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The Sixties

The Long March to Freedom

Aired June 26, 2014 - 21:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All people should obey just laws, but I would also say that an unjust law is no law at all.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (Inaudible) segregation (inaudible) than segregation forever.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The (inaudible) the dream with integrity and justice for all.

JOHN F. KENNEDY, FMR. PRES. OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: We are confronted primarily with a moral issue.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're willing to be beaten for democracy.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They're giving (inaudible).

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If we had (inaudible).

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Would you be willing to go in a demonstration gap (ph)?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes sir.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We want our freedom, and we want it now.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Open hostilities or the civil rights kind of things (ph).

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is the wrong way.

MAYOR ALLEN C. THOMPSON, JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI: We've talked about it here in a separation of the races, customs, and traditions that have been built up over the last time of years that have prove for the best interest of both, the common and the white people.

CLARENCE JONES, ATTORNEY, MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: It was almost 100 years after the emancipation proclamation and America is still rigidly and racially segregated.

TAYLOR BRANCH, AUTHOR, AMERICA IN THE KING YEARS: Black people couldn't vote in the South and they couldn't even go on to the public libraries. Public libraries were segregated. The churches were segregated.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are in Atlanta, Georgia in the Ebenezer Baptist Church where a father and son of the co-pastors. REVEREND MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR: Frankly, as others have said, I don't know what the future holds but I know who holds the future. And this is our hope. This is that something that keeps us going.

BRANCH: Martin Luther King was immensely frustrated by the end of the 1950s because he had become famous. He's preaching all over the country. He knows that's his gift but he says people cry at my sermons, then the next morning, it's still segregated.

REVEREND C.T. VIVIAN, CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST: Martin King calls above 50 ministers from across the South to start a non-violent movement. The understanding of teaching non-violence was clear that there was a new politics teachers like James Lawson.

DR. CLAYBORNE CARSON, HISTORIAN: James Lawson has been to India and comes back with the store house of Gandhian tactics.

REVEREND JAMES LAWSON, CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST: Martin King said come to national now, we need you now. So I went to national and organized other people.

That night, we have a most important business to try to accomplish and that is to try to have one major role playing experience which sort of tries to set the stage for an actual demonstration, for an actual sit in.

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, AUTHOR, ROSA PARKS: A LIFE: He talked about the Civil Rights Movement in the '60s. People often talk about Salmon (ph), Birmingham, and Montgomery, but the incubator of it all was Nashville, Tennessee where James Lawson started teaching his classes on non-violence.

LAWSON: And then after beating him ...

BRINKLEY: Teaching people like John Lewis, James Pebble, Diane Nash how to not swing back if somebody hits you in the head with a nightstick.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Nigger.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Nigger.

DIANE NASH, CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST: We actually practiced sitting in. Some took the role of students who is sitting at a lunch counter and others took the role of white thugs (ph). We were practicing how to remain nonviolent even in the face of violence.

DAVID GARROW, AUTHOR, BEARING THE CROSS: There had been other sit-ins in those early months of 1960, but no one is centrally organizing or coordinating this like the student group from Nashville.

REP. JOHN LEWIS, CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST: It was (inaudible) that they're thinking (ph). We had the very first sit-in in Nashville.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I took my sit at the counter. I asked the waiter for a hamburger and a coke. DAN T. CARTER, HISTORIAN: The students sit down at the lunch counter asking to be served knowing for well that it's against the law.

LEWIS: (Inaudible) to be arrested and then go to jail. And if necessary, stay in jail.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It was a moving theater (ph) within me that I was sitting there demanding of God-given right. I could no longer be satisfied. I'll go along with an evil system (ph).

BRANCH: The big surprise for them was that they weren't arrested. They sat there all day and they realized that white people were (inaudible).

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The new tactic came as a surprise creating bewilderment and confusion in the white communities and even among the Negros themselves.

JAMES KILPATRICK, EDITOR, RICHMOND NEWS LEADER: When this disciplined platoon comes into a store, occupies all of the seats at the lunch counter, they refused to move on the request of the store owner, they put on a boorish exhibition of what seems to be playing bad manners in crashing into a place where they are not welcome. I submit to you, sir, it comes with singularly (ph) poor grace for their spokesman to then charge the store owner with that behavior.

KING: Mr. Kilpatrick, I think on this point, you would have to agree with me that all people should obey just laws but I would also say that an unjust law is no law at all. And when we find an unjust law, I think we have a moral obligation to take a stand against it.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: During the weeks after the sit-ins began, opposition in the White communities of the South solidified. And the first signs of violence appeared.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (Inaudible) a man came out and take it and said that there was a fire down the other side. There was a bunch of (inaudible) on the stools from the counters, so I instructed the man to put in place in (inaudible).

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: On February 27, 80 Nashville students were arrested out of over 300 who are participating in the sit-ins that day. As the students were confronted with the choice of paying a $50 fine or spending over a month in jail, each of them chose jail.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I feel free. I feel liberated. I feel like I have crossed over.

NASH: While we were in jail, black women got on the foam (ph), and organized an economic withdrawal.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A Negro has a terrific praising power (ph). So the merchants of course was being with the pinch (ph) because they were definitely not coming downtown to spend their time.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The next day, the Nashville, Tennessee (inaudible) newspaper to kind of get one, mayor favored desegregation.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It was a great victory for the (inaudible) and for the city of Nashville.

CHET HUNTLEY, NBC NEWS: The economic boycott was withdrawn and Nashville became the first major city in the South to permit Whites and Negros to eat together in public places.

CARSON: The remarkable group that Lawson brought together in Nashville, they became a country (ph).

NASH: We all applauded and here was the situation that turned out right.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The ideas that they promoted very quickly spread across the region and across the nation.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HUNTLEY: The city on movement. It has challenged certain fundamental concepts of law and is shaking the regional creations (ph) of the South in an entirely new way.

GARROW: King is extremely pleased with the emergence of the student sit-in movement in early 1960. There are sit-ins in Atlanta where Dr. King is living by that time. King himself gets arrested in at one at Rich's (ph) department store. King is kept in jail when everyone else is released.

BRANCH: And that's when he got involved in the presidential campaign.

GARROW: John Kennedy, the presidential candidate calls Mrs. King to express his concern, very unexpected public gesture.

HARRIS WOFFORD, SPECIAL ASST., PRESIDENT KENNEDY: Within 24 hours, Robert Kennedy calls that judge and asked King out of jail. Next thing he knew was Dr. King had on public and had said I was against having a catholic for president but if he can wipe the tears from my daughter-in-laws' eyes, I have the courage to vote for Kennedy for president and I have a suitcase full of votes.

RAY MOORE, NBC NEWS: Dr. King, have you heard anything from Vice President Nixon or any of your supporters?

KING: I have been confined and I haven't talked with anybody from Washington or from the campaign.

MOORE: Do you know if any efforts made on behalf of the Kennedy group?

KING: Well, I understand that the Kennedy group did make definite contacts and did a great deal to make my release possible.

BRANCH: It turned out that that phone call was given credit for Kennedy's victory in one of the closest elections in modern history. WOFFORD: King said "I hope that at last we have a president with the intelligence to understand this problem. I'm convinced that he has that understanding and now we'll have to see what his passion leads him to do."

KENNEDY: But what together we can do ...

RICHARD KEEVES, AUTHOR, PRESIDENT KENNEDY: PROFILE OF POWER: Kennedy, in his inaugural speech, did not have single mention of domestic issue. Harris Wofford said all these people out there in particularly Black people who voted for you and you've got to give them something. What they did then was had two words talking about freedom and human rights abroad and at home. That was the only mentioned.

ROBERT KENNEDY, ATTORNEY GENERAL: Kennedy's administration is trying to keep a lead on the civil rights issue.

ROBERT DALLEK, AUTHOR, FLAWED GIANT: And civil rights activists are determined to push ahead.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Brave Blacks and Whites rode into the Deep South together on Greyhound and Traiways buses to challenge segregation as freedom riders.

BRINKLEY: The freedom right started with two buses, 13 people going from Washington D.C. to New Orleans.

GENE ROBERTS, AUTHOR, THE RACE BEAT: The concept of the freedom rights was to show that the segregation laws were not be enforced in the south.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Even though the law demands that a passenger can ride (inaudible) and participate in lunch room, waiting rooms, and bathing rooms that into the law offenses (ph) everyone cannot, particularly, the Negro.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They find tickets from town to town and getting off in each town going into waiting rooms, restaurants, cafes, which are traditionally segregated in such amount (ph) as to enrage them and to provoke them into acts of violence. That's what they are doing.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm going to board at Greyhound bus going to Birmingham. We were surrounded by mob. We (inaudible) Anniston for about four miles (inaudible), and finally, threw a bomb into the bus, the bus fairly very rapidly with black smoke.

ROBERTS: Meanwhile, when the Trailways bus got to Birmingham, it was even worst.

HOWARD SMITH, NBC NEWS: They dragged about six of the passengers out, both Negro and White. They took them in the carters (ph) and alleys and began beating them, began hitting them with lead pipes. They're not one man -- a White man don (ph) at my feet and they beat him and kicked him until his face was a bloody red pulp.

NASH: Free riders who were severely beaten could not continue. The Nashville movement decided that we have to take up the freedom ride where it had left off.

(Inaudible).

VIVIAN: Diane Nash said the mind made the difference. She said we will not allow violence to destroy nonviolence. This was the test. 10 of the kids said we will go tonight and that's the stuff that makes you free. That's the stuff that is freedom.

ROBERTS: A group of them have got on a bus in Birmingham. When the bus pull down through the Montgomery station, John Lewis could see hundreds of whites headed towards and with baseball bats, bricks, rocks.

LEWIS: An angry mob just came out of nowhere. (Inaudible) beaten the freedom riders, was hit with a wooden crane (ph), beaten, left lying in a pool of blood.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Before police finally broke up the crowd with tear gas, they beat and injured at least 20 persons.

GARROW: After the riders are attacked and brutally beaten, the freedom riders essentially become trapped in Ralph Abernathy's first Baptist church.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The church was surrounded and people were setting fired crackers (ph).

LEWIS: That is a very dangerous situation (inaudible) no one, but no one who leaves the church.

GARROW: Dr. King had gone over the Montgomery from Atlanta to lend support to the freedom riders and so King, too, along with the riders is trapped at this church.

KING: Now, it's very easy for us to get angry and bitter and even violent in a moment like this, but I think this is a testing point.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KING: I hope that we will remain calm as we have done in so many touching (ph) difficult moments and I know we're going to do it.

LEWIS: Once that King Jr. placed a call Robert Kennedy and said to the attorney general (ph) something must be done.

ROBERT KENNEDY: We are finding (inaudible) to send in several hundreds more U.S. marshals from around the country to help and assist.

LEWIS: President Kennedy call out United State marshals to place the city of Montgomery under Martial law.

KING: (Inaudible) and I want to make this announcement that the city is now on the Martial law and troops are on the way into Montgomery.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Now, the best thing for King and all of the so called freedom riders has to return to their homes, go back to their books, and learn their own vents (ph).

ROBERTS: Finally, with federal intervention, the freedom riders were put on a bus and headed to Jackson.

VIVIAN: We fall out (ph) into Jackson, the wagon was waiting for us.

NASH: We didn't know at that time that the Kennedy's has agreed that the freedom riders could be imprisoned.

GARROW: The Kennedy administration makes a deal whereby the Mississippi police units agreed that they'll be no violence but the tradeoff is that every freedom rider arriving in Jackson immediately will be arrested.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Officials in Mississippi think they found a legal way to circumvent the segregation. Their method calling any defiance of segregation a threat to the peace in an area where popular feelings run so high.

ROBERTS: The freedom riders included James Pebble (ph), John Lewis, James Lawson, among others were sent to Parchman State Penitentiary.

VIVIAN: So this guy, it takes me back to the jail cell on prison doors slammed (ph). It has an effect on you. That sound you've felt you would never get out again.

THOMPSON: As soon as they're agitatedly (ph) and get out of trying is their option (ph). They're going back to the same, old way of living. This made us that it's such a wonderful place in which to live.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thank you very much Mr. Mayor.

THOMPSON: Well.

CARTER: There's attempt to stop the freedom rights. Only served to fuel the flames of the Civil Rights Movement.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'd like to see the show of hands of those of you who will be willing to continue the freedom ride in the near future. Show of hands please.

BRANCH: Freedom ride after freedom ride would come through. They get arrested in Jackson, they go to the Hinds County Jail or the Jackson Jail and then they would get moved to Parchman Penitentiary.

ROBERTS: You're in the time that you spent in prison a band (ph) form and I came out of prison more dedicated than ever. And I began to fan out across the South.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: James H. Meredith, son of a cotton farmer, grandson of a slave, and applicant for admission to the University of Mississippi. James, why do you want to enter the University of Mississippi?

JAMES H. MEREDITH: Well, I think that every citizen should have an opportunity to receive an education in his own state. I think you should have an education. It was an opportunity to receive the best possible education.

DALLEK: In Mississippi, (inaudible) was veteran, James Meredith insist on being admitted to the University of Mississippi. And Ross Barnett, the governor of the state, he's not going to let this happen.

ROSS BARNETT: I do hereby deny you admission to the University of Mississippi.

DALLEK: And it becomes a crisis.

BRANCH: Ross Barnett withdrew local police and allowed the campus to turn into a kind of war zone.

BARNETT: Please why don't you -- can't you give an order up there to remove Meredith?

KENNEDY: How can I remove him governor when there's a riot in the street? He may step out of that building and something happen to him. I can't remove him under those conditions. We've got to get somebody up there now to get order and stop the firing and the shooting then you and I will talk on the phone about Meredith, but first we got to get order.

BRANCH: Finally, the army arrives from Minneapolis (ph) and comes rolling on the campus and stops the riot at that point.

KENNEDY: I deeply regret the fact that any action by the executive branch was necessary in this case, but all other avenues and alternatives including persuasion and conciliation had been tried and exhausted.

BILL RYAN, NBC NEWS: James Meredith went to school (inaudible) today but his travels turned from classes were not those of a regular student.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Go home now. Go home now.

RYAN: For everywhere that Meredith went, so does he's escort, the federal marshals and troops of the United States army.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There is no country where the violence of Sunday and Monday has gone unreported. For example, the biggest story in the London Evening Standard was the violence on the Mississippi campus. The outburst of violence was described as humiliating for American democracy and embarrassing for American prestige abroad.

KENNEDY JR.: I think my father and my uncle were originally focused on us foreign policy issues of America's leadership in the globe and saw the Civil Rights Movement in our country as kind of a destruction.

KING: I think this is a charge before the president. He must stop now making moral decisions rather than purely political decisions.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GEORGE WALLACE, 5TH GOVERNOR OF ALABAMA: In the name of the greatest people that have ever crawled this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the goblet before the seed of tyranny and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.

CARTER: George Wallace become almost mythic figure for white southerners, in that speech in which he call a segregation forever is the foolish expression of that commitment to becoming of the leader of the resistant by the south.

KING: I'm sorry Mr. Wallace. God has spoken to me. That he wants freedom for his people.

It may even mean physical death, but it means that I will die standing up for the freedom of my people. God has spoken to me.

TIMOTHY NAFTALI, DIRECTOR, TAMIMENT LIBRARY, NYU: Kind very wisely sees an opportunity to get more exposure to the civil rights movement, and to proud the Kennedy Administration.

ROBERTS: Martin Luther King decided that they should have major demonstrations only in areas that local law enforcement would react violently.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you think you can keep Birmingham in the present situation of segregation?

EUGENE CONNOR, COMMISSIONER OF PUBLIC SAFETY: I may not be able to do it but I'll die trying.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARTER: Bull Connor has a well known identity. He's one of the hardest hard-liners in defensive segregation. He encouraged the hiring of clansman (ph) on his police force.

DIANE McWHORTER, ATHUR, CARRY ME HOME: King assuming thinking that Bull Connor is going to provide the pictures and the footage they need to outrage the country.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Safety Commissioner Bull Connor used mass arrests, fire hoses, police dogs to break up the demonstrations.

BRANCH: The demonstrations continued for weeks, you got 12, 14, 20 adults maximum per day marching. They're making no news and numbers were dwindling. And the movement was on the brink of extinction when Bevel in the Nashville comes along and said, "I've got plenty of teenagers in my Youth Workshops who are willing to go to jail."

REVEREND JAMES LAWSON, CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST: I was on the phone constantly with Jim (ph), with Diane (ph), and others about making it happen.

GARROW: There's an understandable reluctance on King's part of organizing students to get arrested when their parents are going to be furious for putting their children in the line of fire.

CARTER: Finally, it's King who makes the decision to send the children into the streets.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Will you use the hoses and dogs?

CONNOR: We will use the dogs if they start drawing knifes again, drawing off. We will use the hose if it becomes necessary, stop them all.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Most of the pickets and marchers were juveniles, instead of the adults seen in previous protest. Officers quickly move in to make the arrest under the direction of Commissioner Bull Connor. Police overflowed juvenile hall with the youthful demonstrators.

All kinds of vehicles had to be pressed into service to carry the Negroes, cars, police paddy wagon, and later on the day school busses. The Sheriff's Department estimate upwards of 400 had been arrested.

BRANCH: Instead of 14 adults, he had 600 teenagers, and then the next day a 1000, and that's when the dogs and the fire hoses came.

CARTER: Of course what he was doing was exactly what head of the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham wanted them to do. To create a theater, that was going to be broadcast on national television that would show just how bad things were in Birmingham.

ROBERTS: Demonstrators attacked water hoses were as young as 6, 8, 9- years old.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Why did you want to take a part of the demonstrations?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: If all the color folk get together in take part in that -- and fight for freedom, maybe I get something. But they don't, it won't get nowhere.

JONES: Birmingham was a crucible in which the soul of the nation was being forged.

CHARLES COLLINGWOOD, CBB NEWS: The Negro drive for equality gathered momentum this week. The Supreme Court sanctions sit-in demonstrations. Still another court, removed the strongly segregationist, City Government of Birmingham dominated by Eugene "Bull" Connor.

CONNOR: (Inaudible) where I can see is, I have enjoyed my 23.5 year as Public Safety Commissioner of the City of Birmingham. I don't believe I hold the tax payers of Birmingham anything. They're going to own me almost 2.5 years back pay.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Don't shop for anything on Campbell Street. These are the stores that help to support that white citizens (inaudible).

DAN RATHER, FMR CORRESPONDENT, CBS NEWS: (Inaudible) is operating in and around Jackson, Mississippi, where -- the heart of resistance to the desegregation.

ROBERTS: The MBC Network affiliate was notorious for feature segregation in his speeches. It pertains such a problem that Medgar Evers demanded of the equal time.

CARTER: When the Jackson, Mississippi Television Station found itself on the treat of the SCC, they agree to allow Medgar Evers to go on television and make a statement about the goals of the movement.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You know this black son-of-a-bitch that's on television?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They don't more than goddamn 17 minutes, they better get his black ass over, I'm going to come and take him out.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sir, we are required to do this.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh hell no, this is in the South, this below the Mason-Dixon Line. You don't have to put these black jungle bunnies on T.V.

CARTER: To many white Mississippian, it was an outrage. That's the first time a black man had ever been allowed to appear on television in Mississippi. Certainly, to argue against segregation.

It made him in some ways a kind of mark man in Mississippi.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We'll be demonstrating here until freedom comes, the Negros here and Johnson Mississippi.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Our guest today on Meet the Press is Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama State as the only one in country today whose schools are completely segregated.

Next weeks the issue heads for our climax when two Negro students were safe to enroll at the University of Alabama. Governor Wallace has been (inaudible) that he will personally buy their entrance despite of federal court order and the threat of federal troops.

VERMONT ROYSTER, WALL STREET JOURNAL: That you believe that the Negros on the South are human being created by God?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Of course they are. I said so in my campaign address, it wasn't ...

ROYSTER: Do you think they should be discriminated?

WALLACE: Obviously isn't.

LAWRENCE SPIVAK, NBC NEWS: They cannot be enrolled without fields of critics.

WALLACE: Well of course -- we just have to wait and see exactly what transpires on that occasion.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: At the center of this potential storm, our two young Negro students Vivian Malone and Jimmy Hood. Vi is 20 years old, made the national honor society when she attended the segregated high school in our hometown of Mobile, Alabama.

He's also 20. He was the President of his class in high school at Gadsden, Alabama and President of the Student of Council.

RATHER: What's the general feeling around the campus concerning the agreement to admit the Negro here this summer?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well all the students I have talk to and my friends, I feel that it's not going be any repeat of Mississippi situation there's no -- it won't be no balance.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, I feel like it won't as much trouble as they've been on that campuses but it will be bad news when the Negro comes there.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Does the government plan to use federal marshal if it does goes through with these massive intentions to prevent the Negro student (inaudible).

KENNEDY: I know there's a great opposition in Alabama or indeed in any state to federal marshals and federal troops and I would be very reluctant to see as reach that point.

CONNOR: You know, who was Kennedy? (Inaudible)

They give anything (inaudible), they will have some trouble to do that.

Now George (ph) ask me -- ask you to do that, do him one thing. Tell your friend when you live (inaudible). Don't go with it. Leave it alone. They ain't going to handle this situation.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Governor Wallace has ordered 500 Alabama national guards went in to (inaudible). At the moment, they are under his control. It would require hardly more than the flourish of pen to convert their status to federalize troops and face them at the disposal of President Kennedy.

REEVES: National Guard units are commanded by our Governor unless they're federalized and the President becomes their commander and chief. Kennedy had to make the decision of what to do next.

KING: President Kennedy has done some significant things in civil right. At the same time, I must say that President Kennedy hadn't done enough and we must remind him that we elected him.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Under assuring Alabama sun that already has the temperature near of 100 degrees, the waiting continues. But Governor George Wallace's direct confrontation with federal authorities and two Negro students at the University of Alabama is now believe to be only a very short time away.

The two Negroes Vivian Malone and Jimmy Hood reportedly they are on route from Birmingham to the campus. Governor Wallace reported the he's about ready to make his appearance on campus.

MCWHORTER: Coming into nobody knows what's going to happen. The justice supreme doesn't know what Wallace is going to do. Wallace doesn't know whether he's going to be put on jail.

WALLACE: As Governor and Chief magistrate to the State of Alabama, I name it to be my solemn obligation and duty to stand before you representing the rights and in sovereign for this state and its people.

And now being (inaudible) my duties and responsibilities under the constitution of the United States, the constitution of the state of Alabama is seeking preserve and maintain the peace and dignity of the state and the individual freedoms to the citizens thereof do hereby denounce and forbid this illegal and unwanted action by the central (ph) government.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Governor Wallace, I take it from that statement that you are going to stand on that door and that you are not going to carry out the order...

WALLACE: I stand upon the statement.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Stand upon that statement. Governor, I'm not interested in this show. I don't know what the purpose of this show is. I am interested in the orders of this (inaudible). That is my only responsibility here.

The choice is yours. I would ask you once again, to responsible to step aside.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The justice department says that the Negro students will be enrolled sometime today.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: After all mess, the Kennedy's learn their lesson about negotiating with the Southern Governor.

Kennedy just decide to go ahead and federalize the guard, he's not going to play games anymore. The National Guard General Henry Graham goes up to Wallace, he says it is my sad duty to tell you to step aside.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We shall now return to McGlamry for the purpose of continuing this fight, this constitutional fight because we are winning.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Governor Wallace moved away from the door and has left after being confronted with about 150 federalized national guardsmen.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: United States has just confronting General Nicholas (ph), now all smiles as the two Negro students are to enter the registration building.

WOFFORD: Each time that a big issue came up and the President and the Attorney General did everything they could not to have to get involved, it was after the encounter with Wallace at the Civil Right, became top priority.

KENNEDY: This is not a sectional issue. Difficulties of a segregation and discrimination exist in every city, in every state of the union. But knowing all can not make men seem right. We are confronted primarily with a moral issue, it is as olds as the scriptures and is as clear as the American constitution.

JONES: And that was the first time the President made the question of ending racial segregation, not because it is politically expatiate to do so, because it is morally right to do so.

KENNEDY: Next week I shall ask the congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment and it is not fully made in this century, to the proposition that race has no place in the American life or law.

CARTER: It's he's most eloquent speech in some ways, most heart felt speech.

KENNEDY: And this nation for all its hopes and all its folks will not be fully free until all it's citizens are free.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's a kind of bitter hour in it in that within hours afterwards Medgar Evers comes home and his wife and children are up because they want to tell him about the President's wonderful speech.

VALERIANI: Currently after midnight, Medgar Evers seats in his car in this driver way, then Evers was murdered. The final bullet was fired from a vacant lot across the street from Evers' home, crashing through his body and through the window of this home. He was 37.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What was uphold at the cowardly ambush of him at his home and properties, wife and children. You said something about how far these two had to go in reaching in semblance of social and injustice.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KING: If you are going to Washington to urge the congress to pass strong Civil Right legislation this year.

GARROW: The nationwide response to the power of Alabama supplies the energy that allows the march on Washington to start coming together.

KING: We will keep this demonstration nonviolent, it will be peaceful, it will be dignified and discipline and I think it will have a great impact.

NORTON: In my judgment, there was perhaps only one man or woman in America who could have put that march together, and it was by Rustin.

RUSTIN: By any movement, we need the cooperation of the best minds many of which are right as well as black (ph).

JONES: Rustin was simply an organization of genius. He was the best and the brightest. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you feel that the President's Civil Rights program is actually not needed?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't it's needed and further more, I think it's unconstitutional.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Segregationist Senators like Strom Thurmond are attempting to trumpet the fact that (inaudible) is known to be gay, as a way to undercut the march.

JONES: There was an effort to block Rustin being selected and Martin King said, let he who has not sinned cast the first stone, it silenced (ph). I recommend very strongly, Rustin be designated as the director and chief of staff for the March, people like Randolph (ph) says, I second that.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Freedom now in movement here me, we are requesting all citizens to move into Washington, to go by plane, by car, bus, anyway that you can get there, go to Washington.

CARTER: The White House, the Washington Police Department, the Defense Department were all drawing up this tremendous contingency plans for was bombs.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If you have any questions, be sure you contact your captains for anything and they will take it from there. The whole things are orderly watched.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They came from all over America, Negros and whites, housewives and Hollywood stars. More than 200,000 of them came to Washington this morning and a kind of climax to a historic (ph) spring and summer in the struggle for equal rights.

GREENFIELD: The march in Washington was probably the most joyous protest march I've ever seen.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This turned out to be a huge interracial gathering that clearly did send a national message that there was tremendous support for racial equality.

CARSON: I admire the people my age and I know that John Lewis was the youngest speaker at the march.

LEWIS: As a student and as a participant in a national movement, I was ready to go. I wanted to push, I wanted us to stand up and speak up and speak out.

We're tired of seeing our people locked up in jail over and over again. And then you tell us, be patient. How long can we be patient? We want our freedom and we want it now.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

LEWIS: And I will never forget the speech of Martin Luther King Jr.

On that day, Dr. King spoke out of his soul. And he used that day and the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to preach a sermon, not just to America, but to the world.

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER: I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

JONES: As he was speaking, Mahalia Jackson shouts to him: "Tell them about the dream, Martin. Tell them about the dream."

And I see him take the written text, and he slides it to the left side of the lectern, looks out on the 350,000 people there, and then he speaks.

KING: I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self- evident, that all men are created equal.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

KING: I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

KING: Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

KING: And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last!3

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

CARTER: I don't think they quite anticipated just how successful it would be. It represents the civil rights movement at a kind of high watermark.

WALTER CRONKITE, CBS NEWS ANCHOR: The momentum of change seems to be accelerating in the hearts of 21 million American Negroes and, I'm told, millions of sympathetic whites, their beef tonight, the hope that the dream of Negro equality was at last overtaking the reality of history.

GARROW: In the immediate wake of the March on Washington, the civil rights movement has a national glow to it that it never before had had. But that glow tragically lasts hardly two weeks.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The bombing of this Birmingham, Alabama, church claimed the lives of four little girls attending Sunday school.

BRANCH: That was the church out of which all the kids had marched in May. So it was clearly a punishment.

NASH: We felt like we were involved, because, if there had been no movement, chances are that bombing would not have taken place.

JAMES BALDWIN, ACTIVIST: Kids were murdered in Birmingham on a Sunday and in Sunday school in a Christian nation, and nobody cares.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: White House Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff has just announced that President Kennedy died at approximately 1:00 Central Standard Time, which is about 35 minutes ago.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: After being shot at...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: After being shot...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: ... by an unknown assailant.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: ... by an unknown assailant.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: During a motorcade drive through downtown Dallas.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: During a motorcade drive through downtown Dallas.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What are you feeling right now?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I really couldn't say, really. Right now, I just don't know what to do. I don't even know where to go, what to say. There is nothing for me to say.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It is said that the human mind has a greater capacity for remembering the pleasant than the unpleasant. But today was a day that will live in memory and in grief.

LYNDON JOHNSON, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: No words are strong enough to express our determination to continue the forward thrust of America that he began.

(APPLAUSE)

CARO: Lyndon Johnson wasn't that widely known in the country at large. Johnson's aides say to him, in this speech, don't fight for civil rights. It's a noble cause, but it's a lost cause. You know what Johnson says to them? Well, what the hell is the presidency for then? JOHNSON: No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor

president Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.

CARO: Johnson gets that civil rights bill moving in the first few weeks after Kennedy's assassination.

ROBERT SCHENKKAN, PLAYWRIGHT: Dixiecrats led by Richard Russell announced a filibuster. That is, they would continue to talk and prevent the bill from coming forward for a straight up-our-down vote.

SEN. RICHARD RUSSELL (D), GEORGIA: This bill, which we feel is a perversion of the American way of life and a great blow at the right of dominion over private property that has been the genesis of our greatness.

SCHENKKAN: LBJ and his allies knew that they were short. So thus began a 24/7 campaign. He bullied. He cajoled. He made deals in order to get enough senators on board.

ROBERT ABERNETHY, NBC NEWS: Surprisingly, after a year on Capitol Hill, this bill is stronger than the one President Kennedy first requested. President Johnson should have the bill on his desk by the Fourth of July.

ROBERT MOSES, CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST: We hope to send in to Mississippi this summer upwards of 1,000 teachers, ministers, and students to open up Mississippi to the country.

SCHENKKAN: Freedom Summer, an operation to flood the state of Mississippi with volunteers, white and black students.

BARNEY FRANK (D), FORMER MASSACHUSETTS CONGRESSMAN: We were there because we could assume that if the white Mississippians mistreated us the way they mistreated the black people, that would be a basis on which to mobilize national opinion.

GOV. ROSS BARNETT (D), MISSISSIPPI: We will treat anyone with great respect here in Mississippi, but we will treat the people who come here, these children, like any other backward children should be treated.

And here is the news.

CHET HUNTLEY, NBC NEWS: There is some mystery and some fear concerning three civil rights workers, two whites from New York City and a Negro from Mississippi. Police say they arrested the three men for speeding yesterday, but released them after they posted bond. They have not been heard from since.

CECIL PRICE, NESHOBA COUNTY, MISSISSIPPI, DEPUTY SHERIFF: They paid the fine, and I released them. We escorted them to their car. And that's the last time we saw any of them.

MOSES: We got word that Mickey and Andy and James had been arrested. And there was no word what had happened to them. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mr. President, I wanted to let you know we have

found the car.

JOHNSON: yes?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Now, this is not known. Nobody knows this at all, but the car was burned. And we do not know yet whether any bodies are inside of the car because of the intense heat. It is merely an assumption that probably they were burned in the car.

JOHNSON: Or maybe kidnapped and locked up.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, I would doubt whether those people down there would -- would even give them that much of a break.

JOHNSON: We believe that all men are entitled to the blessings of liberty, yet millions are being deprived of those blessings, not because of their own failures, but because of the color of their skin. We can understand without rancor or hatred how this all happened.

But it cannot continue. Our Constitution, foundation of our republic, forbids it. The principles of our freedom forbid it. And the law I will sign tonight forbids it.

(APPLAUSE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Senator Hubert Humphrey has called the civil rights bill the greatest piece of social legislation of our generation.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Tell somebody, my staff, be sure we get some more pens here.

ABERNETHY: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is not going to create instant Brotherhood. No one pretends that. But the attorney general gets new power to bring suits against racial discrimination in voting, in public accommodations, in education, in employment.

If a court finds you guilty of violating some part of the civil rights law, and if you continue violating the law, you can be fined or put in jail until you stop violating the law.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Three civil rights workers have disappeared in Mississippi, still have not been heard from. A search has thus far produced only one clue, the burned-out station wagon in which the three were last seen riding. There is little hope that they are still alive.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman were found shot to death in a grave at the base of a recently built dam just six miles from the city of Philadelphia. Their bodies, wrapped in plastic bags numbered one, two, and three, were taken to the state medical center in Jackson for identification and examination.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The two white boys were shot once each through the heart. James Chaney, the black youth, had been beaten with chains until every bone in his body was broken. Then he was shot three times.

KING: The finding of the bodies of the three Mississippi civil rights workers is a saddening and shocking reminder of the brutality of race hatred. We naturally expect that those responsible for these terrible murders will be brought to justice.

(SINGING)

DAVID DENNIS, CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST: We know they're going to say, not guilty, because no one saw them pull the trigger. I'm tired of that. Don't bow down anymore. Hold your heads up. We want our freedom now. I don't want to have to go to another memorial. I'm tired of funerals. I'm tired of it. We have got to stand up.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The arrests had started before dawn. In all, FBI men picked up 21 men. Included in the group were the chief law officers of Neshoba County, Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Cecil Price.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They were murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen with the conspiratorial help of the local sheriff.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Bond was set, but less than a week later, the accused were set free, their bond lifted. For James Chaney's mother, who attended that hearing, it was a shock, frustration, disappointment. The legal answer to her son's murder seemed to her as far away as ever.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I have the great honor to hand over to you the insignia of the Nobel Peace Prize and a gold medal.

(APPLAUSE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Some critics have charged that the Nobel Peace Prize was not appropriately given this year. What is your reaction to that one?

KING: Well, first, I should say that I don't think the Peace Prize was given to me personally, and I don't accept it as a personal honor. I think it is, rather, a tribute to the wise restraint of discipline and dignity of which Negroes and white persons of goodwill have carried out the whole struggle for civil rights.

GARROW: By the end of 1964, Dr. King is aware that the one major Southern civil rights challenge that had not been dealt with in the 1964 Civil Rights Act was voter registration.

EDWIN NEWMAN, NBC NEWS: Bewildering hodgepodge of election laws from state to state prevents many from voting. Boss-controlled-political machines disenfranchise others by downright fraud. The Negro citizen may go to register, only to be told that the date is wrong or the hour is late, or the official in charge is absent.

ABERNETHY: There are five counties in Mississippi, each at least 57 percent Negro in which no Negroes at all are registered.

KING: Today marks the beginning of a determined, organized, mobilized campaign to get the right to vote all over this state.

ROBERT DALLEK, PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN: Martin Luther King chooses the city of Selma because it has the worst record of any Southern city on black voting.

KING: We will dramatize this whole situation and seek to arouse the conscience of the federal government by marching by the thousands on places of registration all over the city.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Now, move.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Move. Move. Move.

GARROW: Student protesters had already had a presence in Selma going back to 1963, but had found it exceptionally tough going because the Dallas County sheriff, Jim Clark, was an even tougher version of Birmingham's Bull Connor.

JIM CLARK, DALLAS COUNTY, ALABAMA, SHERIFF: Registers is not in session is not in session this afternoon, as you were informed. You came down to make a mockery out of this courthouse. This courthouse is a serious place of business. And you seem to think you can take it just to be Disneyland or something on parade.

CLARK: We have had numerous Negroes that couldn't read and write come down and say they were told to come, and if they didn't come, they would lose their pensions from the welfare department or their Social Security or have their land confiscated if they didn't show up to register to vote. And when they came down, they had no idea then what they were supposed to do.

REV. C.T. VIVIAN, CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST: You are breaking the injunction by not allowing these people to come inside this courthouse and wait. This courthouse does not belong to Sheriff Clark. This courthouse belongs to the people of Dallas County, and these are the people of Dallas County. And they have come to register. And you know this within your own heart, Sheriff Clark.

Clark, he knew what he wanted to do to me, but he couldn't do it in the open because of all those cameras, right?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have come to be here because they are registering at this time.

(CROSSTALK)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I can't enforce the rules.

(CROSSTALK)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have come to register. And this is our reason for being here.

(CROSSTALK)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You're blinding me with that light.

(CROSSTALK)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Move back.

(SHOUTING)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If you want to arrest us, arrest us.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Why don't you get out in front of the camera and go on?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's not a matter of being in front of the camera. It's a matter of facing your sheriff and facing your judge. We're willing to be beaten for democracy. And you misuse democracy in the street. You beat people bloody in order that they will not have the privilege to vote.

KING: I'm here to tell you tonight that the mayor of this city, the police commissioner of this city, and everybody in the white power structure of this city must take a responsibility for everything that Jim Clark does in this community.

(APPLAUSE)

LEWIS: We're marching today to dramatize to the nation, dramatize to the world the hundreds and thousands of Negro citizens of Alabama, but particularly here in the Blytheville (ph) area, denied the right to vote. We intend to march to Montgomery (INAUDIBLE) grievance to Governor George C. Wallace.

GARROW: Governor George Wallace's head of the Alabama State Patrol, in tandem with his good buddy, Sheriff Jim Clark, thinks that what these marchers deserve is a good beating.

LEWIS: We arrive at the highest point on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Down below, we saw a sea of Alabama State Troopers.

SCHENKKAN: Opposing the protesters was a force of Alabama State Troopers, Sheriff Clark, and Clark's private army, the so-called posse men.

LEWIS: We saw these men putting on their gas masks. They came toward us.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It would be detrimental to your safety to continue this march. You are ordered to disperse, go home or go to your church. This march will not continue.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is an unlawful assembly. You have to disperse. You are ordered to disperse.

REP. JOHN LEWIS, CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER: I thought we were going to be arrested. The major said "troopers advance."

ROBERT SCHENKKAN, PLAYWRIGHT/ACTOR: They used electric cattle prods, bull whips, wooden clubs wrapped with barbed wire.

LEWIS: I was hit in the head by a state trooper with a nightstick. I thought I saw death. I thought I was going to die.

SCHENKKAN: Sheriff Clark and his volunteer army, the possemen sent 80 men, women and children into the hospital. ABC broke in with this footage. It was now being called Bloody Sunday. And white middle class Americans sitting in their comfortable living rooms suddenly had the whole racial ugly mess thrust into their face. It was a watershed moment in television, a landmark moment in the civil rights movement.

DAVID GARROW, HISTORIAN/AUTHOR: For the first time since Birmingham, that footage sets off a national firestorm.

JACOB JAVITS, FORMER SENATOR FROM NEW YORK: In our country, we don't tolerate police by terror taking the law into their own hands. This is unacceptable, and just not American. And I believe the time has come for the president to step in.

DAN T. CARTER, HISTORIAN: The Pettus Bridge incident is one of those seminal events that helped create a political groundswell for Lyndon Johnson to quickly and this time without nearly as much opposition as the Civil Rights Act of '64 to push through the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The president of the United States.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Johnson feels that he needs to go before the country in a joint session of Congress about why this should be done.

LEWIS: I was in the home of a local family in Selma with Dr. King, and we watched and listened to President Johnson.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: At times history and fate meet at a single time to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.

There, long-suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans. Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it's not just negroes but really, it's all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome. LEWIS: To hear Lyndon Johnson, the president of the United States,

use the theme song of the movement, "We shall overcome," I looked at Dr. King. Tears came down his face. He started crying. We all cried a little.

SCHENKKAN: Dr. King decided that the only proper response to this was to continue the march to Montgomery, and a court order forced the state of Alabama to permit said march.

REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER: Johnson has just ruled that we have a legal and constitutional right to march from Selma to Montgomery.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (singing): Come and follow me, you know the master said. Don't wait until tomorrow, or you may be dead. I was young and I wanted to play, said I'd wait just one more day. Don't you know I would. No, I would. No, I would.

KING: Now with those who said we would get here only over their dead bodies, well, all the world today knows that we are here, that we are standing before the forces of power in the state of Alabama, saying we ain't going to let nobody turn us around.

I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth will rise again. How long? Not long. Because no lie can live forever. How long? Not long, because all of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. How long? Not long. Because mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. Glory hallelujah, glory hallelujah, glory hallelujah, glory hallelujah, glory hallelujah. This too will march on.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ROBERT DALLEK, HISTORIAN: In the summer of '65, Johnson gets that voting rights bill passed.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

CARTER: Sure, the '64 Civil Rights Act led to dramatic changes. But politically, at least in the short-run, the Voting Rights Act was even more dramatic.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is an examination room at the central post office in downtown Birmingham, where under the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, federal officials are examining people to determine their qualifications to register and vote under the laws of Alabama.

BARNEY FRANK, FORMER MASSACHUSETTS REPRESENTATIVE: Once the Voting Rights Act was passed and people got the right to vote, they stopped sitting in and started voting. And that turned out to be much more effective.

DALLEK: The number of blacks who began voting across the south, the number of black office holders at the local level, the state level, at the congressional level, one of the greatest changes in American society.

TOM JARREL, JOURNALIST: This is what James Meredith intends to do for the next two weeks: march along the highways of Mississippi, a state where he is one of the most hated men alive. His purpose: Meredith hopes to encourage unregistered negroes along the way to qualify as voters. He also, by his very presence, hopes to dispel some of the fear negroes have in the south.

SCHENKKAN: In 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, you'd have thought anything was possible. But then very quickly after that, things start to fall apart.

GENE ROBERTS, JOURNALIST: As James Meredith was walking along the highway, a gunman stepped out of the woods and just blasted him with a shotgun.

JOHN HART, CBS NEWS: Meredith was taken to a Memphis hospital under police guard. His blood still remains on the highway.

DR. CLAYBORNE CARSON, HISTORY PROFESSOR, DIRECTOR OF MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. RESEARCH AND EDUCATION INSTITUTE, STANFORD UNIVERSITY: Once he was shot, then there had to be some response by the movement. They had to show that the segregationists can't win that way. They got together and decided to continue the march, Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King. Stokely Carmichael was very much unlike the national group in terms of his perspective.

KING: We feel that we must continue this march right now, that it is urgent to do it. And we will be calling on people of good will from all over the nation to join us in this march.

CARSON: Martin Luther King was almost at the level of sainthood. Stokely Carmichael understood that he needed that symbol in order to provide legitimacy for what he was trying to do.

STOKELY CARMICHAEL, CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST: We want to put President Johnson on the spot. He called a conference two days ago to fulfill these rights. We want those rights fulfilled. They cannot be fulfilled with words. Words cannot stop bullets. And we need action, and we need it now from the federal government.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No more questions.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No more questions, gentlemen.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All right.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We've got the march.

BOB EVANS, JOURNALIST: The most impressive thing about this march on Mississippi is a developing coalition among civil rights leaders. There are reports of differences between leaders, and they are true. But their organizations have always been divided. A split among them is nothing new. Put them all together on a march on a highway in Mississippi, and frictions emerge because of personal competition and individual ego. CARMICHAEL: Our sweat and blood built Mississippi, and we got to take

it over because we deserve to have it. That's what we're working for.

CARSON: Stokely Carmichael started expressing the goal now is black people exercising power.

KING: Let me say first that this march is nonviolent. It is a nonviolent expression of our determination to be free. This is a principle of the march, and certainly we intend to keep this march nonviolent.

FRANK MCGILL, JOURNALIST: Mr. Carmichael, are you as committed to the nonviolent approach as Dr. King is?

CARMICHAEL: No, I'm not.

MCGILL: Why aren't you?

CARMICHAEL: Well, I just don't see this as a way of life. I never have. And I also realize that no one in this country is asking the white community in the south to be nonviolent. And that, in a sense, it's giving them a free license to go ahead and shoot us at will.

MIKE WALLACE, CBS NEWS: If there was a symbol of white anger at negro protest in the north this summer, it was Cicero, Illinois, a town chosen by Dr. Martin Luther King as the pressure point in his open housing drive.

SCHENKKAN: Dr. King takes the civil rights movement north to Chicago. And the issue is housing.

REV. JAMES LAWSON, CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST: The northern scene was a far more complicated scene and did not have the advantage of the Jim Crow law as a target.

SCHENKKAN: It was one thing for northern liberals when the issue was integration in Selma. It's quite a different thing when it was in Cicero.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If, let's say, 10 or 20 families moved into Cicero, which is a town of 70,000?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They'd get killed.

SCHENKKAN: It was the beginning of serious white backlash against the entire civil rights movement.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The nation suddenly learned what it should have known, that racial prejudice was not just a southern problem; it was nationwide. Whites in the north formerly could comfort themselves by pointing an accusing finger at the south. They could do so no longer.

JOSH DARSA, JOURNALIST: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) once again is showing open hostility towards the civil rights demonstrators. These people here are firmly opposed to these marches. Moreover, they don't see where they serve any useful purpose. GARROW: Most of the national press categorizes Chicago as a defeat

for King.

KING: I can say that I have never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama, mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I've seen in Chicago.

MARK KURLANSKY, JOURNALIST: There was a growing feeling that King's movement wasn't working. He had lost a lot of support from whites and blacks.

MUHAMMAD ALI, FORMER HEAVYWEIGHT BOXING CHAMPION: Martin Luther King is a good man. He's my brother. He's still like me. We're all catching hell. He's got his approaches of freedom. He's doing his best. And he's changing now, too. He sees now that it seems to be impossible to do what he want to do.

SCHENKKAN: King was rapidly being eclipsed by a younger and much more militant faction of the Black Power Movement.

WILLIE RICKS, CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST: We are not going to let these white people come into our neighborhoods and kill us. We are going to put every cracker in Atlanta on his knees.

CARSON: There was a lot of disunity because the only thing that had really kept the black community together, ironically, was segregation. Once that has been overcome, then the question is what do you want?

KING: I would like for all of us to believe in nonviolence, but I'm here to say tonight that if every negro in the United States turns against nonviolence, I'm going to stand up as a lone voice and say this is the wrong way.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARMICHAEL: I think that there's a realization in this country that black power is not just a mere slogan, nationally or internationally. It is real that black people can come together and start determining for their lives how they're going to live and controlling their economic and political lives.

So it means that you have to build a movement so strong in this country that, if one black man is touched, every black man will rise up and let this country know they're not going to tolerate it.

H. RAP BROWN, CHAIRMAN, STUDENT NONVIOLENT COORDINATING COMMITTEE: You better quit running around here, talking about loving these honkies to death. During the rebellions, bring, you have to stop looking and start shooting.

Black power, brother.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Black power!

DALLEK: The issue is one that moves across civil rights, moves across poverty. We get this explosion of violence. You have the Watts riots. Then subsequently riots in Newark, in Detroit. CARTER: The riots spring to the fore the problems of inner city life.

A consequence of a generation of neglect in America's urban centers.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This happened on 12th Street in Detroit in July. Next time it could happen downtown or in your town.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When you stood on the Lincoln Memorial, you said "I had a dream." Did that dream envision the federal government preventing the society doing for the negroes that what you think had to be done?

KING: It was a high moment, a great watershed moment. But I must confess that that dream that I had that day has at many points turned into a nightmare.

Now I'm not one to lose hope. I keep on hoping. I still have faith in the future. But I've had to analyze many things over the last few years, and I would say over the last few months I've gone through a lot of soul-searching and agonizing moments. And some of the old optimism was a little superficial. And now it must be tempered with a solid realism. And I think the realistic fact is that we still have a long, long way to go.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Martin Luther King Jr. was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee, shot in the face as he stood on the balcony of his hotel room.

REV. C.T. VIVIAN, CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST: Martin was gone. And the main part of everything was over. And we knew that the movement would never be the movement as it was, but then the things that we had lived and really fought for was won.

KING: I just want to do God's will, and he has allowed me to go up to the mountain. I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

DIANE NASH, CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST: There were many kinds of sacrifices made for freedom. Most liberation struggle is trying to bring about a better world and a better society.

LEWIS: We had to give everything we had to the movement. We accepted a way of peace as a way of life, to wear nonviolence as way of life, as a way of living.

LAWSON: We forged an agenda in the mind of the country. The movement begins with Montgomery, becomes the sit-in campaign, the Freedom Ride, the Birmingham campaign, the Mississippi summer, the Selma to Montgomery march.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: History will record that those singular cumulative acts of courage transformed the south. Transformed the country.

LEWIS: We wanted to change America, make America better, not just for our generation, but for a generation yet unborn.

SAMMY DAVIS JR., ENTERTAINER: All of the civil rights, all the marches, all the people who have died in the civil rights struggle will have died in vain if, once the opportunity, once the doors are open, no one is prepared for it. I know there's got to be several young people here who are like 5 years old, right? It's now becoming a possibility that that young man, by the time he's 50, could be running for the president of the United States.

END