les payne pulitzer-prize winning journalist, thank you for being with us as well. i thank you as we look back on selma. many say the line that met the protesters may have been replaced by other lines, prison and unemployment lines, if you have heard us talking about where black men outnumber their white counterparts the thin blue line the line that separates hispanic families along the u.s. mexican border where i amgration is a hot topic in this country, picture lines where workers continue to demand just a living wage just enough to be able to make ends meet. the line to take communion in churches that define themselves >>> we end with the last words of the lyndon johnson: we shall overcome some day. i am del walters. thanks for watching. ♪ glory ♪ alleluia. ♪ glory. ♪ oh ♪ glory, hallelujah. ♪ everybody standing here today has their own edmund pettus bridge to cross. >> we have come a long way since the events of that bloody sunday. selma changed [ ♪♪ ] >> we get the, you know, credible messages from credible source that is we can never trace back to their origin

. >> les payne alabama? >> same. we did not see white people. they were across town and i was across town. but one story when i was a six years old a telegram boy came to deliver a telegram to our house. he was white he must have been a teenager. i noticed that my grandmother answered him sir. it confused me because in our etiquette you answer sir to adults. this was clearly a kid. and my grandmother answered to him as sir. later on in that same year i was in a shoe store. and i refused to answer him sir because he was--he was a teenager. and i wouldn't answer him--my mother slapped me because i wouldn't--i refused. like i said, i'm the rebel but i just--you didn't answer kids, sir. but you answered white people, all of them, sir. that was one of the things that struck me. that was a part of the state terror that imposeed upon african-americans a sense of inferiority from the date of birth. parents did it to keep their kids out of harm's way. we're looking at selma alabama the scene of bloody sunday, 50 years ago. the president is set to address

les payne and randall pinkston. he biography of malcolm x. >> he was invited down and they would begin to verge from the peaceful passivist. they invited malcolm down. he left the nation of islam at this point. >> did that change him as much as some have said? he started to see the world less black and white and more right and wrong. >> he said he would us said the mohammed teaches us, yes but not necessarily changed him totally, but it changed what he said publicly because he began to speak for himself. and it did, in fact, change him. >> there is a seen in the movie where malcolm meets with coretta scott king, fact or fiction, and did it set his role as the militant side of the more moderate-- >> no question about it. malcolm, he spoke to the students at brown ame and he offered himself king was in jail when he was there. in february king was in jail. he met with ms. king, and did in fact--and, in fact, with the eyes on the prize they quote mrs. king's interview where clearly she was as moved touched and influenced

earlier today i talked to journalist and author les payne.e told me today that we're at another pivotal point in the fight for equal rights. >> it's the same issue. 50 years later we're book ending this same issue to make sure that a black life is similar equal to a white life. we've not reached that point yet. >> are you optimistic as we look at the events unfolding in selma today? >> enormously optimistic. because i think this generation the millennium, they will step forward, and they will provide the leadership in--that is needed to respond to their condition, and hopefully they would do it in a background and sense of what went before. but they have to adjust. they should not make the mistakes of the past but they have to create new solutions to problems as they crop up. >> as you heard tony and robert report from selma this week, bringing back difficult memories for many including one alabama centurion, who was there when there were dividing lines between black and white and in selma. she remembers it like today. [ ♪ come by here, lord,