Peter C. Myers: Civil Rights & Civil Disobedience | BRI Scholar Talks

0:00 [Music] this is tony williams a senior fellow with the bill of rights institute and we have our guest here peter myers and peter myers is a professor of political science at the university of wisconsin at eau claire and a professor at the ashland university masters program for teachers he’s published a fantastic book i i think it’s the the best book on frederick douglass titled frederick douglass race and the rebirth of american liberalism many of his scholar among many of his scholarly essays he’s written essays on martin luther king and is currently at work on an extensive project about the idea of colorblindness

0:45 in the history of american political thought now he wrote a an essay for on the birmingham march and on black power the black power movement of the 1960s for bri and for our free online textbook life liberty and the pursuit of happiness which you can sign up for at bill of rights institute dot org the book is a series of components including narratives decision points and scholarly point counterpoints that that really bring out the the compelling stories and dramas in american history he’s also acting as a scholarly reviewer for the bill of rights institute’s

1:32 curriculum on race relations entitled liberty and justice for all pete thank you uh very much for joining us thank you for having me my pleasure excellent well let’s just jump right in i your essay on the 1963 birmingham march was was really just a model of great narrative writing uh and and it it’s really a model for what makes our textbook so compelling uh first for teachers and students and can you just give us maybe a little overview what and and maybe maybe focus on your writing of it like what drew you to the story and and what makes it such a compelling story what drew me to this story was at the

2:18 time i was i was doing a lot of work on uh on martin luther king jr you you mentioned the uh the book project the color blindness book project and i was going back and forth in my mind about what i wanted that book to be and for a time i thought maybe i would focus it more narrowly on on mlk and so i was doing a lot of work on him uh more lately i i decided it should have a broader focus if we look at this as a kind of king-centric story that birmingham is the great turning point that king’s fortunes for reasons we’ll get into are flagging a bit actually before

3:04 birmingham uh and the whole trajectory of king’s career changes or maybe changes again uh you know starts going upward again after after birmingham he calls it uh he calls it a third american revolution and and this is this is to him this uh the signature moment of it um it is also the moment at which because of the letter from birmingham jail i think um it’s the moment at which king makes his greatest confusion to uh do american civil religion i mean as as as moving a speech as the as the i have a dream speech is i

3:50 think the letter from birmingham jail is the is is the greatest contribution that the king makes to uh to our way of thinking about uh about morals of politics but we can uh i mean i think really king king in these uh king as well as events have taught americans over the last 50 years 50 60 years or so um to think of racism as the deadliest sin you know i mean as we as we see now um in uh in american public rhetoric so that’s uh that’s that’s a generalist way i guess of characterized the significance of birmingham very interesting thank you uh yes and

4:37 and can you provide a little bit of perhaps brief uh historical background uh for the events leading up to birmingham well as you as you get to know me better you’ll find uh brevity is maybe not the not the the greatest of my virtues but uh but i’ll i’ll try um if moving really quickly over over a half century or so of historical events um the the regime of of race segregation in especially the old south the old confederacy begins construction late 1880s uh early 1890s

5:23 supreme court ratifies that in plessy versus ferguson uh and uh and then commences kind of a muted and low level for the most part uh civil rights battle that starts to get louder in the world war ii era and i mean the beginnings of the what became the freedom rides are in the 1940s um and uh and the prep the legal preparation for brown versus board uh takes place in the late starts the late 1930s uh the moment that a lot of people reasonably enough associate with the commencement of the civil rights

6:09 movement in its activist phase uh when uh when rosa parks decides to uh to take an act of disobedience um in on a bus in december of 1955 um interesting little part of that story is that this happens in montgomery where where young martin luther king jr is a new pastor and it’s a it’s a women’s organization that begins that protest that turns into the montgomery bus boycott which turns into martin luther king jr’s first triumph and that’s really his entrance onto the national stage he becomes famous what follows from that um

6:54 let’s see the in 1960 the students kind of spontaneously in the beginning start a sit-in movement in lunch counters in north carolina that spreads all over the south then the freedom rides in 1961 were attempts to to make good on an interstate commerce commission desegregation regulations so they were testing that in bus terminals so they organized bus travels from d.c washington dc to uh to birmingham across the south quite a bit of violence and some publicity uh and then uh king’s failure which isn’t really king’s failure but we can tell that story later in albany and that sets up

7:40 the uh that sets up the campaign in birmingham uh success in birmingham then we go on to the march and then we get uh and then we get really serious civil rights legislation excellent thank you and that was brief so okay uh thanks for that overview and and what can you tell us a little bit more about this albany movement because you’ve mentioned that that king sort of uh you know had had a failure um or or at least didn’t achieve his objectives and so uh what what led to that failure yeah king um came to regret his involvement in albany and actually the albany movement wasn’t

8:27 planned by by king the albany movement was it was a campaign initiated by the student nonviolent coordinating committee snik as as commonly known which was as the name implies a gathering of students that really grew out of the the sit-ins of the of 1960 and the freedom rides so snick gets organized its first president is john lewis uh snake gets organized and in the fall of 1961 this is a kind of an extension of the of the freedom rides uh a couple of students in atlanta decide that we’re gonna go to albany

9:13 there’s a there’s a historically black college there and we’re gonna desegregate or make sure at least of the desegregation of the bus terminal in albany so that’s how it gets started and so that’s one of the goals but one of the things king complained about was that he thought the goals were a bit scattered so they formed this albany movement the naacp local chapter of the naacp gets involved a couple of local business figures black business figures get involved as leaders of the of the albany movement and um doing all this so they organize uh demonstrations at the at the bus terminal they run into a very clever

9:59 adversary uh and clever adversary is the sheriff of albany a man named laurie pritchett he had studied the civil rights movement and so he had studied the way in which it succeeds in the way in which it fails and he came to the conclusion that to put it very briefly when it gets a lot of publicity succeeds when it attracts national publicity uh and the way it attracts national publicity this is of course a sadly familiar story for us um is um by by disseminating images of of police brutality and so that’s the thing we want to avoid uh and so pritchett i don’t

10:45 know pritchard said yes i he would say things publicly like yes i’m a convert to non-violence uh which wasn’t exactly true but he uh kept the violence off camera he also makes sure from surrounding counties that he’s got enough jail space to to put demonstrators in jail so they never succeed in overwhelming the jail system and city officials refuse to negotiate and it comes more or less to a standstill and then king gets asked to the one of the local business leaders was a friend of king leaders of the albany movement and asks king to intervene and so king

11:30 says okay and his thinking is i’m going to come to albany i’m going to give a speech and then i’m going to be on my way and they ask him to lead to mars spending jail but nothing really comes of this uh and i’ll this is a long enough story already i won’t go on and on about it nothing comes of it then this is now december 1961. um king goes away king gets invited back the next summer still nothing really comes of it the media coverage is to the effect that uh albany’s a big failure and embarrassment for for martin luther king and then following that early well no sorry later 1962 from king’s point of view

12:16 the civil rights movement is at a kind of a crossroads his organization is pretty much out of money the southern christian leadership conference his own leadership of the movement is in question because the the younger activists are kind of superseding him and are actually quite irritated with him we’ve been talking about that if you want um and so she thinks this is kind of a moment of crisis after after albany okay that’s right yeah that’s that’s the lead-in to to the birmingham campaign yeah well it certainly is and so why does king and and why did the the movement leaders shift uh their efforts over to birmingham why did they select birmingham to hold

13:01 civil rights demonstrations well king called birmingham the citadel of southern segregation um birmingham was uh was known among uh the the civil rights movement um leadership and activists as bombing him colloquially it was a violent place to be uh to be involved in the civil rights cause birmingham had a relatively large population of african americans a little under 40 percent and that meant that birmingham had a tighter regime of

13:46 segregation than than some other cities did this is why this is a part of the history of race relations in the us that it much of it is an important factor let’s put it this way is is demographics you know that the the larger the concentration of the black population the more worried and the more sometimes repressive the the white population becomes that was true in birmingham so birmingham has this reputation of so to speak the capital of segregation king as i say is worried about the movement running the ground and so birmingham is chosen if we wanna uh use a sports metaphor as kind of a

14:32 hail mary i mean birmingham is is going for broke and the idea is if we can pull this off you know then we’ve then we can really turn things around uh and uh and so that’s the that’s why birmingham is chosen but uh birmingham is chosen with a good bit of trepidation because they they were um they were well prepared for the for the eventuality that they’re going to face some of them might not come out of their lives all right interesting uh and can you tell us about some of the the course of events at birmingham how does how do how do they start and and where do they go let me say yeah

15:18 yeah i mean in kind of transition to answering that let me say one further thing um i i just painted a very grim picture of birmingham i think i think everything as far as i know everything i said is true but there’s one further thing i guess that’s worth noting about the choice of birmingham there’s some indication that change might be afoot um there’s a mayoral election the mayoral election pits two defenders of segregation against one another but one of them is is moderate and reasonable and the other one is not the other one is really hardline the other one is the the now infamous eugene bull connor um and there’s a real chance

16:04 the locals think that the bulkhana regime might be um uh might be removed from office that there might be a new day in birmingham and so there’s a there i don’t know if i want to call it a coalition but there’s some sharing of opinion on the part of relatively moderate whites uncomfortable with segregation uncomfortable with the kind of reputation that it gives the city and uh black leadership who think that maybe we can actually get something done um uh in a way that we were gonna be unable to do that before okay so let’s um

16:49 yeah let’s let’s touch on a few highlights in the the chain of events in the birmingham campaign we should credit uh the the local minister who’s uh the the sclc activist member uh who’s been an agitator for equal rights for a long time is a guy named fred shuttlesworth and so shuttlesworth wants to organize a campaign you know a jobs and desegregation kind of campaign in birmingham and shuttlesworth wants the involvement of the network the southern christian leadership conference along with along with ping and so

17:36 shuttlesworth and the others decide to plan this campaign and so king is trying to learn his lessons from albany so they’re trying to be very deliberate so they spend the winter months 1962 early 1963 planning then comes this mayoral election that i alluded to in april of 63. some of the locals are saying please don’t do any direct action demonstrations before this mayor’s election because you’re gonna you know that you’re gonna risk a backlash that’ll keep bull connor in office you don’t want to do that so so king and his colleagues agreed that they would uh that they would hold off for a while

18:22 so the election happens the the result is that bull connor gets voted out but he challenges the result and so that’s really up in the air for the next few months and king and shuttlesworth uh and uh uh and ralph abernathy decide to go ahead with uh with the with the campaign um the campaign itself takes twists and turns um they uh you know their initial demonstrations initial jailings not a heck of a lot of media influence sorry media attention the city in response secures

19:09 a judicial decree local judicial decree for being for devastation so king has the decision now do i want to disobey and go to jail or do i want to comply with this and fight it in the courts which is going to take at least months and maybe and maybe longer if king is in jail then then there’s a concern that they might not be able to raise any money they might not have need to bail out people who are protests and that means they might not be able to recruit people you know who who need to put food on the table for these protests so it’s a it’s a bind but he decides to go ahead with the march to disobey them to disobey the law

19:54 the march takes place uh symbolically enough on uh on good friday of 1963 and so you see martin luther king marching to jail uh as jesus is marching to his fate uh right um and this is the first major act of civil disobedience on king’s part in the uh in civil rights in the civil rights era and a further thing happens so king goes to jail on good friday that same day a group of birmingham clergy when i teach classes on this subject i like to call them the birmingham eight a group of birmingham clergy they’re all whites they’re not segregationists they’re

20:39 relatively moderate opponents of segregation they vary ideologically you know along the scale um they compose a public letter the letter gets published on that good friday and king gets wind of it uh the following day somebody shows it to him in prison and the um the letter s in effect is a public letter addressed to king the protesters please desist your protesters are outsiders um the street protests aren’t going to be helpful there’s a very high risk of of of i don’t know if i want to use the word inciting but eliciting a violent response

21:25 and unsettling the cause of reform please just leave it to us and leave it to legal channels uh and that’s according to the legend that’s what prompts king to write the the letter from birmingham jail the the the story the true story is a little more complicated than that i mean they’ve been they’ve been wanting a civil rights manifesto for a long time they talk about writing a letter from jail you know this is of course modeled on saint paul’s letters they talked about writing at for some time they talked about writing one at the albany in the albany campaign but that didn’t work out well so they were looking for an occasion and this is what this is what presented itself king um king writes the letter uh which now is world famous and

22:12 anthologized in a million different places um it really didn’t have that much effect right away it didn’t appear in print right away king was in jail eight days he gets out that’s long before the the letter sees the light of day so the letter doesn’t turn events really somebody comes up with the idea let’s you know what we need are more protesters um let’s enlist people’s children uh and so they and so they stage and there’s big controversy about this lots of misgivings about this uh among black residents of birmingham uh but they decide to go ahead with it so they have the children’s march and the children’s march infuriates

23:00 bull connor um the children’s march is met with uh i say children some of them are quite young but these are high school kids mostly right um who are charged up about this whole cause and are willing to go to jail and uh this infuriates the the police commissioner connor who unleashes the dogs that everybody has seen on on film footage now that does attract tremendous national attention pretty much instantly that gets the kennedy administration involved putting pressure on the locals to negotiate it makes the local business leaders very uneasy about all of this and so

23:45 fairly quickly after that a desegregation settlement is reached and it’s a gigantic media victory for the for the protesters so there’s there’s birmingham in a few minutes right yeah i mean uh the the images of not only the the police dogs with the fire hoses being the people the the the beatings that are taking place i mean really really horrific stuff and and so going a little bit maybe maybe taking a little deeper dive into this letter uh from birmingham jail uh can you tell us just a little bit more about that uh you know i i there’s a copy in in this resource and it really describes i think the pathos of

24:30 segregation he really describes his horrors um very movingly also a lot of natural law uh distinguishing between just an unjust laws and and also some appeal to not only american principles but sort of western ideals writ large the yeah um the the birmingham eight the the clergy to whom he’s approximately responding um had a good claim in a way to be uh to be moderates middle of the roaders and it’s an important part of the story because they charged king with being an extremist

25:16 so i’ll come back to that point in a second um the a a little further word about context to set this up i i ask students when i’m talking about this and sometimes in teacher seminars okay who’s the who’s the governor of alabama at this time and the answer is newly relatively newly elected george wallace and so george wallace gives in his inaugural governor’s address uh january of 1863 you know the famous segregation today so segregation now segregation tomorrow segregation forever speech and he invokes jefferson davis and robert e lee and so forth so you know wallace says look you know i want to fight the civil war again against the against these civil rights campaigners

26:03 and he gets elected on that platform in response to that this same group of birmingham clergy wrote a public letter with the same title the letter to king was called um an appeal to law and order and common sense the first letter that they wrote um which was called an appeal to law and order common sense was uh not addressed by name but everybody knew it was addressed to the governor uh and the gist of the letter was the appeal to law and order meant the law and order in question was brown versus board stop resisting the desegregation decision you know this is now constitutional law of the land and uh you know obey the law and let’s do this in a in a

26:49 moderate reformist kind of way so they rebuked governor wallace first and then they rebuked the street protesters led by led by king later and and so they’re they’re gradualists they’re gradual reformists and they called on that basis i mean they’re they’re saying in effect we’re the true moderates and king and wallace are the extremists on both sides of us and that charge better son king he says i’m not gonna i can’t quote it from memory exactly but he says he says in effect this um i don’t respond to criticism very often i’m i’m martin luther king jr i did a lot of correspondence you know and and and it a lot of it’s

27:36 unfriendly um and i don’t respond to it because if i did that’s all i would do is respond to the the mail i get um and and that leads you to think okay so king doesn’t respond to critical um correspondence but he does hear and so why so that means king must think there’s something kind of special about this letter that really demands a response now i said you know before they’re looking for an occasion but i think what’s special about it is this claim to moderation and the fact that they’re they’re clergy uh they’re uh they’re seven uh christians of various denominations in one rabbi um

28:24 and uh uh and so they’re men of god and and these are exactly the people that king wants to communicate with i mean king isn’t going to talk bull connor out of his pro-segregation position but there are plenty of people in the south who might be receptive to the right kind of appeal so this is this is why he he um he takes two positions in response to this charge of um of extremism i mean if you wanted to rebut that just in general terms you could say either of two things you know you could say no i’m not an extremist or you could say yes i am but it’s okay to be an extremist and king kind of says both those things

29:11 in the in the letter but the claim to moderation i think is the one that we ought to that we ought to focus on here the most that that’s a kind of long-winded uh introduction to the response to your questions about the natural law but i think it’s very important for king um to locate the movement in the in the uh in the mainstream american tradition of thinking about thinking about justice i think um that that king understood that it was a dictator of wisdom not to allow the civil rights movement to degenerate

29:57 into anti-americanism the the abolitionists you know 100 years before that had just the same sort of tension that they had to uh that they had to work through the king is in a similar kind of position so he’s taking great pains in the in the letter uh to to demonstrate a kind of wholehearted uh fidelity to the first principles of the of the american of the american regime um and it serves his purpose well enough i mean uh i think uh the the the the natural when king talks about natural law he goes he mentions the declaration and goes beyond it he talks about saint thomas aquinas too he

30:43 talks about a whole long briefly but he talks about a whole long western tradition natural but the part of it i think for him is the is the declaration of independence um and he has a good way of applying it to uh to the campaign in birmingham that that the fundamental principle of the american political and constitutional order is equality of rights equality in natural human rights and that means the just government has to be by the consent of the governed and those two things mean that any political order that segregates people that disfranchises them

31:29 simply on the basis of their color has to be understood as a violation of natural rights and a further thing so what do you do about that and king says a remarkable thing here in the in the context of uh of explaining his and defending his act of civil disobedience of disobeying the law king says what we’re doing here is expressing the highest respect for law he says that uh there’s a prudential consideration in that but there’s also a principled argument in that i think the protesters on the one hand really

32:15 had to show themselves in a demonstrative way as being a law-abiding people you know not not anarchists not not people interested in in chaos or anything like that they had to show themselves as basically lawful citizens um and the argument is that the natural rights principles imply that just government has to be by rule of law meaning not only that people who are citizens are subject to the law but the people who make and enforce the laws have to be subject to law also those people public officials have to be subject to a higher law that higher law

33:00 the highest of those higher laws is the law of nature um and then the constitutional law is supposed to be a kind of specification of the law of nature what happens when government transgresses those limits well people have the right to judge the transgression to petition government to to redress it they have the right to vote governors out of office and if they’re denied those things then they have the right to disobey i mean if the transgressions are sufficiently serious and chronic they have the right to disobey and disobedience can be must be civil if possible and maybe non-civil if uh if if necessary

33:49 you know so that’s that’s my summation of his of his argument and he says for um to uh uh to to substantiate it but you know along the way he’s mentioning socrates and he’s mentioning know st augustine and he’s mentioning thomas aquinas and he’s mentioning lincoln and thomas jefferson he’s really he’s made he’s putting himself in the in the mainstream of american thinking about justice right and and really trying to explore why is why he thinks that and unjust laws no law at all right yeah and and really uh examining why it’s sociologically politically economically sinful and wrong deciding of segregation this

34:35 segregation regime all right and so what effects do these events have in birmingham on the american conscience uh how does television and media uh help to uh you know help to shape that that understanding especially for for those uh who aren’t living under you know jim crow it’s an interesting question whether martin luther king jr could have been martin luther king jr you know could have been successful in the way that he was before the advent of television um i think there there is a certain i don’t know that this is

35:21 uh exclusive to king but there’s a certain genius about um about staging protests um and putting oneself in the position of really of of martyrdom um i mean in in maybe varying degrees that’s that’s very powerful when people see it um a a really general consideration might be to say that i think one of the one of the big things that king understood is that great leadership has to be an appeal to a combination of the head and the heart

36:06 you know you’re not going to just reason people out of segregation many uh there are many people who are not people of ill will racially who thought that the the aftermath of these direct action protests is often violence and disorder uh and and so there’s this powerful current of opinion but when you’re shown these pictures you know of especially dogs biting teenage timing fierce dogs fighting kids cops beating people um then that hasn’t that has an effect and uh it certainly had an effect on the

36:53 kennedy administration which was in a cautious sort of way friendly to the civil rights cause but very very worried about losing democrat votes in the in the southern states and so you know they didn’t like the direct action because they i mean for political reasons i think mainly they were very worried about it yeah but opinion turned and the kennedy administration became quickly much more energetic in pursuing civil rights legislation in the aftermath of birmingham okay and how does the king how does the movement generally build on these successes in birmingham to then uh because another event that

37:39 summer later on that summer is is obviously the uh the march on washington uh so so how does that lead us and tell us a little bit about that that march yeah you know um king called his method direct action non-violent direct action uh and he meant by that essentially you know let’s appeal to public opinion rather than going through the going through the courts um but there’s a sense in which you know all that we’ve described up to this point is really kind of indirect action because what you’re trying to do is you know you’re attracting media coverage and that’s going to arouse northern public opinion mainly um and that’s going to stir the canadian administration or the federal government into action and that’s going

38:24 to move the state government into into action so it’s all relatively indirect after birmingham i think king decides let’s make it really direct let’s go straight to washington uh and uh and so they start planning right away king wants to do this um others in i mean leaders of other civil rights organizations are some of them enthusiastic of course the the the younger people at snake are going to be enthusiastic the naacp is a little more cautious uh the urban league apparently initially is a little more cautious but king is all on board with this

39:11 publicly and so they all get on board really pretty quickly the the march on washington it was an idea that had been around for a couple of decades and the real initiator of the idea is a philip randolph a veteran labor leader who uh who initially planned one and was going to go through with it as a way of pressuring the franklin roosevelt administration and roosevelt conceded enough at the last minute roosevelt was like kennedy he thought the potential for embarrassment or worse was very high and so he didn’t want any part of this march and so roosevelt sections some partnership came off but randolph had still entertained um a hopefulness about about about

39:59 conducting such a march in dc and so it finally comes about and he too was one of the is one of the big organizers of it um this was a really quite extraordinary thing the the the march on washington um the the the figure that that is commonly mentioned is 250 000 people gathered um for this march and it came on the kennedy administration is very worried about the obvious things you would worry about you know about uh about an outbreak of violence and it came off very peacefully and it was by and large very well organized for which bayern rustin another the civil rights uh activist leaders deserves deserves a

40:46 good bit of credit um but you know when we talk about this i don’t i’m not going to editorialize but when we talk about this in the present day a gathering of 250 000 people in the aftermath of a victory yes but a victory that contained visible outrages in birmingham and a really dramatic outrage in the medgar evers killing and it came off totally peacefully um that’s that’s got to seem a remarkable thing and uh of course there were many other speakers that day um but we remember the king’s speech and and it really is a seminal speech in in american history and

41:32 and and again like we did with the the letter from birmingham jail maybe if you can discuss a little bit about um you know some of the the uh constitutional american principles in there uh and he does something very interesting rhetorically right he calls the declaration of independence a promissory note right uh jefferson called it a self-evident truth uh lincoln because of the contested nature of the idea in the civil war called it uh you know a proposition that all men are created equal yeah uh yeah now king calls it a promissory note really it’s really interesting changes uh over time uh so maybe you can allude to that that’s all very interesting isn’t it um jefferson wanted to call in sacred and undeniable truths

42:21 and i’m pretty sure i got to look this up you are a superior historian to me so you might you may already know this i’m pretty sure the congress put the self-evident truth in in revision but anyway uh um yeah lincoln calls it a proposition uh dedicated at gettysburg dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal um lincoln explains a bit more elaborately what he means by that in his speech on the dred scott decision where lincoln says that the authors of the declaration knew very well that not everybody’s rights were

43:07 secure at this moment but they envisioned these principles as spreading and deepening their influence um and he says very pointedly that they they meant those principles in a colorblind way you know to benefit he says all men of all colors are all people i think of all colors everywhere and in that respect i think king’s reading of the declaration is pretty much entirely in accord with lincoln’s um king was very much inspired by the example of lincoln he had lincoln on his mind a lot and that um that persisted through at least the early and the most

43:53 successful part of his adult career uh the the year 1963 as you as you suggested is itself significant here the year 1963 is the hundred year anniversary of the gettysburg address but it’s more fundamentally the hundred year anniversary of the emancipation proclamation frederick douglass uh uh when when the emancipation proclamation was issued um in a fit of enthusiasm said you know hence forward this day january the 1st is going to replace july the 4th in the minds of uh minds and hearts of the american people

44:38 this is i mean this is lincoln’s new birth of freedom right this is the rebirth of the of of the country this is when america becomes itself um that of course didn’t happen but king is thinking along the line i think you know when he said his five score years ago he wants people to think this is you know look um i want to remind you of what happened in 1863 was emancipation we’re supposed to be emancipated but we’re not fully fully emancipated um back to back to lincoln he uh um king tried to persuade jfk to issue um a kind of updated emancipation

45:23 proclamation it was an executive order you know mandating non-discriminate non-discriminatory hiring and things like that um and of course he didn’t persuade jfk to do that uh and then when he’s crafting this speech that becomes the i have a dream speech he’s um he’s quite self-consciously thinking about the gettysburg address and he’s trying to come up with words that um that might be um that might be worthy you know that might make his speech worthy of being a successor to uh to the gettysburg address and of course the the event culminates at the lincoln memorial so lincoln is all over the place in the in the in the march on washington in

46:09 in king’s um in king’s imagination you know and uh and and and same and beyond that same idea that you that you just alluded to uh the the the declaration in the constitution he says he honors the founders and he honors lincoln that this is the soul of the country you know this is the great promise of america is a fully integrated republic integrated across lines of color and creed and and so forth um and this is what we’re here to make to make good on you know uh that we are in a sense we’re not anti-american we’re not coming here in a spirit of opposition we’re

46:54 you know we’re trying to channel the true spirit of of america uh we’re the true sons and daughters of uh of the of the founders here um and you know so it’s a grand kind of patriotic appeal as well as a reformist appeal okay excellent uh and uh how do uh how do these non-violent demonstrations uh this rhetoric of king and others uh how do the successes of the the civil rights movement uh that is what what king calls the fierce urgency of now how does that then lead to the the civil rights act and voting rights act okay that’s a that’s that’s oh yeah i mean that that

47:41 that could be kind of a quick and easy question or it could be as a really big and complicated question uh we don’t have time for all the bigness and the complications but you you would like to be able to say that the march on washington um is is the coming of the civil rights movement to a kind of grand crescendo you know and and then after that it was just quick and easy and inevitable that you got the civil rights act passed and then the following year the voting rights act but it didn’t really happen that way um that uh you know the way we remember king’s dream speech

48:27 is uh you know professors of rhetoric or in public opinion polls say this is the greatest speech of the 20th century by an american and so forth but that that really isn’t the way it was received it’s not that it was received in a hostile way it was received with praise but then relatively quickly forgotten um and it didn’t become a great big thing again sad to say until after king was uh was murdered uh and then the the retrospectives on his life started unearthing this speech and that became the his uh his most enduring words so he didn’t move the congress instantly i mean the the jfk administration had um had composed a civil rights bill

49:16 in uh in the summer of 1963 that bill was now kicking around congress and it had a lot of resistance from uh the quarters you would expect in uh in the congress and its prospects were really quite uncertain and they weren’t really much more certain uh from what i understand anyway they really weren’t much more certain after the march after uh after king’s dream speech um on the timeline of events you know you you again you’d like to say that this is kind of the great triumph and okay now everything’s nice in the civil rights field well hardly more than two weeks after uh the the speech the day of the march on

50:01 washington that that speech was given august 28th a couple weeks after the 16th street bombing um church bombing in birmingham in which four young girls you know going to sunday school get well is uh yeah four of them got killed and one of them was was permanently blinded you know this horrible horrible crime um it isn’t that all the civil rights problems got solved you know by by these by these demonstrations there’s still a great deal of resistance um and so i think you have to say as a matter of explaining the progress of historical events the assassination of kennedy is what

50:46 created a great deal of momentum for uh the passage of the civil rights law so it was to honor the martyred president by enacting um the the legislative program that he was uh that he was that he was pushing for you know the civil rights act and the voting rights act don’t get passed in the same year the voting rights act comes in 1965 in the summer and you would think that lyndon johnson would have been gung-ho about the voting rights act he was in favor of it but he had other things he wanted to do first and so they organized another march the the selma to montgomery march and that is met with

51:32 with outrage first of all that attracts national attention and it’s after that and that again turned public opinion very strongly in support of voting rights measure uh and so that’s what uh that and that sets the the bill at the front of the johnson administration agenda and so that gets passed in the late summer of 19 of 1965. um so you know birmingham and the march uh and these kinds of events did a lot but they didn’t do everything to uh to get these to get these laws passed those are probably the two most important pieces of civil rights legislation in u.s history the voting rights act especially but

52:18 uh but it was they were they were a great struggle all right well thank you so much pete for your time uh and again thank you for your contribution to the life liberty and pursuit of happiness textbook um these uh this topic is certainly in in not only this textbook but also many other bri materials including american portraits our heroes and villains curriculum uh and in the forthcoming liberty and justice for all so again thank you for for coming on and talking with us about uh your essays it’s uh it’s been a pleasure it’s always a pleasure

53:04 you