there were also 80,000 african-americans who were residents of the state of mississippi who served in the u.s. segregated army in world war ii who would also be eligible to vote in that state's elections. thousands of veterans like medgar and charles evers came back with a determination to float. so on his 21st birthday on july the second, 1946 charles and medgar evers and four other young black world war ii veterans walk to the county courthouse. word of plan to their voting spread and decatur's main street was nearly taken. a cluster of 20 well-armed angry white men stood at the courthouse entrance. according to the account of charles evers they held shotguns rifles and pistols. they stood at the courthouse steps eyeballing each other. the whites recognized medgar and charles and urge them to leave before violence erupted. the county sheriff watching the confrontation did nothing to assist the blacks vote. it indeed the sheriff according to charles quote wasn't going to let us both that he didn't want to try to kill us. he knew we might -- you might have to kill us but he didn't want to do that. finally with medgar who decided today was not the best time to have the confrontation and certainly not when the odds were six against 20. don't worry said medgar we will get them next time. as they departed one in and raged racist yelled quote you are going to get all the -- [inaudible] this was the beginning of the political education of medgar evers. our book documents medgar's writings and speeches. the extraordinary journey that this great man took beginning as he was coming back from the war, sacrificing his life, sacrificing all of these things. his freedom to fight for democracy that did not include his family and his friends or himself. he attended alcorn university, alcorn college and became one of the most well-respected students in the college. .. perhaps his main accomplishment was winning and -- winning over an 18-year-old sister from mississippi to be his wife. and the two became an indom nabble force, in a partnership that rewrote the history of the civil rights movement. i want to move forward in the book and talk about what happened when myrlie and medgar went to live at their first -- the first home that they had was in mound bayou, mississippi. now, for young people out here, mount bye yew is an historic african-american town founded by montgomery in the mississippi delta. the book begins in early 1952, the evers household moved to mount bayou and medgar began to travel extensively throughout the delta visiting dozens of 'em improve relinquished homes to -- he could scarcely believe the backwardsness of the delta region. he said that gave him a real taste of poverty on the plantation, myrlie now flects. that. >> this is a taste of poverty on the plantation. he said to me that we second call these people mr. and mrs. and i can give them a sense of dignity. i can help them and i can help them when they need to escape o landlords incredible sum of money simply would vanish from their hasn'ties in the middle of the night fleing to memphis then freedom in the north to chicago. medgar courageously decided to assist them. medgar became active in civil rights organizations, and he, along with other young black women and men, seriously questioned whether it was possible to achieve substantive civil rights or political reforms. perhaps other kinds of solutions and strategies. learning from the experiences of black people struggling throughout the african -- throughout africa and the cribans needed to be employed in the black belt south. medgar was fascinated particularly by the revolution that was being waved in kenya in the 1950's, and in particular, the charismatic intellectual kenyatta. kenyatta came to personify for medgar, the kind of leadership the african-americans needed to embodyy. medgar studied whether armed struggle should be employed. why oppress blacks in the mississippi delta against their white oppressers? medgar seriously struggled with the issue. was armed struggle the way forward? eventually medgar came to the conclusion that it was possible to build a nonviolent movement. nevertheless, i think it is significant that when myrlie and medgar had their first child, darryl, his middle name is kenyatta. unlike dr. king, medgar was not an advocate of nonviolence in the face of white terrorism. he purchaseed a rifle, and over the next years carried it with him in his automobile in case he had to protect his family or himself. he concluded that race war was unfortunately a very real possibility in the deep south. if white structural racism, the extensive socioeconomic institutions of prejudice, power, and privilege that created a permanent sub class of americans. endured, then what alternatives would blacks have? myrlie, during the writing of this book said to me that medgar and her quote, we found ourselves in a separate part of america. how we could not be starved out, how we could be in a location where we would not be surrounded and wiped out at one time. he was thinking about building a nation, a nation of black people. this is a side of medgar evers that few of us really appreciate i'd like to go to the very end of the book and talk briefly, first by reading a short excerpt then talking about my personal experiences working with myrlie. medgar evers was sags nailted. -- assassinated. when pronounced dead at the university of mississippi medical center at 1 cologne 14 a.m. june 12, 1963. he was 37 years of age. this was the first political assassination of the modern black freedom movement. but it would not be the last. perhaps the thousands of women, men, and children who gathered in jackson to honor their servant leader understood this that evers death had changed everything. thousands of people who came 6,000 who came to the funeral including dr. king and other prominent civil rights leaders understood that something had fundamentally changed. the vast majority came, however, were not prominent celebrities. they were not prominent civil rights spokespersons, they came from hundreds of tiny touns and rural areas from all over the state of mississippi to honor their native son. they marched three miles from the ma sonic temple to the home on the street. all of them we want. others chanted "after medgar, no more fear." following the formal funeral march, several demonstrators went to capital street downtown. the reverend ed quing, other civil rights activists quho could be quickly identified by the police were clubbed, stampeded, the cops began to shoot up in the air over the heads of the demonstrators. in death med ger -- medgar evers became not just the principal architect of the black freedom struggle in the state of mississippi. he was no longer the holder of the most difficult civil rights job in the country. that of field organizer of the naacp in the most difficult and racist state in the nation. he was now indeed, a hero to the entire nation. following medgar's efforts, several rights organizations doubled their amendment to contain fundamental democratic change against racism in mississippi. the congress racial equality slerted their voter registration campaign in the fourth district. they then launched an ambitious -- so that thousands of mississippi residents would indeed vote. they organized a mock election held in the autumn of 1963 in which nearly 100,000 african-americans vote indeed that state in the mock election. the following year there was the freedom summer of 1964. 1,000 largely white idealistic college students traveled to the state of mississippi to assist local civil rights workers engaging in voter registration and education campaigns. and yet as all of us know, there were more sacrifices. three civil rights activists, michael shwarner, and two others were brutally murdered in late august 1964, white racists were responsible for fire bombing and attacking. that summer alone, 37 black churches, 80 civil rights workers were seriously injured by beatings. 9,000 civil rights activists that summer alone had been arrested. but with the courageous leadership of fanny lou hamer, of aaron henny, of charles evers who had replaced his late younger brother as the naacp field secretary, there was no turning back. in august, 1964, president lyndon johnson -- they passed the civil rights act outlawing racial segregation laws. the first such law in american history. the following year the voting rights act was passed. by 1969, in the span of only six years, mississippi went from less than 6% blacks who were registered to vote to 61%. today, the largest number of after kwan american elected officials of any state in the country is from the state of mississippi. medgar evers' vision has yet partially -- and i want to repeat that. partially has come true. this is the book that documents in his own words the struggle of medgar evers. but i want to speak for just one minute about the courage, the dignity, and the struggle of myrlie evers williams. in putting together this book, this labor of love. i traveled several times to mississippi, and i walked with myrlie through her former home. where medgar had been killed. i stood in the carport where medgar had been shot cowardly in the back. she told me the story of how late at night after her husband's murder, that she would go outside in the middle of the night and try to scrub out the stain of his blood stai the carport, from the driveway, a stain that was a stain on the driveway, but a stain that had taken away a beloved father from her children, a loving husband from herself, but had taken away a central figure and visionary leader of the black freedom struggle. and for all of us, regardless of race who believe in democracy in this country. i walked into her bedroom, and she paused for a moment, and i asked her why. she told me the story of several days before medgar's assassination, he came home early. she was ironing his white shirts and starching them. she had done about a dozen. she said aren't you going to thank me for ironing and starching your shirts? he said i'm not going to be needing them. what we owe medgar evers and what we owe myrlie evers williams cannot be put into words. because the struggle for democracy and the struggle for freedom is indeed a struggle. and what we have sacrificed for the principles of this country ironically a majority that benefits from those principles does not realize the sacrifices and the pain that it has taken to win them for all of us. part of medgar's greatness was his conviction that what he thought for was not something narrowly just for black folk, but something that was a principle that extended to all americans. he wanted fairness and justice for all. but as an african-american, he was grounded in his history, he was grounded in his people, and what he fought for was human dignity and justice for black folk. it is a struggle that was worth fighting for, and he believed it was worth dying for. that is why i am deeply honored to be with my partner and friend, myrlie evers williams, in putting forward for the first time the voice, the writings, and the documents of medgar evers. i'd like to turn the podium over now to myrlie evers williams. [applause] >> thank you. good evening to all of you, and i'm so delighted to see you here. i am, as always, moved by my friend, dr. manning maribel, and how articulate he is, the historian that he is, the picture that he presents to us so thoroughly and so colorfully. if i may at this point call you manning in front of all of these people, i thank you, i thank you. dr. maribel has played such an important role in getting this book published and out to the public. i want to in my thanking him tell you how this came about. but before i do that, i do want to say that he is a man who makes promises and i'm sure very carefully, but he keeps them. and that's something that epitomized medgar as well. of not promising anything that you can't keep, but that that you do promise, keep that promise. and that's what medgar did. i thank you, too, for going into his younger years and back ground. i met medgar evers the first day, the first hour of the first day that i was on campus as a freshman student, and we mississippians call it alcorn a&m college. my grandmother and my aunt had just left me at my dormitory, and they left me with their last words of wisdom, and to quote them, they said -- and they called me baby. baby, now don't get involved with any of those veterans. within 30 minutes, i was involved, so to speak, with one of those veterans. we freshmen had come to the campus a week before everyone else, the upper classmen had come. there was a football practice going on and medgar was a member of the football team. we were standing out by the president's house, and there was a big, tall light pole, and i just happened to be leaning on it, and all of a sudden you heard the found as though a herd of elephants or something was coming your way. we looked up and we saw all of these football fellows still dressed in full regalia and dressed in their cleats, and that was what was making the noise. they came over, they looked at us up and down as though to say let me see which one i will claim for myself. this man came over to me. he looked at me. i looked at him. and he said you'd better get off of that light pole. you may get shocked. he said i simply tossed my hair. it was long then. and gave him a funny look, and that was it. but i was intrigued. little did i know that his words of being shocked would come to fruition because my life was never the same after that moment, never the same after that moment. medgar was what we called at that time a big wheel on campus. big in sports. editor of his yearbook. president of his class and all of those other wonderful things that dr. marable said. but he was something else as well. he was someone that everyone looked up to, but he was also at the same time someone that people were afraid of. teachers, students, because he would tell them particularly the fraternity men, you party too much. be serious about why you are here. what about the communities from which you came? what about your ability to register and vote? the teachers said about him he rocked the boat. the students said about him he's ok, but he doesn't know what fun is. i found all of that intriguing. when we would talk, i would find myself making an excuse to go to my dormitory room and look up words that he had used, and he didn't do that to embarrass me or anyone else, but he had moved from that point of expressing himself with words that were not of the best choice to someone who had really become interested, interested in education, interested in refinement, and interested in being able to articulate to everyone, whether they were his classmates, other students, the teachers, the president of the college, anyone else what he felt, how he saw his country, and what he thought needed to be done. he said i went into the army, i served my country, i came home and i found out that i was still a second-class citizen. my father was still addressed as boy. i was addressed as boy. my mother as girl. in a sense, we were slaves of that mentality during that period of time. medgar decided that he could only do one thing, and that was to give of himself to make those changes. i was really surprised and a little enthralled by the man because in the first couple of weeks that we dated, he said to me i'm going to make you into the kind of woman i want you to be. i was 17 years old. i knew nothing about the women's movement, anything like that. but believe you me, that struck a chord with me. i don't like this, but i'm fascinated by it. he also said to me shortly thereafter you are going to be the mother of my children. i replied as a naive girl of 17 but you haven't told me you love me yet. and his reply was whenever i do, i'll let you know. but there was something about the man who had a sense of purpose even then, who knew what he wanted, who knew how to go about it that was absolutely fascinating to me, and it was different, very different. medgar came from a family, as you have already heard, of activists. his father challenged the system. they called him crazy jim because he simply refused to take any of those negatives from other people in the community. it was a time when we were not allowed to walk on the sidewalks. daddy jim made sure his family walked on the sidewalks. when he was challenged about the cost of food, his bill, medgar and charles there in the store with him, and he said no, that's not it. and this group of men descended upon him, and i am told that he said to his sons go outside where it's safe. daddy jim proceeds to take a bottle from some place, crack it across the counter, and to tell those men who were challenging him, his sons, and his family come on, come on. backed out of the door, and they went home. but that was the kind of example of manhood, of strength , of devotion to family that medgar grew up in. i grew up in another kind of home, one where there were three females in it. my aunt, my grandmother, and myself. we didn't argue because my grandmother had the last word each and every time. so it was peaceful there. they were school teachers. and their motto was don't rock the boat. so here we have these two people coming together, one that says i can't do anything beyond what society has set for me, and the other saying you are so wrong. you must challenge that society . don't reach for the stars, go beyond that. i admit to you that there were periods of adjustment here and there. i did not always support medgar in his work. that's not something i'm necessarily proud of, but remember how young i was, and i was deathly afraid of his life. when we moved to this town of mount bayou, mississippi, we worked for an insurance company , and how southern it is, the magnolia mutual life insurance company. it was owned by negros, as we used the word to describe ourselves then, and medgar said why not work to build businesses in our own communities? and i can be control of my career. i worked alongside of him, an i.b.m. punch card operator, as i recall, when the computers as such were every bit as big as this table. we were there, and medgar decided he wanted to pursue a law career. it's something that most people don't know, that medgar evers was thers african-american to apply for admission to the university of mississippi. of course he was rejected. and in this book as i thumbed through it to kind of refresh my memory, i saw a copy of the letter that he had written in response to them, governor coleman's rejection. he was asked well, where are you going to stay? and he said in the dormitory, sir, with the other students. i bathe every day and i guarantee you this brown will not rub off on anyone else. and he was determined to pursue that. he was rejected. the naacp said come, work with us, open up the first office of the nacp in mississippi, and he accepted, provided that i was his secretary. they agreed, and we moved to jackson, mississippi, and a whole new life opened up to us. but during that time when medgar felt so hostile toward his own country and when he felt that the only way we could possibly survive was an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, he and other strategically planned how they would manipulate and use what little resources they had to protect his family. and i'm reminded now of this one piece of what? warfare i guess i can call it that we had that was broken down into three parts. it was a machine gun. and i often asked him, i said what good will that do if we need it? when one part of it is in the upper delta of clarksdale, the other part is in a lower part of the delta in cleveland, and we have one part, how will we ever come to bring that one -- those three pieces together for one piece of damage, i guess i should call it? and he said don't worry about it. we have a plan. that spoke over the years to the plan that we had as well in the way in which we communicated with each other. i'm going to fast forward just a little. i find what is happening today so critically important to what happened during that time, because it was during that time when emmett till was killed, and medgar and others dressed in old clothes and disguising themselves as sharecroppers made that investigation possible that we read about today. i remember the anger and the hurt and the need for revenue generals of a sort. but he was able to take that anger in vengeance manner and turn it into can go using the mind, the strategies, the techniques. and when you read this book, i think you will find that those strategies are there for any community group to go to action. and i don't mean violence now, but just a plan of action that we can adopt today that took place then. i of how important it is that today we look at what's happening in philadelphia, mississippi, when this man is on trial for the murder of the three civil rights leaders that occurred one year almost to the day after medgar's assassination. here we are looking at that. what do we see? we still see a few ku klux klan

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