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Transcript: Taylor Branch
Tavis Smiley: Good evening. From Los Angeles, I'm Tavis Smiley. Tonight, a conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch, out now with the latest volume of his brilliant trilogy on the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The new book, "At Canaan's Edge," focuses on the last three years of Dr. King's life; years marked by increasing strife within the civil rights movement, and times of personal turmoil for Dr. King.
Tonight, in his most expansive conversation yet, Taylor Branch on a project 24 years in the making, and a look at the man whose life and legacy we honor this week. We're glad you've joined us. Taylor Branch, coming up right now.
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Taylor Branch
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Tavis Smiley: Taylor Branch has spent nearly a quarter century on three volumes dedicated to the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The first two books in this remarkable trilogy have won every major literary award there is, I believe, including, of course, the Pulitzer Prize for the first book, "Parting the Waters." The third and final volume of his work is called "At Canaan's Edge, America in The King Years, 1965 To 1968.”
Of course, last week, "Time" magazine featured the new book on its cover. You, of course, saw that. We are pleased tonight to be joined by Taylor Branch, who joins us from New York City. Taylor, nice to have you on the program, sir.
Taylor Branch: Thank you, Tavis. Nice to be with you.
Tavis: Congratulations on not just another book, but on the completion of this trilogy. So how does it feel?
Branch: Well, a little giddy and a little scary, like what am I going to do now? But I feel blessed to have this for a life's work. It's such an enthralling period to study.
Tavis: I assume that if one were, one, in this case, would be you. If you were to be judged, your life's work would be judged by this trilogy, I assume that you're okay with that. You’re fine with that?
Branch: I have to stand or fall on it, because to me it's just the heart and soul of everything that's important to me. So I'll take my chances.
Tavis: Let me start with the obvious. I was fascinated, as were many others, I suspect, that you chose to call this trilogy, this volume, the subtitle, that is, "America in the King Years.” I can assume that there are those, perhaps, more partial to the Kennedys who might have a problem with your phraseology there. But talk to me, first of all, about this notion of this subtitle, “America in the King Years."
Branch: Well, Tavis, I really think that the short span of his career, after all, he was killed when he was only 39 years old, covered the period from 1954, which happened to be the year of the Brown decision, when the Supreme Court said segregation was incompatible with American ideals in law, Constitutional law, that's when Dr. King took his first church.
And he rode the movement that defined freedom, the civil rights era, not only for Black people, but for the whole world for the next 14 years until he was killed. So I call it the King years because he was at the center of the movement. Not always at the head of it. Sometimes students were ahead of him. But he was at the center of the movement that defined American freedom during this incandescent period of American history.
Tavis: What does it say about American history that it took one biographer, namely Taylor Branch, after all these years, to even refer to this period as the King years, thus, I would think, elevating it to another level of discourse and dialogue in America? That is to say, the impact of the civil rights movement.
Branch: Well, I think there's still a tendency in the land to kind of contain or cordon off the benefits of this era, even though we take them for granted far beyond the benefits for Black people. The benefits for the south and for women and for the whole world. We tend to want to restrict Dr. King as a leader for Black people, and have this holiday period be one to kind of be nice to Black people for this.
Or blind to the fact that during this period, the movement, led by Black people, was the leader for all Americans in defining what freedom meant. So I think that we are slowly now coming to realize that the movement and Dr. King were really modern founding fathers for this period, and that is an inspiration in leaders for all of us.
Tavis: I thankfully have the balance of this program, Taylor, to try to dialogue with you and to dissect some of what you’ve put into this book, "At Canaan's Edge." Obviously, you spent a quarter century writing it, so I can't do justice to it in 24 minutes. (laugh) But that said, let me ask what it is, and I want to get to more specifics here in a moment.
But let me ask at the outset here, Taylor, what your sense is of what it is that we lose when we talk about King by not focusing on the latter part of his life. So much, as you well know, is made of the early years of his life. And certainly the years around the movement, and “I Have a Dream,” and the March on Washington.
These last three years are very instructive in a real way. What do we miss? What are we losing heretofore, at least, by not focusing on this part of his life?
Branch: We missed the struggling King, the King who emphasized his message under excruciating pressure from all sides, not only from his enemies and from people trying to diminish him, but from people falling by the wayside, by pressure within the movement. Here we start in Selma, struggling over the most fundamental aspect of democracy, the right to vote for Black people.
But by the time he's killed at the end of these three years, he's struggling not only about war, but also about racism and poverty, which he called the three great scourges still plaguing the world, that he felt democracy had enormous potential to address. And so what we missed by not focusing on the last three years is the part of King that makes him contemporary for people who are struggling with freedom, or to establish democracy anywhere.
After all, we're struggling to establish it in Iraq right now, but nobody's taking any lessons from Martin Luther King, and he has a better record in this endeavor than anybody else I know.
Tavis: I saw your piece in the “New York Times,” the Op-Ed piece you wrote about that, I was moved by what you had to say with regard to how we globalize King. I want to talk about globalizing King in a moment, if I might. Let me say with this line of thought, at least for this second. And that is this notion, again, of the latter part of his life.
The focus of this book, '65 to '68. It was during that period, as you’ve already articulated, that King started to refocus, if you will, his work on poverty, specifically on talking about the war, and his opposition to the Vietnam War, etcetera, etcetera. It is also, as you well know, during this same period that King falls off of the list, falls out of the Gallup poll of the most admired Americans.
What am I to make of the fact that near the end of his life, while we celebrate now his holiday 20 years later, this guy was no longer among the most admired Americans at the end of his life?
Branch: Well, a lot of people felt that he didn't have any business talking about war, and that he should just talk about Black issues, and be an inspiring figure for Black people. But I think they missed the point of what he was trying to say. That he was honored for the Nobel Peace Prize for struggling with issues that benefited everyone, and he never framed his message as strictly for Black people.
He said freedom will benefit Black people and White people alike. And that, you know, it's all our duties to be the best citizens we can. So, we missed that, and he tended to get kind of pushed aside when he threatened people's interest and wasn't exactly what they wanted him to be.
Tavis: All right, so let me go back to that notion you mentioned a moment ago of globalizing King. It's one thing to talk about King in the context of his American contribution. And again, later, I want to talk about whether or not it is your sense that King is valued more around the world, indeed, than he is here at home.
But let's talk for a moment about what you had to say in this “New York Times” Op-Ed piece about globalizing King, and how we do that in a contemporary sense.
Branch: We recognize that he felt that the movement was about building freedom and being true to the promise of America. That America is the only country founded on an idea about equal citizenship, and that's all our history means. What does freedom mean? Is it compatible with slavery or not allowing women to vote, or with segregation?
And he said when you struggle with freedom, it pays dividends for everyone. And that message is kind of lost. And as you say, I really believe that it has been alive since his death more outside the United States than inside.
Tavis: Give me examples of what you mean by that. I've had the chance, of course, to travel around the globe, and indeed you have. And it always amazes me when I travel around the world and I hear people, those who America likes, those who America loathes, quote Dr. King.
Branch: Absolutely, because that message - and you can feel it from the bridge in Selma, when, on Bloody Sunday, the whole world resonated to that. That message, the message of freedom, went all around the world. And you can see it just today. The new president in Chile, inspired by Dr. King. The new president of Liberia, the woman president in Liberia, inspired by Dr. King.
But long before that, most people my age never expected the end of apartheid in South Africa without some nuclear Armageddon and race war. And instead, you had Nelson Mandela come out with words of biracial reconciliation and democracy in the spirit of Dr. King. And similarly, we all expected nuclear Armageddon to end the Soviet empire, and it dissolved without warning.
And they were singing "We Shall Overcome" along the Berlin Wall and along the streets of Prague in the Velvet Revolution. And the spirit of nonviolence was even in Tiananmen Square, when Chinese students faced tanks in the spirit of sit-ins. So I believe that the lesson is more around the world than here that nonviolence and struggling to establish equal citizenship politically is the path for permanent and lasting change.
The kind of change that makes us in America not have to worry about whether Montana is going to invade Texas. (laugh) You know, we know that we have a political system and voting as a way of involving people politically and settling disputes without war and violence.
Tavis: And yet, with all due respect to your fine work and the Kingian notion of nonviolence, one could look at the world that we live in today and suggest or certainly argue, perhaps with some credibility, that King's message of nonviolence doesn't work in a twenty first century world.
Branch: Well, people can say that, but I think the more they think about it, the more they'll realize that violence destroys more, but builds less. And that that's the terrible lesson of modern warfare. That you can't really, that in an interdependent world, to govern, that is, to establish solutions that work and allow modern societies to function, it's based on the kind of consent that makes America such a great country.
And where we don't have violence in our elections. And that's why Dr. King kept emphasizing that toward the end of his life in what, quite frankly, was a surprise to me that the more nonviolence became passé toward the end of his years, and the more people rejected it, the more insistent he became that it was the key to the progress that he had set in motion and the movement had set in motion to benefit everyone. And that, at least, is worth debate in the modern era.
Tavis: What have you come to believe were King's - I'm trying to phrase this the right way - his personal drivers? And by that I mean the kind of courage and conviction and commitment it took in the face of all kinds of threats, to say nothing of the threats on his life. But just the kind of one-upmanship, the kind of threat coming from the CIA and the FBI, and etcetera.
All the stuff you detailed in this book. What were his personal drivers, those things that kept his focused, that kept him on message, as we'd say in a contemporary sense?
Branch: I think that's one of his great and mystifying gifts, was his tremendous ballast. That he could even be good-natured and funny in the middle of a crucible like that, where not only does he have a lot of enemies and secret enemies after him and people trying to kill him, but he's got a movement where you've got a lot of people with big egos at one another's throat about what to do next.
And I think his drive, in part, was just a consuming guilt, to some degree, according to Coretta, about privilege in the face of all the suffering in the world. And that he really felt that suffering deeply. I think another sense of his drive was just this tremendous balance he had that made his oratories so remarkable.
That he had a real sense of spiritual drive from the notion of equal souls, sand political drive from the notion of equal votes. And somehow, he fused them together into a remarkable stability that made him see that there was a path to a better world.
Tavis: In the annals of speechmaking, speech-giving history, tell me where you think King ranks with regard to his oratory.
Branch: I think he's right at the top. Although in this book, we have some pretty amazing speeches on all sides. I think Lyndon Johnson's “We Shall Overcome” speech in the floor of the house, proposing the Voting Rights Act, knowing that he was going to change the partisan structure of American politics for many generations and possibly lose the base of Democratic presidents for his lifetime and beyond, was a very eloquent and brave speech.
But King, in this volume, his speech at the end of the Montgomery march, his speech at the end of his life in Memphis, and his drum major instincts speech, and his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, are great addresses in the history of oratory.
Tavis: You mentioned a moment ago the capacity that he had to walk this really fine line, this tightrope, if you will, of balancing egos in this movement. When we think of the movement, of course, we think of Dr. King because he's the one who got a holiday out of it, named after him, deservedly so. But that said, there were a lot of egos. You talk about some of the egos in this book.
I'll let folk read the book; I don’t wanna call out any names in particular, 'cause I don't want to cast aspersion on a particular person. But there were some egos that Dr. King had to put in check regularly. So how did he do that, number one, and how did he remain humble enough so that his ego didn't overtake him?
Branch: It's really a remarkable part of his ballast. He would always say, look, you have to be crazy to do what we're doing. We can't rebuke people for being crazy and for coming up with all these strange notions, because we're trying to change the greatest power in the world with no army and no companies and no money and no anything.
All we've got is our bodies. So you gotta be crazy. So give people an allowance. Let them come forward with these ideas. Let them argue it out, and then we'll try to pick the right path. And it's a great tribute to him that he was so comfortable having strong people around him advocating different courses, so that he could pick the best tactical path toward freedom at all times.
Tavis: Earlier in this conversation, Taylor, you used the word Armageddon. Let me go back and get that word now, if I can, Armageddon. Because you have flirted with Armageddon where many Black folk are concerned, when you write a book called "At Canaan's Edge," and you show some of the dark side, if you will, of the life and legacy of Dr. King.
Black folk don't take kindly, as you well know, to having their hero cast in a light that we see the warts. The good, the bad, and the ugly. So tell me, just as a biographer, as a man, as a person, how you approach writing a book like this where you know to be a truth teller, to put it all out there, the ugly has got to come out with the pretty.
Branch: Well, I think it's really hard, and I do it with as much sense of humility and awe as I can. But when Dr. King himself made his private failings an issue in the movement, and had debates because he thought that it was putting the movement in jeopardy and that he needed to discuss it with his own aides, and he knows he's being blackmailed, and he knows it's in the FBI record, you can't sweep all of that under the rug.
You've got to try to pick your spots and present this in a way that's fair to readers and will enable them to see how he was a human being, struggling to be the best he could, and make their own conclusions about whether this affected his public message. I think his public message is intact. I don't always say that people's private lives have nothing to do with their public message.
It can threaten it or corrupt it. But I don't think that's true in this case. And just as I don't think we ought to be tearing down the Jefferson Memorial, I don't think that we need to be using his private life as a way to block discussion of his challenge to us in the modern world.
Tavis: That said, how close, if at all, did his personal failings come to upending the movement, as it were? I think of Bill Clinton, for example. You know, a guy who I like personally, but a guy who obviously got caught in a situation that has threatened his legacy. He's working hard to turn that around. But let me go back to Dr. King. In this case, how did his personal failings, did they, in fact, come close to upending the movement?
Branch: Well, of course, it was a different era. It was when the media didn't write about public failings. But it wasn't for lack of trying on the part of the FBI. The problem was that the FBI kept trying to peddle these stories, but they would always say you can't use the FBI as a source. And no news people were brave enough, or foolhardy enough, to try to run with a story that they didn't really know.
And they didn't have the evidence without being able to say this comes from the FBI. So basically, it was always under perpetual threat, and he feared it, and he knew they were trying to expose this. And that was just another pressure that he had to live with. And it clearly added to the burdens on him that he survived with.
And he kept going. They basically wanted him to commit suicide or resign from the movement, and tried to blackmail him into doing it. And to his credit, he refused.
Tavis: Before I move on, let me ask you, all that said, with regard to his personal failings, that is, whether or not these revelations tarnish his image in your mind, or in some way allow his sacrifice to burn even brighter in your eyes.
Branch: Well, there's a lot of evidence that he himself drove himself to do penance by taking greater sacrifice in the movement and by purifying himself, as it were, in the risks that he was taking and risking death every day, because he felt haunted by his private failings. You know, I don't think that it's clear at all exactly how one relates to the other.
But in this case, I started off this process many, many years ago, kind of with a naive inspiration from Dr. King. I've endured and lived with and talked with a lot of people about his private life, and that has not been easy. But suffice it to say I admire him as a political figure, and even a spiritual figure, and a modern founder in America much more today, knowing what I know now, than I did when I started.
Tavis: Back to the issues. In the latter part of his life, as we mentioned earlier, he was focusing a great deal of his attention on, for lack of a better phrase, a poor people's campaign, a poor people's movement. Talk to me about that work.
Branch: That was the last great decision of his life. His staff unanimously recommended that he not come out against the Vietnam War. He did it anyway. Then, when he did and got roundly denounced by everybody, including the “New York Times” and the Main Street media, saying keep out of the war business, he didn't really know what to do.
And he came up with this idea of maybe having the poor people's campaign, suggested by Marian Wright, now Marian Wright Edelman, and others. And his staff unanimously was against that, saying that in the climate of war, it's not going to catch on. We're wasting our time. And we should consolidate our gains in the south, or some people wanted to go after the war.
King felt, in what I believe was the last major decision of his life, that the antiwar campaign, although it was right and he had made his feelings known, essentially was negative. It was trying to get his government to stop killing, to stop doing something that was wrong. And he wanted to go back, even if the campaign didn't succeed and it was just left as a testament afterwards, because he felt that he might be killed at any time, to something that was positive.
Summoning the country and his countrymen to rise up and live out the true meaning of the American creed, and if they worked together for democracy, they would work miracles about poverty. That they could debate it, they could do it. And he had these amazing meetings, where at the end of his life, he had Puerto Ricans and Chicanos and Mexicans and American Indian representatives.
And Appalachian coal miners, and White poverty people, and ex-Klansmen, all of whom were poor, gathering together trying to form a new coalition on that. And the reason he did it was because it was positive. It was going back to where he had been since the bus boycott, summoning America to work miracles through democracy.
Tavis: That sounds like a contemporary America, the most multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic America ever. So let me close with this, then. Given your last comment, and you've written a whole book about it, this is an unfair question, but I'll ask it anyway, Taylor. What do you think is most instructive, then, about the King years for our politics today?
Branch: That we should emulate Dr. King in talking profoundly about the lessons within democracy and how we relate to one another. And that every citizen can work miracles. This book is just filled with ordinary citizens becoming heroes because they followed his example to take democracy seriously across the barriers that divide us.
And it was always rewarding. And that, to me, is the great and abiding lesson of America and the King years today, whether we're trying to build democracy in Iraq or rescue our suffering world here at home.
Tavis: Do you think folk can get that message? 'Cause after all, when you get to the end of this book, I hate to surprise you, but you find out that King got assassinated for doing that, Taylor.
Branch: Yes, he did. But he had changed the world by the time he did, and the legacy and what that means is up to each and every one of us. And a lot of wonderful things have happened in his spirit.
Tavis: So, what does Taylor Branch do now? (laugh) It's done. You've got all three volumes done.
Branch: It's done. I want to go around and talk about how many wonderful stories I think there are in this book, about how many contemporary lessons I think beckon us to have a better America. And then I want to rest for a while and maybe try to find a shorter book to write.
Tavis: Oh, I am always honored to have any conversation with Taylor Branch. The new book, "At Canaan's Edge, America in The King Years, 1965 to 1968.” I'm certain many awards to follow. Much deserved. Taylor Branch, glad to have you on.
Branch: Thank you, Tavis, nice to be with you.
Tavis: That's our show tonight. You can catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. See you back here next time on PBS. Until then, good night from Los Angeles. Thanks for watching, and as always, keep the faith.
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