right now, you can go on the web and find information that was only available to maybe a dozen scholars when i began editing my mr. king's papers 30 years ago. now we can use that to provide education opportunities to vast numbers throughout the world. host: gloria joining us in diamond bar, california. what is your question for professor clayborne carson. caller: hello, professor garson. i'm 80 years old and i'm african-american. my husband was military and we were stationed in england when all of this was going on. and if worse, what -- and of course when we came back to the country it was amazing to see what was happening. the buzz across the south and the reaction of most of the southerners that were there with us, they were so angry that the blacks were doing anything to help themselves.

but i just want to pose this question. all of the education needs to confront the strongest entity in this country, and that is, the church. the church is standing for israel, but the church should also be standing for the rights of this country, and sending in they have to realize -- standing in such a way that they have to realize -- they are so frightened and if we don't stand for israel, there is judgment of god. what about our country here? they should have ministers crossing this country, preaching that we need to change the very conscience of this nation toward one another, and until we begin to put the civil rights movement along with the church just as martin luther king did when he

knelt and he prayed, we have to put together god with this. because the conscience has to be changed. there is a fight here and the spiritual wickedness is in high places. we need god to do with this. so the civil rights movement cannot just be of talking cannot just be dealing with history. but with us together with god, with the strongest entity in this country, the church. guest: i think the way i would respond to that is, if martin luther king was here, he was the type of minister that was pushing the church of his day to be a picking -- be a beacon for social justice, for human rights . and not just for black americans, and not just

americans, but people around the world. that is what martin luther king's good for. -- what martin luther king stood for. i think the church has become complacent and has forgotten that message of the social gospel that king represented. and instead, we have sort of the gospel of prosperity. i think you are right in terms of emphasizing that this is the strongest institution that african-americans control. and if that institution is not on the side of social justice then we have a problem. host: professor clayborne carson live with us in selma, alabama. help us understand some of that history. the southern christian leadership conference, martin luther king, the others involved, the student nonviolent coordinating committee, how were those groups involved?

how to they coordinate their activities? and was there tension between them? guest: as some people know, i wrote a book about the student nonviolent coordinating committee. it was an organization is always pushing king. one of the misconceptions you might get from the film if you just look at it superficially about someselma, is that king is this sort of unchallenged leader . but the way in which the young people were challenging him they were not following dr. king. they thought he was the one following them because they were those -- they were the first to initiate the freedom rides and to initiate the voting rights campaign several years before king came here. it is important for us to understand that the movement was

not just a single leader. it was a number of people who were taking the initiative. one thing i like to point out is that rosa parks made it possible for martin luther king to emerge. martin luther king did not make it possible for rosa parks to emerge as she did. if she had not taken the reaction that she did in montgomery, martin luther king would never have had the platform that he had to become prominent as a leader during the 1950's. i hear people saying well, we need another martin luther king. we need a lot more rosa parks. we need a lot more people like the young students who initiated these events. these are the people that are also essential. host: we have twitter questions.

guest: i know there is a lot of controversy in reaction to the actions of the family concerning marlee the king's legacy. but i want to point out, there are more publications today of all of martin luther king's writing, far more than existed during his lifetime. and the work i'm doing could not have been done without the support of the family. you can have all kinds of questions about who profits from that, but i don't want there to be the misconception that it is stopping the information of martin luther king from getting out. that information is more available today than it has ever been in the past including when

my mr. king was alive. all you have to do is a google search and you will see what i'm saying is true. you can look and find all the books that have been written about martin luther king. there are more books of martin luther king's writings and ideas today than there were at the time of his death. host: professor clayborne carson, thanks for doing battle there with some of the music in the background and for staying with us today. clayborne carson is the director of the martin luther king jr. research and education institute at stanford, and the author screeria

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