east, especially, the northeast sent british sailors into the appalachian mountains into what was french territory what they called nuvo french. france claimed all of canada, the land around the great lakes, the lands around on either side of the ohio and mississippi river valleys, down to the gulf of mexico. in 1753, the governor of virginia sent a young major named george washington, and most americans don't know this story. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> up next, another program from our archives, jonathan rieder looks at martin luther king, jr., through his lesser known speeches and private conversations with colleagues. this weekend marks the 48th

anniversary of the "i have a dream" speech. this is a little over an hour. >> i want to begin with a standard image of martin luther king in his relationship to americans to their culture and we tend to think of him of the icon of the loftiest dreams of universal humanity, the great high flow and moral ideal, the e-alitoian dreamer that turned the other cheek. it's not a black dream, not a white dream but a dream that transcended race in some sense. and this noble king in many ways is part of a whole narrative of st. martin, the kind of utter perfect person, utterly noble.

[inaudibl [inaudible] >> the identities up through evangelical christianity which brought their identity into the modern civic world, we're here too and in some sense we think is a break with all of that stress on the particular

identity. now, it's not that this conventional image of king is wrong. but it's highly partial and what i try to do in my book is sort of take us to a more complicated picture of king, a backstage king, who in many ways was earthier, more servant, blacker and you should hear the quotes around that phrase. rambunctious and rowdy. and certainly a less polite and noble king in many ways. so not martin to larger society but this backstage king who emerged specifically beyond the larger society. and my buddy whom i spent a great deal of amount of time who i looked at the king and preached to the black

congregations and this is based more of a decade of recovering recordings of the spoken king because it doesn't come alive. king was really a man of spoken performance. king in the mass meetings and the special community he established in selma and birmingham and small towns across the black belt and after having done that i returned to king's crossover addresses and we understand a different -- we can hear this other earthier blacker voice operating in the mix of this crossover tail. i'm not going to talk about the conversations tonight and the questions we can get into it about people who have questions of "i have a dream" and "letters from birmingham jail" but i'm really just going to try to evoke this backstage king as it were. now, king we know was an unbelievably dignified person and dignity -- the mask of

dignity was very important to him. he describes i was driving back south listening to the south of the metropolitan opera, listening to many playing and he goes on noticing the spires of architecture and it's the most refined king and, again, king was a very refined person and that was all part of him. but, of course, we know backstage -- we know there's somebody in the car with him that day, vernon johns who was a wild man, black preacher hell of a fellow who hitchhiked a ride and with ralph abernathy who was king's close associate in the

movement. and king had to go on to this other church he had just been hired at dexter church. king says stop in here. john goes if you go to that other church you're going to get white people's food but if you come here to abernathy you're going to get southern soul food so king -- king is smelling that food, and he loved to eat. and he's thinking, i really -- i'm supposed to go to this church i'm about to take over as pastor. you convinced me i'll tell them i'm delayed and they get involved in this chat about the new church, dexter church which has lots of alabama state professors and it was sort of a snooty church and they never shouted. and vernon johns says, you got to be careful because that's a big "n" word church. down home earthier vernacular backstage. it's not the metropolitan opera. but they were all part of king.

and andrew young was described to me, you know, somebody who worked with king for a long time in the movement. king loved to crack jokes about crackers and his nickname for young, moments before king was killed he was looking for young and he would mock inpatience, just where have you been, this rep parte, ethnic -- you know, backstage with his buddies. king was a great mimic and a very funny guy and, of course, he knew he would be killed from early on. after the montgomery boycott. he did not expect to live a long life. and one of the things he and his buddies would preach their funeral sermons to each other and they would rehearse it and king said you think they're going to get me first but, no, you're going to be out there jumping in front of the camera and they're going to get one of you but i will preach you the best funeral you ever had.

and then he would get going with it. and this is one he preached for andrew young. now, andy when the clan finally gets you, the white folks made a mistake today they sent home to glory home they killed the young negro. in andrew young white folk had a friend so faithful, so endearing they never should have never harmed a hair on his head. among my associates no one loved white folks more than andy. now, young was sort of the foil for this ethnic banter about who was black enough backstage and joe lowry and ct vivian told me hilarious stories and this was mainly because andrew young wasn't a baptistist he was a congregationalist and he had gone to moore house college and his dad was a dentist so a lot of this was real class banter

backstage. now, to turn -- i don't want to say to a less trivial but certainly a different area of this was king's preaching. when king preached in synagogueses and he was very comfortable and fluent and very close friends with rabbis not reformed rabbis but skive rabbis and heshel was one of his best friend and the quaker settings were familiar to him, the national cathedral and when he was in those settings he would tend to parade his knowledge. so there would be quotes from martin buber and paul tillic and, again, very fancy stuff and, again, the refined dr. king was a real part of king. that was someone the authentic king. it's important to understand this refinement in some sense as

a revolt his his father. daddy king was a very powerful authoritative figure. he was an old-fashioned whooper and king was embarrassed of the primitive pyrotenics. and he swore he would never walk the benches at most acrobatic type of preaching. and king looked down on all of that. and yet king had a more fervent style of preaching that became especially noticeable the older he got and as he moved on from dexter to ebenezer baptist church. actually it was even there from the beginning. and the driver of his once drove him up to birmingham from dexter church and said, after the sermon, he was amazed, dr. king, i've never heard you whoop before. at dexter you never whoop. and king said, well, at dexter the old sisters don't shout and

call to me like they did here up in birmingham. and he responded to southern black congregations as he got farther away from his graduate school airs and john lewis told me the first time he heard king. he was a little boy out in troy, alabama, and he heard a sermon coming off of montgomery radio. and he said right away he could tell this was a learned intellectual man but he could still hear the rhythms of black preaching and he could tell again -- he didn't whoop but there was a certain powerful expressive dimension to it. and if you hear king when he's backstage at ebenezer, you hear a man with a passionate relationship with his savior. he played this down in synagogues. he didn't talk a lot about jesus as the savior. it was moses and, again, exodus and he knew how to talk the talk

but king was not a fundamentalist, but'd -- but he had a passionate relationship with jesus. and his vision with god was just as direct as immediate and he would say, nicodemus, you must be born again. and he would talk about being alone, and he would say god came to me and he said, martin luther, stand up for justice. i will never leave you. never leave you. and so there's this eitherier, more traditional king who was the king that most black congregationists knew, who saw him not only as a social movement leader or a student of niborn and tillic but a traditional christian being the good news of jesus and healing the brokenhearted and he would talk to ebenezer, don't jump, are you disappointed tonight, ebenezer. don't jump. he told the story about someone

who told the story about someone jumping off a bridge and he said don't jump when life gets you down. and this traditional earthier style against the refined and kre cerebral king. sometimes when he would do "never alone" he would go right into that into the hymns he promised never leave me and you hear king almost thinking like many more traditional black preachers blurring the lines of chanting and song and word in the crescendo and king is semi singing, semi chanting, never alone, like a haunted man. but more than black style, when king was with black congregation, he was a teller of black stories and so there's a lot of debate lately about jeremiah wright and trinity church and jeremiah wright describes trinity unapologetic black and unapologetically

christian. and it's fair to say backstage king was unapologetically black and christian. he loved to tell stories about his sauntering out into the world. typically, he would report that he was on a plane when a white passenger told him, you know, i grew up with so much affection and love for negras and king immediately interrupts himself and he says in the sermon he didn't say negras. he said ni good, gras. i always did nice things in my ni go niggr-as we loved them. speak. but over the last few years and now as king told it, his interlocutor switched since you niggra-as have been demonstrating and you got other shouting black power and all this, we just don't feel the

same kind of love towards ya. the hush falls across the congregation. after the watts riots king would not disavow black nationalists and rioters. he would disavow their way but one of his most powerful preaching in los angeles, mount zion baptist church. not long after the riots and king looks about and he says, i know the temptation and king had this sigh. and this sigh -- and this sigh was his substitute for whooping. he could use it as an accent

mark to do anything. it could be passive. oh, it could be in the presence of the divine. oh, it has a power. in this case it was passive. oh, i know the temptation to become bitter against the white man. i know it. it comes to all of us. and here the us is a black us, not a universal us. now, king is putting himself in the community of black bitterness and, of course, he had gone through a long phase of hating white people. it had taken him years for him to get over his hatred of white people just like it took years for daddy king that it took years to get over his hatred of white people and they didn't understand that king's vision of love of the white man was tuck-minded. oh, i know it's hard to love the

white man. he's grinning the legitimacy. he's not trying to argue against that. he says there's a better way. it doesn't mean and then he gets fancy. it doesn't mean you like the white man. oh, it's hard to like. love -- god operating in the human heart. so king identified powerfully with black alienation. but never was this sense of black communion more powerful than when king channeled the voice of the slaves. and this is something -- before black power, before black pride, king had a powerful identification with the slaves. he actually brought it into his white preaching as well but that's another story. at the national cathedral he didn't leave out the ancestors but much of his preaching to black congregations was channeling the slave's experience and invoking it. they were heroic people.

they were wonderful. they could -- they created hope. how could they have a theology of hope? 'cause they had lived with the rawhide whip and king was borrowing -- he was a great samper as the great hip hop theorists would say of other people's language. he was taking from the theologian howard thurman. what would the slaves do, he would tell his congregations over and over they took that question mark, is there a bomb in gilead and they straightened into an assertion. there is a bomb in gilead so the slaves represented this superior moral virtue but sometimes king would make himself the old slave preacher. and he would say that old slave preacher would say. all day long you'd been called a nigger and all day you've been told you ain't nobody. but i'm here to tell you, you are ain't no nigger, you are

somebody. and again you can hear king's voice tremuless with passion because the wounds of slavery had not disappeared. he did not say forget that memory transcend it throughout higher realm but that did not mean repressing the awareness, the collective memory that was so powerful to him. finally, this same powerful sense of blackness appeared in the mass meetings, selma, birmingam, montgomery and it's important to understand king wasn't certainly preaching 'cause he's figuring out how to create defiant revolution warriors who had to walk out of a church door and king wasn't alone in this. he had these tough characters,

the field staff, the ground crew who prepared the kind of infrastructure for a king performance. my wife and i were down in atlanta with some of me colleagues and willy bolden who was one of the most extraordinary of these characters who again was beaten and scarred. and when king preached about, you know -- it's better to live with a scarred-up body than a scarred-up soul. he was really talking about these tough characters who paved the way for the moral argument, to get people to -- to get the guts to walk over a bridge in selma, to walk out of that church door in birmingam that there were others on the outside. so when king is in selma, he said why do i come to selma? he gives the white minister who criticized him in birmingham which are all theological

universalistic answers. is he anywheres is justice everywhere. and he quotes gentilic but in selma he adds something different. i am here because my people are suffering. and this phrase "my people" -- when king was shifting out of the universal into the black ethnic frame, he was calling forth my people and identifying himself. and once you listen for that echo in the middle of "i have a dream," there are three places in which king turns from kennedy and white america and talks to something i must say to my people. he intergrates that in the middle. so i've come here to selma because my people are suffering. i've come here to help you sing come by here my lord, lordy, lordy somebody is suffering and that is why i've come to selma.

now, if i can find the pages i'm going to quote from that are not out of order -- i'll manage, i think. king's sense of communion in the mass meetings was not only to lift up his people what he was always doing is was elevating the people. in the biblical narratives. he put them in the crucifixion. this is the cross we bear for our people. or he was putting them into exodus or those other stories to the testament deliverers. but sometimes it was the indig innocent king -- when he seethed with racism was an angry black preacher. he would say it's the black man who produced the wealth of the

nation. all right. and the nation doesn't have enough sense to share its wealth and its power with the very people who made it so, all right. and i know what i'm talking about this morning. the black man made america wealthy. and before long he fell into this poetic meter that he often used in black belt meetings, which established a claim to america that was deeper than civil religion in jefferson. we were here. that's his phrase. a black "we." we were here before the plymouth landed in 1870. and the majestics words of the independence, we were here. we were here. and sometimes that we were here could become indig innocent, even beyond angry. they kept us in slavery 244

years in just country and they said they freed us from slavery, but they didn't give us any land. frederick douglass said we should have 40 acres and a mule. and then king underscores that's not like ancient memory. they haven't given us anything. after making our forebears work and labor for 244 years and king says you hear him through the jeer and for nothing. didn't pay him a cent and your young black boys and our young white boys are supposed to fight together in vietnam and when they come back home, they can't even live on the same block. a few weeks earlier, and this is just months before his death, as he was running across the black belt in the buildup to the poor people's march, king came back

to that. and he said, oh, each individual has certain rights. all men are created equal. he says oh, that's beautiful. america never lived up to that. the man who wrote that owned slaves and king then launched a devastating chronicle of the captive black nation. he said did you know that even before slavery, the white man sought to exterminate the indian. racism is very deep. they destroyed indigenous people. usually he hedges and not all white people but it's the white man. do you know that in america, the white man sought to annihilate the indian, literally to wipe him out and he made a national policy, the only good indian is a dead indian and now a nation that got started like that got a lot of repentant to do. got a lot of repentant to do.

now, what i wanted to do tonight is mainly just give you an evocative sense of this backstage kind of really variety voices of king and get to if you have any questions and we can get into anything you want to because this is the 40th anniversary, i want to return to this theme of king's premonition of his death because king's death talk was eclectic. and it's kind of an interesting way to commemorate him by sort of thinking about the many moods and modes that he could mull on his death. sometimes it took the form of eery unsettlement as a rattled king collapsed at the podium of his church and start sobbing.

if anyone should be killed, let it be me. it was snippy, when a young activist would not relent in telling king, you got to join the freedom rides. they're beating our people and you got to join. and king says i will choose the time. it was pedestrian with his battered staff oh, i settled that death a long time ago. i don't think anybody can be free until you solve that problem. lying in a hospital after he was stabbed by a mad black woman in hummer and andrew young told me the story. according to young, it took the form of an out of body experience with king looking down and imagining a round of black clergy eager for his death and king musing that he wasn't ready to go yet. death evoked a light quip before a flight to memphis right before

his assassination. when a pilot said there was a bomb flight and it looked like they won't kill me tonight. and a black belt that cycled from defiant rejection from bodyguards, i can't live that kind of life. i feel like a bird in a cage. there's no way in the world you can stop somebody from killing you if they're determined to kill you. to sardonic to engine trouble i would be the martin luther king late than the late martin luther king. it could soar with intensity. i've been to the mountaintop. i'm not fearing any man. my eyes have seen the coming of the coming of the lord and he could exhaust in a glowing praise song, i'm glad i didn't die. thank you. [applause] >> so i'm here to take any of

your questions, observations, reflections about king himself or the legacy of king today. and certainly i've been feeling a lot of questions in most places about king and obama and jeremiah wright. any place where anybody would like to cut in, you're most welcome. now, i've been advised because c-span is taping they will sort of get a mic close to you. this gentleman here. i'm sorry. if you'll give me one minute to switch glasses, i'll even be able to see. there you go. >> i want to ask you because some of the things you were saying about king sounded like jeremiah wright. >> yeah. >> and what would king say about jeremiah wright today, do you think? >> well, i think you might want to separate jeremiah wright's -- i don't want to call it a

performance but whatever it was yesterday. clowning around, sabotaging obama, the father angry at the son who surpassed him everyone has speculated. but if you go back and look at the sermons that have really gotten the most attention, white sermons that have gotten the most attention, almost all of them are these little snippets ripped out of a very complicated context. if you look at the goddamned america, wright was not making a secular statement. he was in the middle of what had been an extended biblical prophesy in which he was reflecting on the casualty of innocent children in war. and he had gone back to the psalms and other places and reflecting on the shift from worship to war. so there's a prophetic frame there which makes it sound different.

and, in fact, there were some positive harmonious things said about america early and later in the sermon so we're looking at a little bit and if you cut into king at certain points you could construct a very different king. the other thing i would say is king had a prophetic vision. when backs were criticizing him for getting involved in the vietnam war, they were saying -- stop worrying about the war, you're going to distract attention from black people's problems. you're a black leader and king would say, no. before i was a civil rights leader, i was anointed to preach the gospel. and if you listen to king's most powerful preaching, he sees himself in the prophet line as many african-american clergy do. some people talk about the importance of the prophetic dimension. it's why black christianity is always gone further back. it's a kind of jewish christianity, the old testament

prophets who identified the sinfulness of arrogant nations so you could say that king, too, identified the sinfulness of arrogant nations and he identifies america. he said nobody has been as big of a purveyor of violence than the ideas. >> america, you got a lot of repentant to do. and king came out of it and showed the way to the better way. so there are certain similarities in the proupsetic off in mississippi. and the partnerer says king was silent. he didn't see anything for a long time. and he was laying on the bed. and he says, ralph, i knew there

was hunger. but i didn't know it was like that. and in that period, both in black churches and in the national cathedral king would say, god doesn't like the way his children are being treated. he said the rich man didn't go to hell because he was rich it's because he didn't recognize a the man. jeremiah, jeremiah, there's a reason for that. i think there's differences between king and wright but i think we sanitized king and we lost track at how much he was reviled in the finals years. "the washington post" and the "new york times" condemned his anti-vietnam speech of riverside church and basically said that it was almost treason. and king does quote that famous line of black poetry in there,

america was never america to me. now, he gets beyond that always. that's the king element. that he was tough minded enough not to give in just to the emotion but to hold out the better way. so king was pretty much roughed up in his time and we've taken all that out and creating the st. martin and it's why c.t. vivian, reverend c.t. vivian, one of the great men of nashville nonviolence who worked for scls who was part of john lewis' circle and all those other great young people in c.t. vivian said which is why he didn't go to the 40th sell bringing of bloody selma and i went down there because i wanted to be with john lewis and the march over pettis bridge but a lot of king's field works didn't go. a lot of the men who got their bodies ripped apart to prepare

for selma and they said this is going to be making nice. ..

he basically was quoting at length from my vote and sort of identified the inconvenient cane. anyway, i have gone on long enough there's other people who want to get in here. >> when does he go from just training to be a preacher. is there a moment or series that things that affect them and make them go in a very different course from his father? or otherwise pick up the torch. >> it's a really great question and a lot of people have been thinking about kings late adolescence. more houses somewhat of a playboy, ladies man. he was a fine dresser, great closet full of seeds. look at those pictures. he really looked fine.

and that creature's seminary, not so far from here, there he was very engaged. his first time in the white world. king grew up at all black world. he spent a lot of time in chester in the black churches. what was important mayor was he look that way if they're pro-protestant preaching. so then he goes on to boston university and once that phd. this is that the plagiarism on his dissertation arrives. he was playing. job board once he was away from the preaching. so he's around boston in his convertible and dating the ladies before he bacharach and he and his buddies have a fine time. he's thinking like going to go back to a church or become a

professor? and he decides he wants to preach the gospel. but it's still somewhat uninformed. he goes back to mock him and gets caught up in the montgomery bus boycott. if pressed them into it and he didn't leap right into it. he was there kind of a compromise character because he's the new guy in town. people were fighting, who should lead to knock on boycott. yes, and king -- you know, at b.u. he ran the club any real black activists would go to the philosophers club, the dialect tic society it was called. there is no action here because these guys are really trying to show that they know their san augustine. so, can never set out to be a

civil rights leader, though his father was an activist and certainly every spam and took no guff from white people in the top back to police. so king comes and gets caught up in this. it wasn't that he didn't have progressive leaning. but the old ella baker's statement that the movement making as much as king made the movement is absolutely correct. even in birmingham, keying was good at making decisions. he was delay and think on it and they're running out of the till hotties. and james bevel, whether this young ministers who really could mobilize the case and he'd been working on the young people in this great football players from birmingham high school. they were ready to go. he said you can't use a cane. king was in jail. this movement inside.

we will not have a civil rights bill. we just have to let the kids out. he and andy young basically set tickets free. king had to come on board. the times says this is unethical to exploit children. he is preaching insane, god could not exempt the children because we are fighting for the kingdom of god. you cannot exempt someone from the realization of the kingdom. and king then starts preaching. there is another child on the dusty rodentia listen. he tells the story of jesus on passover and got caught up in a quarrel. he got caught up in these children -- these children are about their parents business. so king had to be pushed. now, he gave his life to the movement, but it starts in a

kind of interesting human, almost novelistic way. he did not set out to do this exact thing. [inaudible] >> no. his father was a whooper and a traditional baptists. like co frank and, aretha franklin's father, turned out one of the great preachers of the 20th century, king's favorite preacher and he had a lot of great people who trained him very sophisticated preachers who are blending refinement and passion. if we look at the cultural lathe or that produced king was to hear comments like whether a surgeon or a car mechanic or a painter, he went through this tutorial, not just with the vote open it, but i do read the thing of his cultural capital who had been working on elegance and

passion. gardner, taylor, sandy ray. and aretha franklin's father hadn't ask is preaching. and daddy kane did spend a month with his rival who it onto a white seminary and king was attracted to border. border with the man who wrote the same in i.e. and sympathy that jesse jackson ripped off from king because jesse jackson watched everything king did. if you can't run, fly. that is like king and birmingham. so daddy kane did have this profanity can exit his commitment in the importers and a full month of preaching of deliberation and post. as many would say, that's the central narrative in african-american religion. so daddy kane have been involved in the naacp. but the refinement and some of this other stuff that king is elaborating through the crossover artists who were bilious model. mordecai johnson, hurry her

name. and king would sample howard thurman story of what happened in india to tell the story of what happened when king was in india. he was introduced once as an untouchable. he tells the congregation, reporting back in anthony's, here is a fellow untouchable from america. and everybody, you hear the audience wednesday. my, my, this is terrible. i thought about it and i could not stop and take my children in a motel. all of these things, if you look at the graduation speeches that howard and moorhouse, king recycled a whole lot of that and howard thurman as well. so this is the hip-hop aspect of cane, his ability to leave and then i have a dream, which was this brilliant on this path. he had rejected that since

washington and harriet jackson was up on the dais with him. he was in mr. king better speech. it was a very very restrained speech and he was worried about kennedy in the solar rate bill. so he had to be very careful. halfway through, he serves on the prepared text and just as free black preaching commie is on the spot complaining all of his rates and combining them in a hole. kennedy really did like king. king did not respect kennedy. and suddenly king is one speaker admiring another artists. he took off. what's happening here? yes, michael. >> two unrelated questions and you can decide to insert either already there. first i want to go back to jeremiah wright example of muslim similarities or

differences of their better. but the fact that you mention it is a snippet of the year jeremiah wright and that is at least in part because of the world with it for now with youtube and fox news and surveillance all over the place. could you speculate a little bit on whether or not a leader like king could emerge in the information environment we live in today? and the second unrelated question as -- a more personal one, you write a book about an iconic figure in the black community and uruguay. in your also presenting this figure is a real person, with multiple approaches, multiple audiences, flaws. could you talk a little bit about what it was like as he went to the process of interviewing people about this and what the reaction is ben bradlee in the black community as to the politics of this? >> yeah, i'll take both of them.

well, you know, i think your question in no way contains the answer. it is impossible to imagine king sort of surviving in the current information age. because if you think about king in terms his fancy academic theory about the post-ethnic world and these multiple identities. and there's more shifting back and forth. king was precociously the case because he had been in more environments. nonetheless, his ability to straddle audiences with an part on the ability to compartmentalize and keep them separate. so at one point, one of his best friends, king's best friend was his jewish colleague, david levinson. and in the mid--- probably around 66, there was another advisor who wanted to bring a recording of king sermon as a

moneymaking for sdlc. and king really trusted levinson and went inside what do you think? levenson said, don't do it. too much the black idiom. it will hurt you. and there was not a mike jeremiah wright. he was king in vernacular. king backstage teaching to black people. leader of the nationals. levinson understood that the white audience was comforted by king. it's not that they did not respond to his moral appeal, but their ability to respond to the moral appeal was in his gentility. he knew how to ease them through logic. and so he often plays the role with whites at the start her. i am sure you would all agree with me that, you know, prejudice is a sin as defined as

the decorating of the human personality and does not racism degrades human personality. therefore, walk with me brothers and sisters. racism is sinful. for established the good samaritan. and remember, the samaritan, a very important point. the presbyterian church brad drake gave king his rendering as another race and tried. so king would remind his audience. you know, i am sure if i was in germany i would not want to sit on the sidelines when my jewish brothers were suffering. and he was a therefore you should not sit on the sideline for us. well, king's ability to move white audiences and liberal protestants, quakers, lurcher way kind of religious, spiritual and secular audiences based on manhunt in the comfort with him

and seeing him as familiar. the information environment would have made it impossible. in that sense, we can see how hard it is to get this data. a lot of what i have come a very few listen to. i give credit to a lot of people, but after those birmingham jail, he goes to a black church. i found a tape that had been discovered about a year ago and king is talking about in a letter from birmingham jail, my dear fellow clergy. and he is so angry when he gets out of jail. walker was the general birmingham told me, king scott brown is over. why do you care so much about these white ministers criticizing you and this one rabbi? let's focus on but people. king experience in a? into the church and says these bleachers were noddy. so for king to be powerful, he had to be segregated.

the answer is just implied by the question. it's impossible to imagine. it was hard enough then. now youtube would be running. he said white people will put black people in concentration camps. king said that. you remember what they said to be japanese. that's what king thought about the white backlash. so, -- i'm sorry, your second question? >> the personal aspect of the politics of it. >> you know, in certain ways, you would tinker with a combination of chutzpah and humility involved in this. it is not just the king is an iconic figure. there's a lot of brilliant people who have written brilliant things on whose shoulders i stood. or you don't do this unless you think you can see something fresh. so then there was a question as i was awake i going to get access to this?

i think because i studied race my whole life. my first work as an academic who is white backlash. i find it much harder. i was telling us vigilantes in brooklyn who fire bombed the homes of black people moving in. i would be interviewing people who would say, after has been that it come either as a "new york times" reporter for fbi. once they figured out it was a standup guy, rieder is a standup guy. people would stop me and say you have asked me before what i thought about the negroes. come back, so you had i really think about them. and you can meet the little woman. they weren't talking about the politics of complexity. in some stance, sitting down with sophisticated people who

told their lead story late joseph lowery, andrew young. it wasn't so hard because i just felt as a student i'd studied korean black conflict in brooklyn. i'd never felt whiteness as a barrier except in the sense that we are all limited by who we are. on the other hand, who we are is also gives us privileged access. so can then study women, can then study women? if i really believed that was the impediment, obviously they are impediment. the political side, i was worried about certain people not talking to me. one of the foot soldiers who have wanted to talk to simply said i'm tired of white people writing the story of our black lives in getting rich off of it. i said to the silo, you talk to anybody who's talked to me. it's not what i'm up to. i'm not going to beg you.

i argued with him. i said fine, but i really did feel a kind of humility with the foot soldiers because they can't protect themselves and their story hasn't been told. so these are people who were king's bodyguard, who in philadelphia, mississippi, one year after the killing of schwager and cheney, king went back understanding of philadelphia, mississippi. king goes out to cecil price would have a meniscus city before he delivered them over to the mob who killed him. and king says come you're the the guy who had that voice. price book signing. that's right. and king is preaching insane, i believe the people who killed warner goodman and chaney are in this crowd and people are proudly say we are here. it was the most frightened king ever was, except for chicago.

they were the two most frightening times. and so, these men who i wanted to talk to, who had been scarred up and they said we are reluctant to talk to you because i had to stay on their case, but ice tarted talking -- they did start to open not connected the willy goldmans kind of reached what we were together in atlanta at the reading. i said really, i was really nervous. you're one of the people he was waiting to hear from. he said well, i gave you a hard time. i wasn't going to talk to john. by day god up and said the chapters on us. i started to cry. i acquitted myself politically. so far i don't see a white african american difference.

the radio shows have been very good that i'm getting that came to make sense to them and sort of reclaiming him. on the other hand, i don't deny the importance. one of my arguments is the white and the black talk what equally authentic because of his king's crescendo universalism and children was the balance. the power was so difficult so far. but stay tuned. i think we have time for -- we have time for one or two more questions. >> prechewed talk about that dichotomy and himself about sort of going over the bridge between his white cells and his black self for adjusting for a certain audience and then coming back? do you ever address back?

>> one of the things they talk about what academics are setting up the distinction between the waking and blacking. the centric is the real king. what i try to show is that king really didn't see it as the black or the wife. he didn't think like that. what is said to john lewis, this poker bonding preacher talk and those guys are unbelievable. that's how they read loose at the end of the day. congressman lewis. i was at part of today's staff. king didn't talk that way. in the book i'm more precise. is it really white masculine talk with people who happen to be black? the same name, when king gave his first sermon at ebenezer baptist, he could've gone to this old pulpit, they took a

sermon structure from harriet bosman because he loved listening to the liberal white ministers. mccracken at riverside church, ralph meade, all of these incredible white liberal politicians. he was the way preachers who they are. so it breaks down because king preached white to black audiences in black to white audiences. so one reviewer, somebody who got the book. one of the few people, you know, thought i was saying that the weight voice was inauthentic. king didn't carve it up that way. you know, he was way too beyond race, anchored in this blackness and comfortable in his humanity. and that is why of course with sdlc, when people got worked up and say why are you worried about vietnamese and the whites of appalachia. he said you know god does not

see color. very powerful. >> you are so well prepared to write this book. were there some prizes that you encountered along the way? >> yeah, you know, the real surprise happened earlier. i thought this book was done about eight years ago. and i had a lock on it. i did very fancy publisher, handing the tss and it really was the split between the black and white cane. and how he met from black audiences to white audiences. i started hearing things and had heard enough. here he is in an unmonitored but zero discourse until a con con.

and then i get a tape of king in sco retreat, lecturing on marx. now marks was reflecting on his jewishness and how it created marxism. and then i started listening to tapes were king is with the preachers. you know, the preachiness boat was entertaining. in ct vivian, reverend vivienne was with his people and said, you know, i don't have the voice. at one point he says okay, i'm ready. i'm going to preach about it. in vivian says we all thought he had been preaching. another's time he says i'm just going to talk tonight. i don't have the voice. preachers are wanting to preach. and they ground. nec. when i'm done talking, they will

preach about it. king gets caught up in the moment and he is flying out the look on this king catches himself and looks out at the audience and says, you all better be careful. you're going to make me preach. so there was a self-consciousness about some of the jorn. sometimes it is just our place. it became the language of the body. i don't did he thought about it at a certain point. he became seamless. he said at a certain point how to do it. here's one of the subconscious. he told me this story that sometimes kingwood talked women to them if they have the way reporters gone because they want to sound. so there were moments in which he said i want to some, but not with this audience. so i think there were decrees of

self-consciousness. and i think that i have a dream, you know, i think what happened and i have a dream, which he had been preaching for years, usually the black audience, but he preached once at an afl-cio convention, these ethnic types are not big at obama's experience or lofty language. they like practical literacy. king is really soaring with them. but he think what happened at i have a dream, even before the haley at jackson said tell them about the train, martin because she had been with king at a black focused march that aretha franklin, cl franklin, so that was fresh in her mind. what happened is right before that, it came turned to the black civil rights workers that come from without.

and right before he goes flying, he says that in his prepared remarks i believe. he said i know some of you have come here from trials and tribulations and there is something about the biblical language and a return to the veteran accreted suffering, which were really his people. they were the people he felt was like jesus. i know you're asking how long. usually doing a social network on the affected key people to collectively mobilize to believe it's rational to keep doing it. he says in a brief moment how long you're asking. he is reassuring them not long as he does after the solomon of montgomery march. here he comes out of that chair and to the black civil rights workers who have been beat up and had trials and tribulations. he comes back for one second and the sort of stumbling. it seems any harriet jackson

says tell them about the train. john lewis says yes. taylor branch has somebody else that says yes. and then he goes off into that prophecy, that musical moment it ended because there were two musical moments that and i have a dream and this may be a good place to add. remember the two most all moments that end i have a dream. the first is when that day comes, we all will thing my country to the d. with new meaning. it's a moment of nation building. for the first time because we can sing. black entered the white national anthem. but blacks crossing over into the way song is not the end. the slaves have the last word. and king makes, when that day, white children, black children,

jews and gentiles will thing in the world of veal gentile. widespread into the voice of the black slaves. and in some sense, made white black and displays their granddaddies engram moms. so it is an important moment, a very black moment in style and in implication, even as he is doing one of the great moments of americans about religion. there is this other thing right in there, all mixed up and drenched in blackness in a variety of ways. i need to depend on that moment, but i thank you all for coming out tonight. there are books that people want to purchase them. i will be there to sign them. thank you famous for your questions and for coming out.

[applause] [inaudible conversations] >> booktv travel to frankfurt, kentucky to uncover the rich literature. next, and interview with doug boyd about the 400 families known as "crawfish bottom." the 50 acres of land in the kentucky river became decided the capitol plaza in the 1960s. >> "crawfish bottom" was a neighborhood in north frankfort, kentucky. initially, it was the place where nobody else wanted to

live, so it was where the poor people lived because it had the cheapest housing. it was the area frankfurt that flooded out. so that really does attract it to recently freed slaves in the late 1860s, early 1870s. it also is very attractive to the families of prison inmates who were at the penitentiary. their families would move up and needed cheap housing because their breadwinner basically was incarcerated. a lot of families of incarcerated prisoners. you had read slaves and you actually had poor democrats analyze. and again, this area frankfurt was flooded often times and said the housing was oftentimes considered dilapidated. a lot of people in the early newspapers are calling for the cleanup of this neighborhood in the 1870s and 1880s were sane, decent in about this neighborhood.

really, i would say it was a well placed between the 18th 70s and the 1930s. it had a reputation as being the bad part of town. during that period of time, the reputation was probably well-founded. there was a lot of wild type dvd. the loggers -- they're a couple walking facilities in the loggers would float down from eastern kentucky and they would get paid for the logs and would go crazy for a weekend. so a lot of the joints, a lot of the saloons, and vodka prostitution was occurring here in this neighborhood. and so, that is what contributed to this participation in the neighborhood had. interestingly enough, historians got a hold of that. one of the earliest historical references to the neighborhood is in the 1930s and 1940s and historians started to refer to it as the seedy underbelly of frankfurt.

and so, once historians got a hold of it, that version of the neighborhood became entrenched in public memory. and so, despite the fact that the neighborhood really in the 1930s, 40s, 50s became a poor, close-knit neighborhood, it was not still has this really rowdy while part of town. >> so what is the demographic of "crawfish bottom"? >> it was always known as the black heart of town. the majority was very slight. often times it was very much irish. it is very much sort of immigrant demographic. all of them are poor, but was that great working-class neighborhood. we had police officers who lived in cross. we folks who lived in the hands factory, folks who worked at the local distillery for the shoe factory, while lived in this neighborhood. it's very much a working-class neighborhood. interestingly enough, the most recent repetitions of that

during the 1950s, remember it as an integrated neighborhood before formal integration. time after time, people were talking about how they were here unified more by their class, the fact that they were poor, then they were divided by the fact they were white and black. saddam was an interesting perspective that i didn't necessarily expect range the oral history interviews are being done. and it was really neat tear that. >> so what did happen to crawfish bottom? >> like i said, they've been calling for the destruction of the neighborhood since the 1870s. that car was persistent. greater frankfurt felt like this is the bad part of town. in 1913 made to the major study with a documented the slums. they were from the photographic documentation of the slums of frankfurt, which are just

amazing. a lot of people were sort of likening slums to disease and during that time. there was a lot of calls for cleaning up the neighborhood. early in the 1950s, when urban renewal really swept the nation, was when frankfurt decided that crawfish bottom, at that point it was referred to as the craw or the bottoms. it was replaced with civic center, hotel, ymca, state government building, the state tower and a plethora of shops. i think the vision was this to be kind of a mall, a pedestrian mall that people could walk and shop in lebanon. we are actually standing on the corner of the grounds of the old state capitol in frankfort. right across the street from the old state capitol was really where crawfish bottom began, which is interesting to you at

the state legislature's right across the street and from what was considered the bad part of town you do is considered the neglected part of town. and you are a stone's throw away from where the laws are happening. but it was actually about 50 acres that was taken out by urban renewal. and so, there's a lot of question. even the people who lived there couldn't really give a consistent answer as to exactly what streets made it a neighborhood, which was kind of the fun of it actually to hear them talk about these sort of shifting boundaries of these neighborhoods. some people said craw was the corner of clinton and washington street. whereas, some people would say that was craw, but the rest is bottoms. some people with a bad craw was

really pleased for blocks, but beyond that was the bottoms. it was really an interesting exercise in memory and public perception. public memory of where people lived. interestingly enough, was also something they were remembering something that the longer existed. the person who did the interviews with a map and show them a map of the neighborhood and they would look at the map and sort of say, this was craw here and here. it wasn't like these were buildings. those were gone. >> where do the families go? >> that's a bit of the a controversy because a great deal of promises were made by the city, promising public housing, affordable housing options. the city really fell short of its promise is in terms of saying we were going to provide alternative housing and folks ended up going everywhere.

wherever they could afford to live. a lot of the feedback we got in the interviews really was saddened by that fact. it's not so much the last of the neighborhood as much as a loss of the community, where they say, you know, i am the only african-american in this neighborhood and i couldn't tell you who lived next door to me on either side. when in reality, with a rear in the neighborhood was a situation where they could go to the neighbors. they checked on their neighbor. if their neighbor had been seen that day, someone is going over and knocking on the door to make sure they are okay. to sort of contrast that with putting people into maybe a naysayer quote, unquote neighborhood, but a neighbor that had a lack of community was really disheartening for most of the residents. so i think that is where the feelings of frustration, the flames of resentment about the whole process came about.

so the folks who were displaced by urban renewal, for the most part, pretty much resent the whole process and were frustrated by losing that sense of community. i had the city delivered on the promise of providing the housing that they had once stated they were going to provide, that might've been a little different. but at least according to the residents, those options weren't there for them. and so, that's where a lot of the frustration began to unfold. >> how did you come across this story? >> ibc archivist to have this oral history collection. i worked at the kentucky is the oral history archivist. we had a collection of over 8000 interviews. one of the selections was just called the craw. i didn't know what was it about and i attended a presentation being given