My Chat with Two Pulitzers on King and his Legacy

       Jan 17, 2013 I called in the Dianne Rehm show on NPR and talked to Taylor Branch and and Isabel Wilkerson. Here is my part of the transcript about the 45th minute into the hour.

   And its the Thankful Baptist Church in Rome, Ga about a quarter mile from Momma and Dad were married and a half mile from my Grandparents Grave and three aunts.

  In her book the Warmth of Other Suns Wilkerson talks often about visiting her Mothers People in Rome where they were active in Thankful Baptist Church.

        

• STEP H ENTaylor, I desperately wanted to hear you at Sanford last October in the lecture there. But I didn't make it. I want you to tell your story about the anonymous black fellow who was on the march from Selma to Montgomery in '65. He said we won when we started walking. And to Isabel my parents were married in a house about a quarter of a mile from the Faithful Baptist Church in Rome, Georgia. So I feel very kind of...

• 11:48:33

  STEPHENMy father was a Baptist minister and I know, Taylor, you're a product of the Second Ponce de Leon Baptist in Atlanta as is Charles Marsh, who's written about civil rights. And so I know that white Baptists have a very checkered history, to say the least, in that era. But there was, you know, the priesthood, the belief thing, it's good and thanks.

• 11:48:55

  GJELTENWell, Isabel and Taylor we're getting all your old friends calling. Isn't that great?

• 11:48:58

  BRANCHYeah, this is quite something and connecting...

• 11:48:59

  WILKERSONThat's lovely.

• 11:49:00

  BRANCH...connecting the two of us. Well, the story that he mentioned is from a guy up in Lowndes County, Alabama, one of the most primitive counties -- nobody -- no black. It was 70 percent black, but not a single black person had even tried to register to vote in the entire 20th Century. But one man joined the march to Montgomery and was asked, you know, when did you know this might be a good thing. And he said we won when we started.

• 11:49:26

  BRANCHAnd what he meant by that is that if you're an ordinary citizen the hardest thing to do is to take action toward and act like you deserve the rights you're claiming. Which is a great metaphor for that whole movement, which was an aroused citizenry interacting with responsive elected representatives. That's what makes the 1960s so great.

• 11:49:48

  BRANCHAnd if you -- speaking to Isabel because of her book, "The Warmth of Other Suns," it is such a great corrective to Americans' loss of memory about these amazing migrations because we generally willfully and, to some degree, wishfully misremember all the strands in our history that really should be inspiring. But you have to face -- you have to face the unflinching realities of the divisions that we have in order to be inspired by the changes.

• 11:50:19

  BRANCHAnd if you did, we would be inspired by the politics of this 1960s era. And it should inspire us to tackle big problems today. And, instead, because we misremember it so pervasively there are awful lot of people who think that what guards their liberty is the machine gun in their closet instead of the things that we've built among ourselves in this amazing history that we're trying to describe that really do protect freedom.