Brief chat with Two Pulitzers on NPR

   Last October I was hoping to attend Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch's lecture at Samford; but I didn't make it. His trilogy on Martin Luther King is magisterial, as many have said. In 1987 I remember reading the segment about William Moore in the first installment, and how King's Dream speech in Detroit was within a week of JFK's Ich bin ein Berlinner in 1963. I was  moved to tears by the analysis and comparison of the Detroit to Berlin speech, and like Frye Gaillard in his book on the Civil Rights era  reminded of a terrible God who would ask Abraham to be willing to sacrifice Isaac by the violence perpetrated on Moore and many others during that era. And Moore came right down the Highway through the small town in which My Mother was baptized.
    Reading Branch, I could almost see Moore walking down Highway 11 right in front of my Bama home, though I was going from Miss Farish's fourth grade to Mrs. Goforth's 5th in 1963 in Gaffney, S.C.
     And I saw Isabel Wilkerson on BookTV with Michelle Norris in 2010, then read her Book The Warmth of Other Suns. This first black woman to win the Pulitzer for nonfiction has roots in the Thankful Baptist Church of Rome, Georgia, about a quarter mile from the home where my Mother and father were married in 48.
    So when yesterday both Taylor and Wilkerson were on the Diane Rehm show I had to call in.
    I got excited and called my friend Hillary Beard, a native of Guntersville, Alabama, Bham Sthrn grad now staffer for US Congresswoman Terri Sewell of Selma. Just in case I didn't get on air, was going for a backup and had her send an email. Wanted the nation to know at least two white folks in Bama "get it."
    Was an interesting series of events this week. Had an email exchange with former Furman President David Shi with a note about the NPR story Monday, the 50th anniversary of George Wallace Inauguration as Governor of Alabama. I made a post at Collinsville Historical Association site about William Moore's murder as written up in the LA Times in 2002.
     Shi reported he had just reread Furman 63 grad Marshall Frady's great Penguin bio of King. Frady was the first biographer of Wallace, the bio from which the TNT movie starring Gary Sinise was made.
     And then Thursday, NPR Here and Now broadcast the entire Dream Speech of King, first time I'd listened to the full speech in 20 years or so, best of my Memory.
      So I was all in this year to honor Martin. I hope you will listen to the conversation in entirety. And have your children listen.
      They need to know, and the NPR conversation is a great capsule introduction.
      I know my Momma is proud of me for being a part of it.

      Links to follow

   drshow

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2013-01-17/rev-martin-luther-king-his-legacy/transcript

And the LA Times story on the murder of William Moore about 7 miles south of my home in Alabama

http://articles.latimes.com/2002/oct/27/magazine/tm-south43/4