Dan Snow's History Hit - Martin Luther King Jr
Episode Date: August 28, 2021On 28 August 1963 Martin Luther King Jr delivered his 'I have a dream' speech stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. to an audience of hundreds of thousands of people. The speech an...d King's life have been an inspiration to millions of people both in the United States and around the world in the fight for civil rights and equality. In this episode of the podcast, Dan is joined by Charles Woods, III, from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. They discuss Martin Luther King's life, struggles, successes and the enduring power of the words he delivered that day.
Transcript
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Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hour. I'm just searching a woodland, searching
a woodland for some archaeology for a project you're about to get to watch on History Hit
TV, coming at you very soon. But more importantly, let's talk about this podcast today. It is
the anniversary today, when this podcast is first broadcast, of the March on Washington
at which Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous I Have a Dream speech. We thought we'd mark this anniversary with a podcast about Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous I Have a Dream speech.
We thought we'd mark this anniversary with a podcast about Martin Luther King Jr. I haven't really done one specifically on him yet.
I'd very like to have the historian Charles Woods III on the podcast.
He is a historian.
He's a program outreach coordinator at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama.
He is a place I've visited many times.
It's one of my favorite
museums in that part of the world if you wish to listen to more of these podcasts without the ads
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But in the meantime, here is Charles Woods III
talking about Martin Luther King Jr.
Enjoy.
Okay, Charles, thanks so much for coming on the pod.
When Martin Luther King electrified the world with that speech on the mail,
how established was he within the civil rights movement at the time?
Was he already a kind of dominant figure?
Well, he was a known figure.
And I'll say that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
had been founded a few years prior.
But King really hadn't had a successful civil rights campaign
since the Montgomery bus
boycott. That was in 1955 and 1956. The SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
was in Albany, Georgia for about a year and didn't receive any successful civil rights
gains. And so King was known in the civil rights community because of the success of the Montgomery
bus boycott, which changed so many things with the Supreme Court legislation. But people really weren't behind King around the
time that he gave his speech. Tell me about his background as a Baptist minister. What is it
to those of us who haven't attended those services and aren't steeped in that language,
that delivery? Was he typical? Are all Baptist ministers that
eloquent? Or did he stand out as an orator? Oh, King stood out as an orator on every regard.
He also stood out as a scholar, okay? And so a lot of times King doesn't get the credit that
he deserves as being one of America's greatest scholars. He graduated high school at 15 years
old, went straight into college at Morehouse University.
Morehouse College, which is in Atlanta, is an HBCU, Historic Black College University, where he went on to get his undergrad.
Then he went straight into graduate school.
He was a young doctor.
He got his doctorate in theology very early on. And so everyone knows him for his speaking, but he was a great mind as well.
for his speaking, but he was a great mind as well. And so people tend to kind of keep King in his civil rights box, but he was a dynamic mind and should be respected for it. In terms of pioneering
the methods of resistance, did that come from King? Well, you know, like I said, he was a very
learned man. He studied extensively. And so, you know, we always hear about him getting his
philosophy from Gandhi,
right? That nonviolent resistance. But that foundation got molded even more by a man by
the name of Bayard Rustin. Bayard Rustin was one of the organizers for the March on Washington,
where King spoke the I Have a Dream speech. And Bayard Rustin was a pacifist. You know,
we have these stories about King that a lot of people don't know.
But one of those stories was that King had several guns in his household.
Let me say it like that.
I want to say he had an arsenal, but he had several weapons, guns in his household.
Because during this movement, the civil rights movement, you were attacked from all sides.
Sometimes those attacks were Molotov cocktails.
Sometimes they were shotgun blastsotov cocktails. Sometimes they were
shotgun blasts through your window. Sometimes they were pistol shots. Whatever the case,
you always had that plan B to protect yourself, right? And King was along with that plan B,
as well as a lot of the other leaders. But Bayard Rustin, who was a pacifist, helped King modify
that nonviolent resistance. And he told him that it can't be
just something that you put on when you go out to march. This has to be something that you apply to
your life. You make it part of your livelihood. And so at that point, King took all of the weapons
and things out of his house because he really began to truly adopt that nonviolence philosophy.
So you said it's interesting they were subject to violence. Is that when he became a campaigning activist?
Because he talks about the humiliations of his childhood living in segregated Atlanta.
Would he have experienced, obviously, segregation,
but personally, did his family experience violence against their home or in their community?
Yes. So just growing up in the segregated South during that time period
was enough for African-Americans during this time period to have experienced violence, to see violence happen to other people.
That idea of black people staying in their place. And so when blacks were not in their place, a lot of times violence was taken upon them.
Now, there are stories about King's mother being stabbed, other things that happened at Ebenezer Baptist Church where his father preached.
But under my own recollection, I can't think of anything where he outspokenly talked about violence that they may have suffered or somebody in their household.
But that would have been endemic in Georgia at the time for that community.
Yes. Any other major cities in the South or any other southern states,
that was something that ended up becoming part of everyday African-American life.
If not you experiencing it yourself, you seeing someone else experiencing it while you're out, you know, living your day-to-day life.
And apart from the, I mean, violence, there was institutional discrimination.
I mean, he was forced to, it was a famous incident, he made him very angry as an adolescent, he was forced to move the back of the bus or to make way for white people to sit down
at the front. Yeah, so during this time period, and we talk about this a lot at the Birmingham
Civil Rights Institute, the bus life for an African American during this period in the state
of Alabama was just a real lesson in second class citizenship. If you were African American,
you had to get onto the front of the bus,
pay your fare, exit off the bus, and then enter in through a rear entrance.
And they really gave the power to the bus driver.
So the bus driver also had a sign that said white on one side,
colored on the other side, that he can move at his discretion.
And so a lot of times if that bus driver chose to put that sign
at the furthest place where it can go, it meant that he just wasn't picking up black people that day.
And so, you know, we hear about Rosa Parks. We hear about this incident with King.
The local leader here, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, they all have stories and instances of confrontations with bus drivers in their respective cities.
And to me, that was a daily reminder of your second class citizenship, just trying to get to work or to school in the morning.
You had to deal with these segregation ordinances.
And then also you had to deal with the, you know, however those bus drivers decided to treat you that day as well.
So you mentioned Rosa Parks there.
The Montgomery bus boycott, I guess, just before Christmas in 1955.
Did it start with Rosa Parks refusing to move from her seat on the bus? And was King
involved with Rosa Parks that stage? Or did he join soon afterwards? It's funny that you ask that.
So here at the Institute, we talk about other women who refused to give up their seats on
Montgomery buses prior to Rosa Parks. And so you have women like Aurelia Browder, Claudette Colvin,
whose name has come out more recently. She just wrote a book. But those were individuals who did not give up their seats on Montgomery City buses,
but we don't know their names because they didn't build a movement around them.
And so Rosa Parks was chosen strategically to do what she did,
and it was because she was already a member of the NAACP,
and she was a field secretary for them.
Her job was to log sexual assault accounts of black women to white men because
those black women could not go to the authorities with those accounts. They knew that nothing would
happen. And so Rosa Parks, being good at her job with the NAACP, they literally ran a grocery
store owner out of town by boycotting his business because he had sexually assaulted one of his
employees. And so the reason why Rosa Parks, and we know who Rosa Parks is
today, is because she was chosen to do what she did. Now, I say chosen because it was a strategic
move. The NAACP knew that they were going to attack these segregated bus ordinances. The
question was how or with who, right? And so Claudette Colvin, who was a young lady who
refused to give up her seat prior to Rosa Parks, the rumor was that she was a 15-year-old pregnant woman.
She was a young mother, but at the time of her arrest, she was not pregnant.
But she was 15 years old.
She did cuss out the police officer that arrested her.
You know, maybe she was a little too fiery because of that.
We had one woman that was very elderly.
They didn't think that she would live through the trial that may have ultimately went to the Supreme Court. One of the young women they said was maybe too dark skinned. But what you need
to know is that the NAACP was thinking about these things and Rosa Parks ended up fitting the bill.
Before Rosa Parks even made bail, they had the flyers and things ready to start the Montgomery
bus boycott because it was her and the community just loved her. One of the other
things that I mentioned about that is that the Montgomery Improvement Association, which was the
organization that was newly formed, where they put King at the presidency of that organization. Now,
King is a new preacher at this time at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He's new to Montgomery.
He's taken over the pastorship of this particular church. And it's a known church. It's right downtown. It's not too far from the Capitol
building. And they chose him to be the leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association
because he was not from Montgomery. He was literally a foreigner. And they knew that if
all of this kind of blew up in their faces and they were never successful, King could go back
to Atlanta and go back and co-pastor at his father's church
and not really lose a step in his own life, in his own livelihood. And so he was strategically
chosen for that. What they realized later was that they chose a very dynamic speaker. They chose a
very smart young man. Those things kind of, you know, showed their head a little later.
And so how did the bus boycott work and what did it achieve?
So the bus boycott, so they were able to keep that bus boycott up for over 382 days.
So over a year, they carpooled, they walked, they did whatever they could to get to their jobs and to school.
And ultimately, almost putting the bus company out of business, the fact that these people wanted to change the segregated bus ordinances end up going all the way to the Supreme Court.
And the Supreme Court ruled that segregated bus seating on public buses was unconstitutional and needed to change.
And so because of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which is really considered to be the thrust into the modern civil rights movement, I have to say modern civil rights movement because black people have been resisting all of the things that have been happening with them in this country since the beginning.
And so we talk about sitting in movements.
We talk about boycotts.
But those type of things have been going on for years and years before the Montgomery bus boycott. But the fact of the matter is that Montgomery bus boycott was the thrust into
the modern day civil rights movement sprung by the death of Emmett Till.
And that happened in Money, Mississippi in 1955.
It was the death of that young man who gave motivation to start the civil rights
movement in Montgomery, Alabama and other places,
similar to what you kind of saw in 2020 with the death of George Floyd. I compare George Floyd and
Emmett Till a lot because they were both basically martyrs that started movements that ultimately are
going to have sustainable change. I'm talking to you in Birmingham,
Birmingham, Alabama. Martin Luther King came to you in Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama. Mark
Luther King came to Birmingham in 63, just before the March on Washington that we're building up to.
Was Birmingham one of the toughest nuts to crack for this movement?
It exactly was. It was the most oppressive, racist, segregated city in the United States at that time.
You had a city leader in the city of Birmingham by the name of Theopolis Bull Connor,
who was a very powerful antagonist.
And he really took the fight to the black community here in Birmingham,
even though the black community a lot of times was not fighting back.
It was Bull Connor who ultimately gave the movement its biggest thrust without him probably even knowing it.
But Bull Connor started off his career as an announcer here at Rickwood Field.
Rickwood Field being one of the oldest professional baseball field in the country.
And he would call the Birmingham Black Baron games.
And as he would call those games, you know,
he would say things like if they hit a home run and it went into the black section, he would say,
oh, you know, he hit that into the cold, the cold area, you know, that he would make these racist
and just oppressive statements in his calling the games that he became real popular. And that
caused him to run for office. And he ultimately won as a public safety commissioner,
which is the person that is in control of the fire department and the police.
And so Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC had a campaign in Albany, Georgia,
and this was still in the 50s, and that was not successful.
And so Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, who was the leader here in the city of Birmingham
when it comes to the civil rights movement and also co-founder of the SCLC, he's the one who called King and told King that you need to come to Birmingham.
Like, it's time for us to crack the hardest egg, I guess you could say.
And what Shuttlesworth understood is that wherever King went, the media came as well.
Right. And so if you wanted to show the world how bad it is in the South for African Americans,
Birmingham was the place to do it because every aspect of life in Birmingham was segregated.
And so King accepted to come to Birmingham to do what's known as Project C, C standing for confrontation.
And the SCLC joined forces with the Alabama Christian Movement for
Human Rights which is Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth's group as well as other preachers and leaders in
the city of Birmingham and then they went on to start Project C. Project C standing for
confrontation and that's what brought King to Birmingham in 63. And so the idea of that
confrontation is you openly violate the kind of the most unjust, the most egregious laws.
Yeah. So, you know, while King was here in Birmingham, he wrote his famous letter from a Birmingham jail.
In that letter, he does talk about how if you know a law is unjust, then you have to openly defy that law in the public and you have to purposely break the law. And so a lot of times
this is what was a part of the civil disobedience of the civil rights movement, breaking laws that
you know are unjust, doing things like sit-ins where you basically sit in at that lunch counter
that you know is not going to serve you because you're black. And you're breaking the law to
highlight that the law is unjust. And King talks extensively about why that is important.
And the importance is really that if the law is unjust and you know you're going to break it
anyway, you have to do it in a way that brings light to the fact that that law is unjust.
It's such an extraordinary piece of writing. He talks about the Boston Tea Party. He talks about
things, and Adolf Hitler and resistance him like things that whites i guess
who's his audience there is it international is it white kind of liberals or centrists in the
northern states like who's he trying to talk to there well you know honestly the events that took
place here in birmingham once king was brought to the city and you know king was swiftly incarcerated
here and then this is when he wrote his letter from a birmingham jail and as
he's incarcerated they started to organize the children here in the city of birmingham to pick
up where the adults weren't willing to start and so in that letter from a birmingham jail especially
it was a response from eight clergymen who wrote an op-ed in the birmingham news that basically said
what king was doing in the city of birmingham was untimely, that Birmingham was already kind of changing, and that, you know,
King should wait and kind of come back and see the progress that Birmingham is going to make.
And so in response to those eight clergymen, two of them being rabbis, King responded in a way to
tell them why a wait for an African American is usually a never. And he eloquently
tells them why it's important that the events that are happening in Birmingham continue to happen.
But also in the letter from Birmingham. So you got to think that. So you got these eight white
clergymen that he's responding to in the letter. Right. So that's his audience in one sense.
In another sense, though, he talks about this kind of moderate liberal. He talks about individuals who really don't have to get involved. Right.
Did they can live their lives. They can go on and do everything that they wanted to achieve with their life and their goals and never have to get involved in the civil rights movement.
He talks about those people that are kind of on the fence. Right.
Or kind of what we call straddling the fence, trying to figure things out, because he said in there, he said he's not worried about the white supremacists.
He's not worried about the racist that's going to be in his face.
You know, he knows where they lie. He knows how they think. He knows what they feel.
But that he's always kind of being diplomatic with these moderate kind of white liberals who really are not getting involved
and are kind of, you know, just being a little wishy-washy because he doesn't know where they
lie and that they're able to kind of go either way that they want to go when they feel like it
instead of standing up and making a choice and a decision and then fighting for that cause.
And so that's really his audience. His audience are really those individuals who could be white allies who really just have not gotten involved.
They know that things that they're seeing is wrong and they see that change is necessary and things have to change in this country.
But they're really not doing anything about it, you know.
And so that's really one of his main audience, especially in the letter from Birmingham jail, is to get those people kind of, you know, off their butts and get them involved in what's going on. They already feel strongly about it.
They're just not doing anything.
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Well, they decide to do something.
A few months after writing that letter from his prison.
So he's bailed out, I think, by trade unionists, right?
But so a few months later, he takes part in the March on Washington, the March for Jobs and Freedom.
We often forget the full title.
But what was the idea behind this big march, the nation's capital?
Every march, you know, they have a goal or outline that they're trying to achieve.
And it was several, so I'm not going to run them off. But it was basically a march from Washington for jobs and freedom. And it was a march that was
really trying to put pressure on the Kennedy administration to sign the Civil Rights Act.
That was one of the main goals of the march. One of the other goals of the march was to
put pressure on our legislative body and the president to make real change in this country
when it came to policy and laws that were created to affect African-Americans disproportionately on
certain issues. So like, for example, housing. The March on Washington called for a housing
type of committee or something to be created to investigate racist practices in housing and how blacks aren't getting equal amount of loans and things of that nature.
And so when it talks about freedom and jobs, the jobs aspect, it was asking for or looking for an economic response to a lot of the things that blacks were going through at that time.
a lot of the things that blacks were going through at that time.
And so they felt that if African-Americans were properly educated, if they were properly employed, right, with a living wage,
that a lot of the issues that the black community were dealing with could be alleviated.
And so March on Washington called for that and many more things.
And King ended up becoming basically the keynote speaker for that event.
Let's talk about that famous speech. It was one of many speeches that day.
Why do you think that's the one that stood out? It was a glittering cast. Like why him and why
that moment? By this point, you know, everyone's pretty familiar with King's oratory skills. You
know, we know that he's an excellent speaker. And so, and like you said, several people spoke that day.
You know, John Lewis recently passed away, who is also a beloved civil rights leader here in the United States of America.
He had one of the most controversial speeches that day.
His original speech was really critical of the Kennedy administration.
And so they asked him to change some things before he got up there and spoke.
they asked him to change some things before he got up there and spoke. Now, the thing that's really interesting about the King speech that day that I have a dream speech is that's not the speech
that he was set to give that day. He had a totally different speech already written in writing that
he was going to give that day. But right before he got up to speak, his favorite gospel singer,
Mahalia Jackson, sang his favorite gospel song right before he got up to speak. And as she
was going to sit down and he was coming up to the podium, Mahalia Jackson told Martin Luther King Jr.
to tell them about your dream. And she said, tell them about your dream. And she said that because
she had heard King give the I Have a Dream speech several weeks prior here in Birmingham, Alabama
at the famous historic 16th Street Baptist Church for some other event
that was going on. And so she heard the I Have a Dream speech and she enjoyed it. And she told
King to tell him about your dream. And so Martin Luther King Jr., if you watch the footage of that
speech in the beginning, he freestyles a few things, right? Kind of just talking about freedom
and some other things and then he just
rolls right into the I have a dream speech off the top of his head right no
paper in front of him he was not reading he is reciting what he had internally
and it turned out to be probably the biggest greatest thing that King ever
did right he basically highlighted what his ideal of a pluralistic, a integrated, a everybody represented type of society, what it looks like in his mind's eye.
You know, we always think about that famous line about his children being judged by the content of their character, but not the color of their skin. I know I said that backwards, but this idea of what the society could ultimately look like
is what King put in everyone's imagination with that speech.
And because he's such a great speaker and such a great orator,
and like I said, he's a scholar in his own right,
that speech is amazing because of how he basically pulls in the whole country.
Right.
So he talks about the hills of Georgia.
He talks about these other places.
Right.
He's bringing in the whole country into this center where everybody can be here together, where everybody is represented, where everybody is happy and understands the true creeds and the true
rhetoric and philosophy that this country is founded upon, when everybody can realize what
those words were that our forefathers put down for all of us to be not only created equal, but for
all of us to be able to realize the freedoms that we have and that we hope to be able to achieve in our
individual lives. And King was very serious about putting that in the forefront. The civil rights
movement was less about colored drinking fountains and colored bathrooms. And, you know, if I'm
walking down the street and the white man's coming towards me and I have to step off the curb, like it was way more than just changing those aspects of what it is or what it was.
The Civil Rights Movement was much more about being able to recognize this demographic of the population,
being able to recognize their full citizenship as a citizen of this nation.
Right. Being able to realize all of the rights that you have and be
able to exercise all of those rights we got everything we needed with the 13th 14th and
15th amendment right during reconstruction black people voted in mass during reconstruction but the
powers came and squashed that so we had everything needed. It was just that somebody messed up our 14th Amendment,
which is due process of law, and took that due process away.
So you could take my vote away,
but you're not giving me the due process to say why you're taking that away.
And so they skipped over the 14th Amendment to disenfranchise African Americans
and put them in those boxes, that oppressive, segregated box.
And so King really
just wanted people, everyone in this nation to be able to exercise their full rights as citizens of
this country. The activism of King and the whole movement, it won. There was significant civil
rights legislation. Was the march important? Was King's rhetoric important? Did it move the needle?
Did it convince politicians? Did it bring white America into a better understanding of what this was about?
I believe it did.
I believe it did.
I believe that King and the civil rights movement as a whole really allowed America to take a look at itself.
Now, the problem with the civil rights movement, and I don't want to limit anything that King was able to achieve,
but King understood that legislation doesn't change the minds and ideas of the people.
Right. And so because the legislation can kind of force the needle, it still doesn't change how
people think about what's going on. And King understood that. And so ultimately, it became
important to not only get the legislation passed, but it also became important to build groups,
to build coalitions, to build things where the different demographics of the nation are coming
together, right, to see something happen or to make a change or to make a decision about something.
Some of that is the ideas that King started to think about as he moved forward. And then,
you know, prior, and I know we're really talking about the March on Washington,
but prior to King's death, it's really illustrated how his philosophy began to shift a little
bit, right?
It became to shift a little bit because now it was less about legislation and more about
action.
So he really became a staunch proponent
of the poor people's campaign.
So now instead of just talking about civil equality,
now we're talking about economic equality, okay?
And then the other thing is that he started to become,
and this has a little bit to do with Bayard Rustin,
that guy I told you about before
that was one of the main organizers
of the March on Washington, who was also a pacifist. Now King also started to speak out against the Vietnam War.
Those were shifts in how you bring things across, right? It was a shift in the subject matter
that's important for the day. And so for me, King really started to step out of his own box.
Once he felt like some of these gains were made, now it's time to move on to the next thing.
And that next thing were helping to change the ideas and the minds of the people, right?
Starting to deal with some things that you can see some real examples of equality like getting blacks and white men to be on equal with the dollar that they
make at a job right those things are ultimately what king um was thinking about or was about
upon his death the 1964 civil rights act in particular has been called one of the single
great bits of legislation in u.s history and it was followed by others. But yeah, as you say, he went on to further battles,
and that's what led to his death in 68. He was campaigning. I guess, tell me,
how many times did he escape death before the fateful day in spring 1968?
Oh, man. I mean, that's a tough question. And I could give you numbers. King was arrested over 30 times.
I would say that every time King ever was incarcerated or arrested, it was a potential that he could have lost his life.
So that's just one instance. If you go to his parsonage house in Montgomery, where he lived as he was pastoring Dexter Avenue Baptist Church,
as he was pastoring Dexter Avenue Baptist Church,
there's literally a hole in the brick of his porch where someone threw a Molotov cocktail at his house,
and the blast went off right there,
but it didn't affect the rest of the house anywhere.
You could count that as one that he was able to elude death.
Maybe his most famous one was when the young lady stabbed him in the chest.
I believe it was in New York as he was signing autographs
or maybe it was like a book signing or something like that.
And she came up to him and said, hey, are you Martin Luther King Jr.?
He said, yes, ma'am.
This is a black woman, by the way.
And she took out like a letter opener and stabbed him in the chest.
And they told him, the doctors told King that if he had sneezed,
he would have lost his life.
And that's actually the beginning of his from the
mountaintop speech right another great speech yeah one of the oh man that one is powerful i mean
really really powerful but you know he said that if i would have sneezed he could have easily lost
his life and so i'm not really sure the full answer to that question, you know, how many times was he able to elude death?
And then, unfortunately, March 29, 1968, finally, his luck runs out and he's assassinated.
What did that do to the movement that he was one of the leaders of?
Oh, man. I mean, I think it's safe to say that it almost eliminated it completely.
Now, there are plenty of leaders that are continuing to do great work,
who continue to do great work after King's death.
Names come to mind like Joseph Lowry, the other leaders of the Poor People's Campaign,
Jesse Jackson and others. They went on to continue the work.
But for the masses of people that were behind the movement and behind King,
it totally stifled the movement.
Once King was assassinated, you saw several major cities erupt in rioting, civil unrest, because people were hurt, right?
You killed the biggest proponent of nonviolent civil disobedience, and you kill them in a very violent way.
And people did not know how to deal with that.
And young people went to the streets.
Older people cried and prayed and tried to do what they could to help the young people process what happened.
But for me, it almost completely flipped the movement.
Right.
Because you got to think right around at the same time,
1966,
you had the black Panther party who's coming on the scene. When King is killed,
that organization is just really getting to start really getting his ground,
you know,
getting his footing with him being assassinated.
I think it gave even more fervor and even more legitimacy
to what the Black
Panther Party was preaching and trying to get the
black community to understand, right?
And so, in one way, it did
stifle the civil rights movement
as a whole. His death
gave way to
other modes of thinking
and other modes of
ways that you could stop the oppressive nature that black people were experiencing in this country.
But ultimately, it was an eye opener.
It was a very blatant, open reminder of what black life was and still was at that point for black people in the United States.
Thank you very much, Charles Woods. How can people find out more about your organization,
both there in the U.S. and around the world?
You can go to our website, www.bcri.org. My organization is the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, BCRI dot org. Please just stay
connected to us. We have several things going on and we also have a virtual program platform
that people can tune in and see the great discussions and talks that we're having about
multiple subjects all the way from critical race theory to disproportionate gaps that exist in the United States, the wealth gap, education gap, mass incarceration gap.
We'll be discussing all of those issues to really help not only our United States viewers, but also our international viewers have these difficult discussions and conversations so that we ultimately may be able to have progress in this
world i've been to the organization several times and it's opposite the 16th street baptist church
it's on that famous square it's where history was made yes and there's plenty in the building as
well hello the ground thanks for coming and making it on the podcast as well man thank you very much
thank you no problem Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. No problem.
Thanks, folks, for listening to this episode of Dan Stokes History.
As I tell you all the time, I love doing these podcasts.
They are the best thing I do professionally.
I feel very lucky to have you listening to them.
If you fancied giving them a rating review obviously the best rating review possible would be ideal it makes a big difference to us i know it's a pain but we'd really really be grateful
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We've got the ancients with our very own Tristan Hughes.
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Please go and check those out wherever you get your pods. you