Taylor Branch talking:
President Kennedy was very nervous about the march and wished that it would not go forward. If it had been up to him, there wouldn’t have been a march. He had just proposed the Civil Rights Act in 19—in June of ’63 on national television, the best civil rights speech President Kennedy ever gave, the only one in which he addressed the race issue of segregation as a moral issue, as clear as the Constitution and as old as the Scriptures. But he was afraid that a march would lead to controversy and rioting and that sort of thing, and make it hard to get the bill through Congress. So he tried to talk them out of having the march and was immensely relieved, along with a lot of the rest of America, when the march turned out to be so peaceful.
King’s great gamble in Birmingham had not worked. Nobody was interested in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” one iota. It was dismissed as another long-winded King sermon. He took a stupefying risk in Birmingham to allow not only high school students, but elementary school students, to take the place of a dwindling number of adult volunteers who were discouraged. And instead of 10 or 15, which is what the daily quota had finally dwindled down to be, they had over a thousand students march, downtown Birmingham, and were met with dogs and fire hoses on May 2nd and May 3rd. It was a stupefying gamble in his career.
Everybody was against it. Everybody, from Bobby Kennedy and Malcolm X to George Wallace, condemned the use of schoolchildren. But it broke through America’s defenses on the race issue of saying it’s somebody else’s problem, it may be wrong, and finally it became everybody’s problem. And people raised questions, and it went all around the world. So, yes, it was an emotional breakthrough in the sense that people were asking questions.
And in that sense, it’s really critical for us today, because before that breakthrough, the sides were in gridlock over segregation in America. There was resentment on both sides, and each side said the world would be fine if everybody else dropped dead. After Birmingham, everybody was raising questions. Even food critics were writing about race after that. “What are we going to do about it?” And it’s that spirit of questioning and getting to fundamentals that is really what we need today, because we’re in another state of gridlock, but nobody is really asking to what degree it is driven by race and how we’re going to get out of it.
the civil rights movement finally rises into national prominence—it becomes the issue in national politics—J. Edgar Hoover is in a bind, because his FBI basically is all-white, and it defends an all-white view of the world. And he had—the only FBI agents he had who were black were his chauffeurs and his butlers. So it was a profound threat to his world view. And so, he was trying to force the Kennedy administration into wiretapping Dr. King. That was occurring at the same time that this was going on behind the scenes that summer. Bobby Kennedy turns down a request to wiretap Dr. King in the summer of 1963, and then, on the other side of the “I Have a Dream” speech, in October of 1963, he approved it—the attorney general of the United States. So this was a struggle going on behind the scenes over covert government, which is, you know, a profound—was and still is a challenge to the promise of open democracy in which the citizens are responsible for decisions. You can’t be responsible for decisions if you don’t know about them.
– source democracynow.org
Taylor Branch, Pulitzer Prize-winning author best known for his landmark narrative history of the civil rights era, the America in the King Years trilogy. His new book is a collection from the trilogy that he has adapted for a college course. It’s called The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement.