president and you can't quite figure out how or how or why he was able to accomplish what he accomplished, because he was indirect. he was incrementalist. he was a manager. he was not a man of force. it turns out that without that force he had amazing capacity to manipulate people and manipulate them into doing the things that he wanted them to do while they thought it was their idea. >> sunday night at 8:00 eastern on q&a on cspan. up next, taylor branch discusses the challenges of researching and writing biographies. the graduate center for the city university of new york hosted this event. it's about an hour. >> but tonight we're here to

honor taylor branch. taylor is best known for his trillage of the civil rights movement, america in the king years, the first volume parting the waters won the pulitzer prize in 1989. two successive volumes and still remain essential text to any understanding of the role that martin luther king played in transforming our nation. along the way, taylor won an in addition to the pults administer prize and many other prizes. i think he would agree that this extraordinary career really began in 1970 when he took a very low paid job with charlie peters, the legendary founder and editor of the washington monthly, a very small

circulation political opinion and reporting magazine which still exists. i strongly suspect that taylor learned his trade as a journalist and book author while working for peters for three years. a few years later i went through a similar process myself but working for victor navaski at the nation magazine here in new york. both of us arguably became buy og gras fers after immersing ourselves in journalism. oddly enough, taylor and i both worked in the 1972 campaign for george mcgovern. he didn't know this, but i was just a lowly canvasser knocking on doors in california and nebraska and minnesota. taylor however had a slightly more elevated campaign position in austin, texas, where he happened to share an apartment with one bill clinton. that friendship survived the

mcgovern electoral debacle and taylor later was routinely sneaking into the clinton white house to record bill's thoughts about the presidency. this resulted in taylor's 2009 book, the clinton tapes, wrestling with history. all of this is to say that taylor branch has led an incredibly colorful life as a journalist, historian and buy og gras fer and now he's going to share with us a few words about the peril of biographical history. taylor branch. [ applause ] thank you. thank you to the levy center, to ms. white, for all of you who are here and the previous

fellows. it's an honor to be the -- i'm just happy to be here with previous speakers for this occasion, like bob carro. we once spent an evening wondering whether we could survive multi-decade, multi-volume enterprises and i'm blessed to see that we both have so far. so it is -- it's an honor to be here and to discuss biography and i want to say right from the beginning that my topic is perils of biographical history but i don't want any of you who are doing biographies to believe that you can't go blythy right along without any perils. mill perils have to do specifically with biographical history in the area of race where i believe that we grossly

underestimate the subject at hand and i'm going to try to explain why and why that is both a burden and a huge opportunity for citizens and scholars in this era. i think biography meets history at the beginning in basics like vocabulary and point of view, which are crucial in that and of course i'm always asked how can you write a book about a black man when you're a white southerner but i'm also asked i thought you were black, so -- it just goes to show the quicksand in the terrain here when you approach that. i began to learn lessons about -- about the special properties of trying to understand race through people

long before i ever dreamed of becoming a writer. in 1969, less than a year after dr. king was killed, i was a graduate student at princeton and i was haunted by the fact that the civil rights movement had changed the direction of my life's interests against my will growing up in atlanta, it was relentless all through my childhood. i was in the first grade the year of the brown decision. i graduated from college in the year dr. king was killed and all through those formative years the movement was pounding away and it scared everybody to death. it was only later that i learned most people were lying and were in the middle of the movement and were dr. king's best friend. it was a scary event, but i -- i was upset that i had missed it other than picketing the white house once when i was in al

lowenstein but if you were with al, you were going to picket the white house. i couldn't take too much krild for that. i had missed it and i really wanted to have some experience with it so in the summer of '69 between my two years at the woodrow wilson school i defied the program which was that you were supposed to work for the ford foundation or some policy relevant institution and i got a job from john lewis and vernon jordan. they told me they had 20 counties in far southeastern georgia that were so small they didn't even have any names on their rolodex about people who might be willing and able to run a voter registration project in counties with black majorities and virtually no register -- black registered voters. this was a shock to me, first of all because it was four years after the voting rights act and i thought since i had seen black

people voting for the first time that it was a universal experience. so it was a shock to go down there and find that it was not only like it was before 1965 but like it was before maybe 1865 in some of these counties where i saw black prisoners come out of the jail on the courthouse lawn on saturday morning with shoes of the local upstanding citizens that they had shined for them to go to church on their way to mow their lawns. this was really like a time capsule to go there and i was profoundly unprepared to be alone and i had three days to go into sight unseen into these counties to see if i could find somebody that vernon and john lewis could talk to. columbus was not more lost when he set sail for the west than i was when i went into these tiny little counties looking for the next martin luther king and all the preachers through me out

instantly, so did the school principals and especially the funeral parlor directors who gave me lectures about how they had things very well under control. then i will went out into the jib joints thinking that i could recruit the rebels, the black power types who didn't exist in places like big epa where i was arrested for being on the wrong side of town so i was lost and it took me about a month before i started talking to i am which i never would have done at the beginning. you go in with your preconceptions of the time and that was difficult too until one day i was recommended that this old -- they called her an 1800s person, this tiny county in georgia, if anybody knew anybody that was brave enough to be interested in this voting stuff

it would be she and i got these directions, you know, old country style, you go down this road until it dead ends and then go until you will see two big dead trees on the right and turn at the next left and any way, there she was on her porch rocking and i started talking to her about voting in the county and how important it was and she rocked and didn't say anything, she didn't acknowledge my name. i had talked for a long time and i was beginning to panic that it was the wrong person and finally she said, young man, do you really believe we landed on the moon last night? because this was july 23rd, the day after neil arm strong landed on the moon and i said, yes, ma'am, i do. i saw it on walter cronkite at the motel last night. yes we landed on the moon and she looked at me and she didn't say a word. she just kept rocking and i'm

trying to figure out what that has to do with voter registration or whether she was just a fan of the space program or something so weird. i knew that she knew at least something about current events and she had a wise face and i kept talking and she didn't say anything and you're around a lot of graduate students. when graduate students get nervous, they tend to use bigger words so i'm trying to explain -- i'm trying to explain to her what a 501(c)(3) organization is and how the grants are necessary and some of the statistics about voting and she didn't say anything and -- um, it went on for at least five or ten minutes and finally the next question out of her mouth was, she said, have you ever seen the simonizeed wax

commercial and i was really flux moxed and i said you mean the one where the little children float across the kitchen floor on an invisible shield of wax and they don't scuff the floor and she didn't say anything but i think i know what she's getting at. yes, i saw that but that's a commercial. they can make it look like the kids are floating on an invisible shield but i saw the moon landing on a news show so now i'm trying to explain the difference between a commercial and a news show about what's real and what's not real. any way, this conversation went on for about an hour but she only chipped in every now and then, you know, with questions like have you ever been in a fistfight? and that she could prove that we didn't land on the moon because if we had, all we had to do was fill up our tank on the moon and on the next leap we could make

it into heaven and you know god wouldn't let us do that, so we didn't land on the moon and by then i already knew that meant she was not interested in voter registration in this county because it went to the marrow of life and death people trying to vote. but at the time way she made this point was so indelible to me and so dumb founding to me that i went back to the motel and scribbled down every bit of dialogue, everything i said, everything she said and it was the beginning of a summer diary that reached 400 pages by the end of the summer, the first thing i ever wrote that was not assigned, was not meant for publication. i will turned it into princeton and got in big trouble in the graduate program because i was supposed to write a memo, but one of the professors sent it to charlie peters at the washington monthly who published excerpts

of it almost without asking me. that's what led me into journalism. the point of this, though, was that i had been reading everything i could about the civil rights movement to try to find out what had happened that it had so much power on southerners and so much power on the nation in my early youth and most of it was analytical and food of labels about who was militant, who was radical, what was economic, what was religious and political labels and none of it felt like the movement that i saw, but the personal discovery that i had from people in south georgia like this simonized wax woman made me realize that discovery and race is when

things get very personal and you forget all these labels and they scramble and you can put them back together later, and i resolved that if i ever could write about the civil rights movement i would try to write in the narrative style about the people involved rather than the analytical concept which i think float over the realities of race like paper airplanes. that's why my books on race or long and fat because they're stories and it raises the tension about the reality of stories that are personal versus the historical impact that comes from the concepts that we deal with and that is to me the perils of historic biography grounded in race. i started -- it was only the beginning of my troubles with point of view, though after a few years at the washington monthly. i realized i'm never going to grow up.

i thought i was just in journalism until i could decide to be a professor or political activist and that journalism was a good place bide my time and be an observer but i thought i would become a writer and the way to break in to book writing was with as a ghost writer. my first ghost writing book was about john dean about watergate. i lived in his house in the basement with moe and wrote blind ambition which has ruined by wikipedia page but conspiracyists constantly say i helped perpetrate the conspiracy of john dean blaming nixon when he was the master mind. but it gave me experience in writing from the point of view of someone else. i was just john dean in this

book and the next one i did was with bill russell. i thought i would write with somebody as different as possible from john dean and so i went and lived with bill russell in seattle and learned -- it was an amazing year and i learned from him that he's not only got the world's greatest laugh and cracker barrel fill loss fer but he thinks deeply about sport. each sport is its own mix of art and war and anybody who's going to be good in the sport understands that, there are many uneducated top tier athletes but there are no dumb top tier athletes who understand the nature of their sport. so i thought having finished the russell book, which he insisted be coauthored by him and me in his voice so that the point of view really didn't make a lot of

sense but i wrote it in his voice. then i thought this is what novelists do. they create lots of characters and the writer writes and a lot of these different points of view so i'm ready to write a novel so poor alice may who did the dean book, and i said to alice, how many more books do i have to do until i can do the civil rights movement, i want to right a narrative history of the civil rights movement and she said, well, race books don't sell. you probably need to write another one so i wrote some other books but finally came back and i didn't enjoy reading in novels any way, which is what novelists do and that's why i don't really enjoy reading -- i'm going to read you the previous face to parting the

waters because i think it stands up after six years immersed in the research for parting the waters, the first question i wanted to address is the question we're here to talk about tonight. the tension between biography and history where race is involved, because i think that it goes to the tension that i want to discuss about how our history is so screwed up now because of race but i didn't know that this time. this is written in 1988, 20 years after martin luther king and 19 years after i met the simonized wax lady. it's only two paragraphs. almost as color defines vision itself, race shapes the cultural eye, what we do and do not notice, the reach of empathy and the alignment of response, this subliminal force recommends care

in choosing a point of view for a history grounded in race. strictly speaking, this book is not a biography of martin luther king jr., though he is at its heart, to recreate the perceptions within his inherited world would isolate most readers including myself far outside from boundaries but to focus upon the historical king as generally established by his impact on white society, would exclude much of the texture of his life which i believe makes for unstable history and collapsible myth. to overcome these pitfalls of race, i have tried to make biography and history reinforce each other by knitting together a number of personal stories along the main seam of an american epic, like king himself, this book attempts to rise from an isolated culture into a larger history by

speaking more than one language. so that's how i undertook to spend 24 years writing the movement in three volumes, the king years. i think king wags the best metaphor for a movement that set in motion changes in america grounded in race that spread far beyond race and the question was how well do we understand the blessings that they engendered and the lessons that that leaves for us now and the answer is not very well. not very well so far and i think a lot of this is because of this tension between race being personal and our history being the concepts, the vocabulary, the lessons, the point of view that we have for all of history, and so i told stories in the

book and i'm going to give you three examples that i think resonate with larger lessons but that the lessons are lost. one was, i told the story of the "the new york times" v sullivan case. it is still the prevailing law, taught in law schools about libel, supreme court decision. it grew out of the sit-ins. i'll talk more about the sit-ins and king and what the sit-ins meant to king but in the sit-ins in 1960 they had sit-ins around the alabama capital in montgomery and at the same time, king had been indicted for income tax invasion on a trumped up charge and they had these sit-ins around the capital and harry bell fonty still here and wrote an ad for the "the new

york times" to raise money for king's defense in his tax trial and it was a full page ad in the times and it said here there are rising voices and there was a picture of the arrests in montgomery and it said that constitution breaking enforcement officers arrested students for protesting the segregation laws. for this ad the governor, the police chief, assorted officials in alabama filed a libel suit against the signatories on the bottom of the ad many whom didn't even know what was in the ad and against the "the new york times," took it to court where under alabama law they proved there were two factual errors, the text said that they surrounded the alabama capital when, in fact, they only were on two sides and not the other two sides and it said that they

sang, my country tis of thee, when in fact they sang america the beautiful. these two facts allowed under alabama law the jury to decide whether the factual errors were libelists and they heaped upon the signatories, ralph and the people there, and the "the new york times," $3 million in libel judgments. 50 times larger than they had ever done before. this is the governor, the mayor, all of these people trying to break the movement. law students today read "the new york times" v. sullivan and have absolutely no idea it has anything to do with race because the case and the reasoning is all about malis and evidence of malice before and so on and so forth. it's so denatured that you have no idea of the chief reality here which was the nature of

american race relations in this time was that the supreme court could not afford to say the lower courts and this is a case that never should have come. you can't say that. they had to invent a new standard of instituticonstituti for students to still study in order to rescue this case by stealth. the wells of democracy, this is not about race, justice, redeeming the soul of american democracy. and he laid out all the

principles and he preached himself and he said he was the first and only adult black leader even though he was just a few years older. certain aspects of human nature are so stubborn that worlds and principles are not enough. these kids, you can't boycott a place that won't let you in. these kids have figured out a way to accent their displip and their faith in the american dream with sacrifice. there are two basic principles they understood that america is about self-governing public trust and citizens willing to put themselves on the line for it. three years later, in 1963, the movement had gone through the sit ins, freedom rides, ole miss great krcrisis, king was terroid

the movement u was going recede and he went into birmingham as a great gamble. trained people for months. didn't tell his father he was going to go because he knew his father would object. went in there. mounted this struggle and it was, it was a tremendous failure. people were too scared to go to bull conner's jail and they ran out of the adults who were willing to go through the training. he was on the verge of leaving birmingham in retreat when young aides came to him and said we have we don't have any adults willing to go to jail, but children will. and in may, on may 2nd, 1963, he took the biggest gamble of his life and on may 1st, 12 adults ready to go to jail. on may 2nd, they had 600 kids who marched out of the 16th street church. on may 3rd, they had 1,000, as young as years old.

mostly girls. this is when the dogs and fire hoses were louised on them. these are the images that went around the world and in my view, melted the emotional distance that the rest of the country had on civil rights. under which people were saying this is terrible. a new leader should do something about this. president kennedy should do something about this. but when people saw these paragraphs photographs of the dogs and fire hoses leashed on small children, they say we need to do something about this. it had an explosive effect on black communities. this was what king said we are on a breakthrough. this is why he said we're going to have the march on washington. this is why kennedy introduced the civil rights bill. we have to stop this. this is a wild fire. coming out of birmingham. i argue in the books historically, that the

birmingham children's marches are almost biblical like the passover. in ascribing changes in a great nation to the witness of school children. to me, this salient fact that is that you can read ph.d. dissertations on a minor modification in an attack ad that might affect a senate race. but i know after no ph.d. dissertations on the birmingham children's marches. pundits didn't know anything about it. they didn't know how it came about. they didn't know about the titanic struggles of the black parents who accused martin luther king of being criminal to subject their children to criminal records in a losing movement and yet they were converted by the witness of their own children so these same parents supported them. to me, this is, this is a

turning point in all of american history. that is unanalyzed, unrecorded, unstudiey eiey eied by american. which is precisely why it needs to be studied. another story in the same year, 1963, king gave speech in which he said george wallace is delivering minor little classic speeches that i think will be significant in the future. this is the same george wallace who had started 1963 saying segregation for foever is the preimminent signal of racial bigos bi bigotry. george wallace modified his

speech. he exponged all from race. he that his campaign had nothing to do against pointy headed bureaucra bureaucrats, biased media, tyrannical judges and government. he basically invented the vocabulary of modern politics. and king recognized it. said these are little classics. at that same time, he recognized that nbc did a, did a three-hour special on race. and he said this is obvious. this is a conspiracy by liberals and the national immediate yachlt so concentrate all effective power on the central government based on overemphasizing the race issue

in american politics. now i told all of these stories and to me, this is the beginning of modern politics and how we have this unbelievable mismatched manche in the last 50 years. two marches. one, the blessings of the children's march have produced not only an end to legal segregation, but changes for women, for immigrants who have been welcomed through the whole world from the immigrants act. things that went around the world. the freedom movement as king said was causing the widest liberation in human history, caused the soviet union to fall with a playing we shall overcome. all these changes beyond the imagination of people. marriage equality. i was still in college in 1965 and there were no women at the university of north carolina by state law.

except nursing students. these changes were set in motion by equal citizenship i think in the emotional swath of the freedom movement dealing with equal citizenship in ways that applied to women, senior citizens, the disabled, and ultimately, yes, gay rights. so empirical blessings have flowed even our political discourse has followed george wallace and barnett in the predominant idea that government is bad, which is trans parent y parentally a way of adjusting politically to the race issue. and trump is the epitome of it. he at the end of a 50-year cycle, he has to be explicit about the racial base of it and at the same time, the emptyness of the anti government rhetoric. all you have to do is say washington is bad. i want to preserve choices for

people and get rid of centralized government. the emptyness is now manifest, but no one really clap it is lessons of 50 years from the movement that drew upon the heart of patriotism. so i'm just going to sketch what do we do about this? i want to sketch a few thing frs the work i'm trying to do now. which is to look at all of american history from the point of view of race and how it effects american history and our politics and memory. i think we are paying a price for not understanding how deeply the civil rights movement drew upon the best lessons of our political history.

in a way that goes to the democratic challenge and what the experiment is about. the civil rights movement had a tremendous memory. the failures are in four different areas. i'm trying to argue. onery. one is constitutional principle. three is optimism or outlook and four is the centrality of violence. on memory, dr. king said we are drawing on the memory back to the revolution in which we need to learn because we don't have any traditional, we don't have armies, money, businesses. dwoent have police forces. we're largely invisible. what do we have? we have an a appreciation for the example and the professed values of american democracy. and they have not been remembered.

lincoln said this is a great lesson about offenses for the ages. and in the next 50 years, we forgot that and turned the civil war into a contest of valor. the academy in the north named the process by which terrorism restored white rule in the south and forgot all three of the civil war amendments, the 13th, 14th and 15th. they called that process redempti redemption. it's the official name. even the revisionist historians who are doing yeoman's work go by the title of redemption because that's the official name. just like skal wag and carpet bagger are the only words this came into the language out of

that period. there is no word that came into the language for somebody who wanted the freedom to vote. so just as in the 1860s, there were great lessons, courageously recognized by lincoln then forgotten and turned upside down in the next 50 years until by 1915, the whole country comes together, white people in the birth of a nation in the film and woodrow wilson segregates washington and shows that film. it also showed in the supreme court by the way. the lessons of the civil war

dismissing lincoln. king had a better memory and he said we have to go beneath this forgetfulness to come up with a accurate history of america because race is the gate to freedom. that's my title. freedom's gate. it's what blocks our perception and our achievement freedom, but it is also the hope in rare cases when we deal with race, we push freedom forward. the institution. there are a lot of strurk rall things about the was that the political experiment raced on the capacity of mankind for self-government and the capacity of mankind to build trust. all our political experiments rest on the capacity of man

kind. unless we build people's public trust. king said this is a profound challenge. the founders also said citizens have to, that's why he recognized that the sit in students beyond the abstract qualities of this, that citizen involvement and taking personal risks in that discipline like the freedom riders did, said nothing is more patriotic than a freedom rider who looks in the face of a klansman that says -- but i believe that our children will come into a political citizenship because of what we're doing here.

the ultimate example is mickey shorner, honored here when she was shot. in the summer of 1964. his last words were sir, i know how you feel looking at the klansman with the pistol at his chest who killed him. try iing to make some contact wh this bloodthirsty klansman at the moment. it convinced the fbi agents that they had believable confessions when they got those same seven words from two different klansmen. this kind of disciplined belief that we can create some sort of bou boundary relationship from across the racial boundaries that divide us. the third element that the movement had is optimism, sorely looking. political correctness passes for wisdom in a cynical society.

king said we will win our freedom. we may not get there with you, but the goal of america is freedom. h drew that right out of the constitution. it begins with with the people, i think all politician should have to recite the preamble before the debate. we the people in order to establish djustice, promote the common welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this constitution for the united states. unbelievely awe daurns, but optimistic. i'm here to strangle washington

flight that was enjengerred by race. that there were elements in this country, that if the choice is between democracy and giving up racial division, they'll give up democracy. that's how stark the choice is. and lastly violence. said that madison was trying to make a government that was based on loyalty and armies and the king's discipline. a government run on votes instead. what's a vote? a vote is a piece of nonviolence. that's why madison was such a wimp in the war of 1812. that's what the embargoes were about. we want to government to run on votes. they had to have the war to prove themselves respectable in a world of violence. that thought democracy was fleeting and about to go, but it was about establishing a vote so dr. king would always say you think nonviolence is odd ball

stuff u and diets and indians who won't step on insecs, but if you believe in democracy, you should be studying the relative impact of violence and nonviolence in modern society. most of you have never seen any violence because you live in a society where votes govern your little league team, your church, university, your everything, plus your politics and nubble those votes and that's the strength of america. that's the only thing i have in common with racists. that so far at least we've been building something that's about votes. instead of violence. so we should be studying violence and nonviolence. i took a course from hannah aaron when i was at princeton who told us that all political science taught that violence and power were an extension of one

and the other. she said in the modern world that's interdependent and built on cooperation, you could build just as good a case that power and violence are opposites that in a world in which everybody is at war, no one has any power. that challenge as far as i know has never been takening up since. but it was deep in martin luther king's belief that nonviolence is at the heart of american democracy because votes is what the hope of the american experiment is is based on. votes are the greatest invention of nonviolence and yet we have 1,000 words in our vocabulary of violence and only nonviolence for violence and votes. i argue base by cli that universities and citizens should be studying the civil rights movement as a model of constitutional future. not the quaint past of

segregated bus stops. power that is free to benefit mooumts all over the world. because it's drawing on the -- so james madison should be studied side by side for lessons. we don't go back to the fundamentals of democracy any longer and we don't recognize in my view that the civil rights movement is right there as modern founders. the only choice i see is that you are racist or not. it's a theorem that is grossly

impoverished. the best people i know say we dismantle racism. what does that build? a couple of hundred years from now in which racist is not the word, the word racist draws its meaning from our negative view of race. that has been inherited. the word signist now draws its meaning and vey lens from the way we feel about science. if the world of race for its roo roots and not just the bad side. one day we might understand that a racist is somebody b who sees how the different families of

man not unlike the united states where we have crossed racial boundaries. most of who our friends are, our habits, our habits of mind and our vocabulary to we're stuck with racist. violence. and nonviolence is the only word we have and we still think it's quaint and what race and violence have in common is that people want the to talk about them just long enough to find a safe ground and in the conversation. and that's what happened. so that race and politics are al terro terrontive worlds instead of integral parts of one another because when you're talking about democracy in the united states, if you're not talking about race, you're not at the root of democracy. either it's problems or its promise. because that is the lesson that

i think comes out of the pearls of biographical his wtory when trying to address race in america. >> thank you so much, taylor, for that passion. exploration of race in america through biography. it was incredible.

we're all very thankful for your remarks. those who have signed up for the dinner, it's on the ninth floor in the skylight room. and we should adjourn for that. thank you so much, taylor. this weekend on the cspan networks, saturday at 9:15 p.m. eastern on cspan, former presidential speech writers for presidents nixon to obama. and sunday at 6:30 p.m., dr. anthony on how your zip code impacts your health. on book tv on cspan 2, saturday at 9:00 p.m. eastern. daily caller news foundation editor in chief, christopher bedford on his book, the art of

the donald. lessons from america's philosopher in chief. and on sunday at 11:00, rebecca frazier and her book, mayflower, on american history tv on cspan 3, saturday at 8:55 p.m. eastern, penn state history professor, matthew restall on the u.s. capitol's art and architecture. and sunday at 10:00 p.m., the ground breaking ceremony of the eisenhower memorial in washington, d.c. this weekend on the cspan networks. >> next, sonoma state university professor laura watt teaches a class on the evolution of a national parks system and the effort to preserve pristine wilderness. she argueses this approach often obscures the ways humans have already