On MLK Day, January 18, President Obama and his wife Michelle invited me to join them in the Roosevelt Room for a small group discussion of the 1963 March on Washington. Most of the dozen other people there were elderly veterans of that event, including one couple who were both over 100 years old. Dorothy Height, who has since died to widespread notice for her long career in civil rights, was the only public figure among my fellow guests. Most of them told stories about the March and how it has affected their lives since. Both Obamas asked many questions, saying they wanted to hear stories inasmuch as they had been far too young to experience the March themselves.
On February 23, I went to Chapel Hill, North Carolina for the formal opening of all my Clinton files, including dictation tapes and written exchanges with the President. They are are available to researchers who visit the Southern Historical Collection at UNC’s Wilson Library. These Clinton materials now join the much larger collection of civil rights research gathered for the King era trilogy, which I deposited in 2006.
To contact the library or review a finding aid for the Clinton and MLK files, go to: http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/b/Branch,Taylor.html
My work has entered a new phase. After twenty-four years of enthralled labor on the King trilogy, I felt compelled in 2006 to disclose the side-project in which I had gathered raw materials for presidential history through eight years of confidential interviews with Bill Clinton at the White House. Now that The Clinton Tapes is published (2009), I am free again to choose fresh topics. It is a strange feeling.
