the rebels. but only got me arrested in a place called bubba dues big apple. that was in georgia. to make the story short, by the hand of the summer, every time i went into a new county, i went out in the fields and talked to the women. because the women were the only people that would tell me straight and at the end, -- they would tell me straight in riddles. man, do you believe we landed on the moon this summer? have you seen the simon eyes to wax commercial? the one where -- i said, the one where the little children float across the kitchen on an invisible shield of time and iced wax? yes, i have seen that she said, do you believe that? i said, i saw the moon landing on the news in the wax is a

commercial. i'm trying to explain the difference. realizing that she is asking me, what is real and what is not about voting in georgia? end, threethe counties i recommended to john and he gave voter registration grants to three different projects all headed by women who all had the same profession. i never would have guessed in a million years when i started looking for martin luther king, they were all midwives. had a natural authority and an independence from the white economy that allowed them to escape the pervasive fear in those counties. decided that i this movement contained wonders beyond my imagination and that the only way i was going to find out where this movement had come from was to write it myself with one rule which was not to use labels like racist and militant

because for me, we crossed the boundaries of race from personal discovery that scrambles are categories that make us feel good and protected, and then we can reorder them. norule -- my one rule was essays. it killed me for a long time can't startid, you a history of a movement that grew out of the black church without certain -- without realities of how the black chart -- black church culture worked. since i couldn't write an essay, i couldn't start the book. or least that is what i told myself. my publisher said i was stalling. i came to memphis in 1983, still stuck. 35 years ago. the first time. i checked into the lorraine motel. i got a lot of very funny looks when i said i was going to stay a week because a lot of people

were staying by the hour. [laughter] mr. branch: one of the miracles of memphis, and i don't know how it happened, but it must have been a civic miracle not a lot of you were involved in to take the lorraine motel from where i saw it in 1983 to that incredible institution worldwide. [applause] mr. branch: so, thank you for that. they let me stay in room 308, the room next to dr. king. he didn't have a key. they said they didn't have a key to any of the rooms. you had to go to the office and they would let you in. while i was here, i was doing research. maybe some people were here from

the mississippi valley collection. an assortment of your ancestors and to some of you from that an almost biblical event happened here when dr. king was killed. let's gather information, oral histories so other people can figure it out because it goes very deep. in what is here in memphis pier 1 of the many collections was that they went out and they got all of the film footage from the memphis television station. what had been on the air and what had not. i went through all of this. i am sitting there looking at an outtake of a white reporter on the night dr. king was killed, in memphis, in the hospital, trying and the reporter was saying, what did you see? did dr. king say anything? did you see the shooter? he kept asking all these questions. i think he was in shock.

i think he didn't say a word. i had what i used to call the standard civil rights interview. i was his best friend. wasn't very useful. all of a sudden, this reporter got so frustrated that he said, what happened tonight, can you tell me when you first met martin luther king? like that, he snapped out of his , young man, id first met martin luther king on a cold and rainy january day in 1954 when he arrived at my of ourge in the company profit, learned mentor, vernon john.

he started telling vernon john stories. this reporter couldn't get him to talk it all about the assassination, couldn't shut him off -- shut him up. i said this must be really important and wound up writing the first chapter all about vernon john because the next time i went to see the reverend and asked him some questions, it was like putting a key in the engine. he told all the stories and cause one of my first crises with a publisher and said, this is your first chapter? are you sure? thing you have going for you is there is interest in martin luther king and you turn in a chapter that does not mention him and is about something nobody has heard of. you can feel how the black church worked.

he is an amazing character. metheir credit, they let begin with that. i think memphis for my first chapter with vernon john because of the experience of the weight reporter. i had to divided into two halves. the reluctant to send in king all the way up to the nobel prize. through that, in the sit in's and the freedom rides and saint augustine, he was trying to get into the some sense and in was like if -- a conventional politician, but he was also reluctant. he refused. all along, he saw himself as

someone impaled by his beliefs. a lot of people treat him like a professor and say his ideas change over time. goal a scourge of bigotry and war and poverty from the 1950's. claim, shall he audacious for a movement of largely invisible people who had access to no traditional clinical weapons. they did not want to just free themselves, but the whole world. not just of race but poverty and war to boot. he said they were inextricably related. violence of the flesh and violence of the spirit. that was his goal. through this reluctant time going up, he behaved like a traditional politician. from 1964 on, he became driven.

what happened the way he described it is the movement convinced america to abandon legal segregation, that it was too much to not even allow black children to go into public libraries and set on the back of the bus. the polls said the black movement was going too far and too fast and we resented it. dr. king became driven to show , endingework he had violence of the flesh and violence of the spirit, had to take the message farther and he dragged it north to chicago. to prove that race was not and never has been about the south. hatred on the streets of chicago.

not to denounce the vietnam war. he did it anyway. dr. king said it is the ones that let the laden -- the cracked ones that let the light in. thewashington post and whole world rejected him without even considering the substance of the war. on the bonus marchers from world was starving and went to washington in 1932. people killed. dr. king said they did not succeed but they started edging

into the political consciousness for the people in washington who saw themselves as guilty. told the staff in one of the ontings, we have to finish what we have left even if it is next to nothing, quoting the book of revelation. leading the witness about the completion of what is at stake in race relations. poor people's camp, he was diverted into memphis. because of your stormy weather. you have always had stormy weather. on february 1 of 1968, you had tornadoes and the attention of not only memphis but the whole country was whether or not elvis

would be safe getting across to deliveriscilla her baby. day, the sanitation trucks in memphis were going through the neighborhood under strict rules that they were not, no matter what the weather was, to seek shelter in the neighborhoods of memphis. nobody wanted to be bothered with them. truckad three men on each old-fashioned trucks with room for one man in the driver. only place they could go us through a slit just behind the cab with the garbage. abram fell on the lever and it compacted. in the back of a garbage truck, this.tness saw the struggle to get out.

two were crushed with the garbage. not like a piece of garbage. he wanted to come. int is why he came here 1968. and the message has gone -- he was driven to finish on what he had left, when he said here, i may not get there with you but we as a people will get to the promise land.

since then, we have had a country stalled between liberation and gridlock because we lost track of that message, in my view. we are lucky enough to think about the witnesses that we have . 200 years ago frederick douglass was born. he said after the civil war that the south repackaged its hatred of the yankees in the civil war to disestablish the 14th amendment largely here aside the and set 15th amendment and parts of the 13th amendment, that we went backwards and repackaged intolity of yankees

hostility to friedman. dr. king said what happened at the end of his career is that america had repackaged the over resentment of segregation into a resentment of the federal government sponsoring diversity and civil rights laws. to government theme ine prevailing government. and say that his only goal is to from tranquil governments and tax and spend liberals. we turned away from the message of dr. king for largely 50 years in gridlock. it has happened before. my thesis is race almost going

to has been -- that it can swing open and it can swing closed. we tend to bounce off of race to get onto other topics and lose the wonder of it. the new -- it is potential across racial barriers. we are in another time of stirring. women of color and dreamers and and blackof color lives matter people and high schools, students, upset by the culture of guns, to try and influence us the way kids did in birmingham in 1963. it is kind of like the 1960's.

when other people were saying it , citizens were break fruit -- a breakthrough from the start because there are certain elements of human nature that are so stubborn that words alone are not enough. three areas i think are worthwhile for debate and signal posts and whether or not the stirring of age can't coalesce. the civil rights movement has opened freedom skate for a lot

of other people. couldn't go to the university of north carolina if i were there. we are trapped in cynicism because i think we are all succumbed to the anti-, to the cynical politics that resented the politics that produced the civil rights movement. mention three areas of fierce debate. he will never recapture the civil rights movement. you can't fight the next movement by the last movement's

rules. you need to look at them. room forhere is healthy debate about leadership and styles of leadership. dr. king was prophetic leadership. he was the standard leader. your civil heritage, it was a remarkable balance in his rhetoric. but a lot of students said he is a traditional leader, he is just saying follow me, he wants grassroots leadership. we want to go out and serve. should be a lot better known. the issues are profound. thought, butudy,

also sacrifice. my own point of view is you need every kind of leadership you can get and beyond leadership, you need every citizen to think it is a citizen's duty to be leaders. that is kind of connected to grassroots. [applause] i think it is a healthy sign that we are beginning to have debates about what kind of leadership is most necessary. and who is responsible or not. and people saying whether or not these high school kids can be seriously, of course they can. in america, everybody's leadership rests on what they are doing their the element of maturity and surprise and optimism is all on their side. the second issue that i think we need to bear in mind is the issue of violence versus nonviolence.

this is a hard issue because i think people tend to bounce off nonviolence the same way they bounce off race. to find some safe ground to say, i'm not a bad person. i'm not a racist. or some place to say there is a case for violence here or there. i have to put in at this point, a shameless plug. i had a premiere last night of a movie on hbo, king in the wilderness, i'm executive producer. some of the most poignant scenes , it has only been on once, so if you missed it, he will be back, the first -- it will be back, i have been trying to get movement on the screen. this is the first one. some of the most poignant scenes are dr. king debating carmichael as they walk along the streets of mississippi during the march in 1966 about the merits of violence and nonviolence. and saying, what you told me afterwards, not all of this is only film, but why do we have to be nonviolent? why does american -- america

admires nonviolence of black people? but they admire james bond? he said i've been to jail 36 times. i am like a soldier. why do i have to keep inviting violence against me to get white america to do what it should have done in the first place? dr. king's i come you are right. it is unfair. nobody has the right to impose nonviolence on anyone else. all i am trying to get you to see is nonviolence is a leadership doctrine. we are ahead of where white america is. if we step up to violence, we are going back to where they are. apart from the political and practical issues of whether or

not you can win nonviolence as a minority, a largely unarmed minority, in the morality, nonviolence is the leadership doctrine and it cannot -- we must rise above the stigma -- stigmatizing of nonviolence is something that is for the weak. we didn't get past that. dr. king did not win that argument. black power became the rage. i can tell you to this day, i know i a lot of veterans of the nonviolent civil rights movement who were not violent who deny they are nonviolent. today. being embarrassed by it. not a lot. i know some. i just mention that because it is so shocking that people equate violence with strength. that is a question that deserves profound thought, not just your knee-jerk answer. dr. king went to india to try to find out about nonviolence in 1959 to whether he could make it work. he came back fairly disillusioned. he said, first of all, the leading opponent of nonviolence, nehru, is billing and atomic on -- bomb.

the rest of the people have split into a thousand factions, some of whom fast all the time. he said, we can't have fast in the american civil rights movement because those indians haven't had barbecue. [laughter] we are not going to fast that much. besides, we have to invent our own form of nonviolence in the united states. the point is, he says nonviolence is not an esoteric weird thing for vegetarians and gandhian's. nonviolence is the essence of democracy because democracy is about votes. every four years we have a festival of votes called an election. where as in other countries like syria, they have a festival of bloodbaths. votes are power.

in the pentagon, if you go to the national war college, they are the only people who take nonviolent seriously, from a theoretical point of view. they say history's trend is since napoleon industrialized war, violence, military violence destroys more and governance less. and in an interdependent world, power grows against the grain of violence. if we had civil wars instead of elections, in 2020, what our country be more powerful or less powerful? these are profound questions i think colleges ought to be debating. violence is one of the most salient topics there is.

we are now moved to the places where we are addressing violence even among spouses and partners and in the workplace. and yet we do not have theoretical discussions about the potential of nonviolence to be the advanced -- add vanguard of civil relations among us. of votes. what a vote is. it is a greatest invention and nonviolence there ever was. dr. king talked about it and he said apart from the fact that jesus went to the cross, to show that there was life beyond death through nonviolence, a witness against violence and we now measure time into adn bc, by that witness, apart from that, and our civic -- in our civic creed, nonviolence is at the heart. i commend people need to think more about nonviolence as a conscious strategy. not only for a movement, but for our country and around the world. how we make it -- witness for democracy. [applause] finally, i want to say the third

area that is hard is the area of optimism. and this is an is an -- and cynicism itself. what is the role? where did the optimism of the civil role -- civil rights movement come from? how did we get to be cynical? why is it that everybody will say we are in a cynical age and you hardly ever hear anyone say, how did we get here and how do we get out? what are the elements of citizens in?

-- cynicism? i suggest it is an appetite. it is an appetite to have a negative answer. we, the people on the civil rights side of this issue, are vulnerable to that too. we can be cynical about the promise of government. i have interviewed a lot of fbi agents including the ones that persecuted dr. king, the ones who ran his wiretap, i yield to no one in an appreciation of the insidious culture of the fbi and persecuting dr. king. and yet, i hesitate when people say that they must have order to hit themselves and it must have come out of the federal government. these are sensitive issues. but i think they go to the heart of what message we can hope to offer if we think the premise of america is poisoned by inherent evil. that cannot be escaped. and cannot be risen above. some of dr. king's most poignant sermons were saying, where did the vitality of the black culture in america come from? how did they take the question of jeremiah in a time of mourning, is there a bomb, is

there no balm in gilead and turn it around and he said, stretch that question mark out internet exclamation point -- into an exclamation point. it can create that spiritual. how can we in the 21st century with all the liberation that has let loose believe that our experiment in democracy is fatally poisoned? and that we can't offer hope from our political traditions? do not let us become a mirror -- a mere contributor to the cynicism that saying our government is poisoned against justice.

that is what you get 50 years ago tonight. dr. king saying, we will get to the promised land. my eyes have seen the glory. he was not a pollyanna. he knew as well as anyone the depth of what he was struggling against because he had just made witness for those last three years knowing that he was not capturing america. then america was in that revolt that frederick douglass had complained about a hundred years before. nevertheless, he offered optimism. every single time. i think that is the most distinctive thing about dr. king. the timbre of his voice. you hear the struggle between realism and hope in his voice and it comes out as a him for hope -- as a hymn for hope every time to we have to offer optimism in this time of stories so that we too have a chance to take the legacy of equal souls, equal votes forward again. bob moses, i give speeches occasionally and he does everyone of them, he says, i wish every candidate, every debate would begin simply by recapturing the astonishing, breathtaking audacity and optimism of our form of government and every citizen's responsibility simply by reciting the first sentence in the constitution.

it is very easy. but when you think of what is piled up from 1787, it is pretty breathtaking. "we the people of the united states, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the united states of america." that is an

optimism that falls on every citizen. nobody lived up to it better than the movement people in the civil rights era. including jesse and many other heroes who are here. to me, as a white southerner, who studied this movement for 35 years, i think there is no greater miracle than people who had been denied anything but the whiplash of our professions of liberty had the political genius and the indescribable courage to lift the rest of us toward the meaning of our own professed values. [applause] dr. king left a legacy even after he died. it was published in look magazine. he wrote it before he came to memphis. it was published after his funeral. in which he said, the american people are infected with racism. that is the problem. the american people are also infest -- infected with democratic idealism. there is our hope. thank you. [applause]

>> tonight, we take a look at the 50th anniversary of the assassination of dr. martin luther king jr.. begins atistory tv 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span3. tomorrow, more live coverage from the 50th anniversary in tennessee and a forum on martin luther king jr.'s life and legacy from past and present civil rights leaders. tomorrow ontory tv c-span3.

john kasich -- john kasich will be in new hampshire and live coverage begins at 5:30 eastern on c-span and he can watch live on c-span.org and listen on the c-span radio app. the 10th anniversary of the death of william buckley and the future of conservatism. -- lowry,rich lally jonah goldberg, and you can see it tonight 8:00 eastern here on c-span. >> wednesday morning, the next stop on the c-span bus, lieutenant governor mike gundy will be the guest on the bus.

former cbs news correspondent bill plante, and marie nelson, president of news, shared their perspective. the ford 10 -- the ford foundation shares the news comments in detroit. >> good evening. i the great honor of welcoming you to the special occasion. to thank you for being with us this evening. i have to call out a special colleague, a remarkable woman. intelligent and brilliant.