0 protests in baltimore to try to make that theater admit black patrons as early as 1955, it opened in 1950, it was whites only. this was 1955, big interracial groups of students going down to that theater, lining up, trying to get admission into the theater. the early protests never worked. after years of the intermittent protests, in february 1963, a group of local students from morgan college, loyola and johns hopkins, they decided they were going to stop taking no for answer answer and they were going to get this thing done. by this point, other businesses in the downtown, including drug steers, even some other theaters, they were already getting desegregated. but the northwood theater was a holdout. the students and the civil rights activists ramped up their protests that february. they ramped up into a confrontation that looked like baltimore city hall, to trying to figure out what to do. groups of students and protesters picketed. black students, and white students and all sorts of different religious groups throughout the city. it's now a huge pain in the butt for the city of baltimore. the students were filling up the jail. some of the students studying in jail, this photo was circulated widely at the time. eventually after increasing publicity and increasing annoyance and protracted negotiations, the city was persuaded to drop the high bail for all of those demonstrators that were arrested. and the demonstrators were let out. that day that they were let out, the northwood theater announced it would desegregate so everybody could sit together on february 22nd, 1963 and watch that terrible disney movie. around the same time in the state of georgia, some young organizing these demonstrations. to stop being the outside agitator, he responded with a letter from the birmingham jail which he wrote longhand in the margins of the newspaper in which he was able to read the ad and read the stories of his fellow ministers criticizing his tactics. his arrest was one component of a big activist plan for birmingham that year. birmingham was seen as being among the most impossible places for progress. it was the most stubborn, the most violent, the most rigidly opposed to desegregation. the plan was to push there in one of the worst places notice country. and see what happened. see how they responded to pressure. and after what they thought was a slow start of sit-ins and protests in the first eight days a total of 150 people had been arrested and taken to jail, that sounds like a lot, but for the time it was disappointingly low, after that, what they perceived to be a slow start in birmingham, on april 12th, dr. king was arrested himself, and the most horrifying images of fire hoses and dogs, were from the time that fire hoses and dogs were turned on kids. they not only hit kids with fire hoses. this famous image of walter gadson being bitten by a police dog, he was a high schoolkid. he was one of the older kids at that protest. and they did not just unleash that violence on those kids. they arrested them. they put hundreds and hundreds of children in jail in birmingham, they used school buses to pick up kids from the demonstration that -- they had hit them with fire hoses and dogs at the demonstration and arrested them, they hauled those kids into the jail. they filled the jail cells, the singer harry bellafonte was very close to a lot of national civil rights leaders at the time, including martin luther king, and his family, in harry bellafonte's auto biography, he writes about these protests and how there was this national shock and horror at seeing these images, at how these protesters were brutalized in birmingham. there was the practical nuts and bolts dollars and sense matter of raising the bail money to get the protesters out of jail. he raised $50,000 himself, the unions stepped in and kicked up a lot of money. a black store workers union in new york. they sent tens of thousands of dollars to the jail to serve as bail money. with all those hundreds of children in jail, when they totalled up the bill for bail, it was staggering. something like $160,000 they needed to raise to bail out the children. that is in 1963, that is not adjusted for inflation. do you realize how much money that was at that time. and you know who coughed up money in a really big way? nelson rockefeller. nelson rockefeller, not only governor of new york at the time, but also a rockefeller, and he asked dr. king's private attorney to meet him at a chase manhattan bank in new york city, on the corner of 47th street and 6th avenue, about three blocks from here. they met there on a saturday morning, nelson rockefeller, met dr. king's attorney at the bank vault. the guards opened up the vault, governor rockefeller walked into the vault and came out with two giant stacks of plastic wrapped cash and said i hope this is enough. it was $100,000 in crisp new bills. remember, this was for bail money. this was not a gift, this was not a donation, the governor was giving this as bail money for the kids and he was expecting it back. before he let dr. king's friend and speech writer and personal attorney leave with the giant stacks of plastic wrapped cash that day, he had him sign a documents were signing a promissory note to which every american was to fall heir, a promise that all men would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. it's obvious today that america has defaulted on this promissory note in so far as her citizens of colors are concerned. although black americans had been given a bad check, it had come back marked insufficient funds, he had refused to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity in this nation. he said, we have come to cash this check. we think of that speech and that march as a singular event. and there is in fact nothing like it in our history. but it is less of a pillar and more like a peak, it is a summit that was reached. it was a moment in an ongoing movement that was well underway and not nearly over by the time that happened. and that march, and that speech like the campaign to desegregate the northwood theater in baltimore, and those protests with the terrifying consequences in america's georgia, that march was a tactic dreamed up in realtime by real imperfect people working together as a body in motion making incremental decisions about what to do next. about what might work. when we come back, we will be joined by the man who signed that promissory note in that bank vault that day. dr. martin luther king's friend, speech writer and personal attorney. tires screech ] [ beeping ] ♪ [ male announcer ] we don't just certify our pre-owned vehicles. we inspect, analyze and recondition each one, until it's nothing short of a genuine certified pre-owned... mercedes-benz for the next new owner. ♪ hurry in to your authorized mercedes-benz dealer for 1.99% financing during our certified pre-owned sales event through september 3rd.