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13342,http://libarchstor2.uah.edu/digitalcollections/items/show/13342,uah_civr_000002,"Digitized VHS tape of ""Inaugural Lecture"".",,"Taylor Branch is the speaker in this lecture given at University of Alabama in Huntsville.","Alabama A & M University^^University of Alabama in Huntsville","University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections",2001-08-30,2000-2009,,,"Branch, Taylor, 1947-^^Civil rights movements--Southern states--History--20th century^^Montgomery (Ala.)^^Montgomery County^^African American churches^^Montgomery Bus Boycott, Montgomery, Ala., 1955-1956^^Segregation","Lectures^^Moving Image",MP4,"Lecture Series on Civil Rights in Alabama, 1954-1965
VHS Tape of: Inaugural Lecture - Speaker: Taylor Branch, 2001-08-30. Box 2, Tape 1
University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives, Special Collections, and Digital Initiatives, Huntsville, Alabama",,"Inaugural Lecture - Speaker: Taylor Branch - Transcription of Tape 1, 2003",,en,"This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. You may use the digitized material for private study, scholarship, or research. Though the University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections has physical ownership of the material in its collections, in some cases we may not own the copyright to the material. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in our collections.",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,01:57:33,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,http://libarchstor2.uah.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=uah_civr_000002.xml,"Inaugural Lecture Speaker: Taylor Branch
Introduction: In 1963, Taylor Branch was a high school junior in Atlanta,
Georgia. As he watched the evening news that spring, he recalls being
thunderstruck by images of fire hoses and dogs turned against marching children
in Birmingham, Alabama, images that led him to formulate his first political
questions. What tremendous power made those children march and made police
attack them? What was the Civil Rights Movement made of and where did it come
from? It was a moment that changed the direction of his life and, twenty years
later, finding answers to those questions would become his life's work.
After high school, Mr. Branch graduated from the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill and received his graduate degree in International Economics from
Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International
Affairs. He began a career as a reporter and a writer during the l 970's,
holding editorial positions at the Washington Monthly, Harper's and Esquire while
continuing to write for a wide variety of publications. In 1976 he wrote the
best seller Blind Ambition with President Nixon's former counsel and
Watergate figure, John Dean. Mr. Branch continued his successful collaboration,
publishing Second Wind with Bill Russell and The Labyrinth, with Eugene
M. Proper, in the following years. By the ! 980's, Mr. Branch was engaged
in a monumental research project whose goal was nothing less than a narrative
history of the Civil Rights Movement, focusing on the life of Martin Luther King
Jr. and the struggle that transformed America. The first volume of a planned
trilogy, Parting the Waters,
America in the King Years, 1954 to 1963, appeared in 1988 and was met with
overwhelming public and critical acclaim, beginning with the Pulitzer prize for
history and extending to the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the National Book
Critic Circle Award. The same was true for his second volume, Pillar of Fire,
America in the King Years, 1963 to 1965, which was published in 1998. A
magisterial history of one of the most tumultuous periods in post-war America,
as one critic described it, Pillar of Fire won the Sidney Hillman Book Award,
the Imus Book Award and the American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award. Critics
have described Mr. Branch's work as inspiring, definitive, one of the
greatest achievements in American biography, a tour de force of research and
synthesis, the measure of all books to come. He has been the recipient of a
McArthur Foundation Fellowship and in 1999 President William J. Clinton awarded
him the National Humanities Medal. Currently Mr. Branch is working on the third
and final volume of his trilogy, At Canaan's Edge. Also in the making is an
eight-hour miniseries based on the first two books in the trilogy called Parting
the Waters, which Mr. Branch is producing with Harry Belafonte and which will be
televised by ABC. We are honored to have such a distinguished author as the
inaugural speaker in this fall's series on the Civil Rights Movement in
Alabama.The topic of Mr. Branch's speech tonight is ""Equal Souls, Equal
Vote, Alabama in the Heart of Civil Rights."" Please join me in extending a warm
welcome to Mr. Taylor Branch.
Taylor Branch: Thank you very much. I am very happy to be here. I know this is
not California. You pay your electric bills because there is plenty of light
here. It is quite bright up here so I can't see you but I hope I can hear
you from time to time. I am
honored to be here at this inaugural event and I'm flattered by all of the
things just said about me in the introduction. To undercut it a little bit, I
want you to know that the Don Imus award I received was the first and the only
Don Imus Award that will ever be awarded. The Awards program died on some snafu
or scandal involving Don Imus. And, on a more somber note, the eight-hour
miniseries that Harry and I have been trying to make now for ten years is
forthcoming, but forthcoming is a very elastic word in television and it is a
labor of love to work in this subject but it is not always a labor of love to
try to break down racial barriers in Hollywood, I can tell you that. It is a
combination of money and reluctance. We do hope, and we have a wonderful script,
that we can bring this truly amazing story of American freedom to a larger
audience. People are not going to read big history books or come to lecturers at
UAH. But, I'm very grateful to be here. I am glad that two institutions are
collaborating and cooperating to do this. It is part of the lesson of the
movement that if you are not stretching yourself for citizenship you are in
danger of losing it. It's always a little stretch. Never expect to get it
all right. Never expect to be completely comfortable, if you were you
wouldn't be stretching. So, I'm glad that you are doing it. We had
some events like that in Baltimore, cross-campus events, and they were
stupendously successful but, again, not without stretch marks I guess you would
say. So expect those and I hope it goes well and I wish you well. You are going
to have some wonderful people here. Many of your speakers are dear friends and
colleagues of mine, Diane Nash and Fred Shuttlesworth. He is the only person I
know who kind of preaches like an airplane. He will literally get his arms out
and say I'm looking for a place to land. So, you're in for a treat
with a lot of the
speakers that you are going to have here, and I just mentioned two of them. I
think Diane Nash is one of the most unsung figures of the whole Freedom Rights
Era and she's coming down from Chicago. She does not make that many
appearances so I'm really glad you have her and I hope you'll take
advantage of it. Before I start, I would like to mention one personal note. The
kind introduction began in Westminster when I was a junior in high school,
stupefied by the demonstrations in Birmingham. My football classmate from that
era is now, it's hard for me to even get this out, the distinguished Dr.
Marshall Shreeder here in Huntsville. He was my classmate and it was one of my
treats to come here and spend the night last night with Doctor Shreeder and his
wife, Lucinda, who also went to the same high school. I see that they are here
tonight. I know that a Jot of you don't want to meet Dr. Shreeder because
he is the cancer doctor but, if you do, it will be a treat even if you have
cancer. I tell you, he is a wonderful guy.
I am here to talk to you about the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama and to give
you something of an overview about it. Alabama is the heart of the Civil Rights
Movement. I am going to talk to you about three miracles that occurred here, a
miracle of cars, a miracle of children and a miracle of young citizens. The
miracle of cars, of course, occurred in the bus boycott, which was as much about
cars as it was about people. At the time, the black citizens in Montgomery
resolved not to ride the buses and Jess than five percent of the black people in
Montgomery owned automobiles and there was no alternative form of transportation
in a community that was very widely stretched out. Most of the cars that were
owned were concentrated in two small Baptist congregations, Dexter Avenue, Dr.
King's church, and First Baptist, Ralph Abernathy's church. The
people in those two churches by in large didn't speak to one another. The
one came out of the other. Abernathy's church was built first, right after
the Civil War. It was burned down later and they rebuilt it. It was known as the
brick-a-day church because the ex slaves didn't have any money and
everybody was required to go out in the countryside and find one brick a day and
bring it to the site and they built the church. They built it up there on the
high hill, the same hill where the capital is in Montgomery. But some of the
finer members of First Baptist church in the late 19th century were upset by the
fact that
the door exited out onto the steep side of the hill, I forget which direction
that is, toward
Rigley Street and they got mud on their shoes coming out and they felt that they
were too good for mud and so they withdrew and went down to a slave pen at the
foot of the hill
and formed Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. And ever thereafter there was a little
bit of snootiness between the two churches.
Ralph Abernathy told me once that, he said that in Dr. King's church you
couldn't even talk about Jesus. He said, ""You could mention Him maybe, but
they preferred that you talk about Plato."" He said, ""Now, at First Baptist, we
didn't have any shouting. It was not a shouting congregation. All of the
other congregations, where people didn't own any automobiles, were shouting
churches."" He said you couldn't shout at First Baptist. Other people said
that wasn't true, that you really could shout at First Baptist, but
Abernathy didn't like to advertise that because he wanted to be as
distinguished as Dexter Avenue. He said you couldn't shout, but you could
talk about Jesus. He said, ""I could preach about Jesus from my pulpit, but not
at Dr. King's church."" He said, ""At Dexter Avenue they didn't even
have music in their hymnal. Their hymnal was a book of
poetry because to them if you put music there, it was kind of demeaning."" These
are the two congregations, one hundred years later, out of slavery, that split
over an issue of status and whether you were going to get mud on your feet
coming out onto Ripley Avenue in which all the cars were concentrated when they
resolved not to ride the buses and 50,000 people have to get to work. Most of
them were maids and day laborers without their established form of public
transportation, i.e. the bus. That meant they had to get into the cars of the
Dexter members and the First Baptist members, who didn't even want each
other in their cars. Their cars were their prize possessions. Vernon Johns, the
minister of Dexter Avenue, who preceded Dr. King at Dexter Avenue, said ""Do you
want a definition of perpetual motion, give the average Negro a Cadillac and
tell him to park it on some land he owns."" This is what he said to his own
members trying to tweak them about how much money they would spend on their
cars. ""You wouldn't even have a house, but you've got a car."" These
people loved their cars. We all love our cars. Americans love cars. But if it is
a rare possession and if 80% of the working population of black Montgomery at
the time of the bus boycott are day laborers and maids, and not a single white
collar occupation in the whole city is open to you, it is a profound test of a
divided society to ride in somebody else's car to work when you are muddy
and dirty and you are a day laborer. To do it for one day is rough. They did it
in large part in the beginning for all the reasons that you might think of
accumulated degradation and accumulated frustration, but you have to remember
that Rosa Parks was not by any means the first person that had been dragged off
the buses and arrested. It had happened a number of times and, in fact, it had
happened a number of times when they had tried to
do something about it. Always, the circumstances weren't right. A person
arrested, one of them turned out to be a pregnant teenager. Well, who wants to
rally the community around a pregnant teenager, or a divorcee? The significant
fact that I want to start with you about, about this miracle, is that it was not
what Rosa Parks did that was significant, it was who she was. Rosa Parks had a
personality and a persona in Montgomery that transcended all of the little
status cleavages that divide us even in our academic departments in a
university. Dr. King used to say, ""People think black people don't quarrel
over status because we don't have any of it, but if you have only a small
quantity, you quarrel in all that more minute and finite a degree. Rosa Parks
cured all of that. She was a person of great refinement and also a seamstress.
She lorded herself over no one and yet she wrote beautiful letters in perfect
English for the NAACP, she was the secretary. She sewed for the better members
in Dexter Avenue, but went to church in a Lutheran church taught in a little
like missionary colony. She was a person who transcended all of the little
differences there. The big people liked her because they thought she was
refined. The little people liked her because she didn't lord it over
anybody. I tried to say in the book, because somebody told me this, that Rosa
Parks really makes up for about fifty of society's sociopaths that are let
loose. One transcendent personality that everybody likes from every station in
life. So, the bus boycott started because of who she was, not that she did
something extraordinary or that something extraordinarily bad happened to her,
but the combination of this indignity happening to this person made everybody
willing to get in the cars. It made everybody willing to submit to that on both
sides, to have your car dented, to have your car ticketed,
to have your car muddied and, on the other side, to humble yourself and say,
""May I ride in your highfalutin car, Dr. Atkin?"" It forged community bonds that
people never knew existed. Talk about stretching yourself, this is the
overlooked part of the Miracle in Montgomery. People stretched themselves
everyday to walk miles, to ride miles, to endure the harassment by the police,
every kind that you can imagine, including arresting Dr. King, of course,
several times. To do that for three hundred days, through two winters, is a true
phenomenon of social transformation at a community level about the automobile
and about people doing things they didn't believe they could do. It really
meant a lot to Dr. King when old Mother Pollard, you know he tried to get her to
take a ride, said some of the older people shouldn't be doing this. They
should take a ride in the car and after a while some people got so devoted to
the spirit of the movement, that they would tum down the rides from people, even
when they were offered, and Mother Pollard turned down a ride from Dr. King
several times and kept saying, ""No, I don't want to ride. My feets is
tired, but my soul is rested."" That famous line came from somebody literally
walking into town in that whole long year.
People argue about whether the bus boycott was won or lost by the demonstrations
or by the lawsuits that ultimately ended the segregation there, but the fact of
the matter is that it was the transition within the community itself that
happened and made this possible, that laid the groundwork for all the other
surprises of people saying, ""We can do something about this ourselves if we are
willing to stretch across community lines."" Nobody knew it was going to be about
the buses anymore than they knew that the next stage was going to be about a
lunch counter. This is the kind of accidental surprise
that happens once people begin to stretch themselves and try to ask if somebody
else from a different walk of life, across a line, if I'm willing to make
myself nervous and expose myself to ask if somebody else will do this, the
movement says you will be surprised, you will be pleasantly answered and later
on people in the movement are risking their lives to do precisely that. It
created hope out of no hope, but we have to be harsh historically and honestly.
The bus boycott ended m 1956. Montgomery was never the site of another serious
initiative in Civil Rights because as soon as it was over people started
quarreling over the success. Rosa Parks was driven out of Montgomery because
people resented the fact that she became known as the mother of the Civil Rights
Movement and she wasn't from either of the two elite churches. These are
harsh facts. The genius and the spirit doesn't last forever and you have to
be on guard to figure out where it is going to go. Not only that, it didn't
really turn up anywhere else either because seven years later, in 1963, Dr. King
really feared that the Civil Rights Movement was going recede from its window in
history with segregation still intact. It was still as strong as ever and he
believed that the rise of the opposition to the Civil Rights Movements had more
momentum than the movement itself by 1962 and he went into Birmingham, the most
segregated city and the toughest city, basically as a desperate measure to try
to take a risk when he felt he had nothing to lose because the movement
otherwise was going to recede.
Now, this is the miracle of children. I want to make clear to what degree
Birmingham succeeded, not because of a letter from a Birmingham jail, not
because of political mobilization of outside people, not because of the
accumulated forces of other
Civil Rights support groups and not even because of the wearing down of the long
weeks of demonstrations in Birmingham. They were on the point of surrender.
Nobody was going to publish the letter from Birmingham jail. Nobody paid any
attention. It was a long-winded letter, another one of Dr. King's sermons.
President Kennedy, after over a month of demonstrations in Birmingham and people
going to jail, basically wasn't even asked questions about Birmingham. It
wasn't on the screen and Dr. King was preparing to withdraw from Birmingham
when James Bevel and his wife Diane, Diane Nash who is coming here, said, ""Well,
you're going to have to withdraw because you're running out of people
who are willing to go to jail because of all of the terrible things that are
happening in Bull Connor's jail and what happens when you are in there. Who
wants to go?"" But we have plenty of people, it's just that they are 18 and
17 and 16, and an argument began to break out in Birmingham behind the scenes. I
mean an argument with fistfights among nonviolent people. Those are really
serious arguments. ""You mean to say that you have come in here to Birmingham and
mobilized hatred among whites, they are firing people right and left, the
movement is failing and now you are about to withdraw and you want to leave for
good measure all of our children with criminal records. You want to put babies
in jail?"" Bevel was the leader of the team saying, ""Why not? They are
segregated. They have no future."" One of the fistfights broke out when a parent
came in and said, ""Get this lunatic out of here, Dr. King. Why is he threatening
to put my child in jail?"" Bevel said, ""I want to put your child in jail because
he is willing to do what you should have done thirty years ago,"" and there was
almost a fight there. Bevel essentially argued half seriously, because he was
always on the borderline of
lunacy, that ""If Baptists could accept baptism and determine their eternal
destiny as early as 6-years-old, how can you tell them they can't march for
freedom?"" All of the preachers would say, ""Now come on Bevel, we do that in the
church but we are building the church membership.""
But the real significant thing about the children's miracle in Birmingham
is the
argument that took place in almost every household or, in some cases didn't
take place, because it became younger and younger and younger. The first day
they marched, they allowed people as young as twelve to go to jail. The second
day, where you got a lot of the Charles Moore photographs, there were kids as
young as six and eight years old, mostly girls, and these are the photographs
that stupefied me over there in Atlanta while watching them on TV. The
significant thing about the miracle is what took place in the households in
black Birmingham during this time between parent and child, ""Am I going to go to
jail, do know what going to jail means, you're twelve years old,
you're my future, I'm not going to jail, well daddy, you'll lose
your job and I can't lose a job,"" people debating over dinner tables what
to do. Most were forbidden to go. Some got permission to go. Dr. Freeman
Hrabowski, the president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, argued
with his family in Birmingham. He was twelve years old. He was the classmate of
Denise McNaire, who was later killed in a church bombing. He said it took about
two weeks, but his parents tearfully gave him permission to march to jail. He
said that it was the hardest thing that he ever did. He was terrified. He said
there were awful things that happened in the jail and you have kids crowded up,
forty to a cell, a cell for eight people, in with other criminals, being
terrorized by the jailers. He was
later expelled from the school because he was a ringleader, even at the age of
twelve. He said to him the greatest lesson that he has ever had that he's
carried on through his career as a black president of a predominately white
technical school, a State University. It said it was all more than made up for
by what happened when they expelled him. He said the white school superintendent
insisted that he be expelled as a lesson. He said, ""My principal had no choice
but to do it in an all black school and he called a big assembly like this. He
said, ""The principal did a feat worthy of a poet. He expelled me from school in
front of everybody else with the political bosses in the back of the room using
language that satisfied them that he was being expelled."" ""You knew what you
were doing wrong, Freeman. You knew that this was a deliberate choice and you
are going to pay the price here you are going to pay the price down the road,
who knows what will happen to you because of this."" He said that principal
communicated and expelled him in a way that convinced every kid there that the
principal was proud of him for what he was doing, and yet satisfied the people
in the back. Now that is walking a fine line. But it happened in Montgomery, in
the children's marches, with over two thousand people going to jail the
first day and then it just spilled over the whole country. There were over
fourteen hundred demonstrations in the net six weeks, President Kennedy throwing
up his hands, introducing the Civil Rights Bill, essentially in a desperate plea
to try to stop the spread of demonstrations that went out from Birmingham, out
from the heart of Alabama, the second great miracle here. It led almost
inexorably and very quickly to the third.
Bevel and Nash were celebrated privately within the movement because as much of
an orphan as the idea of putting children in jail was before this great miracle,
once it
spread all over the country, they were geniuses. Nobody really knew that much
about the agonizing over strategy, but they knew that putting children in jail
had been largely their campaign. So on the night of the Birmingham church
bombing when four little girls who, by the way did not take part in those
demonstrations, there weren't that many who didn't, but they
didn't, were blown up in Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Bevel and Nash
stayed up all night, they broke furniture, they wailed and they beat on each
other. They said, ""This has happened because of us, we killed those girls, and
before morning we are going to have an answer to it."" They debated essentially,
the way Diane puts it, and Bevel too; they're estranged now and Bevel is
still on the edge of lunacy, living in Chicago. The million-man march was his
idea, among many other things. He said, ""We are going to have a Malcolm X
solution. We know who set that bomb."" When we called down to Birmingham,
preachers already knew Chambliss and those people did it. That was no secret. He
said, ""I know people who can kill them, we'll have a vigilante because we
know there's not going to be any investigation so we're going to have
a vigilante style response because we can't take this any longer."" He said,
""We know there's not going to be any investigation. We're going to
have a vigilante style response because we can't take this any longer."" He
said, ""That's what John Wayne would do."" Bevel would say, ""Well what would
John Wayne do? Would he sit back and wait? Americans like John Wayne don't
they, unless he's black."" He called people that night. The alternative,
they said, was to devise something appropriate to the heinousness of the crime
from the tradition they knew, the tradition of nonviolence, and they went back
and forth. I think that this is an honest debate but by morning they had typed
up this blueprint for a
nonviolent answer to the church bomb. They are in North Carolina in another
movement. Diane drove all the way to Birmingham where Birmingham was in shock,
getting ready for the funeral. Dr. King was there. She fought her way through
Fred Shuttlesworth and all the people in the the anteroom and the chaos and
presented this plan which was a blueprint for a nonviolent army to march all
over Alabama and immobilize the state until black people in Alabama had the
right to vote on the theory that if you could secure the right to vote, crimes
like the Birmingham church bombing would no longer be trivialized, it would no
longer be passed off and sloughed off. For a lot of you, this is historical
trivia at the time, but Alabama took far more seriously the fact that Dr. King
got a ride in a car from a Justice Department lawyer from Birmingham to Selma
trying to stop riots after the Birmingham church bombing than they took the
investigation of the bombing itself. They impaneled several grand juries. They
said essentially that the federal government, by offering him a ride was
subsidizing somebody who was an avowed traitor to the established segregation
laws of the State of Alabama and they impaneled grand juries and this was
front-page news everywhere. So, getting a ride was a bigger crime than bombing
this church. Bevel once said, ""Diane, did you ever see the movie Casablanca?"" He
said, ""When Humphrey Bogart got in the river and got those leeches on him,
that's the way Diane gets on you."" He said, ""Diane got on Dr. King about
the right to vote movement and that was the origin of the Selma right to vote
movement. So this miracle that occurred in Selma was the brain child of two
twenty-three-year-old black citizens who could not vote themselves, who in the
faith of the church bombings said, ""We are not going to wait for somebody else
to do something about this. We're not
going to wait for the President, we're not going to say somebody else
should do it, we're not going to say that Walter Cronkite should do it. We
are pledging to ourselves, even if it costs us our marriage, that we are not
going to rest until we carry through this plan as citizens because we own this
country."" They nagged Dr. King until he came to Selma to start the Right to Vote
Movement. He took three trips across the Selma Bridge ultimately after these
demonstrations, too. They all have their own lives. Finally they got their first
martyr, a person killed, Jimmy Lee Jackson killed in a church in Marion,
Alabama. When they were locked up in Selma, they marched outside of Selma. In
the church, the state troopers came and shot a fellow in the stomach and he died.
Bevel and Nash, this time it was mostly Bevel, had the idea to march from Selma
to Montgomery to petition Governor Wallace for the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson.
It took two more marches to get across that bridge, but by the end of the year
you had the Voting Rights Act that added five million new black voters to the
role, not just in Alabama, but across the South. This worked out to about 1.25
million new voters per martyr in the Birmingham church bombing. On the whole the
martyrs in the Civil Right Movement were relatively few given the scope of the
miracle that was wrought.
Again, I want to tell you a sad part about this though. By the time Bevel and
Nash's plan was complete, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
denounced the Voting Rights Act as insufficient. They had worked on it for years
themselves, but they had grown too tired, too disillusioned, and too angry about
the slowness of the federal government. They said, ""If Lyndon Johnson proposed
it, it can't be good,"" so they were against it. They turned against
government and the other secret about it was
that all of a sudden they didn't get along very well internally, black and
white, within the movement. That's a big secret, but it's true. They
split apart and they couldn't acknowledge the fact because they were
holding out in public themselves, as people who were above the race question,
but they weren't. Now, in retrospect, it is not surprising that they
weren't. The cultures were separate. You have to stretch yourself. You have
to expect differences, but they couldn't, and they split apart. The
movement disintegrated almost instantly after the Selma Miracle.
These three miracles that occurred here in Alabama, and there were others but I
cited three, the Bus Boycott, The Miracle of Children that destroyed segregation
and in the course of it lifted up women. Discrimination against women was banned
in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by accident. As a last ditch effort, the
Southerners in the congress decided to add sex in there, thinking that it would
make it ridiculous; the idea of having the same bathrooms and that women could
be airline pilots and other things that were manifestly ludicrous. They thought
that this would discredit the whole bill and maybe it would go down the tubes
but there was so much momentum behind the bill and there were a few women in the
congress that stood up and accepted and embraced it. Within a year of that
people wrestled with the question, ""What does equality mean between the sexes?""
You had the first female rabbi in the five thousand-year history of Judaism. The
Women's Movement began to rise out of the stretching of the question, ""What
does equality mean?"" These miracles are wonderful miracles. They are seldom
studied. In a culture that is obsessed with political strategy, that will
analyze a media consultant's strategy for winning a primary, you have a
miracle wrought by cars, a miracle wrought
by school children, and I argue that it is on par with the plague of the infants
in the Bible. Not since Passover have you had the power of relationships of a
great power turned on the witness of eight and ten year old children marching in
school and changed the whole legal standard of the entire South, which than
changed the whole balance of politics in the United States. Within a week of
Barry Goldwater announcing that he, the Republican candidate, was going to
oppose the Civil Rights Act, the first candidates of the Republican party who
had any prospect of success filed for election to congress here in Alabama and
five of them were elected. They were elected so fast they didn't even have
any party records. They were all Democrats. They shifted overnight. While I was
growing up, we didn't have any Republicans in the South. They were like
polar bears. They were Yankees and we didn't have them. As soon Barry
Goldwater, for the Republicans in 1964, opposed the Civil Rights Act, that was a
fulcrum powerful enough to tum party politics on a dime. It changed things. All
of this came about by what school children did. Where are the political
textbooks analyzing that you can change the fulcrum of national, and even
international politics, if you can devise a strong enough political message
through children of that courage? The same is true of Selma, that two kids, in
reaction to a heinous crime, could devise a strategy that would lead, within a
year and a half, to a law that changed the voting pattern in a whole region of
the country is a stupendous deed. We don't study it very much because I
think the reaction against this period, because of the Vietnam War and because
the movement itself disintegrated and because the resentment of the government
that created these miracles has dominated our politics every since. It has kind
of bleached it out of our vocabulary.
These were great miracles in the tradition of American freedom, in the tradition
of the revolution, in the tradition of Lincoln and the tradition of all
Americans struggling over what the intuition for equal citizenship really means
in practice. Throughout our history, usually when you struggle over that, race
is somewhere around there. If it's not race, it's immigrants. If it is
not immigrants, then it is sex. Who is equal? What does it mean? What does
equality mean? It is not an equality of attainment. It's an equality of
essence and the language that Dr. King used, you notice I haven't mentioned
Dr. King through all of this, because Dr. King was not the heart of the
movement. These people, these children, people like Bevel, well there are a
thousand Bevels and a thousand Nashs. They are the ones coming up with the
tactical innovation. Dr. King was the voice of the movement. The voice is what
we miss most today. The objective conditions of America are much, much better
than we like to think. These miracles have swept forward. Tiny America in a
blink of history, the democratic ideas that the movement used to remake the
South in a blank of history has wiped monarchy off the globe from all recorded
history. It's been emperors and czars and sultans and people laughed at
democracy until it rose up, it wiped slavery off the face of the United States,
it enfranchised and transformed the condition of women. Through our national
government, the ideals of equal citizenship transformed old age from the most
discarded stage of life into now the most secure stage of life. We licked
fascism and we licked communism as the iron booted pretended successors to
monarchy. We put people on the moon. We licked polio. We reduced the scourge of
race. We began to transform ancient war into peacemaking and out of Alabama, the
Selma to Montgomery March became a watchword for freedom all around
the world, from South Africa to the Berlin Wall to Tiananmen Square. There have
been rebellions in China for five thousand years, but never one modeled on a
city until Tiananmen Square, and that lived.
This is our story. If Dr. King could hope and James Bevel and Diane Nash and
these children could formulate hopeful plans in an era of lynching and church
bombings, then where is our language of hope in an era that cries out to be
redeemed from cynicism and sloth? Our objective conditions are good. Our
language is paralyzed. Dr. King used the language of equal souls and equal vote
in a very special way. I called it paired footings. He put one foot in the
scriptures and one foot in the Constitution, one foot in the Hebrew prophets and
in the parables of Jesus and the other foot in the Declaration of Independence
and the Gettysburg Address. You can hear it throughout his language. It gives it
an enormous sturdiness. We will win our freedom because the Word of God and the
cries of freedom are embodied in our echoing demands. One day he wrote a letter
from the Birmingham jail. He wrote, ""One day the South will know that when the
disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters in Birmingham, they were
in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and for the most
sacred value in our Judeo-Christian Heritage."" With only one foot in the
scriptures and one foot in the Constitution, equal souls, equal vote, with Rabbi
Hashol, a wonderful character I studied in the second book, King used to sit
around and talk about the basis for democracy is scriptural. In other words, the
idea is equal vote and everybody's vote should count as equal, is born up
by the idea of equal souls. Everybody's soul is equal in the sight of God.
You should measure, and this was the innovation of a prophet, that you should
hold King
to the standard of how they treat widows and orphans because that's the
morality that upholds the notion that we are all equally precious.
When you have that idea, that everybody's vote is equal because their souls are
equal, you can get patriotic language that has the ring of the scriptures. You
can get this furnace in King's voice. The furnace in his voice is more
distinctive even in the word because it is the hope of that equal soul that the
? and the universities long, but it bends toward justice, colliding with the
harsh reality of his time. How hard it was. How much violence and how much
hatred there was and when they collide, they come out in that furnace of his
voice, equal souls, equal votes. These are the two feet, I think, that we march
on and it's the language that is lost in our time when we pretend that our
national government has not done anything for us and, in fact, it's bad.
The dominant idea since the death of Martin Luther King in American politics is
that national government is bad. You cannot look objectively in anything other
than the kind of deceptive pride that poisoned our history after the Civil War
to the point that I grew up being taught that slavery was good for black people
and that reconstruction was a nightmare of unfairness. That kind of fundamental
distortion is creeping in again in the history of the 60's and this
movement period is a time of license and a time of tyranny on the part of the
federal government. When these Acts were passed that liberated the South, the
white South, economically, you couldn't even hold a business meeting in the
South as long as it was segregated. A month after the Civil Rights Acts had
passed, the Milwaukee Braves are running to Atlanta. There wasn't any
Sunbelt when it was segregated. That is all the result of this liberation.
People denounced the Civil Rights Act saying that if it passed, the federal
government would have a jackboot in every town and that the white people would
not have a chance. They wouldn't be able to survive and that it would be
worst than Nazi tyranny. Well, where is that tyranny? This has enlarged freedom.
This is a miracle of freedom and unless we understand that, we are going to lose
its language and we won't have it when we need it.
The lesson of American history, I submit, is that every generation needs it in some
crisis and if you sneer at it long enough you won't have it when it's
there to have. Viola Liuzzo was the last martyr of the Selma march. You're
going to hear Mary Stanley who wrote a biography about her. What I want to say
about her miracle is this, she was killed; she was an ordinary Detroit housewife
who was moved by the photographs of the Selma march. She came to Alabama to
volunteer and was bushwhacked, just because she was riding in the car. That was
J. Edgar Hoover's worst moment. We don't have time to go into that but
maybe Mary will. Ladies Home Journal did a survey. Sixty-five percent of
American women said she got what she deserved because she should have been home
with her children. This was a different time and the great tide of freedom that
has rolled forward and is still rolling forward. The people in Alabama are
comfortable with a weatherman named Hassan. They are comfortable with people
from Pakistan and India.
The movement prepared America morally for the inevitable shrinking of the world
where even if you are a mean, cussed, old person, who doesn't care a
farting for democracy or religion, you are going to have to be able to get along
with people from Thailand and Syria because the world is shrinking. This
movement is the moral
preparation for survival in a shrinking world. If Viola Liuzzo was a liberated
woman before she knew she was a liberated woman and nobody appreciated it, but
her witness should remind all of us how much we owe to her. Every white female
who goes to a college owes something to Viola Liuzzo because that sacrifice that
raised up the question of what are women inherently capable of, just like the
question of what are African Americans inherently capable of, transformed this
world. I went to a college at Chapel Hill that had no female students, except
nursing students. It is a State University, and this is in the sixties. Five
percent of the student body was female, now it's seventy percent female, a
larger demographic change than you will ever see in race relations, and all of
this is a result of a tyranny-free liberation washed forward on the sacrifice of
these people, larger than we can appreciate.
The story of America is freedom. It's our only story. We're not a
country just of people who speak one language or come from one place. America is
the story of an idea. We're the only county like that. If we don't
have our story, we have nothing else. Our story marches on two feet, equal
souls, equal vote. On these two feet move the principles that make the flag
wave, that makes Selma to Montgomery and the Alabama miracles of the Civil
Rights Movement, the watchword for democracy's ascendant promise the world
over that have inspired every patriot from George Washington to Jimmy Lee
Jackson; from Thomas Jefferson to Viola Liuzzo; from Abraham Lincoln to Martin
Luther King. Equal souls, equal vote. On these two feet advance history's
struggle for justice that transcends boundaries of race, of nonviolence that
tames our inclination to demonize and dehumanize people into enemies, a
spiritual kinship that joins all humanities beyond
labels of tribe and kind with neither east nor west, male nor female and above
the poison of religious contempt. Equal souls, equal vote. On these two feet
rides a new prosperity and peace of the Sunbelt South, which are showered, not
only upon those who sacrificed, bled and died for them, but also upon those
still with blinders on their eyes and blisters on their hearts, against the very
changes that have blessed us all. Equal souls, equal vote. On these two feet yet
march perhaps the greatest miracle of all for white Southerners of my
generation. For that one time, and not necessarily again, there is no reason
that it should happen again. This is all of our , but for that one time African
Americans, who for centuries had experienced only the boot heel and the whiplash
of democratic values, nevertheless, possessed the nonviolent courage, the
political genius and the astonishing grace to lift the rest of us toward the
true meaning of our own professed values.
May we all keep marching and recover the language of this hope. This is the
language of America. Every step, a leap of faith in each other, that we can be
self governing, that we can have faith in each other, even as our theoretical
elections can turn on the last wino to stumble to the polls as the soul of
wisdom in a democratic country and even as we all believe that we are each
self-governing. Still a stupendous concept in history that we can be
self-governing as individuals and self-governing as a people without external
discipline against all the philosophers and all the previous recorded history.
When we recover this language, we can march again on the two feet of equal souls
and equal vote, in harmony with all means of patriot and patriots of freedom so
that we may, like Mother Pollard, say, ""My feets is tired, but my soul is
rested."" Thank you.
Mr. Branch will be more than willing to entertain questions at this moment. We
now open the floor for questioning.
Mr. Branch: Thank you. I'd love to have questions and they don't have
to be on
anything I said, or even on Alabama. We really should to stick to Alabama
though. When I gave a talk on theology once and the first question was, ""Is it
true that Dr. King was only 5""6""?"" from some student and we really took off from
there. We don't have to stick with highfalutin things.
Q: You do have some academic background in economics and I find it curious that you
don't tie in the misuse of that along with the sex and race.
A: Well, I do have a background in economics, which I have pretty much shed like
an old skin. I talk about class and I write about class, at least in racial
politics and history writing. It turns into a shell game because people who say,
it's not class, it's race,"" or people who say, ""it's not race,
it's class,"" are generally trying to avoid the moral imperative of whatever
the other side is saying, so it seems to me this gets into another topic. You
picked up on something that is right. This talk, the talk that I gave tonight,
is more abstract than my writing. My writing is grounded in discipline. I
dedicated Parting the Waters to Septa McClark because she had the biggest impact
of anybody, I know that most of you probably don't know who Septa McClark
is, but she's a wonderful lady, but I couldn't write about her to the
degree that I felt was fair and that she deserved because I had this rule that I
was only going to do storytelling and let the lessons rise from the stories and
Septa McClark was always off stage teaching people how to read and write. She
had this theory that she could take an illiterate person and teach him to read
and write
in a week. Not only that, she said that she could also teach them to read and
write in a week in a way that one person out of every twenty, she said, another
week and she could teach them to teach the next group. She was a remarkable lady
but she was always down at Dorchester and she's never kind of in front and center.
My theory is that racial discussion is plagued by too much abstraction and not
enough discovery at a very human level, so I try to do storytelling history and
it's hard to get into a lot of economic analysis that way. It's also
hard to comprehend, as I was telling Attorney Thomas. It's harder than law
suits for similar reasons because they don't fit a structure that I think
is mandatory. We discuss race and abstractions and we use labels because
we're all in the Western tradition, right, where the abstract idea is more
powerful than the particular. So we think that if we are using a label about who
is militant and who is a racist or who is this or who is radical as opposed to a
militant, that that kind of abstract label carries more power than a story. It
is my theory that that's fool's gold. We exchange labels across the
divides between us that are very human. They are, ""Who do you eat with? Who do
you know? Who have you taken a risk with? Who do you have a history with?"" and
that's why I talked about the stretching, the movement is great because it
gets precisely into that so I think the general answer to your question is that
I don't get into a lot of economic theory because I don't get into a
lot of any theory. If I get into much theory at all, it's at that
intersection between religion and democratic theory, which is what I was trying
to talk about in Equal souls and Equal vote because I think one of the great
tragedies about America is that we're the only country
founded on freedom as a theory is that we don't teach what that means. What
does democratic theory mean and where does it come from? Does it come from the Bible?
A lot of people find that as a heretical idea, that the underpinnings of
democratic theory are biblical. Now, to me, if you listen to the Gettysburg
address, which is the undercurrent of democratic theory, it sounds like
it's out of the Bible and that's the reason it's stirring, but we
don't even debate these things. So to that degree, I did get out into
abstractions, but the general answer is I don't get a lot into economic
theory although I believe it's important and in the third book, of course,
Dr. King dies in Memphis with garbage workers. Virtually every one of the people
around him didn't want him to be with garbage workers because they
didn't like being with garbage workers. This is a very powerful statement
about economic issues coming at the end of what is essentially a passion before
he is killed, so it will be economic issues there but I don't generally
discuss them as a theoretical matter themselves just because of the way I go
about my work. It's a matter of craft.
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University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama",,en,"This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. You may use the digitized material for private study, scholarship, or research. Though the University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections has physical ownership of the material in its collections, in some cases we may not own the copyright to the material. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in our collections.",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,26,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,http://libarchstor2.uah.edu/digitalcollections/files/original/32/13343/InauguralLecture_Tape1_File2.pdf,,"Lecture Series on Civil Rights in Alabama, 1954-1965",1,0